On the Yovel, the fiftieth jubilee year, the Torah says: veshavtem ish el ahuzato, each person will return to their ahuzah, their original land holding, their inheritance. What would it feel like to do this internally, to return to our original essence, to our soul, to reclaim ourselves?
Our Soul is a Caged Bird
Ukeratem deror. Call out “deror.” At the beginning of the Yovel year, the Torah instructs us to blow the shofar and declare deror for all the inhabitants of the land. Deror is usually translated as “freedom” or “release” – referring to the freeing of slaves and the release from debt during this year – but the word deror also means bird, playing on the natural association between birds and freedom. What is the experience of the Yovel year? It is like a bird, says the classic commentator Ibn Ezra, like a bird who sings a beautiful song when it is free, but if it is held captive, it refuses to eat and withers away until it dies (Ibn Ezra on Leviticus 25:10).
Our soul, our essence, our divine spirit, is such a bird inside us that is wanting to be set free and to sing its song, but for most of us, it has been caged and held captive for a long time.
In its discussion of Yovel, the Torah describes a process of gradual deterioration that can happen over the course of fifty years, as a person gradually becomes detached from their original land holding, or in our interpretation, from their soul and their essence. The Torah describes this process with the word yamuch – ki yamuch akhikha, “when your brother becomes impoverished (Leviticus 25:25),” when there is a loss of vitality, like the bird who refuses to eat, and the person slowly becomes namuch, low, shut down, depressed, disconnected from who they really are.
How has this disconnection from essence – a failure to inhabit your full self – happened inside you, over the course of many years, even in small ways? There is some essential part of us that is indeed trapped like a bird in a cage, forced into a box of constriction, not allowed to fly freely and fully flourish because of internal and external pressures, society, culture, gender assumptions, family expectations, whatever it is or was – our full soul capacity has been limited and shut down in certain ways.
Holding on to the Wrong Holding
Sometimes this disconnection from self manifests as a false ahuzah, a false holding. We hold fast to something that is not ours. This same root, ahaz, to hold, is used for Yaakov’s holding on to Esav’s heel as he emerged from the womb (Genesis 26:26). We do that, too. We are so estranged from our own holding that we chase after someone else’s. We abandon ourselves, not valuing who we are, and instead hold on to the destiny and direction of another person or group. We want to be Esav instead of being Yaakov.
Veshavtem ish el ahuzato. Return to your own holding, the Torah says, ahuzato, each person to their own place, their own particular essence. The world needs each of us to be fully ourselves.
Release What’s in the Way
In order to return to our own holding, there needs to first be some deror, some release of the entrapments, the debt burdens that we carry, all the layers of distance that keep us from our essence. We can imagine all those burdens, all the wounds, false beliefs and attachments, all the shoulds and the harshness, we can imagine all those burdens as barriers, perhaps as walls or veils, that stand between us and our caged bird, and we can imagine gradually pushing away those barriers, dissolving them in order to reach our waiting soul. What may help in this work of release, since surely there will be fear and resistance, what may help is to keep our eyes on the bird, to remember our essence and to touch in to our deepest desire for freedom and self realization, to remember that God put that bird inside us for a reason. God wants us to return to ourselves, to open the cage and let her be free; for this we were born. We can see her there and feel the tug, feel ourselves drawn to her like a magnet, our essence calling to us.
Claim Yourself
Energy is involved in this work, the energy of proclaiming. Ukeratem deror – you should call out, declare your freedom, sound the shofar, ring the liberty bell, make a declaration of independence with force and strength and passion. I declare myself free; I break down all the barriers with the powerful sound of my own shofar, like the yovel shofars which were used in Yericho (Joshua 6), the power of the sound breaking down walls. Internally, I summon my own power to do this work, to make a statement, to proclaim that I am me and have a right to be me, that I am free to embody my own vitality and sing my song, to claim myself, to claim all that I am, even the parts of me that others have devalued or dismissed. Call it out, shout it out from the rooftops, let the internal and external walls to the cage come tumbling down.
Let Yourself Be Carried Back Home
And then, once you have staked your claim, proclaimed your freedom with passion and verve, then something else needs to happen inside – the movement of Yovel. The word Yovel is related to the shofar blow, but it also carries another meaning biblically, like hovalah, to be carried, to be led, to flow like water, as in yivlei mayim, channels or streams of water (Isaiah 30:25 and 44:4). The word yovel in our context then takes on the sense of being drawn down a river to return to one’s source, as the Ramban implies. Everything – land, people, property – all drawn back, like water in a river, to its original source.
So internally, in addition to the energetic stance of proclamation, there also needs to be a surrender, an allowing. We take the initial energetic stance of striding into the river, declaring ourselves worthy of this journey of return to self and to source, we make that initial movement with all our might, and then we relax into the river and let the river return us to Source, let the river carry us home to the wider ocean, where we can connect not just to our own vitality but also to all the souls of the universe and to the source of them all in God, to the place where we all meet. The last part of this work can only be done by letting go. Yovel, yuval – to be led and carried, to be carried home, home to ourselves and home to our source in God.
And as we are led home, maybe we can sense how the bird inside gradually comes back to life and begins to sing again, first tentatively, and then stronger, her own song, the song of this, her river, the song of your soul that you were born to sing. Maybe you can see a thousand people, each one on their own river path, paddling along in their stream and singing their song, and how the songs carry down the river to the sea, mingling in the ocean and becoming, together, an exquiaite song of joint geulah, of redemption, of hope, of another way of being in the world, where each person can return to their own ahuzah, ahuzato, and somehow, all together it becomes ahuzat olam, a worldwide ahuzah, a holding for the world, a holding for all eternity, a holding from another world, from the next world, from olam haba, from the world that is coming, that is ever emerging and unfolding.
Yovel as the Coming Future
Indeed yovel has this tinge of otherworldliness to it, a reaching quality of the next age. We in this age no longer keep yovel but look to a future time when we will. In speaking of this future time, Isaiah says – yuval shay laShem, a gift will be brought, using the root of yovel, yuval, a gift will be brought to God (Isaiah 18:7). Each of us has such a gift to offer God, to offer the world, each of us is such a gift in our essence. We work towards this day by dissolving the barriers, declaring ourselves free to sing our song, and letting the river carry us and our gift back to God.
With Joy!
This return to ourselves and reclaiming of our soul’s unique song is something that happens with joy. Yovel is indeed a jubilee, a time of joy and jubilation. Elsewhere in Isaiah, the future is again imagined using this root of yovel: ki visimichah tetzeun uveshalom tuvalun – “For you will leave in joy and be led home” – tuvalun – “in peace.” And the verse continues: “Before you the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12). When we claim ourselves, return to our holding and sing the song that only we can sing, the world sings with us in joy and gladness. It’s as if the mountains and the hills and the trees have been waiting for us to join them, and as soon as we show our readiness, they offer their hands to us to join them in the universe’s circle of dance and song.
Of course it is not always easy to do this claiming and proclaiming and singing our own song. For most of us, the bird remains somewhat trapped and caged by habit and wound and socetal norm and restriction. And so we practice, and return, veshavtem, veshavtem, again and again, to our holding, to our ahuzah. We notice what it is we are holding fast to today, and we practice releasing our erroneous holdings and holding fast instead to ourselves, to our own holding, claiming ourselves and gradually dissolving the barriers with the power of our own longing for our soul, for our source, for our song, we try singing tentatively at first, and then stronger, and we practice, again and again, allowing ourselves to be led, tuvalun, to float down the river into the wider sea that is waiting for us.
Photo by ArtHouse Studio at Pexels
