Triennial Cycle III: Lev. 27:1-34
Humash Etz Hayim, page 753
Haftarah: Jeremiah 16:19-17:14, page 758
We stand as the last verse of the Book of Leviticus is chanted. At the completion of the reading we chant hazak, hazak v’nit-hazaik — “Be strong, be strong and let us be strengthened.”
Professor Baruch Levine titles this chapter “Funding the Sanctuary,” and he comments, “It is likely that chapter 27 was appended to the Book of Leviticus. From a purely textual perspective, the Epilogue (26:3-46) would seem to be a suitable conclusion to the book. But in order to include in Leviticus a matter of central importance, the funding of the sanctuary, chapter 27 was added. Maintaining the physical plant of the sanctuary was certainly costly, and it was necessary to provide the materials used in public sacrifice and to support the clergy.”
- (27:1-8) Laws concerning a vow to donate the valuation of a person and of an animal to the Temple. The Torah sets forth specific shekel amounts for different aged males and females.
- (27:9-13) Pledges of animals to the sanctuary.
- (27:14-25) Laws concerning the redemption of houses and fields.
- (27:26-29) Laws of the redemption of the firstborn and the devotion of property to the Temple.
- (27:30-33) Laws concerning the tithe of fruit, sheep and cattle.
- (27:34) The conclusion of the Book of Leviticus.
The Blessings &Challenges of Supporting Synagogues
Maintaining the sanctuary was costly. It was necessary to provide the materials used in public sacrifice and to support the clergy. The goal of the system of funding prescribed in this chapter was to secure silver for the sanctuary and its related needs. What was donated was redeemed; it was the redemption payment, the silver that was sought for the sanctuary in most cases. Etz Hayim Commentary on Leviticus 27
In households and communities, the recession has also brought to the fore an “affordability crisis” that has been gathering for decades. At the heart of this crisis is an unyielding reality: above and beyond what Jews expend on the usual necessities and conveniences, it costs a great deal to live an active Jewish life. Growing numbers of families worry that they will not be able to pay the ever-rising bills associated with full participation in Jewish life.
Adding things up, an actively engaged Jewish family that keeps kosher and sends its three school-age children to the most intensive Jewish educational institutions can expect to spend somewhere between $50,000 and $110,000 a year at minimum just to live a Jewish life.
The fiscal consequences of these trends in institutional life are now apparent. Insufficient resources are available to meet the basic needs of the American Jewish community. In communities around the country, agency funding for all kinds of services has been slashed, leaving their clients wanting….The impact is being felt by Jews abroad too. Jack Wertheimer, The High Cost of Jewish Living, March 2010 (www.commentarymagazine.com)
It is the sum of [these] individual choices that determines the fate of the Jewish people…There are those who join synagogues. There are those who do not……Individuals make choices that fit with who they are, with their personal histories, with their beliefs and values. At the same time, there is the larger community, the tent under which all Jews are gathered by dint of their birth. This is the tent of the Jewish people, expansive enough to contain any and all, regardless of where (or indeed, whether) they wish to reside within it….We believe that the modern synagogue together with the home is the place where Jews are created, nurtured, and sustained. By supporting synagogues, Jews are trying to retain the place and meaning of the tabernacle in their lives and in those of generations to follow
The Dues We Pay: Answering the question of why we pay high dues is both simple and complicated. The simple answer is that it costs money to operate synagogues, as it does any complex organization. There are buildings to maintain, staff to hire, programs to develop and implement, and schools to run. For most synagogues,.80 percent or more of their budget is salaries and benefits….
Congregants pay as well to maintain aspects of the synagogue that are not, in the language of the business world, “profit centers”; that is, they cannot cover their costs with the money they attract. A synagogue educational program is the clearest example of this. When it comes to education, whether Harvard University or our local synagogues, we can never charge enough tuition to cover the real costs. Every educational program is subsidized by someone or some fund. In synagogues, the members who are relatively uninvolved but still paying dues are helping to subsidize the cost of every child’s education.
Our congregations invest in Judaism in other ways as well. We support rabbis, not simply to work in our congregations, but to exist in the larger community as well….
In some ways, our congregations are carrying an unfair burden. Congregants are investing a disproportionate amount of the resources— money, time, and energy—to maintain the people and practices of Judaism. They are paying their half shekels; others are not. How can we understand this? One way, of course, is to divide the world of the Jews into those who care (“the practicing Jews”) and those who do not (“the non practicing Jews”), and act as if they are two separate groups whose members have or ought to have little to do with one another…. A second way, then, is to believe that the differences between the groups are slight and that Jews who are unaffiliated, used to be affiliated, thinking about becoming affiliated, or would like to but cannot afford to be affiliated ought to be reached out to and brought closer (keruv) through and into the synagogue.
What we choose to believe matters a great deal in terms of what we do in our synagogues: what proportion of synagogue offerings are for the community at large, how much we support not only our own synagogue but synagogue life in general, and what role the individual synagogue plays in maintaining a vibrant Jewish presence in a world of assimilation.
The truth is that we are all inheritors. Very few of us created the synagogues in which we study, celebrate, and congregate, or the institutions that support the Jewish community, such as the Jewish community center, the cemetery, and the federations. Yet they nourish us because someone had the foresight and the generosity to create them. We need to see ourselves in the same way. Our synagogues cannot simply be places in which we get our needs met. Rather, they need to be seen as parts of a forest whose trees we need to grow and protect so that they will be there to provide the natural resources for the next generation who will enhance them with their love and commitment.
We end this chapter by underscoring an important point that has been implicit throughout: the dues that we pay, in their various forms, are crucial not simply to support synagogue communities, but to securely bind individuals as community members…. We need to remember that every congregant needs to feel as if he or she is contributing, not simply “paying their dues”, to the synagogue community in ways that matter and that dignify them and their synagogues.
Bookman, Kahn, This House We Build, Supporting Institutions That Support Us: Paying Your Real Dues