B'hukotai

What is the value of a human being?  How much is a person worth?  The Sidra this week addresses the idea of a person's value.  Their value will be dependent upon their age.  children from one to five have a value of five shekels, from five to twenty, twenty shekels and sixty years old and upward is reduced to fifteen shekels.  And unsurprisingly, these figures are less for females.  What does all this mean?

These figures, these valuations, concern what one chooses to donate to the Temple.  If they say, "I want to give myself to the Temple" (a modern day version might be the person who states I want to give my valuation, my worth, to Beth Shalom as an act of tzedaka).  Many synagogues throughout the country are doing this now.  They have dispensed with a dues structure and are asking people to give a free-will offering, what they think they can afford based on their earnings, as their donation to be a part of the community and as a measure of their value.  What would you give if we did that here?  What are you worth? How much are you worth?  

The Talmud, commenting on this idea of a person's worth, indicates "hakol" everyone has value.  Everyone has value and is capable of determining and using their value to the betterment and building of a community, "everyone."  Who is excluded and who is included?  Talmud again states emphatically that everyone has "value," even babies. While we may have differences of opinion about the way in which a person is valued in the Torah the truth is that value was based on a broad understanding of what the average person could be expected to bring for working adults with the underlying idea that no one is inconsequential.  So what it comes down to is how do we view ourselves and how to do we perceive one another?  This is the most fundamental aspect, there underpinning of what it means to be Jewish.  

Earlier in the book of Vayikra, Leviticus, we read that we should "love our neighbor as ourselves."  This mitzvah has two vital commandments in it. The first is to love oneself and the second is to love others as much as we love ourselves.    This is not a matter of picking and choosing like we did when choosing sides for teams when we were young on the playground but as adults, Torah is teaching  us that all have the intrinsic, absolute value and and it is a commandment, a mitzvah, to embrace for that unique quality in ourselves and in every other human being, "hakol."

In our time the relegation of the poor and homeless and mentally ill to the margins of society, this is a compelling thought.  We value them less and sometimes even blame them for their situation.  How many times do we hear that someone is too lazy to get a job?  Or 'why can't we get the homeless off our streets?  They are such an eyesore.'  So we build benches on Main Street that have dividers built into them to discourage any homeless person from sleeping on them.

And to make sure that we understand how critical this mitzvah is for our people the Sidra ends with that these words were spoken atop Mt. Sinai.

The words of Torah speak profoundly to the God-given commandment to ensure that each person is treated with dignity and value.  No one is "less"  and no one is "more."

There is a saying, "You will never know the value of a person until he becomes a memory."  We should not wait until it is too late before recognizing that each person has a unique task to fulfill and our job is to help them to get there by tearing "hakol" with dignity.