Shalom Chaverim,
The ultimate answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” is…
…nothing more or less than…
42.
At least, it is “42” according to the book The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
This rather puzzling answer, the book suggests, will only be comprehensible if you know the correct question to ask.
What, then, precisely is “the ultimate Question of life the universe and everything”? Although the Hitchhikers’ Guide provides the answer – 42 – it fails, over the course of questing through four volumes that comprise the Hitchhikers “trilogy” – to find the actual question.
The Torah on the other hand is not exactly a philosophy book disguised as a humorous pseudo science-fiction thriller (which is what the Hitchhikers’ Guide is. The book’s author, Douglas Adams, is commemorated next week on May 25 which is known as “towel day” in his honor). Yet the Torah gives an answer not so different: Can you guess the number?
Not 42.
It’s 49.
We count 7 weeks of seven days, the 49 days of the Omer, between our going out from slavery in Egypt to freedom and our receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai.
We read in this week’s Torah portion, Behar, that every 7 years is a shmitta year, a year on which the land has to lie fallow. This is where the idea of a sabbatical year comes from – just like we need the Sabbath every 7th day of every week, so too do we need a sabbatical year every 7th year.
Moreover, every “week” of shmitta years (that is, seven cycles of seven years) – in other words, after every 49 years – there is the Yovel, the Jubilee year. In the Jubilee year, all slaves go free and all land which was sold due to the vagaries of the economy – the waxing rich of some and the waning poor of others – returns to its original owner and the initial balance and equality of everyone and everything in society and the world is restored. It’s like a “reboot”, not just for your computer but rather for yourself and for all of society.
The ultimate answer, according to the Torah is 49, the number of days of the Omer and also the number of years between Jubilees…but, what is the ultimate question? Does the Torah give us the question as well as the answer?
The question the Torah gives to the answer forty-nine is…Torah itself. Torah itself is the questions we ask it.
On Passover we go free, after 49 days we get the Torah on Mt. Sinai. The Torah tells us – if we engage in questioning it – what to do with our freedom, how to be free, how to create a just society, create a utopia that is supposed to revolutionize the world. If we engage in questioning the Torah’s value system, the Torah explains why we need to do this. If we engage in questioning the Torah’s practical details we might gain insight how to balance work and leisure, deeds and thoughts, self-defense with the need for peace, what our responsibilities are, our celebrations, our core values and how to implement them in our day-to-day lives….
This week’s Torah portion begins: Vayidaber Adonai el Moshe bhar Sinai, God spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai…
And it goes on to discuss the 49-year cycle of the Jubilee whose goal is to push the Torah’s agenda forward with a leap and a bound: Giving us a taste for creating a just society, a society in which no one would be condemned to eternal servitude, in which self-respect of the poor could be regained. Just as the Shabbat each week takes us away from our jobs and so enables us to define ourselves, to think of who we are in non-economic terms, so too the Jubilee enables the entire society to put aside economic competition and the practice of defining a person’s value in economic terms alone.
It would let us all have the gift of a “time out” from the daily grind and habits of thought and routine and pre-conceived ideas and experiences…in order to instead greet life with a fresh and open conscience, the energy and true willingness to try something new, a rest for study and learning and growth.
May you discover many questions and answers from the experience of this coming Shabbat…
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Michael