Session 20: Parashat Behar-Bechukotai
"Address at the Hattiesburg Freedom Day Rally," Ella Baker, January 21, 1964
In Parashat Behar, we see the Israelites attempting to establish agricultural and economic policies that will reduce inequality and manage resources responsibly. Laws establishing Sabbatical and Jubilee years and associated laws about debt and property ownership worked together to protect those struggling with poverty from sliding into destitution and to prevent the ambitious from sliding into sinful greed. Behar’s economic structures and instructions about contracts and property reveal a premodern society thinking structurally about the complexities of power, and equity and justice.
Ella Baker’s speech at the 1964 Freedom Day Rally in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, contends with this same complexity within the context of the active struggle to secure civil and voting rights for African Americans. Baker reminds her audience that addressing even the most urgent injustices does not free a community from the longer-term work of building and reforming systems to promote the general welfare and ensure that the law is applied equally and fairly for all.
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