Every fifty years, the Torah tells us, we’re supposed to go back and start again. We’re to sound the trumpet on Yom Kipur and proclaim yoveil, the Jubilee, a time of release, rest, and restoration. If you have had to sell your family property — even if you sold it decades ago — it is to be returned to you. No matter how far off track you’ve gone, you get another chance. You get to try again.

Unless you live in a walled city, of course.

Vayiqra 25:29–30 remarks: וְאִ֗ישׁ כִּי־יִמְכֹּ֤ר בֵּית־מוֹשַׁב֙ עִ֣יר חוֹמָ֔ה וְהָיְתָה֙ גְּאֻלָּת֔וֹ עַד־תֹּ֖ם שְׁנַ֣ת מִמְכָּר֑וֹ‏ . . . וְאִ֣ם לֹא־יִגָּאֵ֗ל עַד־מְלֹ֣את לוֹ֘ שָׁנָ֣ה תְמִימָה֒ וְ֠קָ֠ם הַבַּ֨יִת . . . לַצְּמִיתֻ֛ת לַקֹּנֶ֥ה אֹת֖וֹ לְדֹרֹתָ֑יו לֹ֥א יֵצֵ֖א בַּיֹּבֵֽל׃ | Və’im ki yimkor beit moshav ir ḥomah vəhayətah gə’ulato ad tom shanat mimkaro . . . və’im lo yiga’eil ad məlot lo shanah təmimah və’qam habáyit . . . latzəmitut laqoneh oto lədorotav lo yeitzei bayovéil. | “And a person that sells a walled-city dwelling-house: Its redemption shall be until the completion of the year of its selling . . . [30] And if it isn’t redeemed until the fullness of its year has passed, the house shall endure . . . perpetually with the one who bought it for their generations; it will not be released in the Jubilee.”

There are various ways of parsing this. It’s possible to treat it as more or less a neutral reflection of the realities of agrarian life: Farmland in an agrarian economy produces the hefty wealth of grain, wool, milk, and meat in ways that a city dwelling without arable fields attached doesn’t, so the loss of such a dwelling (or its restoration) has much less economic impact on a family than the loss of their fields. It’s also possible to read it as a manifestation of the Torah’s ambient background hostility towards (or at least skepticism of) settled, urban life: Vayiqra institutes protections for rural Israelites that aren’t available to urban ones because, you know, fuck those guys and their unnaturally concentrated abodes. Cities are where kings dwell, where tax collectors come from, where wealth and power are forcibly concentrated — it’s about time we had an edict from G-d to look out for the little guy out in the country.

And yet, we can invert this, too: Suppose you are a stranger, and you move in to one of these unwalled communities. Even if you buy land and work it for fifty years — the better part of a life, longer, in fact, than many live — it’s not really yours. Sure, yes, the theological point may be that the land belongs to G-d and humans merely farm it, but when the Jubilee comes, the title doesn’t revert to G-d, it reverts to the family you bought the land from. You and your family can’t gain any kind of permanent foothold; you’re regularly kicked off the place you had to call your home. If your family didn’t get a holding at the very start of the system, tough luck; no one new is allowed permanently in; the first ones there are ultimately the only ones there.

Not so in a city! In a city you can, after a year, own things outright. You can put down roots, become part of the body politic. A city is a place that has room for the new.

This might seem strange when the defining feature of the city is its ḥomah, its wall, nominally there to protect the city and keep strangers out. So central is the wall to the idea of a city that the Hebrew at first doesn’t say a “walled city” or even a “city that has a wall”, but instead a compact, emphatic “city of a wall”.

And yet a wall doesn’t only cut things off. A wall can offer support (as to a roof), and shared walls can be a metaphor for shared, communal space. And indeed, the Hebrew root for ḥomah is the same as the root for the words for your husband’s parents, your in-laws. From which we learn that the sort of city where a house sale can be permanent is the sort of city where there are bonds of family — and not just family of blood, but family of choice, even of someone else’s choice: a city where people understand and enact the bonds of being bound together in a network of relationships where we’re all responsible for one another, in the end. A city that doesn’t just have this network of mutual support, but that is foundationally of this network of mutual support.

In a place without that, no sale can be final, because such a final sale would risk leaving you alone, cut off, disconnected from everyone around you with no means of support. In a place with it, this risk is gone, because there will always be people to take care of you, to welcome you in.

Walled cities hold little appeal for me; connected ones do. When the Jubilee comes, let it release us not back to a frozen, ossified beginning with no hope of progress or change; let it release us towards one another, towards difference, community, and a new world of unrestricted care.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]