In my experience, I have found people attempting to explain Judaism by comparing faith and deed. Unlike other religions, Judaism focuses more on what one does than on what one believes.

And there is certainly some truth to that. The Talmud focuses much more on correct actions than on what beliefs are acceptable and not acceptable. But as is also true that simple statements are often more complex than they first appear.

Take this week’s parsha as an example. We begin Parshat Behar-Bechukotai with a discussion of the laws of Shemittah. Every seventh year, Jews in the Land of Israel must let the land lie fallow. Naturally, this means that they must rely on produce from the sixth year to sustain them for two years. God addresses the concerns of the people in the text of the Mitzvah:

“If you shall say: What will we eat in the seventh year, for lo! We have not planted nor gathered our produce? I shall command My blessing to you in the sixth year and it will produce for three years. You shall plant in the eighth year but you will still be eating from the old produce until the ninth year; until the produce arrives you shall eat [from] the old.” (Vayikra 25:20-22)

This statement helps frame the nature of the mitzvah of Shemittah — an act of faith. It is not simply the value of letting the land rest, or even self-sacrifice, but active trust in God that we will not starve throughout this year of rest. Our faith is expressed through deeds, not creeds.

We can extrapolate out from Shemittah to other mitzvot. Plenty of Jews throughout history have sacrificed financial security to rest on Shabbat, or to eat kosher food. It surely would have been easier to ignore the mitzvot. But for these people, our ancestors, the mitzvot themselves were expressions of faith in God.

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Even the Shema, the central text of Jewish belief, is more than words. We are not commanded to believe the Shema, but to recite the Shema. It is the act of reciting the Shema that expresses our faith, that “accepting upon ourselves the yoke of Heaven” is an active, twice daily, task.

So to be more precise than how we began: Judaism does not differentiate between deed and faith. Every act or, in the case of Shemittah, every rest, is an expression of our trust in God. We submit to God through how we live, how we discover Godliness and holiness in our mundane world.

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