Ever heard the term hangry? It’s a great term because it captures a very real feeling of frustration and anger that build to an irrational point until one eats, and then the sun comes out again. Hangry often starts even before one feels one’s stomach grumbling. Sometimes one suffers from pre-hunger hangry due to anxiety – when one worries that that there will not be food on hand. The thing about being hangry is that it takes away one’s ability to be kind, to be thoughtful, to be generous…to be a basic mentsh.

Those familiar with Parshas Behar, might be wondering what being hangry has to do with this week’s parsha, especially as the parsha seems to have the laws of Yuval as its specific focus. In Perek chaf-hey, which is the majority of the parsha, we learn a lot from what seems a bit of an incongruous interruption. This seems to happen a lot in parshios in Vayikra, but that’s a thought for another time.

Perek chaf-hey starts with the commandment to observe the shmittah, the resting of the land every seven years, and an explanation of how everyone will be taken care of by that which grows naturally. Immediately thereafter, starting in verse 8, the Torah instructs the people that after the seventh shemittah year is completed, it will be time for the Jubilees year, which is observed on the 50th year. The perek goes on to detail how not only will the people once again “only eat the growth direct from the field” (25:12) – for a second year in a row – but also, depending on one’s circumstances, be expected to move. Normal human anxiety would already be starting to kick in, and then the Torah goes on to instruct the people on business limitations associated with Yuval such as the assessment on land sales based on the sales’ proximity to the Yuval year. Everything is always pro-rated. This directive is contained in pasukim 14 – 16.

Having basically instructed that land sales aren’t really sales at all, the Torah goes on to state: “You shall observe My laws and faithfully keep My rules, that you may live upon the land in security; the land shall yield its fruit and you shall eat your fill, and you shall live upon it in security. And should you ask, ‘What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?’ I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years” (25:18-21).

Everything seems up to par with the similarity of the promises of the bountiful yield of shmittah year and the blessings that will come for Jubilee. So what might be the connection to the idea of hangry? The crux is the wording that says “ki tamru, and should you ask.” Really? Hashem is giving you direct instructions and anticipating the questions of those instructions?

Yup. Because Hashem made us, and Hashem set in us the so-called survival instinct that sets off anxiety. Hashem knows that when we fear we will not get enough food, have enough of a sense of security, that we get selfish, and protective, and stingy. And while Hashem responds with the promise of an abundance in the earlier yield, He also presents a different solution, a key ingredient to everything in the Torah.

Between the two sets of verses mentioned above is pasuk yud- zayin, 17, which states: “And you shall not wrong, one man his fellow Jew, and you shall fear your God, for I am the Lord, your God.” This would be no mystery if just such a commandment hadn’t been stated in verse 14, in the added measure that “you shall not wrong one another” (25:14). Why is it saying so again? What exactly is this extra injunction?

While many commentators connect Vayikra 25:17 specifically to not cheating one’s fellow in business dealings, particularly connected land sales and the concepts mentioned connecte