"The first issue of the womb of every being, man or beast, that is offered to the Lord shall be yours, but you shall have the first-born of man redeemed... Take as their redemption price, from the age of one month up, the money equivalent of five shekels by the sanctuary weight, which is twenty gerahs. (Numbers 18:15-16)
This, of course, is the origin of the ceremony of pidyon ha-ben, redemption of the first-born son from Temple service by giving a kohen five pieces of silver on the 31st day after the boy is born or, if that is a Sabbath or Festival, soon thereafter. As the note in the Etz Hayim commentary says, "The modern service to welcome a newborn girl in the covenant (Simhat Bat) can include a special prayer when a daughter is the firstborn."
That the Torah demands redemption of first-born boys and not girls is clearly a function of the way in which patriarchal societies understood gender differences and roles. Only men were to serve in the Temple of yore, and so it was only boys who needed to be redeemed from that service. But why did the Torah require redemption at all? And why only the first-born?
Truth be told, even observant Jews do not pay as much attention to this ceremony as they do to many other aspects of Judaism; thus usually only a few family members and friends are present for a pidyon ha-ben, in contrast to the genuinely public nature of a brit milah or a simhat bat ceremony earlier in the baby's first month. Pidyon ha-ben, though, is rooted in some deep convictions of the Jewish tradition, tenets that shape the very way Judaism perceives our relationship to God.
The first belief that leads to the ceremony and is expressed through it is that God, as Creator of the world, owns it all. As the Torah says later, "Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the Lord your God, the earth and all that is on it!" (Deuteronomy 10:14). We who live after the Industrial Revolution are not used to thinking that someone involved in producing something thereby owns it because modern forms of production divide the work among many people. Even we, though, have a sense of this in some areas. Someone who writes a book, for example, owns that material and usually copyrights it to announce and protect that ownership. Similarly, artists own their artwork unless they were commissioned to create something for a fee. In the same way, God, as Creator of the world, is koneh shamayim va'aretz (Genesis 14:19, 22; cf. Psalms 104:24), where koneh means both creator and owner of heaven and earth.
This means that in theory we all belong to God - not just the first-born. Indeed, another section of the Torah uses this fundamental principle to proclaim that people who fall into debt and thus become slaves to the creditor to pay it off are not to be kept in servitude forever "for they are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt; they may not give themselves over into servitude" (Leviticus 25:42).
The provision that the first-born belongs to God, then, is actually a limitation on God's ownership; God voluntarily requires that only the first-born, and not everyone, be involved in Temple service. And in our reading this week, God restricts that ownership even further: every first-born male is to be redeemed from Temple service through his parents paying five shekels. Still, the principle remains: we all owe God our service because we all belong to Him.
The second tenet that underlies this law goes beyond ownership to gratitude: we not only owe God everything, but we should be grateful for what we have - indeed, for our very lives. The parents give a token to God in recognition of the incredible gift that they have received in the form of this new child. Similarly, the farmer sacrifices the first-born of his animals in thanksgiving for having a means of livelihood altogether.
These two principles are at the heart of what it means to look at the world as a Jew. All too often we look at the world only through our own, self-centered lenses. We presume that we have full control of our lives, that, as American law has it, we own our own bodies. We also presume that we own the things that we possess. In some ways, of course, we do control our own bodies and own things, especially vis--vis other human beings. If we only see life that way, however, we are all too prone to lose perspective - and to make decisions based on that limited perspective. We use our money, for example, only for our own needs simply because it is ours. We treat our children, especially in their early years, as extensions of ourselves, to give us a sense of continuity and pride. Instead, what pidyon ha-ben is teaching us is to remember that our children and our possessions ultimately belong to God and that we therefore have the responsibility to treat them not as solely ours, but as God's. We possess them only temporarily and only on trust to God, and we should act accordingly. Specifically, precisely because God is entrusting us with children and possessions that ultimately belong to God, we have extensive duties to raise our children with love, education, and moral values, and we also have obligations to care for the world that we inhabit.
Our duties, though, also include gratitude. We should not only recognize that God is the ultimate Owner of everything; we should give thanks for being able to live and even thrive in God's creation. The five shekels that the parents pay the kohen are to redeem the child from Temple service, which would have been the way that they pay God back for the gift of being able to reproduce. Instead, they pay this money to thank God for the gift of our reproductive systems and this first fruit of those systems. According to the Talmud (B. Menahot 43b), Jews are supposed to utter one hundred blessings of God each day, each time overcoming our penchant for taking the blessings in our lives for granted. Similarly here, pidyon ha-ben is a way of giving God a gift for the incredible blessing of being able to produce a child.
May the ceremony of pidyon ha-ben, and, more extensively, all the blessings that we utter as part of our Jewish lives, be ways for us to renew our vision of the world as the creation and property of God and to reinvigorate our sense of gratitude for the lives and world we have.
Shabbat Shalom