Property ownership in Eretz Yisrael

This week's Torah portion offers an interesting perspective on property ownership in walled cities in Eretz Yisrael. There is a contradistinction between property in cities that are walled, and otherwise. In the former, were one to sell the land vested to him or her as a tribal inheritance, then, after one year's time, the land could not be repurchased. As such, it would seem that this was a sanction or punishment of sorts; if you sold tribal property in a walled city, after a one year statute of limitations, the land could not be repurchased. In contrast, were the land sold to have been land not found in a walled city, but rather a home with a courtyard with fields for agrarian purposes, that land could not be repurchased for the first 2 years, but then thereafter, could be repurchased during all of the successive years leading up to the jubilee year, at which point it would return to its rightful ancestral owners. 

The ideas presented in the Torah in this respect may be foreign to us. In a way I found eye-opening, the commentators themselves take divergent approaches in grappling with the abovementioned laws. 

The Sefer HaChinuch, an anonymously authored compendium written in 13th century Spain which sets out to explain the meaning behind each and every commandment, writes that the fact that one living in a walled city could no longer repurchase his ancestral inheritance after one year had lapsed was meant to "fine" a person. The Chinuch uses the word knas. It would seem, then, that a person who had sold property in a city - that had been walled from the time of the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, the time of Yehoshua bin Nun - was sanctioned with harsher treatment before the law; after a year was up, he or she lost all rights to redeem the ancestral, tribal heritage or estate. 

The Ramban, though, takes a very pragmatic and functional approach. One living in a walled city faces the greatest difficulty, he writes, in the first year after the sale. He faces the greatest embarrassment, and remorse. After the first year is up, though, he has already settled into a new home, and has acclimated to his new environs. And why, might you ask would a home with a courtyard and pastoral fields be any different? Because, shares the Ramban, this type of estate is more commercial in nature, and therefore, for the first 2 years, the new owner has invested in the property's cultivation and development and deserves to accrue certain financial benefits - the economy, he would add, needs some type of certainty, stability and predictability. After that, though, the original owner, has the right to redeem his ancestral lands, because it would seem, in contradistinction to a walled city, the original owner still has filial ties and pangs of remorse binding him to the property of his fathers, land that was meant to be cultivated by their progeny forever more, and therefore, after 2 years time, the Torah grants the offspring the right to redeem the lands that rightfully belong to them. 

Shabbat shalom!