Who Does the Land Belong To?
By Lori H. Lefkovitz
In Parashat B’har, God declares to Moses that the land is a sacred trust and commands the people to observe periods of comprehensive release. This parashah invites us to consider how, in each generation, we can best serve as guarantors of this trust, respect the duty to rest ourselves and our natural resources, and experience “release.” The legislation in B’har presumes the value of balance and regulates a balance among productivity, rest, and relinquishment.
Inasmuch as punctuating productivity with long pauses lends perspective to life and encourages us to express gratitude for the earth’s bounty, we may wonder what regulations we require today to help us nurture ourselves, one another, and the planet. As women join men in leadership positions and in the work force, it is becoming a Jewish communal priority to effect social and institutional adjustments that allow for a healthy balance between people’s needs and obligations.
B’har affirms that the land belongs to God, and it must be permitted to observe its Sabbaths. The sensibility that the Land of Israel has a responsibility all its own to the Creator recognizes nature’s independence from humanity. The land must be permitted, just like human servants, to praise creation through Shabbat. In the psalmist’s words: kol han’shamah t’halel Yah, “All that breathes praises God” (Psalm 150). The earth must speak its own gratitude.
In the Torah, the earth is an expressive organism. We read that when Miriam died, “the community was without water” (Numbers 20:2). Observing, as it were, its mourning for a heroine whose miracles were all associated with water, the earth dries up. To hear the speech of the earth is a blessing; but if we do not listen, the consequences of our deafness to the planet are traumatic. The ecology movement reminds us of what our biblical forebears understood: the independent consciousness of nature.
Nature’s independence is trumpeted on Yom Kippur after a 50-year countdown. This is when we must (as the Liberty Bell translates the verse) “proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10). We more closely translate dror (“Liberty”) as a proclamation of “release,” a letting go. Counting toward release, we can celebrate release-or we can live in fear of it. And so the liturgy tells us limnotyameinu, to count our days (Psalm 90:12), by which we are meant to understand that since our days are numbered, the trick is to make them count.
Our duty is not to scramble tirelessly, but to be grateful and generous, to assume our small place in creation, and to join the trees in praise. Underlying the laws of B’har is an obligation to take care of each other, to leave no one homeless: “Do not wrong one another, but fear your God” (Leviticus 25:17).
The laws of the sabbatical year echo biblical Creation. The rhythm of the work week undergoes a cosmic magnification: People, imitating the Creator, are productive for six days and then rest. Nature is productive for six years and rests; and then geometrically, after the land has maintained this rhythm for seven cycles of seven: jubilee. The yovel, the jubilee, is a call to restore primal order: Indentured servants are freed, debts are forgiven, and property is restored to its original owners.
Here is a caution against struggling to amass more, and against warring over real estate reminding us that all things are, eventually, released (one way or another) from our possession and control. After the divine promise to Noah that humanity would never again be destroyed by a flood, God devises the jubilee as a peaceful strategy for restoring the world to its original state.
Appreciating that freedom must be learned, a midrash teaches that the Israelites wandered in desert circles for 40 years to make the short trip from Egypt to Canaan because it took that long for the slave population to learn how to manage its freedom. Today, it behooves us to reflect on the substantial gains of the women’s movement and admit that, as B’har teaches, we suffer the consequences of depletion if we do not adequately regulate our hard-won freedoms. Not only do many of us live unbalanced lives, but schools and charities have not corrected for the absence of an earlier generation of volunteer women, to the detriment of children and the poor.
Society needs to effect adjustments so as to make two-career families more viable; and we risk perpetuating conditions of stress at work and home if we do not emphasize to rising generations the need to change existing institutional structures and correct continued gender inequities.
One wonders whether, in the years since the onset of the contemporary women’s movement, we have been panting from exertion without having paused often enough to ask about the meaning of life. High- achieving adolescents too often suffer from depression, and teenage girls suffer from diminished self-worth. Perhaps we have been communicating an unbalanced definition of adulthood-adulthood without sabbatical and jubilation.
The land, our possessions, our bodies, our children, and we ourselves are a sacred trust, and it is not our right to be infinitely demanding on them. We are commanded to rest, not when we are exhausted or having a breakdown, but regularly, as we count the days to Shabbat, to the seven years to the land’s sabbatical, and to the forty-nine years to the releases of jubilee.
Lefkovitz, Lori H. "Who Does the Land Belong To?" MyJewishLearning.com. (Viewed on May 10, 2014). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/urj-bhar.shtml
Putting Shmita Back On The Jewish Map
Cycles of time are central to Jewish life, and they are amongst the most significant of our contributions to the world around us. The modern weekend of western tradition is simply the extension of the Sabbath from one day to two; without the Sabbath there would be no weekend. And without the Torah, and the Shabbat of Jewish tradition, there would be no Sabbath. In practice, today, Shabbat remains central to Jewish life, though Jewish people observe Shabbat differently from each other. But it’s literally impossible to imagine Jewish life without Shabbat.
And just as Shabbat punctuates the week, so too the chaggim – the holidays – punctuate the year. Tu b’Shvat and Purim and Pesach herald the spring. Shavuot marks early summer. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur provoke self-reflection as a new Jewish year begins. Succot celebrates the harvest and the end of summer. Chanukah offers light in the darkness and the knowledge that a new natural cycle will shortly begin.
In recent years there’s been a flowering of interest and awareness in the rhythms of the calendar. The every-28-years blessing of the sun was a big deal when it happened in 2009; I hope I’ll be around to celebrate the next one in 2037. More people probably count the omer, today, than did so a dozen years ago. New books have come out looking at the entire period from Rosh Chodesh Elul, through to Simchat Torah, as a single period of time, focused on teshuvah. More people each cycle seem to be learning daf yomi – a seven-and-a-half cycle of Jewish life that is an early twentieth-century innovation, but one which shows signs of lasting for a long time to come.
The one long cycle of Jewish life that remains relatively unexplored is the cycle of Shmita. The sabbatical year is no less central in the Torah than is Shabbat itself. Six days you should work, and on the seventh you should rest; six years you should work the land, and engage in commerce; in the sixth year (somehow) the land should rest, you should rest, and debts should be annulled. After 49 days, seven cycles of seven, the 50th day is Shavuot. And after 49 years, seven cycles of seven, the 50th is Yovel – the Jubilee year.
In a formal halachic sense – in terms of Jewish law – Shmita only applies in Israel. In practical terms, therefore, Shmita becomes headline news once every seven years when, invariably, there are arguments about how it should be observed in practice in the modern land and state of Israel. There is a good deal of work in Hebrew about Shmita, what it means, how it can and should be observed, and so on.
Even so, inside Israel Shmita is mostly the intellectual property of the orthodox and ultra-orthodox. Until perhaps very recently, few non-orthodox Israeli Jews have much engaged with Shmita, either as an idea or as a potential range of practices. Outside Israel, Shmita remains obscure. In the last two Shmita cycles – in 2000-2001, and in 2007-2008 – I’m aware of a number of synagogues, mostly orthodox, which held study sessions on Shmita. Beyond a few one-off learning sessions: not much.
It was in response to this, in December 2007, following a keynote given by Nati Passow of Jewish Farm School at Hazon’s second Food Conference at Isabella Freedman, that I said that Hazon would launch a Shmita Project. Its goal would be – and remains – simply to put Shmita back on the agenda of the Jewish people; and in due course, through us, to start to seed it as an idea in wider public awareness, beyond the bounds of Jewish life.
There are, I think, two broad – and somewhat distinct, albeit overlapping – ways for us to engage with Shmita. One is, in a sense, instrumental; the second has a deeper kind of intellectual integrity, but may also be vaguer.
The instrumental use is simply about putting Shmita literally back on the calendar. Non-orthodox synagogues may well not observe Shabbat in a halachic way; yet Shabbat is nevertheless different from other days of the week. Jews go to a Seder, or eat matzah on Pesach, even if they don’t keep all of the halachot of Pesach. So Shmita ought, in the first instance, to come back into active Jewish life as a distinct time-frame – regardless of the content with which we actually mark it. I mean by this, things like:
- Using the time from now until the next Shmita year (which starts at Rosh Hashanah 5775, i.e. on September 24th 2014) as a distinct time-period in relation to Shmita: learning about it, getting people excited about, thinking about how the Shmita year could be different; and doing this in advance of the year itself. This involves publicly framing the Shmita year as a year distinct in the life of a particular Jewish institution. How could or should we be different, during this year, than during the other six years of the cycle?
- Then using the Shmita year itself not merely to be different, in some way, than in the previous years; but also – for the first time in modern Jewish history; perhaps for the first time since Second Temple times – using the Shmita year itself partly to start a public conversation about the entire next seven-year Shmita cycle;
- and then entering into a full seven-year cycle, from 13th September 2015 to 25th September 2022, with Shmita firmly on the calendar of Jewish life – with a sense of seven-year goals for institutions, being worked on through the full seven-year period, and with the seventh year itself being both a celebration, a culmination, and a period of rest and reflection, following the preceding six years.
The second way for us to engage Shmita is indeed to engage intellectually (and indeed emotionally, creatively and spiritually) with the texts themselves: the primary, secondary and tertiary texts that introduce, explicate, and commentate on the various ideas encompassed by the idea of “Shmita.”
I have been learning Shmita texts steadily for the last five and a half years. The longer I have learned them the more fascinated I have become by Shmita. The primary texts are models not only of brevity but also of unclarity and contradiction. What exactly were you meant to eat in the Shmita year? How do the different aspects of Shmita stand in relation to each other? If the Jewish people bequeathed to human history only these primary texts, what theory of Jewish tradition – of our values and aspirations – might we derive from them? The prozbul and the heter mechira: are these in some sense regretful compromises, which dilute the pureness of the original biblical texts? Or are they vital innovations in Jewish life which should be celebrated because they are grounded in the reality of human behavior and the necessity to place central human needs (in the economies both of land and of money) above abstract aspiration?
These questions are open questions. Shmita is the public property of the Jewish people – and a gift from us to the whole world. So please read about Shmita – learn its various texts – and share them. I, and everyone at Hazon, hope that this exploration and internalization of Shmita will enrich your life; and in due course play some role in creating a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community, and a healthier and more sustainable world for all.
Savage, Nigel. "Putting Shmita Back on the Jewish Map." Hazon. (Viewed on May 10, 2013). http://hazon.org/shmita-project/overview/about/putting-shmita-back-on-the-jewish-map/
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