The current sabbatical year, which began at Rosh Hashanah, represents a remarkable renewal of the possibilities of shmittah, the biblical seven-year agricultural cycle for the Land of Israel.
The Torah's vision of shmittah embodies profound values of socio-economic equality, environmental sustainability and social renewal. During the shmittah, field owners are to take down their fences and let all who wish come and eat their produce; the land is given a septennial break to renew and restore itself; debts are forgiven and the poorest are enabled to make a new start.
After several decades in which the public face of shmittah in Israel has, sadly, been manifested in deepening disputes between rabbis and religious communities over kosher certification, the present shmittah year has seen a proliferation of programmes which stress its sustainability and social justice
dimensions.
This shift enables shmittah to become a unifying force in the life of the Jewish people. Whereas previously, shmittah was, for diaspora Jews, mostly irrelevant, now shmittah in Israel is beginning to express values that many diaspora Jews share and embrace.
I have been fortunate to view this shift over the past year through the prism of producing a book comprising an annotated translation of Rav Kook's Shabbat Ha'aretz, a classic text on shmittah.
Debts are forgiven and the poorest are able to make a new start
Shabbat Ha'aretz, published by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook on the eve of the 1909-10 shmittah year, is undoubtedly the most important and influential book on shmittah to have appeared in the modern era. Rav Kook, who was then Chief Rabbi of Jaffa, saw that the rigorous observance of the commandment to cease agricultural work for a year could starve the pioneering Jewish farmers and uproot the precarious foothold they had established in the Land of Israel.
He therefore permitted the farmers to sell their land to non-Jews for the duration of the shmittah, allowing them to work and avoid impoverishment. This permit, known as the heter mechirah had first been issued for the pioneering farmers of Israel during the shmittah of 1888–9.
Rav Kook painted a poetic picture of shmittah as enabling a renewed connection to the divine life-force in each individual and within us collectively. Like Shabbat, shmittah quietens the tumult of the intervening periods and restores a more authentic relationship to ourselves, to each other, to nature and to God. Its observance reveals the unique weave of socio-economic relationships that the Torah would have us pattern.
Shabbat Ha'aretz became a defining piece of religious Zionist halachic decision-making and has served as a lightning rod for controversy between religious Zionists and Charedim about the proper parameters of halachic innovation in Israel. Yet throughout Shabbat Ha'aretz shines a vision of how shmittah could be much more than it is today.
Rav Kook believed in the power for social and spiritual reawakening embodied in shmittah. He hoped that the temporary leniency he was proposing - enabling the land to be sold and shmittah effectively not observed - was actually one step on the journey towards the eventual and full renewal of shmittah.
The significance of this shmittah year seems to be as a pivotal point between a period where the main mode of observing shmittah in Israel was, in one way or another, by not observing it, towards an era where Israelis are starting to seriously ask how do we actually observe it in a high-tech economy.
Initiatives under way in Israel include a joint project of government banks and NGOs to bring 5,000 families out of crippling long-term debt this year, through a combination of partial debt relief, rescheduling of loans and counselling on financial planning.
The Environment Ministry has proposed a moratorium on fishing in the Sea of Galilee to allow the near-exhausted fish stocks to replenish themselves. These steps represent creative adaptations of core shmittah values to a 21st century economy. Their advocates span the religious spectrum; the main champion of these ideas in the government has been Ruth Calderon, a secular Knesset member.
There has been a parallel resurgence of interest in shmittah in the diaspora, cross-pollinating ideas with developments in Israel through the recent series of Siach conferences, which brought together social justice and environmental activists from Israel and the diaspora. Hazon, the largest Jewish environmental organisation in the US, has embraced shmittah as a paradigm for Jewish teaching on sustainability.
Shmittah gives British Jewry a unique opportunity to be part of a global Jewish movement; to teach about shmittah and to begin apply its principles to social action in our contemporary world. The Jewish Social Action Forum (JSAF) has chosen inequality as its shmittah theme for 5775, to highlight the increasing prevalence of hunger in the UK. JSAF's Shmittah Mitzvah Day project on November 16 aims to connect Jewish communities with local foodbanks.
Although most of us are not farmers, if we are blessed with an abundance of food we can share it with the poor.
