Social Justice and the Sabbatical Year

by Rabbi Shmuel Lewis

The Conservative Yeshiva is part of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. The yeshiva is a community in which students of all ages join to study Torah lishmah, Torah for its own sake. We learn Torah together, pray together, do chesed together – and try to build a model Jewish community. The yeshiva runs a full-time program of study; part-time students are welcome to join for as much as they wish. The majority of students are young people who have graduated from college within five years.

During the summer the Conservative Yeshiva runs two three-week programs of full-day study, including five levels of ulpan and two of Talmud every morning. The majority of summer students are working people who choose to spend their vacations studying Torah in Jerusalem. The yeshiva also offers online learning opportunities.

A number of times during the year, the rosh yeshiva gives a shiur clali, a session for all the students. To prepare for sabbatical year, students received a lesson in practical halakhah before Rosh Hashanah. The following article is part of a shiur clali given in October.

Details about the Conservative Yeshiva are available on its website, www.ConservativeYeshiva.org.

This year – 5768 – is a sh’nat sh’mitta, a sabbatical year in eretz Yisrael. The sabbatical year calls us to appreciate both the holiness of the land and our social responsibilities to society’s have-nots. The laws as presented in the Bible seem to assume an agrarian economy based on selfsustaining small landholdings. The details are not workable in our concentrated, industrial agriculture, which is designed to provide food for an increasingly urban population. Nonetheless, this is an occasion for thought about what could be called the spiritual aspects of agricultural, political, and economic issues. One way to approach this is via the relations between the theological ideals and the social-economic program embodied in the mitzvah of the sabbatical year.

In the words of Leviticus 25:2-7:

When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a Sabbath of the Lord. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest, a Sabbath of the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. But you may eat whatever the land during its Sabbath will produce – you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all its yield.

The land is to have a year of rest, a “Sabbath of the Lord.” The land belongs to God – we may not work it nor harvest it nor store it up for ourselves, but we may take what we need to eat as we need it, along with other people and animals. The emphasis here is on the theological meaning of the Sabbath year. Human beings are to recognize their place as a part of (created) nature vis-à-vis the real Owner of the land.

Exodus 23:10-11 gives a different perspective:

Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but in the seventh you shall let it rest and abandon it. Let the needy among your people eat of it, and what they leave let the wild beasts eat. You shall do the same with your vineyards and your olive groves.

Here the emphasis is on the social aspect of the sabbatical year. The field is to be abandoned, to be treated as ownerless, not for theological reasons but to provide food for the needy.

Rabbinic interpretation struggles with the difficulty of realizing these two goals simultaneously. Relinquishing all claims to the land and leaving all produce ownerless expresses the theological truth that the real owner is God. However, in practice this means that what grows on the land must be left equally available to all; this is not an effective way to get that food to the people who most need it. If a person wants to direct what the land produces on its own to the most needy, he or she must assert a kind of ownership. Furthermore, private ownership of property has moral and social value. The ownerless reality mandated during the sabbatical year is anarchic. If that were to be the reality all the time, no one would be willing to invest in working the land, and so it is not likely to produce enough to support the human population. Moreover, if everyone – human and animal alike – is to be given equal and free access to the fields, it is unlikely that someone willing to work the land (if there were such a person) would succeed in producing a successful yield.

Translating the religious ideals of Leviticus into a practical program that could realize the social goals of Exodus is a catch-22 situation. The rabbis attempted to be faithful to the thrust of the Torah without sacrificing one goal to the other. This demanded that they use their legal imaginations to construct a system of rules that would be effective despite inevitably failing to maximize either goal.

What seems to be the most promising direction in the rabbinic sources is what has come to be called otzar beit hadin (the storehouse of the court). In this arrangement, private property is relinquished without the attendant anarchy in a kind of communist collective. The beit din (rabbinic court) acts in the name of the entire collective – it delegates people to gather the produce and bring it to central storage facilities. From there, it is distributed according to need under the beit din’s supervision. There is no private ownership or private enterprise, but the fields are not left to be trampled by hungry people and animals looking for food, and (at least in principle) the food arrives at the tables where it is most needed. The lack of private ownership and enterprise makes it unlikely that someone would think “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me” (Deuteronomy 8:17), and thus conveys human dependency on God.

The problem with this arrangement is that it invites the collective to mistake its power for the power of God. The idea of otzar beit hadin is to have a cyclical economy – six years based on private ownership and enterprise and a seventh year based on collective ownership.

The tensions inherent in the conflict between the sabbatical year’s theological ideals and its social-economic goals finally may prove – like the tension between liberty and equality – to be irresolvable. Yet given the self-conscious interlocking nature of national governments and economies in our world, the state of Israel can develop the ideal of the otsar beit hadin by nationalizing produce during the sabbatical year. But the modern world also has made clear the inevitability of corruption that attends both private and collective enterprises. In the final analysis, no system can succeed in balancing the theological ideals and social goals that the sabbatical year is meant to achieve unless the people implementing it are guided in their actual practice by righteousness.