The Shmita Year

Someone sent me this and it’s so good I had to reproduce it in Thoughts while Shaving:

“The beginning of Deuteronomy is filled with promises about taking possession of the land of Canaan. But…remember that our ancestors lost possession of that land and went into exile. The Torah teaches that the way to live long in the land and avoid exile is not by having the strongest army, but by fulfilling the covenant of the Torah. And it tells us that one mitzvah is most important for making this happen: the Sabbatical or Shmita year, when the land rests.

“The Shmita year is a prescription for living sustainably upon the earth. Not only does the land rest every seventh year, but the year following every seventh Shmita year — the fiftieth year of Jubilee — every family returns to the land it received when the land was first distributed among the Israelite tribes.

“That means that in a world where Shmita is observed, poverty can never become permanent, the land is always renewed, and justice becomes the foundation of relations among human beings and between the people and the land. Harmony reigns in a tripartite covenant between God, the people, and the land.”

– Rabbi David Seidenberg