Parshah Commentary

The shemita, or sabbatical, year described at the beginning of this week’s double parshah is troubled by a central contradiction. On the one hand, the land is meant to rest, and there is thus a ban on plowing, planting, harvesting, and other intensive agricultural activities that the Rabbis associate with private ownership. On the other hand, all creatures—owners along with their slaves and hired workers, landless sojourners, and even animals—are meant to eat as equals from the produce of the land. The problem is that the ecological purpose of shemita threatens its social purpose: If standard agricultural practices are restricted, what will the poor and vulnerable eat? How can redistributive politics operate in the context of limited resources and, in our world, a shrinking ecological pie?

The severity of this contradiction depends on a society’s agricultural mode of production. In a fully, or even partially, pastoral or nomadic society, in which people have access to common lands and resources—such as forests, and grazing and hunting grounds—shemita would not have a significant impact, because food could be obtained without agricultural labor and without upending the social order. But the Torah asks the obvious question that would have faced the Israelites, agriculturalists who relied on annual crops and stored surplus for their sustenance: “What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?” The Torah implies that the people are meant to subsist on the accumulated surplus of previous years, as well as the fruit that continues to grow in orchards and volunteer growth, meaning plants that arise on their own from seeds of previous crops. The poor can enjoy some of the food that grows naturally during shemita but otherwise must rely on existing welfare institutions’ surplus, presumably contributed by the rich. In other words, according to the Torah, the imperative for ecological rest is clear, yet the question of how to implement its vision of social equality is left unanswered.

The rabbinic tradition, however, placed a greater emphasis on how shemita might serve as a social equalizer. One of the major rabbinic tenets of shemita is the suspension of the right of exclusion—the basis of private land ownership—allowing anyone to freely graze in any field. The Mekhilta, an early rabbinic text, even suggests that ideally all fences should be torn down during shemita. As the medieval commentator known as the Ramban emphasizes, this means that the right of public access to land during shemita is paramount: “According to Torah law, a person may not guard their field and lock the gate in poor people’s faces on the shemita year, even if he wants to give away the yield at the time of harvest. Rather, the field should be ownerless and available to the poor for the entire year.” In this understanding, shemita is meant to do more than feed the poor; it temporarily restores a world of common lands and sustenance unfettered by private property.

The Tosefta, another rabbinic text, prioritizes redistribution over ecological rest, innovating a different model of collective ownership known as “otzar beis din,” or “the court’s storehouse.” The Rabbis ruled that a court, as an agent of the poor, was authorized to engage in otherwise illicit activities—commercial-scale harvesting and the guarding of fields, as well as confiscating crops from those who harvested excessive amounts. The court’s storehouse would then distribute provisions to every household and maintain a surplus for the common good. The Rabbis thus subvert private ownership by devising an institution of centralized ownership rather than by reverting to common lands. This solution essentially ignores the imperative to let the land rest, and instead pragmatically adapts to the existing agricultural mode of annual crop production in a way that responds to the practical challenges of property abolition.

While the otzar beis din doesn’t achieve everything the Torah is aiming for, it was a reasonable attempt at implementing a very difficult commandment given real-world constraints, while also avoiding treating shemita as an abstruse, arbitrary commandment that can be fulfilled on a formal level alone. This latter approach, however, is what developed in the State of Israel. The dominant approach to shemita in Israel today is called “heter mechirah,” literally “selling permission,” and dates back to the 1880s settlement period, when Jews who had arrived in Palestine struggled to meet subsistence levels in a normal year, even without shemita restrictions. The heter permits Jewish farmers to sell their farmland to non-Jews for the year and work as a gentile’s “employee” or “subcontractor” in order to avoid the prohibition of working Jewish-owned land during shemita. Thus, in a darkly ironic development, Jewish colonization of Palestine and its attendant land takeover coincided with the creation of this legal fiction that allowed largely dispossessed Palestinians to gain legal title to land—but only insofar as it helped Jews circumvent the rigors of Torah law and its vision of equality.

This loophole continues to allow its practitioners to avoid wrestling with the substantive questions about how society should be structured to accommodate the obligation to observe shemita—questions with implications for the whole Jewish world. What would our society look like if, every seven years, we broke open the gates of all private property? How might we create an otzar beis din that can effectively prioritize universal subsistence over private control and wealth accumulation? Are there any parallel obligations on the owners of non-agricultural land or other productive resources? How must shemita function in the context of stolen land? These are questions that should trouble today’s Jewish state, for as our parshah states, a society that ignores shemita will face dire consequences. If the land is not given rest by its inhabitants, it will take its own rest after violent upheaval and exile: “Then shall the land make up for its sabbath years throughout the time that it is desolate and you are in the land of your enemies.” Shemita is coming, in other words—but, unless we change our ways, it will be apocalyptically forced upon us.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.