As the school year winds down, a season of student milestones rapidly replaces the more ordinary days of classes and learning. We celebrate all sorts of academic achievements, coming-of-age events, and more. The atmosphere feels different, more vibrant, even electric at times. Then the school year quickly ends, summer starts, and before we can catch our breath, the whole cycle repeats itself with the beginning of the new year in September. This pattern is not a mere accident of annual school schedules, but may suggest something much deeper and elemental.
The balance of ordinary and blissful, dynamic and rock-steady, is embedded into the very fabric of nature in both time and space. Of course, we are all familiar with this play of kodesh and chol, sacred and profane, when it comes to Judaism’s relationship with time. This is the essence of Shabbat: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Shabbat of the L-rd your G-d; you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your gates.” (Shemot 20: 9-10)
In this week’s parsha, Behar-Bechukosai, the Torah presents a parallel phenomenon with regard to both time and space in the institutions of Shemitta and Yovel, the Sabbatical and Jubilee years: “Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the field. But in the seventh year the land shall have a Shabbat of complete rest, a Shabbat of the L-rd; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard” (Vayikra 25: 3-4) and “You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years… and the shofar will be sounded throughout the land… you shall make holy the fiftieth year… That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you.” (Vayikra 25: 8-11) The laws of Shemitta and Yovel both share some common elements and, of course, features of our weekly Shabbat—they are, after all, both called a “Shabbat of Hashem for the land (of Israel),” and involve letting the earth go uncultivated—but they also have distinctive elements, aspects that distinguish Shemitta from Yovel and vice-versa. Should we just view the Yovel year, the Jubilee year, as a more elaborate, ritualized version of the once-in-every seven years Shemitta, or is there a deeper difference here?
The late, great Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg zt”l, known as HaRav Shagar, developed a beautiful approach to Shemitta and Yovel that both underscored the similarities between these halachic realities and suggested some important differences. For Rav Shagar, Shemitta, with its focus on leaving the fields to the poor and needy and the cancellation of debts (Shemittas Kesafim), represented the highest form of ethical sensitivity which permeates the Jewish tradition: Compassion, inclusion, love for our people. These are qualities that are necessary for ordinary life, for the life of the individual within the community. In that sense, they are basic—not boring or uninteresting, but foundational to a Jewish life.
Yovel, on the other hand, represents something much more ambitious. The Jubilee year with its penetrating, disruptive shofar, with the return of ancestral land to its rightful landed owners and the radical (for that era, certainly) freeing of slaves, points towards a more ideal, even utopian dimension to Yahadut. As my rebbi, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l, would so often say: We need to hold both ideals together, the Shemitta dimension and the Yovel dimension, to uphold the demanding Avodas Hashem of the Jew.
We live in this world, the world of Shemitta, but we also need to aspire to, and at times even actualize, the ideal world of Yovel. May Hashem give us the wisdom and strength to keep this beautiful tension fully alive in our lives. |