Shmittah = Trust in God

Parshat Behar 

by Rabbi Avi Billet

And God said to Moshe at Mt. Sinai, to say, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them that when you come to the land that I am giving you, the land will rest a Sabbath for God.”

Rashi famously asks “What connection exists between Sinai and the Sabbatical year [that merits their being mentioned next to each other]?”

The Kli Yakar notes the parallel between the 49 days leading up to the giving of the Torah on the 50th day and the 49 years which lead up to the Yovel/Jubilee, which is the 50th year. As the mountain was built up in stature and became forbidden from planting and any work on the day of Revelation, a day on which liberty and freedom from Egypt was finalized, and being under the wings of the Almighty was concretized, God told Moshe about how the same concept of holiness would exist for the land, 49 years leading to a 50th.

The air of Israel is like Sinai, its qualities bring wisdom to its inhabitants. In its own way, it needs to have built into its foundation a parallel to Sinai: 49+1, the sounding of a Shofar, proclamation of the oneness of God and the liberty the Israelites have from being under the divine wing.

Jumping on this foundation, Kli Yakar quotes others in asking the question: why is one of the punishments for not keeping Shmittah (Sabbatical year) seriously is being exiled from the land? Presumably, if the argument is oft-made that Shmittah is assumed to be good for the land, then let it be that not observing its laws would result in a consequence of nothing growing!

Exile would just mean the land would lay fallow altogether!

Kli Yakar explains that Shmittah is a means for establishing roots of “Emunah” (trust in God). God was concerned that people would come to the land and think that all the work they put into making things grow would result in their feeling “My strength and fortitude is what made all of this happen,” thus forgetting God.

In simple terms, Kli Yakar notes how the seven year cycle in Israel is different from how farmers elsewhere might take care of their land, so it could rest and strengthen for a new growing season. But the promise God gives for Shmittah is that if the land rests in the seventh year, the food which grows from the sixth year’s planting will last for the sixth, seventh, and eighth years. Whether it will continue to grow each year or will simply have a shelf life that is unprecedented is a debate among the authorities. But no matter how one looks at it, those three years of sustenance is simply miraculous.

“Through all of these wonders you see in the land you will come to know that the land is Mine. And through this your eyes will be raised towards God, as we see from the Manna, which fell daily, so the people would see that their sustenance came from God.”

I don’t think it advisable for people to live this way always – to expect that their daily bread comes from God alone. People must make efforts, have jobs, work, and do their part to make sure their daily bread can be placed on the table.

However, there is something rather enamoring in the idea that my six years of toil is rewarded with a God-given guarantee of food for the year I do not work, and for the year following that year of rest, when work resumes but we cannot rely on our daily bread from previous year’s work. Only God’s guarantee that everything will be alright sustains me.

Those who lived through such promises surely felt God’s presence much more closely. Were we to only merit to feel God’s presence in that way, how holy a nation we would truly be.