The Torah offers a fascinating model of a cyclical social and economic corrective that is meant to inculcate humility. In the portion called B’har (Leviticus 25), the Torah lays out the cycles of Sh’mita/Sabbatical years and the Yovel/Jubilee. Every seventh year the land is to rest: Six years you shall sow your field and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its produce, but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath observed by cessation from work for the land…. In the Sabbatical year nothing is to be planted or harvested. The fields are open to all to come and glean from what grows of itself, not to take away as though a harvest, but to eat as needed right there in the field, the poor, the stranger, and landowner alike.

Ultimately, not only about the land, but about the way people treat each other upon the land, we are told in the context of these laws of the land’s Sabbath: And you shall not grieve one another…. Concerning the impact of individual behavior on society, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch offers beautiful commentary in the context of the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee: God is present not only in the Temple but also in the midst of all business and commerce transacted by the members of the nation. God will support and bless these transactions only if they bring happiness and prosperity to all; if no one “grieves” the other.
Writing in nineteenth-century Germany, Hirsch’s words speak with powerful resonance and warning to our time. An economy that does not bring “happiness and prosperity to all,” evaporating lines of caste and class before God, will undermine the wellbeing of the nation. However different the social and economic realities of our time from that of the Torah, in its promulgation of the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee year, the Torah offers the underlying values of the “Sabbath of the land” as a timeless vision and way of transformation.
Rabbi Victor Reinstein
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