We are in the middle of a shmittah year, the biblical sabbatical. Shmittah is a fascinating test case for what happens to Torah teachings about Jewish collective life in Israel, with the rebirth of a Jewish state.

The state of shmittah today is barely comprehensible without a small but extraordinary book called Shabbat Ha’aretz, published in 1909, by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935). Rav Kook is known as a great modern Jewish thinker and one of the founders of religious Zionism. 

His Shabbat Ha’aretz is arguably the most influential book about shmittah to be published since the Bible itself. It is indispensable for understanding how shmittah is currently observed and what it might one day become.     

To make sense of this, we need to go back to the biblical teachings about shmittah, a central pillar of Judaism’s vision for a just society. Shmittah is discussed in three main passages of the Torah. Exodus 23 tells us that in the seventh year, agricultural work ceases and the produce of the land becomes ownerless. The poor enter and eat from previously private fields. Animals may consume what is left.

Leviticus 25 places the focus on the land. Just as people enjoy Sabbath one day out of seven, so, too, every seven years, the land must have its Sabbath. There is a duty of stewardship to the earth. We should not treat it as merely a resource to be exploited. We are not the earth’s ultimate masters. 

Finally, Deuteronomy 15 is about debt relief. Every seven years, debts are cancelled. The crippling obligations on debtors are lifted. It is meritorious for the debtor to repay the loan after the shmittah year, if he can, but he does not have to do so and the creditor may not demand repayment. 

These mitzvot embody a radical socio-economic and ecological vision. Together, they legislate a septennial time-out in Jewish economic life, a year of spiritual renewal, a holiday for the land, a year-long ceasefire in the economic struggle of all against all, an abolition of many of the rights of private property, a levelling of rich and poor, man and beast. 

So it is not surprising that the history of these commandments has been marked by tension between their exacting requirements and the demands of economic reality. Indeed, the Torah itself recognises that stopping agricultural work for a year required deep faith that God would provide for the farmers’ needs.

The biggest clash between the laws of shmittah and economic exigencies erupted in 1888. Immigration to the Land of Israel, beginning in 1882, brought some 60,000, mostly religious Jews from Eastern Europe. The immigrants worked the land and endured poverty and starvation as they eked out a living from agriculture.

With the shmittah of 1888–89, one settlement, Mazkeret Batya, insisted on ceasing working, as the Torah stipulated (much to the displeasure of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who was supporting them.) Most of the pioneers, however, believed that observing the sabbatical year as commanded in the Bible would be ruinous. 

The inexperienced farmers appealed for help to European rabbis, including Rabbi Shmuel Mohliver and Rabbi Yitzhak Elchanan Spektor, who ruled that they might continue to the work the land in the sabbatical year, provided that the land was sold to non-Jews for the duration of the shmittah This compassionate leniency was modelled on the permission to sell chametz, leavened food, to non-Jews during Passover to avoid serious loss. 

The heter mechirah (leniency of sale), as it became known, was always controversial. Rav Kook’s decisive contribution in Shabbat Ha’aretz was to give a brilliant and audacious argument that put the leniency on a firmer halachic footing. His self-declared motivation for doing so was to enable Jews to live and flourish economically in the Land of Israel. 

Rav Kook identified deeply with the Zionist project and was in awe of the pioneers’ dedication and selflessness. He felt responsible to find a solution that would enable Jews to immigrate with confidence that shmittah observance would not destroy their livelihood. 

Such was the power of Rav Kook’s argument that, 113 years later, most farmers and consumers in Israel still follow his approach, observing shmittah through a halachic method of effectively avoiding shmittah.

The Charedi communities, which always regarded the heter mechirah leniency as illegitimate, are an exception. Their towering authority, the Chazon Ish (1878-1953) wrote against the heter that, “all the murmurings that this is a situation that requires life-saving measures derives from cold-heartenedness and a lack of respect for the fulfilment of the mitzvot.” 

Yet it would be a mistake to think that Rav Kook was content for shmittah to be evaded indefinitely. He introduced his book with a beautiful, soaring, poetic paean to the possibilities of shmittah when we will be able to observe it fully. 

Like Shabbat, he writes, shmittah quietens the tumult of the intervening periods and restores a more authentic relationship to one another, to nature, to ourselves and to God. Its observance reveals the unique weave of socio-economic relationships that the Torah would have us pattern. 

It is to be a periodic outbreak of justice, equality, social renewal and restored human dignity. Kook envisaged a future in which the nascent resettlement of the land would one day be secure enough to enable us to no longer avoid shmittah but to fully observe and embrace it.  

Inspired by Rav Kook’s vision, rabbis, activists, legislators and educators have, recently sought to implement the social and ecological values of shmittah through debt relief programmes for impoverished families, volunteering time banks, and even efforts to experience the teachings of shmittah in hi-tech companies such as by enabling employees to take courses and learn new fields during the sabbatical. 

Time will tell if such initiatives can give meaningful expression to some of the Torah’s central teachings about Jewish economic life. As Rav Kook himself stressed in Shabbat Ha’aretz, “study leads to action.” (Talmud Kiddushin 40b). The road to authentically renewing shmittah leads through learning about these remarkable teachings.    

The Sabbath of the Land: Selections from Rav Kook’s Shabbat HaAretz and Contemporary Reflections on Renewing Shemitta, translated with an introduction by Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair, is published by Maggid Books at £18.99