Aside from Tu Bishvat, Shmittah is the main opportunity in the Jewish calendrical cycle, broadly defined, for most of us to celebrate, commemorate, and ritually observe our relationship as Jews to the earth and to agriculture. Shmittah also gives us a different way to relate to the land of Israel, as actual land, earth, source of sustenance, giving us a way of “grounding” all of the metaphorical, religious, national and political meanings that accrue to it. In Jewish tradition, our historical associations with the land usually lead us to think of the Temple and the Kotel, the ancient cities and communities that gave birth to famous writing and liturgy, or the archeological finds, the ruins still being dug at tels such as Megiddo and Hazor.
In Yehuda Halevi’s famous lament “ציון הלא תשאלי” recited on Tisha B’Av, nature in Israel itself is saturated with the memories of ancient rituals: “Your very air’s alive with souls; / Your earth breathes incense and your rivers / Run with balm.” (Hillel Halkin translation) What that earth doesn’t do in Halevi’s poem is grow wheat, feed chickens, sprout pomegranates, as it does in, say, the Song of Songs and the novels of Amos Oz and Meir Shalev. Shmittah brings us back to the ancient and contemporary Jewish farm, the old/new kibbutz and moshav.
There have been many talks, articles, divrei Torah and parsha sheets about Shmittah this year, including Hazon’s Shmita Project and artistic Prizes. I attended Chovevei Torah’s series of shiurim, each delivered by a different speaker, and was amazed at how many angles there are on Shmittah: Rav Kook’s teaching about the Land, of course, but also how 19th century rabbis new to the land revived and rethought Shmittah, Shmittah as a paradigm for personal sabbatical and regrowth, the release of debts and social justice, and much more. Shmittah also has been central to rabbinic historiosophic speculation, the cycles of eons leading from the beginning to the end of Time.
The connection between Shmittah and Shabbat is clear in the Torah, but when discussed, the comparison is usually drawn one way: How Shmittah is modeled upon Shabbat, is like Shabbat. What would it look like if we asked the question in reverse: How is Shabbat like Shmittah? What if we attempted to bring the spirit of Shmittah into Shabbat? Perhaps we would then feel the freedom from work as simultaneously the freeing of the land from work, the freedom of nature from human implements, of the environment from human impact. Just as various “days” and “months” (“Women’s History Month,” “Rare Diseases Day,” “Earth Day,” etc.) are meant to raise awareness of issues that should really be present all year long, so too the meaning and intensity of a Shmittah year should stay with us in our lives throughout the other six years.
The poet, novelist, Kentucky farmer and agricultural sage Wendell Berry captures something of this connection in one of his many Sabbath poems, titled “How to Be a Poet,” written over the course of his life (he’s now 87 and going strong). Although Berry is not Jewish, some of the poem resonates with our observance of the day’s sacredness:
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
For Berry, the Sabbath is not only a holy time, a vessel for spiritual connection and renewal, but also a day to restore our connection to the earth, which is obscured by modern technology.
The poem ends with a meditation on the generative power of silence, a silencing of our larger man-made technological world that we shut down in our observance of Shabbat:
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
His poem’s silence is modeled on the silence of Shabbat, a day of returning to an undisturbed nature, and the prayers that fill the silence. The poem and the day offer a vision of people living in harmony with nature, as a part of it. Berry’s idea of a poem is as a Shabbat of Shemittah, a day in which humanity’s and nature’s rest coincide, align, and replenish the world with fruitful, peaceful silence.