The current Hebrew year, 5782, is shmitah, or the sabbatical year, on which, according to biblical edict, debts are forgiven and the land left to lie fallow. Since the 1st century BCE, observant Jews have used a rabbinic workaround known as prozbul—designed for economies more complex than those of the late Bronze Age—that allows creditors to press their claims even after the seventh year. Drawing on his own experience with massive debt after the 2008 financial crisis tanked his startup, Baruch Sterman examines the meaning of the shmitah, and its modern-day relevance:
I’ve recently been studying the work of Rabbi Isaac ha-Levi Herzog, the first chief rabbi of the state of Israel (both the father of Israel’s sixth president and grandfather and namesake of Israel’s current president), whose great project was to fit the demands of halakhah to the needs of the modern state. . . . Herzog noted that the court could indeed have annulled the cancelation of debts as part of the shmitah-year regulations, but had it done so, “the very core of the mitzvah would be impaired.”
The core of the commandment, according to Herzog, was the recognition that the earth is the Lord’s and that property, debts, and class distinctions are all human constructions. “All the earth becomes a single plain in the holy year,” Herzog writes, “and all the barriers between rich and poor fall away.” Once every seven years, at least ideally, the economic playing field should be leveled, and those trapped in debt should be freed. The prozbul may have been a necessary legal fiction devised to keep an increasingly complex society running smoothly, but Rabbi Herzog realized that [it was] deliberately structured . . . so that every lender still must encounter the revolutionary ideal of the Bible when writing his or her own prozbul.
The seven-day week, seven-year shmitah sequence, and seven rounds of seven years that lead up to the jubilee year, all highlight the cyclical nature of the world. At any moment, the situation in which one finds oneself—financially, physically, emotionally—may be reversed. In the blink of an eye, we may find ourselves going from the one who can give to the one in need, from a CEO on the verge of great success to a supplicant.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/contemporary-israel/12012/he-shall-not-press-his-fellow/