Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Lord (Leviticus 25:2).
If not redeemed in any of those ways, that person, along with any children, shall go free in the jubilee year. For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants: they are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt—I, your God the Lord. (Leviticus 25:5-56)
The Torah offers us three forms of Sabbatical: the seventh day (Shabbat), the seventh year (Shemita), and the 49th year (Jubilee). On the seventh day, we rest from labor; in the seventh year, the land itself rests; in the 49th year, we free slaves. All three sabbaticals reinforce the recognition that God is sovereign of the world.
God obligates us to rest on the seventh day, let the land rest in the seventh year, and free slaves in the 49th year—each of these is a mini-sacrifice. Each of these involves a stepping back from the grind of life. Each instantiates God’s love for and involvement in the world. Rest in all three cases means acknowledging that our supposed masters are not real. We can have or be bosses, but ultimately, God is the boss. The fecundity of the land requires our effort, but fundamentally requires divine blessing. The world of action is one in which we seek to apply our skill and knowledge, but Shabbat is a reminder that everything exists through divine favor: because God wants it to be. The Jubilee comes as a double gift: a reminder to overlords that they can’t make themselves gods; a reminder to servants that they can’t deify their social superiors. In paganism, leaders are worshipped. In monotheism, the most powerful people and the most powerless people share the same ontological status: servants of God.
Scientists seek to determine the mimhag haOlam and derech haTeva, the way of the world and the laws of Nature. Anytime we underwrite the future, or assume that our actions will have a predictable effect, we are engaging in the basic scientific assumption that the world follows knowable and masterable patterns. Shabbat, Shemita, and Jubilee, are predictable and set, yet they come to punctuate and disrupt—at different intervals—the world of human planning. One can plan for and around a Jubilee, but in so doing one acknowledges that time is not ours. The years are not ours. Our social circumstances are not ours. On different schedules, we are obligated to admit that the laws we take for granted can be changed.
Jubilee and Shabbat are two ends of a spectrum, with one occurring 1-2x in a lifetime and the other occurring weekly. But just as Jubilee is a redemption, so is Shabbat. On Shabbat God redeems all of us from slave-consciousness, from our bondage to the week, our delusion that work is all there is, and our sense that our ontological value is a function of our effectiveness.
In the Torah, slavery is not merely servitude to human masters, but belief that they are your ultimate masters. After 48 years of servitude, it may be near impossible to remember that we all work for God, so God institutes a Jubilee. But Shabbat is a micro-version of the same. We report to God. With that awareness our work takes on a different depth.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins