Shemita – The Blessing which can turn into a Curse

“And you will say. What will we eat in the seventh year? – behold, we will not sow and we will not gather our crop!

I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year and it will yield a crop sufficient for the three years. You will sow in the eighth year but you will eat from the old crop until the ninth year, until the arrival of its crop, you will eat the old.” (Vayikra 25:19-23)

After God commands the Israelites to leave the land barren in the seventh year and not work it, God immediately tells them that they should not worry that they will not have anything to eat in the seventh year and the following ones, because He will bless the sixth year with a crop sufficient for three years.

This would mean that the question, what will we eat, could only be asked at the beginning of the sixth year or even earlier, when the miraculous harvest had not yet started. After that the blessing would already have been implemented and everybody could see that the harvest was miraculously increased. There would no longer be any reason to worry.

The anxiety over lack of food in the seventh, eighth and ninth year was therefore of short duration. After all, the triple harvest took place at the beginning of this period, in the sixth year: “I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year and it will yield a crop sufficient for the three years.”

But this means is that if this miraculous increase in the sixth year fails to happen, it can only mean that God does not want the law of shemita to apply!

After all, the shemita observance by the Jews is dependent on the triple blessing in the sixth year. If the blessing took place, it was obvious that the Jews were obligated to observe the laws of shemita! And if not, they would not be so obligated.

This means that there could not be any speculation whether or not the law would apply: No blessing means no obligation.

The sages, to safeguard the spirit of the Law and its great message, decided however to implement the shmita as rabbinical law, or as an act of piety.

With the establishment of the State of Israel God has not re-introduced the blessing of the sixth year. The law is still a rabbinic one, and thus it is possible to apply several leniencies to make it easier on the Jews to observe the shemita law, such as the sale of the land to non-Jews or making use of hydroponics.

If the law still had the status of biblical law, these leniencies could not apply, since it is halachically impossible to sell the land or use hydroponics. Both of these leniencies are therefore more symbolic than purely legal.

What this means, however, is that, contrary to the conventional opinion, the application of the biblical law was not depending on the Israelites’ observance of shemita. After all, the blessing was to come before the shemita and not afterwards!

And so, it was not God who was waiting for the Israelites to observe the shemita laws. If that were the case, the blessing would only come once the Jews already started observing the shemita in the seventh year. Since the blessing would take place in the sixth year, it is clear that the Israelites were waiting for God to implement the blessing, after which they would start to observe the laws of shemita.

The question then is obvious: Why would God not implement the blessing a-priori? Why would He withhold this blessing when, by granting it, it would mean that the Israelites would be obligated to observe the shemita laws as He required? And what was the purpose of this miracle?

It can only mean that in post-biblical years, when the Jewish people returned to idol worship, the blessing would be lost on them. It would become a blessing in disguise.

A Root Experience

The purpose of the shemita laws is to teach the Jews that the land is a loan to them and not a possession, “For the land is Mine, for you are sojourners and residents with Me.” (Vayikra 25:23) This is meant to reinforce that everything the Israelites own—not only the land—belongs to God.

This means much more than just acknowledging that our possessions are a loan; there must be a spiritual mindset, rather than a legal condition. Not only must the blessing enter the consciousness of the Jewish people, but it must transform this consciousness into what the philosopher Emile Fackenheim calls a “root experience”.[1] This is an a-historical experience, which has its roots in historical reality.

This experience by far surpasses the actual blessing. It shatters everything and anything in the existential sense of the word. It becomes a spiritual revolution, such that, having experienced it, things can never be the same anymore.

The most famous example of this is the splitting of the Reed Sea. It changed everything else in what the Jews felt, thought, and did. It became an ontological and archetypical experience, rooted in the deepest dimension of human existence. As such, the splitting of the Reed Sea is an ongoing experience in the minds of the Jews. It was not a one-time event, but a moment that was transformative.  This is the source of its value.

Thus, it is not the opening of the heavens but rather the transformation of the earth that is decisive in effecting all future Jewish generations.

The most important quality of a miracle is not that it is supernatural, but that it is a moment which, even if it is argued away in terms of science, and even it is brought within the nexus of nature and history, remains miraculous in the eyes of the person who encountered it and which would be experienced by all generations to come.

What is crucial is that the miracle becomes, as it were, transparent, permitting a glimpse of the sphere in which another unrestricted power is at work. The purpose of a miracle is to destroy the security of all knowledge, and to undo the normalcy of all that is ordinary.

It is the abiding astonishment of this moment that is crucial. No knowledge or cognition can weaken the ongoing amazement. Any natural explanation will only deepen the wonder.

Neither owned nor owning

The law of shemita is meant to convey that the human being must realize that he lives in a state of “dispossession”. He does not even own himself. But this recognition is only possible when he realizes that he himself, besides being owned by God, is dispossessed. What he thinks is himself in the form of his physical existence is in fact not his essence, but only his appearance.

It was Maurice Nicoll who eloquently addressed this reality.

We can all see another person’s body directly. We see the lips moving, the eyes opening and shutting, the lines of the mouth and face changing, and the body expressing itself as a whole in action. The person himself is however invisible.

If the invisible side of people were discerned as easily as the visible side, we would live in a new humanity. As we are, we live in visible humanity, a humanity of appearances…. All our thoughts, emotions, feeling, imaginations, reveries, dreams, fantasies are invisible. They constitute oneself…[2]

As such, we cannot physically own anything. What we have is only in appearance. In modern times, we no longer realize that we are in a world of invisible people. Life is the drama of the invisible hidden by the visible.

When a miracle becomes counter-productive

This awareness is the goal of the shemita year. Its goal is to make us to realize that we can own nothing except that part of us that is not visible. But this awareness is only possible when we are capable of breaking through the veil of appearances.

If, when the blessing of abundance in the sixth year takes place, we see only the external violation of the laws of nature, we see the appearance of the miracle but not “Das Ding an Sich”. We miss the essence of the miracle.

More than that: the miracle becomes counter-productive. It evaporates into thin air and its impact fades away. The observer will only see appearance, but not see its essence.

If a farmer observes the crop of the ninth year as similar to the one before the sixth year, he has not seen anything but appearances. Only when he sees the ninth year and the years after as the result of the blessing in the sixth year—as part of an ongoing ontological miracle—has he seen the truth.

Without this awareness, the blessing is meaningless, and in fact dangerous. A miracle runs the risk of being taken for granted and explained away when it is understood in the world of appearances. In that way it becomes a curse.

It is only possible to see the miracle through enormous effort and years of spiritual training. When the Jewish people became more and more non-observant, the miracle would have become counterproductive. It ceased to be accompanied by the ongoing awareness of his own “dispossession” as explained by Maurice Nicoll.

When the Jews prepare themselves to break with appearances, God will grant them the real miracle. But without this change in consciousness, a miracle can become a huge pitfall. As it says: “You shall not lay a stumbling block in front of a blind person and you shall fear the Lord your God” (Vayikra,19:14.)

It seems that for this reason God no longer grants us the blessing of a harvest enough for three years.

Notes:

[1] God’s Presence in History, Harper Torch Books, NY, 1970, p 8-14.

[2] Maurice Nicoll, Living Time and the Integration of the Life, quoted in E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for The Perplexed, p. 33.