Reclaiming Our Day of Rest

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In the 50th year, the land was not worked so it could breathe freely once again. All land was redistributed in equally productive shares, clan by clan, as it had originally been held (Leviticus 25 and 26: 34-35, 43-45; Deuteronomy 15: 1-18). These yearlong Jubilee observances that the Bible calls shabbat shabbaton ('Sabbath to the Sabbatical power' or 'deeply restful rest') are times for enacting social justice and freeing the earth from human exploitation. They are times of release from attachments and habits, addictions and idolatries.

Indeed, in these socially revolutionary passages of Torah, the text never uses the word tzedek -- justice -- but instead the words shmitah and dror, which mean 'release,' what Buddhists today call nonattachment. The deepest root of social justice, according to these biblical passages, is the profoundly restful experience of abandoning control over others and over the earth. The tradition of Shabbat does not teach that restfulness and utter nonattachment is the only worthy path to walk. Rather, the tradition is rooted in an earthy sense of sacred work as well as sacred rest. Indeed, the tradition teaches a rhythm, a spiral of doing and being in which the next stage of doing is always higher and deeper, because a time of being has preceded it. According to Evan Eisenberg's book The Ecology of Eden, this rhythm of Shabbat may have emerged from an effort of Western Semitic communities to cope with the emergence of monocrop agriculture in the Sumerian empire. Semitic small farmers, shepherds, and nomads had to face the new high-efficiency agriculture, which brought with it population growth, ownership, and armies.

The question was, what should the communities of Canaan do? They could ignore the new efficiency -- and go under. They could imitate it -- and see their culture disappear. Or they could learn what was valuable -- and godly -- within it, and absorb that into their own lives in ways that kept their culture both sacred and distinctive.

So one year out of every seven, they pretended to become hunters and gatherers again. They would eat only what grew freely from uncultivated land. They re-affirmed their age-old teaching that God alone, and no human being, owned the land. They came through this profound challenge to their sacred life path changed -- but they were still intact as a people whose Sabbatical restfulness was the sign of their covenant with God.

In the past century, all traditional communities on Planet Earth have been living through an analogous crisis. The great leap in economic efficiency and military mastery that came with modernity played the same role in shattering the ways of Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism that Sumerian efficiency and power played in the ancient Semitic communities.

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