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Seven is a mystical number in Judaism-Shabbat is the seventh day of the week, brides circle their grooms seven times, we count the Omer period of seven weeks of seven days that take us from Passover to Shavuot.  This week, we hear of yet another mystical use of the number seven with the shmitah, or sabbatical year.  Every seventh year, the Torah teaches us that everyone on earth, and even the earth itself, should get a rest.  Fields are to be left fallow, slaves are to be freed, and debts are to be forgiven.

The concept of the sabbatical year was beautiful, but also nearly impossible to fulfill practically.  A law designed to give the land a rest could destroy individuals or entire societies based on agriculture, and people would starve.  People could refuse to loan money as the sabbatical year approached, knowing that loans would be forgiven and never repaid.  Leviticus Rabbah describes how hard it would be to live up to the values of the sabbatical year and gives tremendous credit to someone who kept those laws, knowing that “throughout that year this mighty man sees his field declared ownerless, his fences broken down, and his produce consumed by others, yet he continues to give up his produce without saying a word. Can you conceive a person mightier than such as he?”  Over the centuries, countless Jewish scholars sought to come up with ways that either a person could truly fulfill the letter of the law without suffering, or that new interpretations could be given to the laws to allow at least the spirit of the law to remain.

When I study this Torah portion with b’nai mitzvah students, we often talk about the shmitah year as being primarily a utopian concept, one that is a beautiful idea but nearly impossible to imagine putting into practice.  Yet these past weeks, as people have continued to stay off the streets and remain home, we have gotten a glimpse of our own personal shmitah year.  We have seen animals returning to their natural habitats, with boars wandering the streets of Haifa and rare turtles returning to beaches in Thailand.  Pollution has decreased, so much so that in India, people can see the Himalayas for the first time in decades.  It isn’t a perfect world, or anything close (sadly, the videos of the dolphins in Venetian canals was not real) but it gives us a sense of just what our world and our lives would look like with a true rest.

While I’d never wish a full year of this kind of rest imposed on us, it’s a beautiful reminder that such things are worth continuing to dream about.  This beautiful poem by Kitty O’Meara has been making its rounds over the past weeks, but it’s worth sharing again if you missed it.  May her words be true, and may we find that this strange time becomes one of shmitah for us and for our world.

In The Time of Pandemic

And the people stayed home.

And they listened, and read books, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.

And they listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.