This week's double Torah portion, the first part of which is פרשת בהר (Lev. 25:1 - 26:2), includes the instruction to keep the שמיטה (shmitah) (Leviticus 25:2-4):
When you come to the land that I am giving you, the land shall rest a Sabbath to the Lord. You may sow your field for six years, and for six years you may prune your vineyard, and gather in its produce, but in the seventh year, the land shall have a complete rest, a Sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field, nor shall you prune your vineyard.
While a variety of answers have been given, some of the rabbis stress the social significance of the shmitah year, seeing in it an institution of solidarity and mutual responsibility. Maimonides, for instance, argues that "this law was given in order that we may show sympathy for our fellow men who have neither land nor vineyards, and that they may be happy in the shmitah year, as the rich are happy every year." This explains the obligation to renounce ownership of all agricultural produce and declare it public property (Lev. 25:6-7), but what about the obligation to suspend agricultural work? What is the social significance of this part of the mitzvah?
Both Abraham Ibn Ezra and Abraham Isaac Kook provide insightful answers to this question, anticipating respectively Karl Marx's critique of alienation and Emile Durkheim's conclusions about the rhythm of social life.
Ibn Ezra writes: "The suspension of work in every seventh year causes us to realize that our mission on earth is not to be slaves to the soil but a much higher and nobler one. Work should only serve the purpose of providing food and other needs, while our task is to attain the supreme end; the purpose of giving this land to this people was not to be brought into the land in order to be enslaved by it.... Their purpose is to accomplish themselves and seek perfection, according to the will of their Creator, while satisfying the needs of their sustenance." Here Ibn Ezra recognizes the possibility and danger of inverting the normal subject-object relationship, such that production becomes the objective of man rather than man the objective of production.
Abraham Joshua Heschel makes an analogous point about Shabbat. He criticizes Philo for representing Shabbat “not in the spirit of the Bible but in the spirit of Aristotle. According to the Stagirite, ‘we need relaxation, because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end’; it is ‘for the sake of activity,’ for the sake of gaining strength for new efforts. To the biblical mind, however, labor is the means toward an end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. ‘Last in creation, first in intention,’ the Sabbath is ‘the end of the creation of heaven and earth’” (Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [1951] 1979], 14).
Both Karl Marx and Max Weber would later point to the inversion of the normal subject-object relationship as characteristic of modern capitalism. Capital, which for Marx is nothing more than congealed, objectified, or accumulated labor, should serve as "a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer." Instead, Marx wrote, "bourgeois society" inverts the relationship: in a capitalist mode of production, "living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour." Likewise, Weber noted that the spirit of capitalism made "the earning of more and more money" an "end in itself": "Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship ... is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence." Ibn Ezra implies that such a reversal was possible in precapitalist agrarian societies too, and he points to the shmitah as a way to periodically restore what Weber calls the "natural relationship." Without this restoration, Ibn Ezra suggests, social and spiritual ends tend to be subordinated to material production, which is contrary to the Torah's intent. (This point is worth remembering today, when the ends of education are defined less and less in terms of self-development and increasingly and narrowly in materialistic and economic terms.)
Kook, noting that "what the Sabbath achieves regarding the individual, the shmitah achieves with regard to the nation as a whole," adds to Ibn Ezra's interpretation: "The treasure of the nation, the Divine blessing that is implanted in it, the order of the world, the righteous and good life, lived in harmony with justice and honesty, peace and tranquility, grace and courage ... none can be activated in the day-to-day life. The very nature of this life obfuscates the spiritual majesty of the Divine soul (which dwells in the nation) and prevents its bright and shining light from penetrating the profane reality. Life can only be perfected through the affording of a breathing space from the bustle of everyday life.... The periodical suspension of the normal social routine raises this nation -- when morally settled -- spiritually and morally, and crowns it with perfection." Kook's point was not to draw a sharp dichotomy between the profane and the sacred--a viewpoint he implicitly rejects with his reference to the penetration of the profane--but rather about the proper relationship between them. The satisfaction of physical needs is a necessary means to the attainment of spiritual perfection, but it must not be allowed to crowd out or obscure spiritual aspirations.
If Ibn Ezra brings to mind Marx and Weber, then Kook brings to mind Emile Durkheim. Like Kook, Durkheim associated the profane and the sacred with variations in the rhythm of social life. Durkheim found that life among Australian aborigines also alternated between two different phases: a "dispersed state" of "low intensity" in which "economic activity predominates," and periodic moments of "collective effervescence" when the community congregates for intense religious ceremonies. "The first is the profane world," Durkheim wrote, "and the second, the world of sacred things." Sacred time, Durkheim concluded, is essential for the solidarity of the community: "There can be no society which does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality. This moral remaking can be achieved only through meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which the individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments." Interestingly, Kook and Durkheim arrived at these strikingly similar ideas at about the same time; Kook wrote Shabbat ha-Aretz prior to the shmitah year of 1910, and Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was published in 1912.
In light of this remarkable convergence of thinking, perhaps we are justified in asking whether there is not a close connection between Marx's vision of an un-alienated social world and Durkheim's notion of a "moral remaking." Can it perhaps be said that the sacred is not just the product and representation of the society as it is, at a moment of collective effervescence, but an anticipation of a morally remade society, a world that is no longer inverted, in which the realization of the human being is no mere fantasy but a living reality?
