NOTES for Lev 25:1-24
Leviticus prescribes fairly strict rules concerning the sabbath year and the jubilee year. Here, of course, especially with regard to the jubilee year, there is also a strictly social and property-related aspect: the requirement to return all communal land to the corresponding communities was meant to support social stability. There was, however, something else as well: people and the land had to receive rest from time to time.
The point here is not ecology; one year out of every seven changed nothing in this respect. The point is the meaning of the sabbath as such. What is the sabbath in its essence? A day of rest? Yes, undoubtedly. Rest is absolutely necessary. But how? One can rest by spending time in inactivity, or one can rest in communion with God. The sabbath presupposes communion with God, at least, with the fourth commandment in mind, once a week. The main thing is that it truly be time spent with God.
Spending time with God means, among other things, forgetting the daily rush for a while. It is not by accident that believing Jews during the sabbath are prescribed not only a prohibition on work; during the sabbath it is forbidden to speak and even to think about work. On this day work must be forgotten altogether. One must fall out of the circle in which a person, if he does not live in a monastery or somewhere in the mountains or in the forest, turns every day, sometimes like a squirrel in a wheel. Without such a stepping out of the flow of everyday life, full communion with God is impossible.
Yet the flow includes not only everyday life. Besides the daily cycle, there is also the yearly one, especially in an agricultural society, which Israel was when the prescriptions about the sabbath year and the jubilee year were given. The agricultural year is measured and more or less monotonous: sowing and harvesting replace one another with a regularity that trains a person in complete dependence on natural cycles and in an endless turning from which there is no exit, and no need for one.
Traditional paganism largely represents the consecration of this circle in its unending rotation. Meanwhile, the sabbath year, and especially the jubilee year, breaks it open, tearing a person out of the usual natural, spatial, and temporal matrix: a year without the usual occupations for a farmer accustomed to his labor can turn out to be a true inner shock and liberation, and this increases the chances of meeting God face to face, without which there can be no full spiritual life.