Shmita is... Mindfulness    Wisdom   Tradition Contemplation

Shmita Resources

Below are resources to help you continue learning, practicing, and teaching about Shmita. Use the Search bar to access the entire library of resources or browse the collections below. Some of the collections are organized by four broader themes, which are drawn from the pedagogy of the JOFEE (Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming, and Environmental Education) movement.

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Essentials

Completely redesigned with the user experience in mind, many additional sources, and more thorough commentary and explanations; the updated Shmita Sourcebook is designed to encourage readers to think critically about Shmita, its values, challenges, and opportunities, and how we might apply the Shmita tradition in a modern context to support building healthier and more sustainable Jewish communities today. The updated Sourcebook draws on a range of texts from within Jewish tradition, tracing the development and evolution of Shmita from biblical, rabbinic, historical, and contemporary perspectives. This comprehensive, accessible sourcebook is well-suited for individual, partnered, and group study, with guiding text and discussion questions to enhance your learning, regardless of educational background. The Hazon Shmita Sourcebook offers a holistic understanding of Shmita, from the depth of Jewish tradition to the most pressing issues of our time.

Use this pamphlet to share about shmita with your community.

Through 60 pages of poetic visioning and illustrations, Yigal Deutscher weaves language and art into a Shmita dreamscape, exploring foundational questions: What is the deeper mythic symbolism of Shmita? What is the hidden invitation that Shmita offers us today, for our food, economic, and social systems? How can we begin designing to renew and reimagine Sabbatical Culture for our own communities? This booklet is a narrative of awakening, remembering, reclamation, and celebration; a blueprint for a more sacred, resilient, and holistic future. Included within is a collection of micro-essays and graphics inspired by the weaving together of Shmita, Jewish Mythology, and the tools of Permaculture Design.

In this Mindful Shmita Workbook from The Tasman Center, we’ll offer seven prompts for reflection and practice. We hope this will be a way to savor, celebrate, and mark this Shmita year. The prompts can be responded to all at once during Elul, in preparation for the new year, during Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, or answered throughout the Shmita Year. There will be options for virtual connection with participants around the world and supplemental offerings over the course of the year as well.

Text, essays, videos, and audio relating to parshat Behar and shmita from our friends and partners at 929.

Rav Kook's Introduction to Shabbat Ha'Aretz is the first-ever English translation of the introduction to a book on shmita (Biblical sabbatical year) by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the land of Israel in the 20th century. His essay, written in 1909, is lyrical and mystical, a meditation on the big themes that underlie religious environmentalism.

Shomerai Adamah: Responsible Stewardship

Meaning Guardians of the Earth. God instructed the Jewish people to be guardians for the earth in the garden of Eden. Ever since, we have been entrusted to care for all of God’s creation. During Shmita, we are commanded to the land rest, allowing it to regenerate and ensuring harvests for future generations.

This is an article written by Yigal Deutscher for Tikkun magazine, visioning Shmita as a holistic cultural blueprint for creating resilient communities.

This essay was originally published in Judaism and Environmental Ethics in 1966.

A dvar from Rabbi Jill Hammer on how to use Shmita as inspiration to care for the Earth.

Theodor Herzl said that if you will it, it is no dream. What our Earth looks like in the next yovel, or jubilee, year will not happen by accident. Whether our Earth continues to heat up or whether we stem the tide isn’t predetermined — it’s actually up to us. While our present is what we make of it, our future, as Herzl taught us, will be what we make it to be. By our next yovel, if we choose, we can let climate change become the biggest problem ever faced in human history, or we can deal with it and assign it to the dustbin of history. The choice is ours.

Shabbat: Work and Rest

Shabbat is the Jewish day of rest that celebrates God’s completion of the creation of the world, and is also connected with the Exodus from Egypt. It is the ritual anchor of the Jewish week.  Shmita is referred to a Shabbat Shabbaton. Like the weekly Shabbat is it a period of rest and ceasing from particular types of labor.

This essay offers an in-depth mystical reading of the Shmita Cycle from within the spiritual Torah perspective (exerpt from Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman’s book on the weekly Torah readings, Orchard of Delights)

Rabbi Dani Passow offers a glimpse into the sacred practice of rest and how integral this is to a holistic relationship with Torah

This short article by Jeremy Benstein is a glimpse into a chapter about Shmita in his book, The Way into Judaism and the Environment (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006).

This essay by Jeremy Benstein is an exploration of the idea and concept of ‘sustainability’, deepening this worldview by linking it with cycles of time, cycles of renewal, and Shmita.

In this Mindful Shmita Workbook from The Tasman Center, we’ll offer seven prompts for reflection and practice. We hope this will be a way to savor, celebrate, and mark this Shmita year. The prompts can be responded to all at once during Elul, in preparation for the new year, during Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, or answered throughout the Shmita Year. There will be options for virtual connection with participants around the world and supplemental offerings over the course of the year as well.

The Sabbatical year is upon us! 18 months ago as the realities of the pandemic set in, a lot of folks were talking about how this would be a society-wide opportunity to slow down. What happened?

Yichud: Between Dominion and Harmony

Translates to Oneness or Togetherness. Everything we experience has unfolded
from one Creator and one source. With regular reminders of our unity and interconnectedness with all creation, we will thrive and grow as one. Shmita reminds us of Yichud by making all land ownership is temporary.

The goal and purpose of the Torah covenant, for society as a whole, is that the Israelites will observe the Shmitah (Sabbatical) year, and that in doing so, they will repair the relationship with the Earth that was destroyed in the generations leading up to the flood. Essentially, the covenant with Abraham is meant to take one people and one land, and put them in a right relationship with each other, in order to create a model for how humanity should live. That model is found in the observance of Shmitah and the Jubilee.

An essay by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that contextualizes Shmita in relation to other Jewish festivals, and deepens our connection with the natural world.

This dvar explores how Shmita creates a sense of what is our "right" relationship with the land. It was originally published in the Hazon Shmita Weekly on July 6, 2021.

This essay explores the possibility that perhaps the whole purpose of the Covenant at Sinai was to create a society that observed Shmita, and that Shmita creates the possibility to bring the world back into an Edenic harmony.

Tzedakah: Caring for those in Need

Related to the Hebrew word Tzedek, meaning Justice, Tzedakah is distributing resources to create justice. Justice is not achieved but rather is a process that we commit to through community action. For one year, Shmita allows the needy take what they need to eat from the fields, forgives debts they owe. Every seven Shmita cycles, slaves are set free.

The Rolling Jubilee is a project of the Debt Collective which emerged after the financial crisis of 2008. With individuals struggling with debt unable to access real support, Rolling Jubilee began buying debt for pennies on the dollar - then abolishing it. A bailout of the people, by the people, entirely supported by individual donations. Their work continues today on a broader scale.

Rabbi Shai Held joined Shmita Project Northwest on 4/13/21 to discuss the Book of Devarim (Deuteronomy). Despite our usual associations of Shemitah (the Sabbatical year) with land, Shemitah in Devarim is about something else: It is a year for remitting debts and liberating slaves. In this session, we’ll do a close reading of Devarim 15, and explore such questions as: What kind of social ethic does Devarim seek to instill? How does it work to ensure that there will be no permanent underclass in the land of Israel? What strategies does it use to motivate people to treat one another generously? Along the way, we’ll see how Devarim radicalizes the social vision of Shemot (Exodus).

Jewish observance of shmita (alternatively spelled shemitah)—the sabbatical year, or seventh (sheviit) year—is changing. Historically rooted in agriculture, modern Jewish environmentalists are seizing upon the long-ignored environmental and social justice (tikkun olam) aspects of shmita as originally described in the five books of Moses, the Torah in the Hebrew Bible, the basis of Jewish law.

Rabbi Micha Odenheimer calls attention to the potency and profound need of Shmita, and challenges us to begin exploring this vision however we can, as an offering to the world.

This essay by Rabbi David Seidenberg, first printed in Tikkun magazine in 2008, explores how the Jubilee and our connection to land, in particular, can help to reframe our human role in the ecology of life and our relationship to earth.

This is a chapter from Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s book, Godwrestling: Round 2, published by Jewish Lights in 1986.

(The Shalom Center): A call to action and resource guide to support individuals and communities moving their money away from economic institutions- banks and businesses- that do not support the Shmita values of local, mutually-supportive, and ecologically-healthy economies.

Source Sheets and Teaching Tools

This source sheet is designed as an introduction to Shmita and its core texts.

Completely redesigned with the user experience in mind, many additional sources, and more thorough commentary and explanations; the updated Shmita Sourcebook is designed to encourage readers to think critically about Shmita, its values, challenges, and opportunities, and how we might apply the Shmita tradition in a modern context to support building healthier and more sustainable Jewish communities today. The updated Sourcebook draws on a range of texts from within Jewish tradition, tracing the development and evolution of Shmita from biblical, rabbinic, historical, and contemporary perspectives. This comprehensive, accessible sourcebook is well-suited for individual, partnered, and group study, with guiding text and discussion questions to enhance your learning, regardless of educational background. The Hazon Shmita Sourcebook offers a holistic understanding of Shmita, from the depth of Jewish tradition to the most pressing issues of our time.

Shmita Ideas and Resources for Educators

These slides layout a timeline for when shmita was likely observed between 1312 BCE and 2015 CE

This collection of sources was prepared to accompany a class that was part of the series Understanding Shmita, presented by Hazon and 929 English.

(Neohasid.org): An exploration of early biblical texts, such as the creation story, the fall from Eden, and the flood as a way to understand the deeper meaning and eternal covenant of the Shmita tradition.

(NeoHasid.org): Explore the connection between the covenant of Shmita and the covenant of the Rainbow, given to humanity when Noah and his family left the ark, after the flood waters receded. Both covenants frame sacred relationships between humans, animals, and earth.