The shemitah year calls us to repair a broken food system
As industrialized nations produce more and more food each year, the earth itself is in peril, for true abundance requires rest.
Sabbatical Year 2007: How to Celebrate
A dvar from Rabbi Jill Hammer on how to use Shmita as inspiration to care for the Earth.
The Land is Our Mother
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.
Shmita Culture & Releasing Ourselves From Urgency
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?
Stop Now! ‘Shmita’ and Climate Change
Shmita is the Torah’s prescription for environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Today, climate change is the biggest threat to sustainability.
The Next Jubilee: A Vision for 2050
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.
Let the Land Rest: Lessons from Shmita, the Sabbatical Year
Just as the Torah is a guidebook on mending the relationships between men and women, sibling and sibling, nation and nation, so too, the Torah contains within it commandments whose aim is to heal the brokenness in humanity’s relationship to the Earth. Shmita, the sabbatical year, comprises a number of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) of the Torah.[3] With today’s environmental challenges, these mitzvot may be more relevant and needed today than at any time in Jewish and world history. Posted as part of Jewcology's "Year of Jewish Learning on the Environment," in partnership with Canfei Nesharim.
Judaism’s Next Great Gift To Human Kind
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.
Stop The Machine! The Sabbatical Year Principle
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).