The Baal Shem Tov, or Besht —  the founder of Chasidism — 
met the soul of the Messiah during an ascent to heaven. 
The Besht asked him, "When will the Master come?" 
The Messiah answered, "When your wellsprings break forth to the outside!" 
(from a letter written by the Besht to his brother-in-law about one of his soul ascents) 

Genesis-Shmitah Covenant

Rosh Hashanah 2021 began the next Shmitah/Sabbatical year, when the Torah commands us to let the land rest, to share all the food, to open our fences to the wild animals, and to cancel debts. Here are resources for study about Shmitah. The connection between Shmitah and Sinai also makes these good resources to study on Shavuot. (For more on Shavuot click here.)

Read Shmitah: The Purpose of Sinai. (You can also read it on Huffpost.)

Listen to David's interview about Shmitah on the "Judaism Unbound" podcast

Reb Duvid's Yom Kippur Shmita sermon for Temple Beth Shalom in San Leandro, on Youtube: "How should a nation of priests pray for the planet in a time of climate change?"

More video, plus articles, below!

Download liturgy:

Download the Genesis-Shmitah text study sheets:

"Genesis, Covenant, Jubilee and the Land Ethic" – 4 pages of Torah texts with commentary, plus study guide

"Genesis, Covenant, Jubilee and the Land Ethic" – abridged version with 2 pages of Torah texts

Abridged version in larger font on four pages (also better for Zoom)

Text of abridged version in DOC format or ODT format that you can easily copy and paste from.

At the Haberman Institute forum on "Shmita then and now"", Reb Duvid presented the connections between the agricultural and ecological collapse of Mesopotamia, and the redemptive vision of agriculture that is Shmitah.

An interview with Rabbi David Seidenberg for Wilderness Torah's "Shmita Slowdown" series (and there's lots of other interviews with great teachers!)

Shmitah and the stranger: read about | study verses that connect the two.(You can also download a pdf with all the texts about the stranger in the Torah, to help make sense of Leviticus 25:23, "You may not sell the land permanently, for you are strangers and settlers with Me".)

Read "The Land Ethic" – Aldo Leopold's masterpiece of environmental visioning that started deep ecology, which aligns with Shmitah.

Jewcology hosts the Rainbow Day curriculum (42nd day of the Omer, May 27-28 in 2022), which includes material on Shmitah.

Read "A Shabbat Shabbaton" – a short drash on the connections between Shabbat, Yom Kippur, and Shmitah – below.

Some of the articles by R' David Seidenberg on Shmitah:

The ecology of Canaan, in the eyes of our ancestors (Times of Israel)

The Third Promise: Can Judaism’s indigenous core help us rise above the damaging politics of our time? (Tikkun -- This article is the longer footnoted version of "The ecology of Canaan")

‘Zion will be redeemed through justice’: what Shmita teaches us about Tisha B’Av

Painting liberation: Hyssop and the path from Passover to Shmitah (TOI), or abridged Hazon version)

Can COVID teach us about Shmitah IRL? (Times of Israel)

‘Walk With Me’: What Do the Curses in Leviticus 26 Mean for Us Today? (Huffpost)

The Taste of Shmita (Hazon)

"The spookiest story in Torah: Shmita and the covenant of the halves" (TOI) “And I will break war from the land” – Shavuot, Shmitah, the covenant, and the promise (TOI)

The land of strangers: Understanding Rashi’s first comment on the Torah (Times of Israel)

Human Rights and Ecology (Tikkun)

And here is where you can find lots more resources about Shmitah on Hazon.org.

In the Torah, three things are called "shabbat shabbaton" – the seventh day, Yom Kippur, and Shmitah (the Sabbatical year).

Agnon, in his book The Days of Awe, shares a teaching form Rabbi Tzvi Hakohen of Rymanov about this. The rabbi was asked, if both Yom Kippur and the Sabbath itself are called "shabbat shabbaton", how is Yom Kippur more special? And he answered, the seventh day is called "shabbat shabbaton l’adonai" – a sabbath of sabbaths for God. Yom Kippur is called "shabbat shabbaton lakhem" – a sabbath of sabbaths for all of you. On Yom Kippur we don't just reach toward the divine realm, we draw it into ourselves.

When Rabbi Michael Bernstein shared this teaching with me, he added: "By that logic, Shmitah, which is called “shabbat shabbaton la'aretz”, a sabbath of sabbaths for the land (Lev 25:4), draws that holiness into the land. In this way, Shmitah is even more akin to Yom Kippur than it is to Shabbat."

There's a midrash that can explain this idea. The essence of the Shekhinah, the divine presence, was originally in the land, in the Earth. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, breaking God's command and sinning against the tree, the Shekhinah fled away from the Earth to the first heaven. With each successive generation, the Shekhinah fled further, until she was seven heavens away from the Earth. Then Abraham and Sarah came and drew her down to the sixth heaven, and Isaac and Rebekah drew her even closer, to the fifth heaven, each successive generation bringing the Shekhinah down, until Moses finally brought her "from above to below". (Genesis Rabbah 19:7)

But Yosef Gikatilla, the 13th century Spanish Kabbalist, explained that this didn’t complete the process: "Moshe our teacher came and all Israel with him and they made the mishkan/Tabernacle and its vessels. And they repaired the ruined channels, and…they drew living water. And they made the Shekhinah return to dwell /l’shakhen among the creatures below, in the tent – but not in the ground /baqarqa, not in the Earth itself, as she was in the beginning of the Creation." (Sha`arei Orah, 16)

This is what it means when God says to Moses, “Make me a sanctuary and I will dwell among/within them / v’shakhanti b’tokham” (Ex 25:8): God said that the Shekhinah would “dwell in them”, but not (yet) in the Earth. There was one more step to go.

The Shmitah year, when we are commanded to rest the land and to rest along with the land, when we share food and land not only with the poor and the stranger but also with the wild animals, bridges that last step. Shmitah is a shabbat shabbaton "la'aretz", not just "lakhem".

Shmitah infuses Shekhinah into the Earth itself. Of course, the Earth is already filled with Shekhinah. If we have inured ourselves to that, Shmitah can open our hearts. But first we need to make Shekhinah dwell within us, so that our hearts can meet the world "ba'asher hu sham", at the level of holiness that is already there. That's what Yom Kippur does.

Sabbath, Yom Kippur, and Shmitah represent progressive stages of bringing kedushah/holiness and Shekhinah into this world, from God, to us, to the Earth itself. May we accomplish this goal.

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Design in progress © Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg 2006