Divrei Behar
The Blessing of Shmitta
In this week’s parsha, the Torah spells out the laws of shmitta, of letting the land of Israel rest for one year in seven, and of yovel, of adding a second year of rest every fifty years. The Torah then makes an incredible promise. “If you [Israel] will say, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year? – Behold! We will not sow and not gather in our crops?!?’ I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year and it will yield a crop sufficient for the three-year period. You will sow in the eighth year, but you will eat from the old crop; until the ninth year, until the arrival of its crop, you will eat the old.” (25:20-22)
Rashi there explains that the “three-year period” actually goes from the middle of the sixth year, when the grain was harvested, through the seventh year, when the land lay fallow, until the time of harvesting and storing the crop planted during the eighth year, which would end at Succos time during the ninth year. During a shmitta-yovel cycle, when the land rested for two consecutive years, the bumper crop of the sixth year had to last an additional year, meaning that at the beginning of the tenth year, the Jewish people were still eating food that they had harvested nearly four years before. The Ramban brings the Sifri, which explains that every sixth year, yovel or not, produced like the year preceding a shmitta-yovel double year of rest.
Because America has been transformed from an agrarian society into a nation where we must remind ourselves that fruits and vegetables grow from the ground (and not in the produce section) this miracle does not astound us as it should. To those, however, whose survival depended upon the success of every year’s crop, to suddenly harvest a crop that outdid the previous years’ by 300 to 400 percent, on the same land, using the same seed and working the same way, was as wondrous as the splitting of the Yam Suf or the day their we stood at Har Sinai.
In fact, this promise is considered one of the clearest proofs of the Torah’s Divine authenticity, for if it were not kept, and the sixth year did not produce such a huge crop, then the Jewish people would have faced their first shmitta with emptying silos and pantries. Driven to starvation, and disillusioned by that broken promise, they would have stopped Torah observance after six years. We see, however, that this is not so; that instead, they have loyally kept all the mitzvos, including shmitta, to this very day. Therefore, the promise must have been kept, and the Author of the Torah must be the One Who controls all the world, including the crops. There is no other!
HaRav Yonason Eybeshitz zt”l (in Yaari Im Divshi 3:180) showed that this open miracle even played a role in Jewish history. When the wicked king Achav challenged Eliyahu HaNavi, saying that the curse of Yehoshua (that whoever rebuilt Yericho would lose his children) was fulfilled through Chiel (Melachim 1 16:34); but that the curse of his teacher Moshe (that famine would come if the Jewish people would not keep mitzvos properly) had not happened, Hashem acceded to Eliyahu’s demand that rain be withheld, and the entire land of Israel suffered a famine for three years.
Asks Rav Eybeshitz: First, why didn’t the kingdom of Yehuda complain to Eliyahu? After all, the king there was the righteous Yehoshophat, who had not brazenly questioned Eliyahu, yet the posukim imply that no rain fell anywhere in all the land of Israel. Second, why did the famine last three years, and no more?
Says Rav Eybeshitz: the year that Eliyahu stopped the rain was 3034, which was the 531st year from 2504, the year after the Jews had finished conquering the land of Israel, and the beginning of the shmitta-yovel cycles. We hold that the fiftieth year, the yovel year, also counts as the first year of the next cycle. (Erechin 12b)
Therefore, counting by 49’s from 2504, it comes out that 3034 was the forty-first year in the eleventh yovel cycle, and the sixth year of its sixth shmitta cycle. The kingdom of Yehuda, which kept shmitta, saw the blessing of a quadruple crop that year. Therefore, three years of no rain had no effect upon them, for they had food from Hashem’s blessing their crop that year to last them into the tenth year, according to the Ramban. However, in the ninth year, their food supply was running low, so in their merit, Hashem told Eliyahu to stop the famine. The kingdom of Israel, which did not keep shmitta properly, did not merit the blessing, and so suffered three years of famine.