Outside In | Time, perhaps, to forgive debts as poor countries sink deeper amid a pandemic recession
- The Jewish jubilee year, when traditionally debts are forgiven, nears amid a growing global debate over debt write-offs. As pressure from Christian groups and NGOs grows, will a debt jubilee succeed?
They say history never repeats itself, but often rhymes. So it seems with the Jewish celebration of “shmita” and Jubilee years, which I bumped into by chance last week during a random walk through the verses of Leviticus.
It seems that the coming first night of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, which commemorates the 40 years the Jewish people wandered homeless in the desert, and which starts from September 20, will be the start of the Jewish “shmita year”, and quite a big deal.
Shmita comes around every seven years and for Jewish farmers in ancient times meant leaving the fields fallow for the year. You couldn’t sow or reap crops. And anything that grew could be picked or eaten by anyone – a gift from God. With my thoughts focused on unsustainable farming, and the need to spend more time protecting our soil, flushing it less with chemical fertilisers and pesticides, the idea of “shmita” farming cycles pricked my interest.
But then an even more fascinating thread appeared. It seems that this coming shmita year is not just the seventh in the shmita cycle, but marks the end of seven shmita cycles. This makes it the end of a 49-year cycle which ushers in a jubilee. And if you explore the original Judaic idea of a jubilee, you find fascinating relevance to us today.
Those verses in Leviticus tell us that the jubilee year was when slaves and prisoners were freed, debts forgiven, and leased land or property returned to the original owners. It was a “year of release”: “You shall make the fiftieth year holy and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee to you, and each of you shall return to his own property and each of you shall return to his family.”