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| Modern U.S. society seems to arrange some of its most important cycles of domestic life and employment in groups of seven years. Long before there were sociologists or psychologists to confirm these trends, ancient Jewish agricultural life similarly arranged itself in arcs of seven years to replenish the land lest it become weak. Few of us are large-scale farmers nowadays, but we still get a seven-year itch. Paying attention to it, and making time and space for it, can reap tremendous harvests in life. |
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Parashat Behar 5784 (2024)
Recently I had lunch with a dear friend who hadn’t taken a break in years. Brilliant, dedicated, wise and deeply faithful, she couldn’t imagine stepping back from a demanding job. A break, she felt, would only stress her out by ballooning her workload once she returned.
We can imagine the crash that probably awaits my friend. She knows it, too, but imagines that she can power through until an unspecified future time when a break might be easier.
She said much the same thing six months ago, and a year ago, and 18 months ago.
Privilege and parenting aside (big asides!), effective time management and healthy priorities can allow most readers to take small daily breaks, weekly breaks (i.e. Shabbat), and expansive annual times of meaning like Rosh Hashanah. Our calendar offers built-in opportunities to tune into what’s most important – and we all need them.
Some important times operate only on the order of years, decades and epochs rather than days, weeks and months. Sometimes we need the more fundamental life-trajectory evaluations and changes that come only on these higher orders of time.
This week’s Torah portion focuses on these higher-order stops and shifts to keep our lives most fully alive over the long term. Unsurprisingly for Jewish life, these higher-order shifts come in multiples of seven – shmittah (every seven years), and yovel / Jubilee (after 49 years).
The shmittah, in agricultural days, required leaving fields fallow every one year in seven so the earth could replenish (Lev. 25:2-7). The land itself would observe a shabbat year. Harvests in the sixth year would be more abundant or specially stored, or consumption in the sixth and seventh years would be calibrated, so that the system could work (Lev. 25:21-23). In these ways, shmittah was about feeling a sense of “enough,” suspending the work of production and letting things be so that rejuvenation and transformation could happen.
Shmittah was more than crop rotation, and it isn’t mere history. In modern life, the seventh (“sabbath”) of years translates into a “sabbatical.” Faith communities, seminaries, universities and even some forward-thinking businesses build these higher-order periodic breaks into calendars, careers and budgets. The purpose is to refresh people so that they, metaphorically speaking, can stay as productive as the earth on which we depend.
Put another way, the mind-heart-spirit is the human soil in which our lives grow. Without tending and periodic time to replenish, we become spent.
As it happens, broader society seems to map to seven-year patterns. Studies of employment trends show that for employees tending toward longevity, such as government and management (all sectors), job changes tend to come approximately every seven years. In domestic life, the average duration of a marriage ending in divorce is, you guessed it, seven years. (The 1955 Marilyn Monroe movie, The Seven-Year Itch, hails from this factoid.)
It seems that we’re hard-wired for a seven-year itch. We’re hard-wired for prompts to look hard at our lives and consider big changes. Prompts can come from most anything in our lives; spiritually, Judaism assigns a prompt period of seven years. It’s fascinating that Judaism and Torah reflected this seemingly generic human impulse long before sociologists and psychologists could confirm it. And what’s more, this week’s Torah portion put this command directly atop Sinai, along with the Ten Commandments (Lev. 25:1). This stuff is core.
The yovel / Jubilee is even more radical. After 49 years (i.e. after the seventh shmittah year) came a societal Yom Kippur. With a finely-timed blast of the shofar, all debts were deemed repaid, all lands reverted to their original owners, and hired hands and indentured servants were released (Lev. 25:8-16). Think about it: generational poverty and debtors’ prisons were impossible. Imagine what society would be like today with a yovel.
Our endlessly creative and practical ancestors crafted ways to avert the yovel for economic reasons (and, in so doing, created a system that led to modern banking and consumer credit) – but they left in place the shmittah year. They left in place the seven-year stop to rethink and replenish. Perhaps they knew that a seven-year itch is natural, so better to harness and spiritualize it than ignore it or pretend it away.
Whether you’re working or retired, whether you have domestic responsibilities (or should!), we do well to invest in ourselves and look back at our lives, perhaps in seven-year arcs, to take stock and plan our next seven. We do well to make time and space, and cultivate the most productive circumstances, so that we can be deeply truthful about our lives, where we were and where we’re going. We do well to take those inwardly real times to replenish a bit – daily, weekly (Shabbat), annually (the High Holy Days) and also in broad sweeps of years.
As a Jewish collective, we’re nearly at the midway point between shmittah years: the last one was 5782 (2021-22) and the next will be 5789 (2028-29). Your own personal shmittah, however, can come earlier. How about soon? How about this summer? How about now?
David Evan Markus 