The Torah presents Shmitah, the Sabbatical year, as the ultimate solution to hunger, poverty, classism, xenophobia and environmental degradation, and to protecting habitat, human rights, and animal rights. Shmitah is the plan our ancestors came up with for turning agriculture into the ultimate sacrament of service to the land. Shmitah reconnects human beings to a world where we live in solidarity with other people, and also connects humanity’s fate and liberty with the well-being of the other animals, domestic and wild. Shmitah gives us a model for how a society should undergo reparations for inequality not just once, but necessarily periodically, in order to achieve a just world.

Rabbi David Seidenberg is the creator of neohasid.org and author of “Kabbalah and ecology: God's Image in the More-Than-Human World”. He teaches music, nigunim, dance, spirituality, Jewish thought, & intellectual history.