Q&A: Miracles and the Sabbatical Year
Miracles and the Sabbatical Year
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I am reading your book No Person Rules the Wind, where you present an approach that sees the need for miracles as childishness and as a lack of order in creation. The understanding that it is preferable for us to act in the world ourselves is not just a post facto position; it is the mature and desirable one.
My question is that in the Torah itself, it seems that there are times when what happens in the world depends on how we behave. If we act in an ideal way, or the opposite, there will be non-natural occurrences accordingly. In my opinion, a clear example is the Sabbatical year. In my view, the whole passage of “If you walk in My statutes” speaks about dependence on observing the Sabbatical year (and this is not the place to elaborate). But even aside from that, the Torah says that we will be sustained during the Sabbatical year and in the year after it on the basis of the sixth year: “I will command My blessing…”
Based on this deeper understanding that I took from your words above, I wonder how the Torah commands a commandment whose underlying basis is built only on a miraculous form of life. (I should mention that according to your view there is no difference between open miracles and hidden miracles.)
Answer
I explained there as well the matter of miracles and this dependence (divine involvement) in the Torah. I suggested an idea about the maturation of the generations.
The Torah does not propose a commandment whose observance is based on a miracle; rather, it promises that there will be a miracle. That is not the same thing. The Torah promises long life to one who honors his parents, but honoring them is not done because of long life. And similarly regarding reward in the World to Come (as Maimonides discusses at length in chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance).
Moreover, if a miracle happened in the sixth year, then by the seventh year we are already after it. That is not reliance on a future miracle.
Discussion on Answer
I understood what you meant, and I answered.
Following your comment that the miracle already happened in the sixth year—I have struggled for years with what the law would be if it did not happen. Is there still an obligation to observe the seventh year?
What is there to debate? Of course there is. We have never heard that the commandment depends on the blessing of the sixth year. I wrote that this is a promise and not a definition of the commandment. Like the World to Come in relation to commandments.
Maybe if one sees with his own eyes that in the sixth year the produce did not yield enough for three years, there is no obligation to risk starvation? After all, this is not one of the three transgressions for which one must give up his life.
[The question is of course also relevant at a time when the Sabbatical year applies on a Torah level; all the more so nowadays, when it is rabbinic, and it is doubtful whether there is an obligation or merely a proper custom to let the land lie fallow, or even whether there is any point in doing so at all. There is also doubt as to which year the Sabbatical year falls in; there are three views among the medieval authorities as to which year it is, and for any year we point to, the majority of medieval opinions say that it is not that specific year.]
Obviously, if there is danger to life, one should not observe the Sabbatical year. Saving a life overrides the entire Torah. Does that even need to be said? The blessing in the sixth year also does not come to solve a life-threatening situation; it is a blessing to add prosperity to the observance of the Sabbatical year. That is also why I said there is no reason at all to think that the blessing is a condition for the obligation of the commandment of the Sabbatical year.
What I mean is that the miracle is foundational to the seventh year—not because it is a result of our actions, and not because one keeps the commandment for the sake of the miracle, but because only that way can this commandment be observed. Otherwise the question comes back: what will we eat in the seventh year? We will not sow and we will not reap…