Shmita

Shmita (Hebrew: shemittah, "release"), also called the sabbatical year, is the seventh year of a recurring seven-year cycle in Jewish law. It has two main parts: an agricultural rule that land in the Land of Israel must be left fallow, with its produce treated as ownerless, and a financial rule, known as shemittat kesafim (release of money), under which outstanding personal loans between Jews are cancelled at the end of the year. The financial rule makes shmita one of the oldest recorded systems of periodic debt relief.

Shmita sits within halacha alongside other economic laws such as the ban on interest known as ribbit and the duty of charity, tzedakah. Together they reflect a biblical concern that debt should not lead to permanent poverty.

The agricultural sabbatical appears in Exodus 23:10–11 and Leviticus 25:1–7, which command that the land rest every seventh year. Deuteronomy 15:1–11 sets out the release of debts: at the end of every seven years, every creditor must release what was lent to a neighbor, and the passage warns lenders not to refuse loans because the release year is approaching. Leviticus 25 also describes the jubilee (yovel), the fiftieth year after seven cycles, in which land returned to its original families and servants were freed; the jubilee is not observed today.

Under the financial rule, a lender may not demand repayment of a covered loan after the shmita year ends. The borrower may still choose to repay, and the lender may accept, but the claim is no longer enforceable in Jewish law. The release applies to personal loans between Jews and not to every obligation: wages owed, the price of goods bought on credit at a shop, and some other debts are excluded under the rules developed in the Talmud and later codes. Loans secured by a pledge are also treated differently.

By the late Second Temple period, lenders were refusing to lend as shmita approached, exactly the outcome Deuteronomy had warned against. The sage Hillel the Elder introduced the prozbul, a document in which a lender transfers his debts to a beit din (rabbinical court). Because the release applies to debts owed to individuals and not to debts held by a court, a prozbul preserves the lender's right to collect. Observant lenders still sign a prozbul before the end of a shmita year, often in a simple form before three people acting as a court.

Most authorities hold that, since the end of the jubilee system, both the agricultural and financial laws of shmita apply today by rabbinic rather than biblical authority, but they are still observed. The most recent shmita year ran from Rosh Hashanah in September 2021 to September 2022 (Hebrew year 5782); the next begins in the autumn of 2028.

In modern Israel, farmers use several mechanisms to keep agriculture viable during shmita. The heter mechira is a temporary sale of land to a non-Jew, approved by the Chief Rabbinate but rejected by many strictly observant authorities. The otzar beit din arrangement lets a court take over distribution of produce so that farmers are paid for labor rather than for the crop. Importing produce from outside the Land of Israel is another approach. A posek (decisor) or dayan (judge) advises communities on which arrangements to rely on.

Economists and historians cite shmita as an early example of a legal limit on the duration of debt, comparable in purpose to modern bankruptcy discharge and to campaigns for sovereign debt relief. The prozbul is likewise cited as an early case of a legal workaround adopted to preserve credit markets when a rule, applied literally, discouraged lending. Interest-free loan funds such as the gemach, and the partnership device known as the heter iska, show the same tradition of fitting ethical rules to commercial needs. Comparable concerns appear in Islamic law in the encouragement of the benevolent loan, qard hasan, and the release of a debt, ibra, though Islamic law has no fixed cycle of debt cancellation.