A.
דבר אל בני ישראל ואמרת אליהם כי תבאו אל הארץ אשר אני נתן לכם ושבתה הארץ שבת לד': (“Speak to the bnei Yisra’él and you shall say to them, "For you will come to the land which I am giving you, and the land will rest, a shabbath la-Shem;” XXV, 2).
At first blush our verse seems repetitive and unnecessary, especially in light of the next two verses, in which we discover that we are to sow and reap crops for six years, and tend our vineyards for six years, ובשנה השביעית שבת שבתון יהי' לארץ שדך לא תזרע וכרמך לא תזמר (“And in the seventh year the land will have a sabbath of resting, your field you shall not sow and your vineyard you shall not tend”). Under the circumstances, how does our verse add to the content?
A second issue is opened a bit later in our parasha, where we find: ועשיתם את חקתי וגו' (“And you shall carry out My laws....” v. 18), on which Ramban comments: יזהיר בחוקים מפני השמטה והיובל הנזכרים וגו' (“[G-d] warns us about [His] laws because of the shmitta and yovél mentioned [beforehand]....”). In other words, shmitta and yovél are the chuqqim, the laws, concerning which He is here admonishing us.
This becomes very interesting in light of what Chazal tell us concerning the first verse in next week’s parasha: "אם בחקותי תלכו", בנוהג שבעולם מלך ב"ו גוזר גזירה, אם רצה לקיימה הרי הוא מקיימה ואם לאו סוף שמקיימה על ידי אחרים. אבל הקב"ה אינו כן, אלא גוזר גזירה הוא מקיימה תחלה וגו' (“’If you will go according to My laws;’ In the world’s practice, if a flesh-and-blood king issues a decree, if he wishes, he keeps it, and if not, it is kept by others. Not so the Holy One, Blessed is He; rather, the One who issues the decree keeps it first....” ויק"ר פל"ה סי' ג', ועיי"ש במתנות כהונה).
Torah sources abound with examples of G-d observing His own mitzvoth: For example, He lays t’fillin (ברכות ו.); He observes the sabbath (ב"ר פי"א סי' ה'); He comforts mourners (סוטה י"ד.); He visits the sick (ב"מ פ"ו.), and so on. If shmitta and yovél are amongst the mitzvoth which G-d Himself observes, it is worthwhile trying to discern the form that observance takes.
B.
The sfarim ha-qdoshim (עיי' למשל ספר נחלת בנינין מצוה פ"ה סי' ב', פרדס יוסף פרשתנו סי' י"ד, ודברי יהונתן לר' יהונתן אייבעשיץ, ריש פר' ויצא) assert that the year of Creation was a yovél, such that the heavens and the earth were created in Elul of the yovél, and man’s advent occurred on Rosh ha-Shana of the following year. Therein, they tell us, lies the root of the mitzva of yovél: The earth, when it came into existence, was ownerless (since man had not yet made his appearance); in commemoration of that fact, then, the Patriarchs counted the yovél, and every fifty years the land returned to its pristine, ownerless state.
The Talmud records a dispute concerning the counting of the yovél: ורבנן שנת חמשים אתה מונה ואי אתה מונה שנת חמשים ואחת לאפוקי מדרבי יהודה, דאמר שנת חמשים עולה לכאן ולכאן, קא משמע לן דלא (“And the Rabbis [hold], You count the fiftieth year and do not count the fifty-first year, to detract from the opinion of Rabbi Yehuda, who said, "The fiftieth year counts for both [the yovél and the first year of the next cycle]," so it comes to tell us that it does not;” ראש השנה ט.).
In other words, for the Rabbanan, the yovél cycle constitutes a full fifty years and the next cycle begins with the fifty-first year, while for Rabbi Yehuda, the fiftieth year is both the yovél and the first year of the next cycle; in effect, for Rabbi Yehuda, each yovél cycle consists of forty-nine years (עיי' רש"י שם).
Elsewhere, the Talmud establishes concerning everything said by the Tanna’im, that אלו ואלו דברי אלקים חיים (“Both [sides of a dispute] are the living words of G-d”; גיטין ו: וערובין י"ג: וע"ע חידושי הריטב"א שם). In other words, G-d somehow reconciles both opinions. In this case, I think, this means that we must look for the very first yovél which would be able to coincide with both opinions, the year 2450, either forty-ninth yovél according to the Rabbanan, or the fiftieth according to Rabbi Yehuda to discern Divine observance.
Now, elsewhere the Talmud tells us that the Exodus occurred in the year 2448 after Creation (ע"ז ט.), and that the sin of the m’ragglim, the “spies” (cf. Numbers XIII) occurred on the night of 9 Av of the second year of the Exodus, i.e. 2449 (תענית כ"ט.). Had the m’ragglim not committed their fateful error, therefore, and brought about the panic in Israel which extended their sojourn in the desert, they presumably would have begun to cross into the Holy Land to take it over on the morning of 9 Av 2449.
Rabbi S. R. Hirsch, commenting on Numbers XIII, 2, tells us that the m’ragglim entered the Holy Land from the southeastern corner. This tells us both the position of Israel at the time, and that Israel would have had to proceed diagonally across the face of the country in order to reach its northwestern corner.
Rashi (ibid., v. 25) tells us that the area of the Holy Land is 400 x 400 parsa, and that to cross it from east to west on foot is an effort of 40 days, 10 parsa being the distance a normal man can travel on foot in a day. The Talmud tells us (סוכה ח.) that the diagonal of a square one ama on a side is approximately 1 and 2/5 ama. Therefore, to cross from corner to corner of Eretz Yisra’él would take 2/5 longer than the forty days necessary to cross from east to west, or 56 days.
However, as Tosafoth point out (שם ד"ה כמה), this figure is only approximate, and the true value is slightly larger, closer to 56 and 1/2 days. Then, too, we must note that the tribe destined to take possession of the northwestern corner of the country was Dan (cf. Deuteronomy XXXIII, 22, Rashi ad loc.) and Dan was Israel’s rearguard in the desert (Numbers X, 25). Therefore, Dan had to traverse the entire area occupied by the rest of Israel in order to complete the occupation of their part of the country. The Talmud tells us that the camp of Israel occupied an area of 3x3 parsa (עירובין נ"ה:), so add another half-day (roughly) for the very last member of Dan to arrive on site, bringing us to 57 days.
Next, from Joshua I, 11, we can discern that to prepare to move out, Israel required three more days. Therefore, the total number of days in our calculation rises to 60.
Now consider: Had they received the order to move on 9 Av, there would have been 22 more days in Av (שאב תמיד מלא, עיי' רמב"ם הל' קידוש החודש פ"ח הל' ד'-ה'), another 29 days in the month of Elul, and nine more days in Tishrei until Yom Kippur 2450, when the yovél would have been decreed. This, then, is what the verse with which we started is coming to tell us: That the Divine intent was for Israel to arrive in the Holy Land during the Great Yovél, the first year that would have been a yovél according to everybody, and take possession of the land quickly and painlessly, since the Canaanites’ “ownership” would have been negated. The next verses, then, refer to the interval until the next shmitta year following that initial yovél.
But, as we know, it did not happen that way. The m’ragglim faltered, Israel panicked, and they spent 40 years in the desert.
So what did happen?
C.
The Talmud tells us: ת"ר לפי שראה אדם הראשון יום שמתמעט והולך אמר אוי לי שמא בשביל שסרחתי עולם חשוך בעדי וחוזר לתוהו ובוהו כו' כיון שראה תקופת טבת וראה יום שמאריל והולך, אמר מנהגו של עולם הוא וגו' (“The Rabbis taught: When adam ha-rishon saw the days growing shorter [immediately after his creation, in the autumn]. he said: 'Woe is me, perhaps because I sinned the world is growing dark because of me and returning to chaos.' When he saw [the winter solstice] and the days began to grow longer, he said, 'It is the way of the world....'” ע"ז ח.), whence we learn that, because at first he did not understand what was going on, the first man did not begin his count of the years until the first Rosh ha-Shana after his creation, i.e., the beginning of his second year (עיי' רמב"ם הל' קידוש החודש פ"ו ה"ח, פירוש שם).
In other words, the first man did not begin to count to the first yovél until the second year of Creation; thus, the first yovél according to the human accounting occurred in year 51. It is from this point, then, that the dispute between the Rabbanan and Rabbi Yehuda takes effect, the Rabbanan counting fifty years to the next yovél (101), and Rabbi Yehuda counting forty-nine (100).
Now, 1656 years after the Creation, another cataclysmic, transcendent event occurred: the Mabbul. Chazal are at pains to tell us that the laws of nature were suspended during that event, and so the year of the Mabbul was also not included in the count by subsequent generations (ירושלמי פסחים פ"א ה"א, ב"ר פכ"ה סי' ב', ילקוט שמעוני נ"ז, וע"ע ביאור הגר"א לחושן משפט בהשמטות לסי' ס"ז).
With this in mind, we note, then, that the first yovél to meet the criteria of both the Rabbanan and Rabbi Yehuda according to the count of mortal man is 2502, forty-nine cycles of fifty years from the first yovél for the Rabbanan, or fifty cycles of forty-nine years each for Rabbi Yehuda. This is the date Torah sources assign to the final allocation of Eretz Yisra’él amongst the tribes of Israel (Joshua XVIII, XXI, סדר עולם רבה).
D.
This affords us a rare glimpse of how Divine Providence functions behind the scenes of history.
Had the m’ragglim not presented the report that they did, and/or had Israel not received it and panicked as they did, had they instead faithfully proceeded, trusting in Ha-Shem’s promise that He was giving them the Holy Land (as He had repeatedly said), it seems, that they would have taken possession of it with the minimum amount of fuss, at the beginning of 2450, the Great Yovél according to the Divine count.
As it was, they spent forty years in the desert, until nearly all of the yotz’ei Mitzrayim, had perished in the desert. Then, in 2488, under Yehoshua bin Nun, they finally entered Eretz Yisra’él. But condemned by their failure to use primarily human resources, it took fourteen years of difficult warfare to accomplish what could have been done in minimal time on the Divine cheshbon.
This year is a shmitta year, and also the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel. It is, in light of the above, a fitting occasion to reflect on the extremely difficult history which led up to the founding of that state, as well as subsequent events, in light of the Zionist pioneers’ wholsesale abandonment of their patrimony, the Torah, in contrast to what, perhaps, might have been.
By all accounts, this is also the most widely observed shmitta in the history of the state, thank G-d. In its merit, may we be zocheh to see and understand, very soon, the resolution of this Divine cheshbon, too.
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