The central commandment of the shmita year is to not work your land. What if we apply this sabbatical concept to our internal work and take a break from working our process, from tilling our own internal landscape?
Consider what is prohibited on the shmita year – no sowing, planting, pruning, harvesting, or cultivating the land (Leviticus 25:4-5). Anything that promotes growth is not allowed. You can’t do work that makes the land better for future use. You can only live in this moment with whatever naturally grows and eat what there is and be sustained by it. You have to let go of all of the growth plans and cultivation.
The Work of Self Improvement
So turning that inside, I want to start by simply noticing how much energy is consumed by our self improvement projects, by our attempts to promote growth and healing and transformation. We are constantly pruning what we don’t like and trying to plant new seeds, to cultivate certain habits and fix ourselves. (Even this essay could be understood as an attempt to do that in some way, to shift something inside.) This inner process can be both laborious and subtly aggressive, the way we take sickles and pruning shears and plows to hack at our inner selves and bend us into some new more desirable form, as if you – and the land – are not already whole and beautiful as you are.
A Shmita Experiment
Maybe we can try an experiment. Not forever. Shmita is one year out of seven, like shabbat is one day out of seven. We also need all of that working energy and we honor it. But maybe, just for this moment, all those striving working parts inside you would be willing to take a break, to put down their shearing tools and plows and plans and growth charts and sit down on a lounge chair and not work, not fix, just for this moment, rest and relax.
The Anxiety of the Striving Parts
What happens when you make that suggestion inside? What comes up? In the Torah, what comes up is great anxiety around letting go of such work – mah nokhal, the people say – but what will we eat if we don’t plant and harvest? We can’t let go – we won’t survive without our own work! Maybe sensing a parallel fear inside you, the sense of basic not okayness without these working, striving parts at the helm, the core mistrust that you will be ok, that you will survive if you don’t work hard, if you don’t control things and effort and produce, the essential belief that you will not be provided for unless you make it happen, that the world will not turn unless you keep pushing it, that the trees will not bear fruit without your tending, the terror of letting go of the effort, of the work, the mistrust in things as they are without your tight control. Sometimes, when the striving parts are asked to rest and make space, strangely what comes up is not relaxation but this panic – the panic of letting go, the fear that underlies the urgency of their work.
The Response: God’s Abundance
It is precisely this mistrust and urgent need to control that shmita aims to alleviate by reminding us of something that the strivers often forget: There is a larger force that makes the world go round. We may take part in it, but it is ultimately God that provides the world with sustenance, with free nourishing abundance. This is the Torah’s response to the people’s fear. Vetziviti et birkhati lakhem (Leviticus 25:21), “I will ordain My blessing for you,” God says, my brachah, a freely given gift of abundance, of cornucopia. The world was created for free, out of love, with all that we need already in it, the trees and the plants, the skies and the seas. Hazan et haolam kulu betuvu – God nourishes the whole world with goodness, all the insects and the animals, all provided for. Yes, we participate, we work and produce, but ultimately, we are cared for and provided for from a place beyond our own limited work, from a neverending flow of divine abundance.
Going Back to the Garden of Eden
Rashi links shmita to Shabbat Breishit, the first shabbat of creation (Rashi on Lev 25:2). Indeed, the experience of shmita takes us back to Genesis, back to the Garden of Eden, back to a time before working the land, back to the way things were originally, when we simply walked the garden, walked the earth and ate from its lush produce without tilling the ground. Can you imagine the garden scene in all its cornucopia and green lushness and feel yourself there, streams burbling around you and trees and flowers and plants and bushes and animals all healthy and abundant and giving of themselves? This is God’s brachah, God’s blessing, the world is God’s gift to us, an ever-replenishing gift. We may have left the Garden, but we are invited back through shmita and through shabbat to taste it again and to remember it because it is still true underneath it all. Underneath the veneer of work and effort, it is still true that there is this everlasting fount of abundance that sustains the world, that we are still held unconditionally in eternal love. It may be more hidden now, but it is still there.
The Giving Tree
When you keep shmita and yovel, the Torah says, venatna ha’aretz piryah, the land will give you its fruit. Ve’akhaltem lasova, and you will eat till you are full, content, satisfied (Lev 25: 19). This is the deep rest we can experience in this garden. We can experience not that we make the tree give its fruit, not that we prune and spray and take the fruit, but that the tree actually gives it freely. Maybe you can imagine a tree reaching out its arms with peaches and offering you one; in point of fact, that is what tree branches do: they reach out and offer you free fruit, a gift. We are so busy trying to make things happen that we don’t often pause to marvel at the bounty that is given to us, handed to us with abundance and grace. What if you pause right now from any effort at all and simply open your palm to receive the fruit that the tree wants to drop into it, into that open, waiting palm? Feel how it fills you lasova, full, content, satisfied, there is nothing more to look for, to strive after, to fix. It’s all right here, already provided, already perfect. There are no future plans, no growth potential, just this moment in all its fullness. You receive and are satisfied, aware of the wholeness of the universe and yourself in this moment.
Relaxing into the Pool of Water
Can your striving parts relax into this scene? Can they trust that they can stop running and pruning and making things better, making you better, just for a moment? The word brachah is related to the word breichah, a pool of water. Maybe those striving parts can get into the pool of fresh, cool, eternal waters in the Garden and let themselves float there. Part of the shmita and yovel experience, the Torah says, is veyashvtem lavetah, you will dwell in security (Lev 25:19). Betah means both security and trust. This is what happens to the strivers in these Garden of Eden waters, this pool of divine abundance: they begin to trust the larger divine force in the universe to provide and hold and carry them, so that they – we – can relax and float, feel held and loved and safe.
Shabbat Shabbaton
Can your striving parts let go of their shears now and drop into that pool? It’s ok if it is hard for them. Maybe you have been noticing even as you read this essay a subtle effort to try to make you feel a certain way, the effort to let go of efforting itself, the effort to relax, the effort to trust in the pool and in divine abundance. It is so hard for us to let go of that habit! Perhaps that is why shmita is called shabbat shabbaton – it is a continual return to the shabbat place, to the pool, to the garden, not once, but shabbat shabbaton, repeatedly, again and again. Each time we notice some striving energy, we take another step back into a wider and wider shabbat energy field, more and more spaciousness, a greater trust and relaxing, enlarging the circle, becoming this wider shabbat shabbaton space that holds it all, a divine energy that is beyond any effort and human control.
Opening the Gates
We keep opening the space until boundaries start to dissolve. In the time of shmita, all gates to personal fields were required to be left open so that anyone could come in and partake. The rich and the poor, humans and animals, all ate off the same ownerless earth. As we begin to let go of our personal ground – that tight hold our strivers have on us – we both lose ground, the immediate safety provided by control, and at the same time, we gain the ultimate ground, the ground of being, an endless ground, our field expanding – shabbat shabbaton – so that we are not just standing on this one little plot of earth, 1096 Rogeretta Drive, but somehow connected to the whole universe; we belong to the earth and to all its plants and creatures; we are one with all living things and with the One who created them. We lose something when we open those gates, but we also gain something; we gain this broad expanse of belonging, the endless horizon of shabbat shabbaton spreading out before us. If you breathe deeply, maybe you can feel this expansion in your own body, and make room, too, for the strivers inside you, plenty of room for them, too, here, helping them begin to trust this new groundless ground, helping them trust that we can relax and be in this moment without effort or plans or fixing.
There is ease here instead of aggression. The trees give freely of their fruit; we don’t cut it down with sharp objects. As we begin to sense our belonging in this abundant divine universe, we can also sense our own wholeness. We participate in this abundance ourselves, are ourselves one of God’s fruits, one of God’s gifts. Does a peach need to be improved upon in its luscious ripeness? Do you, in your essence, need to be improved upon? Do we need to take a sickle to ourselves, or might we simply return to the garden of our own divine perfection, to lean into our wholeness and trust it just as we trust the world to keep turning. We don’t have to make anything happen. There is no need to fight our way to healing. Healing comes freely on the breeze when we can let go of the shearing tools and relax into the gentle pool of water in the garden, when we can trust the ever flowing and evergiving Source that created all things, and us among them. We are one with the birds and the grass and the trees, and this oneness provides a healing like no fixing effort ever could. We are ultimately healed not by our own striving, but only by God. Umibaladekha eyn lanu goel. Other than You we have no other redeemer. Our strivers have worked so hard for so long, but sadly, they cannot truly redeem, cannot truly heal us. We let go and relax into the divine pool that can.
And perhaps when you return to the world of work and effort, you can bring some of this shmita energy with you, so that even the working, striving parts of you can do their work from this place of rest and trust, of wholeness and abundance, not urgently or desperately, but freely, in a relaxed way that knows that our work only participates in God’s already abundant world.
Photo by Mateusz Dach at Pexels
