“The Sabbath produce of the land shall be yours to eat.”

This seems to be a contradiction: How can one let the land rest and not be harvested but also have food to eat from the land? Rashi writes:

This means that one can eat whatever grew from uncultivated land but one cannot eat food which grew in the normal fashion of harvesting crops to eat or sell for money.

Why is this so? It seems to me that the shmittah year is about trust, trusting God that He will still provide food for us, although we are not working the field. This is a recurrent theme in the Torah: that God provides us food and drink in an atypical manner so that we will learn to trust and respect his powers.

Although here at Drisha we certainly did not rest this year, the Beit Midrash Program is a year off for many of us who are returning to secular academia or entering or returning to the workforce next year. This year is not in our normal fashion. We took one year off from our daily routine, from our education and from our jobs to spend time studying the texts of our tradition. This was a shmittah year for many of us: learning about trusting God, putting faith into our oral tradition, and of course, trusting that we too will have food to eat during the year.

After the discussion of shmitta is completed, Parshat Behar describes the yovel or jubilee year. The yovel year happens once every 50 years, and it is a year when all property returns to its original owners. Verse 13 states:

“In this yovel year, each person shall return to his ancestral heritage.”

This means that, literally, each family would return to the plot of land in the Land of Israel, that had belonged to them since Joshua divided the land among the children of Israel who had just finished forty years in the desert. Although, this concept of property returning to its original owner is alien to us, and is not practiced anymore, the concept of returning to our ancestral heritage is still relevant, and it is evident daily here at Drisha. Many of my classmates do not have a Jewish day school education and this year, devoted to the study of our texts, constituted a return to ancestral heritage. For Jews, our common heritage is our texts, our traditions of learning: that same heritage that bonds us all, although we come from different backgrounds.

I came to Drisha this year to learn how to study text on my own. I wanted to see the sources for concepts that I understood only vaguely. And most important, I wanted to go back to the original arguments in the gemara and watch them, and the halakha, develop over time. Although I have not always been religious, I have always been lucky enough to have attended Jewish day schools. However, as a woman, the schools where I studied did not focus on learning gemara. Rather we learned the halakha, the laws, with an emphasis on the end-result.

As I grew older, I began searching for a deeper meaning to many of the laws around which I base my life. When I met my husband and his family and saw how well versed they were in the Torah and the oral traditions, I felt that I was truly missing something. Perhaps not coincidentally, at this time I also became friends with a new group of women who had attended Jewish day schools where they did learn gemara. Some had even studied here at Drisha. I noticed that all of these people had something in common: They related to the halakha in a much more personal way than I had seen before, and they displayed a sense of ownership over the laws, and their lives. I thought that if I had the same skills, I wouldn’t struggle as much about keeping the laws.

Well, I have acquired many of those skills, and can safely admit that I was wrong. Learning gemara, as well as halakha and Tanach, in a text-based environment has strengthened my belief and practice in Judaism. However, it did not come without a fight, and as my classmates can attest, we all had our own questions that came up throughout the year. While some of my old concerns have been allayed, they have more than been replaced with new questions and new struggles. I understand that there will always be questions, always be difficulties, and always be frustrations. What Drisha equipped me with are the tools I need to ask better questions and provide better answers. What has been so great about our class this year is that we can each offer a different perspective and help each other through some the issues.

As the year is coming to an end, it is a time of reflection. Have I accomplished all that I wanted to? I remember vividly, the day before Drisha started, I was terrified that I would feel ashamed that although I had gone to Jewish day schools my entire life, I would not be able to read and translate properly. Today, I have so much more confidence in my ability to study Jewish texts and to attend text based classes. But much more significant to me, than the personal gains is the feeling of being a part of the larger Jewish community through understanding more of our background and Jewish law. This is the most important thing that I have gained this year and, I believe my classmates would agree.