My Jubilee Year

Celebrating a birthday by building a yearlong sanctuary in time.

Shabbat is one of Jewish tradition’s most audacious ideas for how we as individuals, families, communities, and even societies can experience a reset. Suspending our creative work for one day a week grants us rest, it liberates us from normal standards of productivity, it evokes our formative memories as a people, and – perhaps most importantly – reminds us of our subordinate role beneath the canopy of divine sovereignty. Neither our time nor our possessions are our own; suspending our instincts to believe otherwise restores our balance. I could not live without Shabbat, and I marvel at people who can.

But the Torah has two bigger visions for societal resets. Leviticus 25 describes the Sabbatical year, a prolonged period of rest for the Land of Israel, a Sabbath in years, when the people may eat of its yield but not tend it; and even more audaciously, the Jubilee year, year 50, at the conclusion of 7 cycles of 7 years. The Jubilee year is marked dramatically with the blowing of the shofar – “Cry Freedom,” the Torah says, literally – and in addition to the laws of the Sabbatical year, everyone is meant to return home. This means most importantly the eradication of debt and the conditions through which debt servitude would have meant the loss of homes and liberty, the proliferation of social inequalities, the creation of multigenerational wealth and a corresponding multigenerational poverty. Every 50 years, this is supposed be reset.

The Torah knows the problem inherent in this tragically utopian vision. Why would those who live securely and affluently want to participate in this reset? Why would anyone make loans in the years leading up to the Jubilee when they know their debtors can wait them out? How are people meant to trust that they will have what they need when the world changes course?

Half the ensuing chapter in Leviticus is dedicated to this anxiety. God wants the Israelites to believe that God is the ultimate grantor of their safety and security, conditional on observing God’s law, and that God is the ultimate guarantor of their affluence and of their debts. The text is almost a pleading by God: come with me on this journey. Trust that in order to have the just and equitable societies that you all want, you will need to take this leap of faith into a reset towards factory settings. The text repeats two phrases over and over: that you will live “securely” in the land – you can trust that the risk you take will be rewarded – and that “I am the Lord your God.” Insisting otherwise, on maintaining the conditions of structural inequality that privilege some over others, may originate as a normal, human expression of fear, a distrust of a utopian promise; theologically speaking, it is a kind of idolatry.

The tragedy of this story, of course, is that while we have evidence that ancient Jews kept time using the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycle, we don’t know how fully they actually observed its precepts. It is hard for me to imagine that the full abrogation of debts or emancipation of slaves really took place; I think we learn as much from the Bible’s acknowledgement of the human instinct to fear such a radical change about what happened as we do from the historical silence about whether this tradition was ever observed. Many Jews in Israel today have resumed the practice of either leaving the land fallow on the 7^th year, or more commonly using a legal loophole of selling their holdings for the duration of the year, but it is unimaginable in a modern capitalist society to see a full re-embrace of the Jubilee mandates. It is sad. And it also tells us something about how some utopian dreams for social justice and radical social overhaul can at best provide us with a north star, something to aspire to; but that baked into those dreams is a prosaic understanding that they should not be taken seriously as real political programs.

Today, January 7, 2026, I’m marking my own Jubilee. I’ve lived through and completed 7 cycles of 7 years, and I am entering my 50^th year. I have few complaints. A bunch of actual sabbaticals along the way would have been nice, but my lifetime of Shabbats have been a gift from my heritage to my happiness and health, and I feel now – like the Israelites were meant to feel, as they entered a year of uncertainty – that they were secure; that the fields would provide, that their future would hold, that their loyalty would be rewarded.

I’ve decided to make this my Jubilee year. I blessedly am not a creditor over others, and rather unfortunately my mortgage lender will probably not take kindly to my proudly announcing, blowing the shofar in the bank lobby, that I am free from paying back my debts. I do not eat from my fields (I do not have fields) and I do not have humans to manumit besides the high school senior who is leaving my house this year whether I like it or not. (I do not.)

But I have three rituals and intentions in mind to mark my own Jubilee.

· I am going to try to let go of the grudges I bear against others who I feel have wronged me. This is one way in which we are enslaved, how the memory of the past takes us captive, and a means through which we grant power to others over us. Letting go of grudges means letting go of feeling righteous and superior, and that’s hard to give up; but maybe forgiving others can be a way of enacting a kind of divine grace, to grasp at the benevolence of the divine promise for how we might emerge on the other side of this momentous year. I am going to try.

· I am going to work on my footprint. Even without tilling the earth, my work takes a toll on it. I am already planning less travel this year than in the past, which is far and away the way in which my work wreaks the most havoc on the planet. I would love to believe that the business of proliferating Torah outweighs these costs, but I do not know.

· And, maybe the hardest of the bunch: I hope for this year to be restful. And not just longer naps (but yes, naps.) As I’ve grown older I have come to appreciate birthdays as moments for gratitude. I am in awe of my bounty and this 50^th year I will try to live more of a life of thriving in what I have.

I pause in reading Leviticus 25 again and think of a society fully at rest: you, your neighbor, your livestock, the widow and the orphan, the livestock, the stranger in your midst.

It is a pastoral scene, a bit blurry – or maybe those are the tears. It is restful. It is a gift.