Ra'anana Community Kollel

The Challenge of Emunah

Rabbi Aharon Liberman

The very beginning of this week’s parshah, Behar, speaks about the mitzvah of shmita, the forbidden agricultural activities relevant to the seventh year of the shmita cycle. During Biblical times, Eretz Yisrael was primarily an agrarian society. As such, the shmita laws basically brought the economy to a halt. Imagine taking a year’s vacation time. Before you start planning too many leisure activities, you have to make sure that you have enough savings to live off of, and that your boss is willing to take you back next year. Now imagine that the whole country took a year’s vacation. There would be unbelievable economic chaos.

The Torah, sensitive to our human insecurities, promises us that Hashem will bless the fields so that they will yield a huge surplus of produce during the sixth year, enough to sustain us for the sixth, seventh, and eighth years, until the economy can stabilize. The Noam Elimelech explains that actually, the normal course of nature is that Hashem always takes care of us, and so the fields would sustain us naturally, even without Hashem’s special blessing. Once we lose faith and question our ability to survive through the harsh shmitta year, we also undermine our special relationship with Hashem, and as a result, our fields would no longer be able to provide for us. Here, Hashem does a special chessed for us by blessing our fields that they should produce sufficiently, despite the fact that nature would dictate that they shouldn’t.

Observing the halachot of shmita properly requires a tremendous leap of faith; it demands that we act in complete opposition to our logic and instincts. Rav Paysach Krohn tells a powerful story on this topic. An IAF squadron was involved in a series of drills. A pilot was fling in formation with other planes. He signaled the target for the others to bomb, and then whisked away while they bombarded their target. Although this was a maneuver he had practiced dozens of times, this particular drill was different because he was experiencing vertigo, a state of confusion where a pilot loses his sense of direction. He felt as if he were flying right side up, but in reality, he was upside down and descending rapidly. Even though all of his gauges indicated that he was losing altitude, he was certain that they had malfunctioned. Just to make sure, he called on the radio for someone to tell him his position. Everyone told him that he was falling, and that he had better turn his plane right side up. Following this advice would actually be very difficult for the pilot considering the fact that his own instincts were telling him that turning over his plane would really be turning it upside down, bringing him crashing onto the land. Despite this, he immediately reversed the direction of his plane, upon which he regained his senses, realizing that he was indeed experiencing vertigo. The pilot learned an important lesson from this which changed his life forever. Sometimes life’s challenges require us to act against our own instincts. For years he had thought that the Torah’s way of life was silly and not meant for him. Upon learning life’s new lesson, he realized that he must embrace the Torah lifestyle, even if it seems foolish to him.

The agrarian society is no more. Technology and industry have revolutionized modern economies. The ability to import fruits and vegetables from abroad has stabilized our fear of shmita. The lessons of emuna, of faith, however, are timeless. We must realize Hashem is loves us and is always taking care of us; we naturally attract blessing and prosperity. Throughout our lives we are confronted by challenges which call upon us either to contradict our instincts and our logic or to send ourselves crashing downwards. Shmitta tells us that Hashem is there for us, all we have to do is have faith. It is no wonder then, that shmitta brings on the emancipation of the slaves, for through the lessons of shmitta, anyone can free himself from the limitations created by his weak emunah.