The Palestinian farmers who vote for Hamas and provide logistics to the PIJ’s rocket launching squads expect windfall profits from the Jews next year: Shmita, the Sabbatical year when a Biblical commandment prohibits sowing. Much of the Orthodox community will refrain from buying food grown in Israel – and will buy from the Palestinians. As so often happens, formal religious observance takes precedence over the essence of Biblical teaching: it is certainly impermissible to financially support an enemy.

The original prohibition in Exodus 23:10 speaks about "your land." The Rabbinical interpretation of "your" as "the land owned by Jews" flies in the face of a parallel term, "land of Egypt" in the previous verse. "Your land" is the Land of Israel rather than private plots of land. Such a reading is confirmed by the re-worded Shmita commandment in Leviticus 25:2: "the land which I give you." Leviticus 25:7 further dispels any ownership attributes by allowing even the beasts to eat the aftergrowth. "The beasts in your land" obviously doesn’t mean "on your plot of land," but rather "in the Land of Israel." Ancient Diaspora Jews worked their land during Shmita, which confirms that "your land" relates to geography rather tha property rights.

The Rabbis devised many ingenious – or shameful – workarounds for the Sabbatical year. Any law could be circumvented. The Talmud (Sotah 22) calls the worst kind of Pharisees those who teach circumventing a law while nominally adhering to it. Only the utter disregard for God allows rabbinical hypocrites to bypass a clear commandment. Is the commandment unreasonable? If so, stop calling yourselves rabbis and go get a degree in business management. Academics, however leftist, enjoy sabbaticals, and there is no reason to refuse them to farmers; the commandment, as every other, is fully rational.

The most common rabbinical workaround for Shmita is a farcical prozbul-like sale, with a buyback option, of agricultural land plots to Gentiles. Ostensibly, the Gentile is under no religious obligation of Shmita, and the land is not Jewish; thus, uninterrupted agriculture. That hypocritical approach to Jews observing commandments by commissioning Gentiles recalls the equally detestable trick of hiring a Sabbath goy to turn off the lights. A temporary sale of land is void both in rabbinical and civil law because of its fictitious nature: the buyer and seller do not intend to create actual legal consequences by signing the deed; a Jewish seller does not lose his profit, and the Gentile buyer receives no entrepreneurial profit. The temporary transfer of land plots is also religiously meaningless because the commandment prohibits tilling the Land of Israel whomever it belongs to.

Other rabbinical authorities made Shmita unenforceable by linking it to the Jubilee year (every fiftieth year of redemption). Contrary to the plain text of the Torah, the rabbinical tradition asserts that Jubilee years do not come on their own, but that the Sanhedrin declares them. The mainstream rabbis shrink from forming a Sanhedrin – an act which would set them on a collision course with the secular government – and therefore observe neither Jubilee years, nor Shmita years. Still others imagine that the Jews can buy agricultural produce from Gaza – a part of Israel neither now nor in Biblical times. Buying from the enemy who kills Jews is hardly in line with Biblical ethics.

The Torah is immensely practical and doesn’t require rabbinical correction. In the ancient sustenance economy, how could the entire population refrain from sowing for a year, even for two years when a Sabbatical year is followed by a Jubilee year? Exodus 23:10 commands gathering harvest for six years. The verb asaf means not just reaping, but actually collecting into storage like healed lepers are taken back into the community (asaf, Deuteronomy 22:2). That creates enough reserves for the Sabbatical year. Leviticus 25:1 reassures that the sixth-year produce will suffice for three years. The example of Joseph arranging a similar storage with Pharaoh to provide for the years of drought confirms that the concept of large-scale food storage was common. Thus, the Sabbatical year applies only to growing storable food and only if the three-year reserve was available. It is permissible to grow non-storable fruits and vegetables, a staple of the modern Israeli diet, during the seventh year. Fruits, moreover, are permitted because there is no need to sow them in the seventh year.

Maintaining the land fallow only one year in seven does not provide for efficient crop rotation; ancient farmers surely realized this fact. The traditional reading of the commandment bans any work on the land, though fallow land must be plowed and weeds treated; the land unworked for a year, especially the low-quality Judean land, would actually deteriorate rather than regain its productivity.

All over the world, farmers rotate crops by keeping some rather than all fields fallow, and for a good reason: keeping the entire land fallow is too risky, especially in sustenance economies. Only an exceptionally good harvest provides reserves for a year of agricultural rest; refraining from agriculture for a year would normally spell starvation. What if the next year (first of a new cycle) brings a poor harvest? It is still more unlikely that the ancients had enough reserves to comfortably survive a seventh year and the following Jubilee year; instead of joy, the fiftieth year would bring widespread hunger.

Let’s delve into the text. Exodus 23:11 enjoins dealing with the vineyard and olive yard similarly to the field. The issue of sowing is inapplicable to grapevines and olive trees. Not harvesting olives is senseless, and not harvesting a vine moreover damages it; it is unimaginable that the Torah sets such unreasonable prohibitions. And indeed, the same verse mandates that produce of the field be made available to the poor and, after they are satisfied – to the beasts; there is produce, even more than the poor can eat. The verse, literally, commands in the seventh year "to release it and let it go forth." That does not necessarily mean to refrain from sowing. "It" is usually understood to refer to the land. Grammatically, however, "it" refers to the nearest antecedent, which is "increase [of produce]". Not the land, but its increase should be released. The poor enjoy the right to glean. Exodus 23:11 extends this right. For six years, farmers sow and collect surplus in storage (Exodus 23:10). In the seventh year, they eat but do not collect the surplus – which is left to the poor who merely glean in other years. Leviticus 25:6 agrees: the seventh-year produce is "a food for you," and reiterates (25:7) that "all [the produce that the land] brings forth is for food" – not for storage.

(The prohibition of sowing and pruning in Leviticus 25:4 was interpolated. It contradicts 25:6 which speaks of Sabbatical-year produce – necessarily sowed. The 25:4 addition necessitates an etymologically impossible reading of sfiah ktzirca (25:5) as "that which grows by itself.")

Similarly to Exodus 23, Leviticus 25:5 prohibits not harvesting per se, but only reaping unpruned and other low-yield (sfiah ktzirca) vines. This again corresponds to the right of gleaning. During the first six years of the Shmita cycle, the poor are allocated the leftovers, but in the seventh year they enjoy even more: the entire low-yield produce and all grain left after the farmers satisfy their personal needs. The Sabbatical year is about benefiting the poor, not about crop rotation. Exodus 23:1-9 provides a context of social justice.

In modern economic terms, in the Sabbatical year farmers are entitled to satisfy their needs but not to receive profit. Leviticus 25:6 allows Sabbatical produce to servants; modern farmers, accordingly, are entitled to cover their production costs. 25:6 permits the produce also to maids; farmers, accordingly, can legitimately use sale proceeds to satisfy their needs – or wants – other than food. But storing Sabbatical produce or accumulating its sale proceeds is unacceptable; any profits must be distributed for charitable purposes. The Israeli farmers may work their land during Sabbatical years with a single restriction: all surplus produce or profits from its sale must go to charity.

The Bible doesn't mention Shmita observance before it figures in Nehemiah 10:32. Shmita may have begun as the year of rest after the Babylonian Exile through erroneous interpretation of the commandment.
Shmita year figures in Hellenistic writings as a year of rest. There are some oddities. In 1Maccabees 6:49, inhabitants of Beth-Zur evacuated their town because they lacked supplies in the Sabbatical year. That makes no sense: evacuation only increased they hardship. In 6:53, food supplies were only lacking in the sanctuary and its defendants therefore scattered to their home villages; it is plausible that only the priests observed Shmita rests on the lands proscribed to the sanctuary. Josephus copies that description in the Antiquities 12:9:5. In War 1:2:4, Josephus relates a contradictory account of Hyrcanus' ending the siege because Jews don't work on the seventh year; that's clearly a hand of Gentile editor. That absurd assertion is a copy of Tacitus' Histories 5:4.
Eusebius (The Preparation of the Gospel 8:7) quotes Philo on Shmita year. Philo is conspicuously polemic on this practice, and devotes six paragraphs to the matter while fast forward with other commandments, lumping the entire section of Jewish law in single phrases. Eusebius' Philo argues that Jews don't cease working in the Shmita year. Eusebius attributed the argument to Philo in order to confront the myth of Shmita as the year of the total rest.
Talmud b.Sanh26a allows Jews to work the land in Shmita year to pay Roman taxes. But what did the Jews do before that relaxation? Josephus (Ant14:202) claims that Julius Ceasar released Jews from taxes in Shmita year. The earlier Seleucid rulers offered Jews no similar tax break. Jews couldn't observe Shmita.

Touching on the topic of the Shmita year, note the erroneous understanding of debt release. The seven-year cycle for debt release in Deuteronomy 15:1 is unrelated to the seven-year land rest cycle. The idea of debt release is simple: debts in antiquity were small, not like modern mortgages, and generally payable back within a year at most. Debts not collected for six years are as bad as it gets. The debt release amounts to writing off bad debt instead of meaninglessly harassing the debtors. The parallel Deuteronomy 15:12 confirms that the six-year period is flexible, and transaction-based. Jews own slaves for six years, and must release them afterwards. The relevant six-year period starts with the purchase of the slave. Similarly, the debt collection period is six years from inception of the debt.

The erroneous identification of debt release with the Shmita year created a situation when, of course, no one was willing to lend when the seventh year drew near. A separate paragraph, Deuteronomy 15:7-11 was added to shame the Jews into lending without a hope of return; this concept is reiterated in Christianity. Hillel introduced the prozbul to circumvent the debt release by nominally transferring the debts into the public domain, which is not covered by the Torah’s injunction.

The lawgiver is wise and there is no need to correct Him, if only we read the Torah closely.