Institutional solvent

Shemitta is an institutional solvent for society. 

Shemitta is a sabbatical, an interruption, not only from personal pursuits of the material requirements of life, shemitta is also a time when both the political and the clerical leaders take a back seat to the creative impulses of the ordinary citizens and to the common-folk residents of the land. That shemitta also forces the economic leaders of society into the back seat goes without saying. 

Shemitta is like an officially sanctioned general strike every seven years during which time the ordinary citizens can work to get their acts together. The equalization that is the hallmark of shemitta is achieved not only in the economic sphere by suspending private property rights, it is achieved also in the political and clerical spheres by moving the concerns of the political forums into the caring for the elementary needs of the populations, and by moving the ordinary, socially manifest domains of sanctity away from the sanctuary and the priesthood and over to the land itself and to the people itself.