Vanished

By the time Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene in Israel, the sabbatical year had already become a defunct institution. 

The Christians therefore did not pick it up to make it part of their practice, and so the medieval, diaspora Jews let it go as well. As a result, the shnat sheviit vanishes from every contemporary, political consciousness except as a vestigial appendage in the academic realm. 

All the moral philosophers’ struggle to find some moderating system by which the social order might be governed is blithely oblivious to the possibilities laid out by the biblical design of the shnat sheviit.