The Bible has a set of laws that allow important new beginnings. These are the laws of ‘Shmita.’ It is the seventh year in a seven-year cycle during which land in Israel must lie fallow and debts are canceled.
New beginning is a core element of the ‘Shmi•ta,’ ‘release’ that is discussed in great length in the Old Testament. There are several kinds of ‘Shmita:’ The sabbath year also called the sabbatical year or ‘sheviit’ (literally ‘seventh’) is the seventh year of the sevenyear agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel, and still observed in contemporary Judaism.
Whereas the previous ‘Shmita’ allows the earth to have a new beginning, another kind of ‘Shmita, that allows a very important fresh start is called ‘shmi•tat cho•vot,’ ‘releasing or dropping of debts.’ This is the the ‘new beginning’ that God’s laws provide for human being who simply cannot pay their debts despite years of trying to do so. The law is the ground for the bankruptcy laws we know today in our modern judicial systems. The law gives the same protection and actually a chance for a new beginning to citizens that have crashed financially.
Much of the Lord’s Prayer is about a opportunity of two directional new beginning – in the first, between God and human beings where we ask God to allow us to start anew, and in the second, between a person to another, where we forgive others and giving them an opportunity of a new beginning:
‘”Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors’ ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors, For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”’
There is another surprising aspect in giving others the opportunity for a new beginning – by doing so we also release ourselves from ill feeling, anger stress and hatred and hostility, all are very damaging self afflicting emotions.
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