CCAR RESPONSA
American Reform Responsa
48. The Jewish Jubilee
(Vol. XLII, 1932, pp. 85-86)QUESTION: Will you please let us know whether there is any record of the year in which the Jewish Jubilee was celebrated, and if there is any way of figuring in what year the next Jubilee would be celebrated if it had continued to be celebrated each fifty years since Biblical days?ANSWER: According to the Talmud (Arachin 32b), the laws about the Jubilee year prescribed in Leviticus were to be observed only as long as all Israel (i.e., all the twelve tribes) lived in Palestine, but not after some of the tribes had been exiled. Accordingly, the Jubilee year could not have been observed during the Second Jewish Commonwealth. But, while not observing the Jubilee year in practice, the Jewish people may have preserved the memory of it in their reckoning of the years. According to a Talmudic tradition (ibid., 12a), “the fourteenth year after the city was smitten,” referred to in Ezek. 40:1, was a Jubilee year. Since the city (i.e., Jerusalem) was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in the year 586 B.C.E., then the year 573 B.C.E. (i.e., the fourteenth year after the destruction) was a Jubilee year. On the basis of this tradition, we could figure that, had the Jubilee continued to be celebrated each fifty years, adding 1932 to 573, which total 2505, and dividing by fifty, the present year would be the fifth in the Jubilee period, and the next Jubilee year would then have to be in 1977. Of course, this figure would not hold true according to the reckoning of R. Judah, who maintains that the fiftieth year, while being the Jubilee year, is at the same time counted as the first year of the following Jubilee period: “Shenat chamishim ola lechan ulechan” (ibid., 212b).Jacob Z. Lauterbach
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