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PRUZBUL

The Talmud in Gittin discusses an apparent innovation of the great Hillel, about a century before the destruction of the Second Temple. The shemitta year carries with it not only the obligation of having the ground of the Land of Israel rest but also the requirement of shemittat ksafim – allowing all personal loans and debts to be automatically cancelled.

The Torah is very explicit about this requirement stating that one should not hold back from lending money to the needy in the sixth year, fearing that it will not be repaid before the shemitta year when the debt will automatically be cancelled. Hillel, aware that in his time lenders were in fact withholding loans as the shemitta year approached, constructed a legal mechanism – the pruzbul – to transfer the private loan into a loan made by the courts, which was not legally subject to the laws of the cancellation of debts on the shemitta year.

This legalism in assigning the loan of the borrower to the court and removing it from the purview of shemittat ksafim had the desired effect and the flow of money and loans between lenders and borrowers remained unaffected by the impending shemitta year.

However, at first glance, one must be puzzled by the institution of pruzbul. What empowered Hillel to construct such a legalism? On the surface it clearly contradicts the very reasoning of the Torah in establishing shemittat ksafim? This is a great topic of discussion in the Talmud and throughout all later rabbinic responsa and writings.

In the Talmud there are two opinions voiced on this matter. One is that during the entire period of the Second Temple the laws of shemitta, as outlined in the Torah, were no longer applicable. All of the laws of shemitta then were only of rabbinic effect – a remembrance to the shemitta ordinances of the Torah - and the rabbis did not ordain shemittat ksafim at all.

Thus Hillel’s achievement was to create a positive remembrance of the Torah’s ordinance of shemittat ksafim by instituting the pruzbul so that the public would always recall that when the Torah ordinances would once again be applicable in the future, the concept of shemittat ksafim would be present.

Tosfot comments that during the entire period of the Second Temple the Torah concept of shemitta was not applicable because a majority of the Jewish people lived outside of the Land of Israel. There was no yovel – no Jubilee year – and therefore no shemitta either. According to Tosfot’s opinion one can state that the Torah shemitta was never observed properly in the Land of Israel by the Jewish nation. The First Temple Jews were exiled because of non-observance of shemitta and the Second Temple Jews only had a rabbinically ordained remembrance of shemitta in their time.

The second opinion is that Hillel’s ordinance was not a new thing but merely publicized an already existing “loophole” in Torah law which allowed private debt to be converted into the debt to courts. Hillel’s act was merely one of publicizing this loophole in order to allow the free flow of credit to continue even in the year before the shemitta. Thus, even when the Torah shemitta is reestablished the use of the pruzbul will continue since the legal “loophole” will still be present.

Over the ages there has been much discussion over the pruzbul and its necessity. For a long period of time, Jews living in the Diaspora never used a pruzbul. The logic was that shemitta in our time after the destruction of the First Temple was only a rabbinic remembrance and the rabbis never instituted it to be followed outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel.

Just as there is no shemitta of land outside of the Land of Israel there is no shemittat ksafim either. However, there were great rabbis who dissented from this view and stated that shemittat ksafim still prevailed outside the Land of Israel and therefore a pruzbul was necessary to prevent the automatic cancellation of the loan. Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel (Rosh) when he became the rabbi in Toledo, Spain at the beginning of the fourteenth century attempted to introduce the pruzbul in his community. But he himself ruefully wrote of his inability to have the Jews of Toledo follow his ruling in this matter.

Over the generations, the institution of pruzbul has taken hold even in Diaspora communities. Many rabbis saw it as a matter of sanctity and remembrance even if not of necessity and therefore encouraged its general use. It became one of the methods of keeping the Land of Israel fresh in the minds of Jews living in a dark and far exile. Hillel’s foresight had many positive results.

Shabbat Shalom.

Berel Wein