לדמיין את היובל: אוטופיות יהודיות מודרניות מראשית הציונות ועד למפנה הקיומי

The commandment to observe the Jubilee year, which appears in the final chapters of Leviticus, is a multifaceted riddle. The Talmud claims that observance of the Jubilee ceased with the expulsion of the Israelite tribes 2,700 years ago, implying a complete lack of oral traditions on the subject. However, despite its absence from Jewish practice and actual memory, the Jubilee played a central role in Jewish utopian thought on ownership, property, and the relationship with the Land of Israel. The rise of modern Zionism witnessed a flowering of utopian thinking inspired by the Jubilee. Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Zionist thinkers offered modern interpretations of the Jubilee, intended to serve as the foundation of the model society they aimed to create. In recent decades, discussion of the Jubilee has become a battleground between liberal and conservative thinkers, who have attempted to frame the commandment as a mechanism of social and economic reform or as a means to strengthen private ownership respectively.This article addresses modern interpretations of the Jubilee from the early Zionist writers to the present, exploring the various ways in which Jubilee utopias have been employed as a source of inspiration for a newly constructed social and economic ethos. Following this analysis, I offer a new, existential interpretation of the Jubilee for the 21st century. I suggest a reading of the act of return to ancestral land every fifty years in the context of the global and virtual era, specifically drawing on the process described by Zygmunt Bauman (1998) as the great war of independence for space.