The Torah tells us that during the Jubilee year, any land sold and purchased resets and reverts to the original owner. Imagine for example a grandfather sold land many years ago. His son had long forgotten that his ancestors once owned the land, let alone his children and descendants who never even suspected their family once owned the land. The Jubilee year arrives and Beis Din announces that property reverts to the original owners. At the Jubilee, the purchaser of the land steps forward and announces “this land he has been living on and cultivating for many years belongs to your ancestors and I must now return it.” The land is given as a gift, there is no monetary transaction required to reacquire ownership. People who never knew of their ancestral property suddenly are presented with land. Ownership of the land reverts to the time of the original distribution that took place many years ago based on the 12 tribes and their descendants. The reset button is pressed and we start over, fresh, new, with a clean slate.
The Jubilee promise applies to Bnei Yisrael as well. We have lost Eretz Yisrael several times, at the hands of the Babylonians and the Romans. As a child, the Rav, zt”l, studied Seder Z’raim. Imagine a child in White Russia studying about purchasing land in Israel and the associated obligations of terumos and maasros. What connection did he have with that land? What connection did he have with the land of E’ver HaYarden, the land of half of the tribe of Menashe, what is now the Golan Heights? Why spend time studying whether the inhabitants of the Golan Heights have an obligation to bring terumos and maasros? The Rav said he had much chidushei Torah on Z’raim. He would ask the same question Jeremiah asked: the land is not ours, why am I learning Seder Z’raim? I am so far away from it.
And the answer is because we have a promise that the Jubilee will come and someday, we pray very soon, Bnei Yisrael will return to our land, our birthright and our ancestral properties and homes. We will start a new, glorious chapter in our relationship with Hashem where the hidden document, shtar chasum, that we wrote with pain and blood over millennia of exile, pogroms and holocaust, will yield to the revealed contract, shtar galuy, that Hashem intended us to write heralding our return. The renewal represented by the Jubilee symbolizes our unswerving faith in the coming of the eschatological period, in-gathering of the exiles, reclaiming Eretz Yisrael with the coming of Mashiach, may it be speedily in our days.