By now you're probably used to the fact that Fr. Paul is on sabbatical, but may be a little unclear on what this really is.  The name comes from the word for "seven" in Hebrew - sheba - and the story of Creation in Genesis, when on the seventh day God rested from all his labors. The wandering Israelites are warned not to go collecting the manna in the desert on the seventh day because there will be none - God is still resting on the seventh day and so should they (gather more the day before!).  Of course, when Moses brings the tables of the Law down from the mountain the fourth commandment directs them to "keep holy" the seventh day by doing no work (and by not requiring those who work for you to work either).  This was famously elaborated into a system of Sabbath rest that could be quite difficult to observe fully, but the basic idea was to have a quiet Saturday.  (Other cultures did not have seven-day weeks - or even a unit of time that corresponded to a week.)  

But it didn't stop with a seventh day alone.  In Leviticus (25:1 and following) God tells Moses that even the  land should keep a Sabbath rest, so for six years you may bring in your crops but in the seventh year, the fields may not be sown, the vines not tended, and even what grows on its own may not be gathered - "it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land."  In colonial Virginia tobacco was the cash crop and was so vital to the English economy that one Bishop of London is said to have replied to a priest's request for more clergy since the people of Virginia had souls to save as well as those of London, "Damn your souls.  Make tobacco!"  And as they found, tobacco enforces its own sabbatical law - after about seven years of cultivation it refuses to grow, nor can anything else be grown on the fields for several years.  That's why all those plantation owners were always eager to grab more land.  Crops really can ruin a field if it is not allowed to "lie fallow" every now and then (though in modern agriculture we use a lot of energy-intensive and polluting chemicals to force constant crops out of the land).  Just like crops, dedicated teachers and pastors put a lot more energy and effort into their jobs than many people understand and are liable, like crop fields, to stop being productive unless they can take time to restore themselves (and in my experience this is not at all a vacation).  

There is also an element of justice in it, and this is reflected in the ultimate sabbatical - the Jubilee year.  After seven times seven years (49 years) the fiftieth year was to be initiated with loud trumpet blasts throughout the land, and the proclamation of "liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants" - like the sabbatical, you neither sowed nor planted in that year (so there were two years together with no harvest!) but also, in that year,  all property in the kingdom returned to its original owner of 50 years ago.  This is an interesting bit of economic control, because it meant that nobody really owned land permanently, and every year closer to the Jubilee year, the lower the property value became because the buyer would have the use of it for a shorter time.  Since the land had been divided up fairly among the tribes, this meant that nobody in Israel could become super-rich by controlling too much land because every 50 years they would all start over equal again.  (In that agricultural time land was the main item of value.  I wonder how we could apply this today?)  We Americans are famous for working harder and taking less vacation than anyone else in the world, except perhaps the Japanese, and we tend to pride ourselves on it.  I wonder if a little serious consideration of the Biblical ideas of Sabbath, sabbatical and Jubilee might give us a better approach to life.