The word fallow comes from the land. In ancient agricultural practice, a field left fallow was not abandoned. It was a resting field, deliberately set aside from production so that the soil could recover what cultivation had depleted. The farmer who fallows the land was participating in an ancient rhythm and wisdom: fruitfulness requires rest, abundance follows emptiness, and the land cannot give what it has not first received.
In the Hebrew tradition, this was divine command. In Exodus 23, God instructs Israel: “For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest your crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused.” This was the Sabbath year, a year in which the land was released from the obligation to produce. What grew on its own could be gathered by the poor and the wild animals, but the farmer was to leave it alone. To trust that God’s provision did not depend on his ceaseless effort.
Leviticus 25 further extends this into the Year of Jubilee, a fallow of fallow years, in which not only the land but debts, relationships, and social structures were released and restored. Every fiftieth year, the whole created order was invited to return to its original intention of freedom, rest, and renewal.
The theological logic beneath these commands is striking as it is so imperative to hear today. God was not simply legislating good agricultural policy. He was forming a people who knew how to receive, not only how to produce. A people who trusted that the earth belonged to God and that its fertility was gift and not achievement. These rhythms of rest were written into creation itself not as weakness, but as wisdom to illuminate our way of work and life.
“The land is mine,” God says in Leviticus 25:23. “You are but aliens and my tenants.” We have forgotten this. And the cost is visible everywhere.
Why Fallowing Is No Longer Optional
In this moment, fallowing is not a luxury for those who can afford to slow down. It is an imperative for anyone who wants to be grounded in what it means to be distinctly human in their work. Artificial intelligence is reshaping not only how we work but how we understand ourselves, our knowledge, and our relationships. The givens that we once assumed in our society are eroding faster than new ones can be built.
The person who never fallows does not simply grow tired. They grow brittle. They lose the capacity for a deep attentiveness, the unhurried quality of presence that makes genuine discernment possible. They begin to mistake efficiency for wisdom, output for meaning, and activity for calling. They become, in the language of Isaiah, those who are “ever seeing but never perceiving, ever hearing but never understanding.”
The practice of fallowing exists precisely for this moment. Not to make you more productive, but to restore your interior life, from which truly enlivened work becomes possible again. Not to add to your burden, but to lead you back to the wisdom grounded beneath your feet.
Why Cambridge
There are places in the world that possess an embedded enchantment. Cambridge is one of them. Walking through the gates and gardens of Jesus College, you feel the combination of centuries pressing against the present moment amidst an environment that calls you to slow down and place what you are contemplating in perspective. The stone courtyards, the River Cam, the long green meadows, and the towering chapels that have held prayer for hundreds of years are not merely aesthetic pleasures. They are a needed reminder that the world is older and deeper and more astonishing than your inbox and news feed suggest. As you walk, listen attentively as you experience how beauty is not merely ornamental nor is wonder simply for the naïve.
We come to Cambridge because enchanted places re-enchant us. In the mudane of our daily lives, we are easily formed by the rush and urgencies of our daily lives. And the antidote is not primarily an argument, but an awakening experience. It is standing in a place where the sacred is part of the stone that gives shelter and where generations of scholars and saints and seekers have pressed their questions against the same walls, where the river still moves at the same pace it has always moved.
And like countless people before us—the artists, the theologians, the musicians, the leaders from across disciplines and callings— we too come to seek a quality of presence and a depth of perception that is in itself a kind of fellowship, reminding us again of the camaraderie and honor we have been given as image-bearers of God.