Every seventh year you shall practice remission of debts. This shall be the nature of the remission: every creditor shall remit the due that he claims from his fellow; he shall not dun his fellow or kinsman, for the remission proclaimed is of the LORD.
It is a biblical positive command to cancel a cash debt in the sabbatical year, as it is written: "Every creditor shall remit the due that he claims from his neighbor" (Deuteronomy 15:2). If one claims a debt which has remained over the sabbatical year, they break a prohibitive command, as it is written: "He shall not exact it of his neighbor, his brother" (2).
(ה) וכתב א"א הרא"ש ז"ל בתשובה ששאלת שנוהגין בארץ הזאת לגבות שטרות שעברה עליהן שביעית הוי יודע שתמהתי על זה מיום בואי לארץ הזאת וצווחתי ככרוכיא ולית דמשגח בי ואמרו כי כבר נהגו בן בארץ הזאת וא"א לשנות המנהג:
My father, Rabbi Asher [1250-1327], said that he's been astonished since coming to Spain that people collect their debts even after a shemitah year, and he has been crowing and screaming at them, and nobody pays him any attention, since they say that this is their practice and it cannot be changed.
If one delivered his bonds to the court and said to them: "You will collect this debt for me," it is not cancelled, as it is written: "You must remit whatever is due you from your brother" (Deuteronomy 15:3), and in this case it is the court that exacts payment from him.— —
When Hillel the Elder saw that the people refrained from giving loans one to another and transgressed what is written in the Torah: "Beware lest you harbor the base thought…", he ordained a prozbul whereby a loan is secured and not cancelled, so that the people might extend loans mutually.
(יח) פרוזבול אינו משמט ואינו נכתב אלא בב"ד חשוב דהיינו שלשה בקיאים בדין ובענין פרוזבול ויודעים ענין שמיטה והמחום רבים עליהם באותה העיר וי"א דכותבין פרוזבול בכל ב"ד (טור וב"י בשם הפוסקים) ונ"ל דיש להקל בזמן הזה:
Rama: Any Beit Din of three people can issue a prozbul
Jacques Derrida, Given time: I. Counterfeit money. Vol. 1. , 1992, p.12
For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or differance...
For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt. The donee owes it to himself even not to give back, he ought not owe [il a le devoir de ne pas devoir] and the donor ought not count on restitution. It is thus necessary, at the limit, that he not recognize the gift as gift. If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift.
Derrida, Jacques. Given time: I. Counterfeit money. Vol. 1. , 1992, p.35
"How is one to speak reasonably, in a sensible fashion, that is, accessible to common sense, of a gift that could not be what it was except on the condition of not being what it was? On the condition of not being or appearing to be the gift of anything, of anything that is or that is present, come from someone and given to someone? On the condition of "being" a gift without given and without giving, without presentable thing and act? A gift that would neither give itself, nor give itself as such, and that could not take place except on the condition of not taking place—and of remaining impossible, without dialectical sublation of the contradiction?
...the gift, that demands an unheard-of accounting since it must not conclude in either a balancing of income and expenses, in an economic circle, or in the regulated rationality of a calculation, a metrics, a symmetry, or any kind of relation... that, as we saw, are sent into crisis by the madness of the gift."