Parshat Behar
Here's the summary.
Oy. What was the Author or author(s) of the laws of shmittah (the sabbatical [year]) and yovel (the jubilee year) thinking? If the year before sh'nat ha-shmittah (the sabbatical year) happened to be a year of draught or other agricultural problem(s), what were the people supposed to do for food? And how were the farmers supposed to support themselves for an entire year without crops to sell? In my opinion, the laws of shmittah are just a disaster waiting to happen. And attempts to mitigate these problems have created other problems. What's worse, ignoring the laws of shmittah, which is anathema to many religious people, or getting around them by selling the land temporarily to (a) non-Jew(s), which is anathema to many Zionists (both Orthodox and non-Orthodox)?
Oy. What was the Author or author(s) of the laws of shmittah (the sabbatical [year]) and yovel (the jubilee year) thinking? If the year before sh'nat ha-shmittah (the sabbatical year) happened to be a year of draught or other agricultural problem(s), what were the people supposed to do for food? And how were the farmers supposed to support themselves for an entire year without crops to sell? In my opinion, the laws of shmittah are just a disaster waiting to happen. And attempts to mitigate these problems have created other problems. What's worse, ignoring the laws of shmittah, which is anathema to many religious people, or getting around them by selling the land temporarily to (a) non-Jew(s), which is anathema to many Zionists (both Orthodox and non-Orthodox)?
posted by Shira Salamone at 2:43 PM
8 Comments:
In first Temple Times, these rules were in effect, and violated. One of the reasons given for the first exile was not following them.
By second Temple times, I believe the Yovel year had fallen by the way side (I could be wrong on that though).
Shmitta isn't ACTUALLY that hard to comply with, though centuries of Rabbinic rulings by Rabbis in lands where Jews were prohibited from owning property make it seem much harder.
Basically, most of the crops you sew can all be sewed before the Shmitta year begins or after the prior one ends. Trees just are. Grapes are a bit more difficult, but if you prune grapes early/late, it might effect your harvest, but it's not a huge problem.
The idea of letting the land "rest" is very important for avoiding over-farming. Complying with the technical strictures of Shmitta isn't a huge disaster in the middle eastern agricultural world.
Selling Eretz Yisrael to goyim may avoid the issue of Shmitta, but opens up a whole different world of problems... some Halachic, some just sanity.
I took a class on shmittah a couple of years ago at a National Havurah Institute. (Too lazy to link to the post.) My recollection is that there's more of a problem than you say regarding shmittah-year sowing of crops that, unlike trees, don't just grow by themselves. If memory serves me correctly, some crops can't be sown in advance--they must be planted at certain times, and this creates real challenges during sh'nat ha-shmittah (sabbatical year).
As for letting the land rest, modern crop-rotation techniques would accomplish the same thing without taking all of the fields out of cultivation at the same time.
"Selling Eretz Yisrael to goyim may avoid the issue of Shmitta, but opens up a whole different world of problems... some Halachic, some just sanity."
Oy. That's an understatement. :(
Not that there is no sacrifice from Shmitta, and certain crops lost, but it's not totally barren and leaving everyone to starve.
Naturally, I can't find the link, which I just spotted about an hour ago, but the financial loss from the most recent sh'nat ha-shmittah was given as 30,000 pounds (or was that 300,000 pounds?) British currency. Whatever it was, it was no small change.
And there's also that interesting problem, straight out of the rules of Rabbi Yishmael, " . . . sh'nei kutivim ha-mach'chishim zeh mi zeh" two rules that contradict one another . . . ", that the rules of shmittah, commanding that we let perfectly good food stay in the field and possibly rot, contradict the "bal tashchit" rule against wasting, which is based on the prohibition against cutting down fruit trees when attacking a city.
And while is the topsy turvey world of Rabbinic Halacha, a Rabbinic ruling about wasting food derived from the clear text probably trumps a pure textual rule, obviously Shmitta is an "exception" to that one.
My point is not that there is a significant loss. My point is that it served an aggrarian purpose (fallow land) before crop rotation was so viable. Part of what makes modern crop rotation "work" is some of the "new world" vegetables that run on different cycles.
3500 years ago in Canaan, you couldn't grow hybridized squashes, since people of the middle east wouldn't be exposed to squash for another 2000 years.
Potatoes are another good food that can grow over weird "cycles" that wouldn't be introduced to Eretz Yisrael for well over another 2000 years.
I believe that the indigenous foods to the middle east are far less dependent on regular crop cycles (like vegetables) and for more dependent on trees and other long term crops.
Not saying that Shmitta was no sacrifice, but it wouldn't be bankruptcy inducing.
The bigger issue is that Shmitta in Eretz Yisrael is a Mitzvah for ALL the Jewish people, but the costs are born entirely on Jewish farmers, particularly observant Jewish farmers.
There WAS an attempt to get diaspora groups to buy "plots" of land to let fallow for the year (in 1'x1x squares or something similar), so all Jews could partake in the Mitzvah and observant Jews wouldn't bear the burden, but pretty sure it mostly flopped.
I mean, you could spread the costs fairly using the State's taxing authority (paying farmers for unused land), but that might be a bit too much of a religious/state power collaboration to handle in modern Israel.
But a cost of 300,000 pounds is on the order of 500,000 dollars, or < 10 cents per Israeli resident, if you wanted to use the treasury to make farmers whole via a produce import tax or something similar.
All of the comments to this post were lost in yesterday's Blogspot/Blogger.com outage. I'm posting what I was able to copy to my Word archives before the outage. Miami Al, I'm pretty sure you posted another comment that I wasn't able to copy, so please feel free to re-post.
5 Comments:
Miami Al said...
In first Temple Times, these rules were in effect, and violated. One of the reasons given for the first exile was not following them.
By second Temple times, I believe the Yovel year had fallen by the way side (I could be wrong on that though).
Shmitta isn't ACTUALLY that hard to comply with, though centuries of Rabbinic rulings by Rabbis in lands where Jews were prohibited from owning property make it seem much harder.
Basically, most of the crops you sew can all be sewed before the Shmitta year begins or after the prior one ends. Trees just are. Grapes are a bit more difficult, but if you prune grapes early/late, it might effect your harvest, but it's not a huge problem.
The idea of letting the land "rest" is very important for avoiding over-farming. Complying with the technical strictures of Shmitta isn't a huge disaster in the middle eastern agricultural world.
Selling Eretz Yisrael to goyim may avoid the issue of Shmitta, but opens up a whole different world of problems... some Halachic, some just sanity.
WED MAY 11, 03:28:00 PM 2011
Shira Salamone said...
I took a class on shmittah a couple of years ago at a National Havurah Institute. (Too lazy to link to the post.) My recollection is that there's more of a problem than you say regarding shmittah-year sowing of crops that, unlike trees, don't just grow by themselves. If memory serves me correctly, some crops can't be sown in advance--they must be planted at certain times, and this creates real challenges during sh'nat ha-shmittah (sabbatical year).
As for letting the land rest, modern crop-rotation techniques would accomplish the same thing without taking all of the fields out of cultivation at the same time.
"Selling Eretz Yisrael to goyim may avoid the issue of Shmitta, but opens up a whole different world of problems... some Halachic, some just sanity."
Oy. That's an understatement. :(
WED MAY 11, 04:59:00 PM 2011
Miami Al said...
Not that there is no sacrifice from Shmitta, and certain crops lost, but it's not totally barren and leaving everyone to starve.
WED MAY 11, 08:23:00 PM 2011
Shira Salamone said...
Naturally, I can't find the link, which I just spotted about an hour ago, but the financial loss from the most recent sh'nat ha-shmittah was given as 30,000 pounds (or was that 300,000 pounds?) British currency. Whatever it was, it was no small change.
THU MAY 12, 02:07:00 PM 2011
Shira Salamone said...
And there's also that interesting problem, straight out of the rules of Rabbi Yishmael, " . . . sh'nei kutivim ha-mach'chishim zeh mi zeh" two rules that contradict one another . . . ", that the rules of shmittah, commanding that we let perfectly good food stay in the field and possibly rot, contradict the "bal tashchit" rule against wasting, which is based on the prohibition against cutting down fruit trees when attacking a city.
THU MAY 12, 02:13:00 PM 2011
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Josephus referenced Jews complying with shmitta. Maybe the rule makes sense in a subsistence agriculture world (where people rely on farming primarily to feed themselves, as was probably true in Second Temple times). But having said that, I'm not a farming expert.
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