NEWS FEATURE: Jewish New Year Ushers in `Jubilee’ Dilemma for Israeli Farmers

c. 2000 Religion News Service MOSHAV BEIT ZAYIT, Israel _ Young lettuce shoots are pushing up from pots in Eldad Avidar’s greenhouse, corn silks are turning dark on the stalk, and the fruit trees are heavy with big red pomegranates whose ripening signals the Jewish holiday season marked by Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Succot. […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

MOSHAV BEIT ZAYIT, Israel _ Young lettuce shoots are pushing up from pots in Eldad Avidar’s greenhouse, corn silks are turning dark on the stalk, and the fruit trees are heavy with big red pomegranates whose ripening signals the Jewish holiday season marked by Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Succot.

But the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashana, which began at sundown Sept. 29, also signals the start of Israel’s special “shmita” year when farmers like Avidar, 73, will be confronted with the modern dilemma of an ancient biblical tradition commanding them to cease farming and observe a “sabbatical.”


According to ancient biblical law, Jewish farmers tilling the land of Israel were commanded to observe the sabbatical for one year out of every seven, abstaining from sowing, cultivation and weeding. During the year, animals were grazed on the uncultivated pasture, and the poor were granted access to the produce that grew spontaneously from fields and orchards belonging to wealthier landowners.

The practice was not only an ancient form of crop rotation, when fields were enriched with the valuable manure of animal wastes, but also a form of social welfare and an acknowledgment of man’s dependency on God, said Rabbi David Rosen, former chief rabbi of Ireland and Israel director of the Anti-Defamation League.

In the Western workplace, the sabbatical concept still endures, albeit among teachers and professionals more than farmers. And many Christians are celebrating the millennial year in the spirit of the ancient biblical “Jubilee” _ the 50-year climax of the sabbatical cycle when slaves and refugees were set free, and mortgaged or rented lands reverted to their original owners.

But in modern Israel the sabbatical year is likely to bring little rest for the rabbis, scholars and farmers who have long been at odds about how to carry out the strict provisions of the law in a modern Jewish farm economy.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious leaders are calling for a stricter observance of the biblical law in the upcoming year. Their calls have angered more moderate religious figures, like Rosen, as well as farmers like Avidar, who just want to make a living.

“I’m a good Jew. I’m not against tradition, but I’m a little bit critical of God’s agents today when it comes to their enforcement of the sabbatical, or `shmita,”’ said the taciturn Avidar. In his youth, Avidar studied agriculture at Israel’s Kadourie Agricultural College, from which the late Yizhak Rabin also graduated. Today, after years in military and government service, he owns a small farm outside Jerusalem.

“If you ask me, the only person that the rabbis are kidding is God himself,” he said.


In sabbatical years past, most rabbis permitted farmers to arrange fictitious “sales” of Jewish-owned land to non-Jewish Arabs for the sabbatical year, so produce could continue to be grown.

Such fictitious sales, which have other precedents in Jewish law and tradition, were endorsed by leading rabbis over a century ago in an era when agriculture was the mainstay of the Israeli economy, said Rosen.

But today, Israeli ultra-Orthodox circles are pressing for a stricter observance of the biblical law, saying agriculture is no longer a life-or-death matter to the Jewish state.

Just recently, Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox rabbinical council declared that it would not regard most fruits, vegetables or grains grown within Israel during the sabbatical year as kosher. That means that large ultra-Orthodox communities, constituting some 5 percent to 10 percent of Israel’s population, will buy mostly imported produce rather than fruits and vegetables from Jewish farmers.

The ultra-Orthodox ruling has shaken the confidence of the more moderate state-supported chief rabbinical councils in the fictitious sales arrangements. That in turn has generated confusion among the broader Israeli public, which relies on the state Kashrut authorities for guidance, about what produce may be considered “kosher.”

In order to circumvent the fractious conflict altogether, both farmers and produce merchants have come up with a number of novel techniques intended to satisfy the ultra-Orthodox and everyone else.


Bezalel Zimora, owner of an organic food store chain in Jerusalem, began planning for the sabbatical over a year ago. He made contact with an Israeli Arab landowner in the Galilee region, Abed Al Magid Hussein, who is an agronomist and owns large tracts of underutilized land.

Zimora helped the Arab agronomist train as an organic farmer and then contracted with him to supply most of his store’s fresh fruits and vegetables for the coming year. Since Hussein isn’t Jewish, his products will be marked as kosher for the ultra-Orthodox community in Zimora’s store.

Avidar, meanwhile, has another method of circumventing the sabbatical rules to the satisfaction of some rabbinical authorities. He grows almost all of his produce, from corn to cucumbers, in big metal or plastic tubs and bins filled with rich compost. His method, he maintains, saves both space and water for Israeli farmers who have little of either. In the sabbatical year, the method has an added advantage, however: The produce isn’t actually grown “in” the land of Israel but on top of it.

On a moral level, the sabbatical year not only restored the ancient ecological balance, but also gave farmers a different perspective about their gardens and their land, said Harvey Sher, a former carrot farmer on a religious kibbutz in northern Israel and now an avid Jerusalem gardener.

“It was giving up a certain amount of human control over the land and saying that it really doesn’t belong to us, but to God. We have only temporary ownership,” said Sher. “It also fostered a certain kind of social equity, in which the poor and the animals were entitled to eat freely from a farmer’s lands.”

But agriculture was not the only focus of the sabbatical year, said Rosen. Other precepts included the freeing of indentured servants and the cancellation of personal debts _ measures intended to release the poor from the “poverty trap” of agricultural society.


Still, as commerce began to play a larger role in agrarian economies, the strict sabbatical year requirements for debt relief were gradually eased, Rosen noted.

“When the fear of debt cancellation started to inhibit people from lending money, the rabbis realized the goal of the law was being defeated,” he added. “Since the sabbatical year laws were ordained by Moses, they couldn’t just be repealed, but rabbis created legal fictions in order to permit loan-giving to continue.”

In Rosen’s view, the fictitious sale of land during the sabbatical year is a similar ploy, and equally legitimate.

“The value of such fiction is not only retaining respect for the letter of Jewish law, but also maintaining some of its spirit under changing circumstances,” he said. “It’s true that Israel today is not as dependent on agriculture as it was 50 or 100 years ago, and that with modern systems of import, goods could be obtained from our neighbors, or from other parts of the world.

“However, the ultra-Orthodox insistence on imported produce during the sabbatical year probably is damaging ecologically, as well as exacerbating the poor position of the Jewish farmer today, who will lose his income for the year, and have to fight to get it back in the following year.

“Indeed, if the purpose of the sabbatical year is to foster ecology and to create social equilibrium, then one could argue that reliance on imported food during the sabbatical year does just the opposite,” he said.


DEA END FLETCHER

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