One of Moses' other edicts sows discontent

Few millennia ago, Moses picked his way down the dusty scrub of Mount Sinai to relay another of God's edicts to the children of Israel: "When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the Lord" every seventh year.

But with the beginning of Jewish year 5671 on Sept. 30 and the onset of another agricultural sabbatical, Israelis are bickering fiercely about how to honor the order not to "sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard."

The squabbling has led to death threats, denunciations, and predictions of economic woe. It has set rabbi against rabbi and roiled farmers, consumers, and politicians.

But if the sabbatical year is making Israelis behave like a stiffnecked people, as Moses would say, the furor is also revealing the growing strength of religious conservatives and the difficulty of building a modern state in a land heavy with biblical history.

At the heart of the matter is a question that has troubled Israel since its founding: Is it simply a country for Jews to call their own? Or is it the holy place where the children of Israel are meant to fulfill their religious destiny?

These days, that problem is rooted in the parched and dusty soil of Israel itself. The fallow year - shmita in Hebrew - has always been a challenge. Indeed, scholars argue about whether 2nd- and 3rd-century farmers even obeyed the directive from on high. It presented a special dilemma for the Jews who came to Palestine at the turn of the century. For those fledgling communities, leaving farms untouched for a year threatened the very survival of their Zionist experiment.

An early religious leader hit on a solution. Jews would "sell" their land to a non-Jew for the year, allowing the land to continue to be worked. The land transactions are on paper only, with no money changing hands. This has become such accepted practice that the Chief Rabbinate, the national religious body, arranges the transactions and issues deeds of sale.

But for ultra-Orthodox Jews, who don't recognize the secular state or the Chief Rabbinate, this compromise has always been second best. Last month, a leading Jerusalem rabbi announced that enough was enough. Israel now has the economic strength to end the "deed-of-sale" fiction and observe shmita properly by importing produce.

In short order, the rabbinate of Jerusalem declared that any restaurant, hotel, or grocery store selling vegetables and fruit from Israel would lose its kosher license - a serious economic threat since most religious Jews won't eat food that doesn't adhere to kosher dietary laws.

Then last week Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron, the national representative of Sephardim, or Jews of Middle Eastern origin, said that farmers could still use deed of sale waivers. As one of the ultra-Orthodox newspapers put it, a "world war" was on.

The rabbis who declared the waivers unacceptable threatened Rabbi Bakshi-Doron with excommunication and castigated him in newspaper editorials that omitted his honorific title - a shocking rudeness.

Page: 1 | 2