 |
| The Shmitta: Israeli farmer Shlomo Forscher sits in a pumpkin field, considering ways to cope with a biblical order not to
plant in the coming year. Ilene R. Prusher |
A Biblical order drives Arab-Israeli cooperation
To keep Israel fed in a year when land is required to lie fallow, farmers look to Palestinians for help.
By Ilene R. Prusher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the September 13, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
BEEROT YITZHAK, ISRAEL - Farmers here are rushing to meet a deadline more sacrosanct than the usual demands of the fall harvest.
By Wednesday evening, the start of the Jewish year, farming in any part of the country defined as the "Land of Israel" should come to a halt in compliance with the biblical commandment to let the land lie fallow once in every seven years.
And, under divine orders outlined in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, all of Israel – from professional farmers and collective agricultural settlements to nursery owners – must find ways to cope with this sabbatical year known in Hebrew as shmita.
But the solution to keep Israel fed this coming year involves Jewish-Arab cooperation and the promise of the increased purchase of Palestinian produce by Israeli wholesalers. Israel has now temporarily sold a huge portion of its farmland to an Arab-Druze citizen of Israel and is in discussions with Fatah officials in the West Bank to significantly increase the amount of fruit and vegetables making it to Israeli buyers.
Weeks of negotiations aimed at getting Gazan growers to be able to ship their goods into Israel have collapsed, an Israeli army official said, due to the rocket attacks on Israel from inside the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
If the biblical order were to be followed to the letter, those who make a living from agriculture might well go broke and the country hungry. There's an acknowledgement by some rabbinic authorities that letting every farm and field go without planting, picking, or pruning is not just impractical, but virtually impossible.
The ushering in of the shmita year is such a challenge that the Ministry of Agriculture has allocated about $25 million to help farmers. While many secular Israelis may not care where their vegetables are grown, farmers are still doing what they can to follow the order as mainstream markets are kosher.
The most common technique for coping is to sell the land to a non-Jew who is contracted to sell it back. But the idea, based on a loophole in Jewish law, is a solution that most modern Orthodox rabbis agree with but many ultra-Orthodox do not.
RSS feed
