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A sabbath of sabbaths
“For six years you may plant your fields, prune your vineyards, and harvest your crops, but the seventh year is a Sabbath of Sabbaths for the land. It is God’s Sabbath during which you may not plant your fields, nor prune your vineyards.” (Leviticus 25:1-7)
And so on Kibbutz Shaalvim, in the year 5768 just ended, the fields lay fallow.
According to Jewish religious law, fields owned by Jews in the Land of Israel must be left untouched every seventh year. Most Israeli farmers don’t follow the literal word of the Torah, but some do.
“The seventh year makes something for your soul,” farmer Tal Bin Nun, 45, told me this morning, standing next to an unruly row of blackberries. He said he devoted more time to religious study during the past year, which ended last week according to the Hebrew calendar.
Still, it wasn’t easy to walk by his fields and witness weeds growing high in the plow rows and fruit rotting on the ground.
Bin Nun provided some water and little else. His rabbi allowed only work that was considered essential for the growth of the kibbutz trees, shrubs and vines.
As in biblical times, the kibbutz offered to the poor its figs and grapes and strawberries and passion fruit and countless more exotic varieties, including a white cactus fruit called desert apple in Hebrew.
“It’s good to give to poor people the idea that something belongs to them, also,” Bin Nun said.
When the Sabbath year, called shmita, ended, Bin Nun ran to his vineyard and began trimming the vines, which had become overgrown.
God may prescribe it, but is it good for the crops, to abandon them for a year?
“I’m not quite sure,” he said, “but it’s the way of life we believe in.”
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