October 12, 2007--Fanaticism XCIII: Making the Desert Bloom

Even atheists like the idea of the Sabbath—having at least one day a week off from work. They may not like the fact that the idea to rest on the Seventh Day is of Old Testament origin, but who doesn’t enjoy the weekend?

But in ultra-Orthodox places such as Israel (and Brooklyn!), the biblical sanction against work on Shabbos also includes the requirement, called shmita, that farmers allow their fields to “rest” every seventh year. In the old days there were good agronomic reasons to have the land lie fallow because in the absence of modern fertilizers time was needed to allow the earth to regenerate. Also, shmita wonderfully says that whatever grows naturally in these fields during the seventh year is not to be harvested but is to be left alone so that poor people might partake of it.

Nowadays there is no need to let the soil renew itself and since Israel’s economy depends so much on agriculture, shmita in the 21st century presents problems. But as with the Shabbos laws themselves, where rabbis have figured out ways to get around the literalness of the rules—for example, having Shabbos goys turn on the lights in shuls or defining an entire neighborhood as a “home” so that Jews can carry money with them on Saturdays, modernizing rabbis came up with the idea of heter mechira, which is not unlike the Shabbos goy concept in that Jews who own farms “sell” them to goys during the shmita years; and this allows planting and harvesting to go on unimpeded. (See NY Times article linked below.)

Brilliant! But there is a but. As more and more secular Jews and the old socialist Zionists leave Israel because of the political situation, the country is coming more and more under the control of Orthodox politicians and rabbis. Exerting this growing power, they are calling for the end of the heter mechira slight-of-hand and a return to strict shmita. This means that stores are under increasing pressure, even threat, each seventh year to sell only products grown by legitimate gentiles. Ironically, these authentic gentiles included Palestinians living in Gaza; but since Hamas was voted into power in Gaza, the Israeli government doesn’t allow imports from there.

This year, 5768 by the Jewish calendar, is a shmita year and as a result of the increasing influence of millennialist rabbis, shoppers are having to pay a premium for their tomatoes and cukes—two to three times more for those grown by non-Jews on the West bank.

The situation has gotten so out of hand that even people with flowers growing in window boxes on the 10th floor of apartment houses are being pressed to allow them to lie fallow.

But there is one overlooked or ignored part of the shmita mandate—in addition to making whatever grows in the fields available to the poor during this agricultural sabbatical (note the etymology here), all debts are to be forgiven. But even the most orthodox rabbis say that this is not relevant today because if this part of shmita were to be imposed what bank would ever make a loan? We are Jews after all.