This tractate focuses on the Shmita, the seventh year sabbatical in the agricultural world in ancient times. Each seven years, fields were to be left fallow, at least in commercial terms – no plowing, planting, tending, or harvesting, other than whatever was needed to support one’s own family with food – nothing to be sold. There are other strictures around the shmita, including the forgiveness of loans and taxes. Interestingly, though the Torah spells out that this is a mandatory forgiveness, the rabbis, much later, decreed that this was only meant to put a hold on payments during the year, and set-up an entire system for restoring the debt and payments structure when the year was over. I guess their consituency wasn’t overly happy about losing all future payments on loans.
Shevi’it – “Seventh” – Taking a Sabbatical from Life
- Chapter 1 – In what seems to be a common approach in Talmudic tractates, this one launches, not with the informative or positive, i.e., what a shmita is, how to observe it, but with the exceptions, the negative. Almost the entire first chapter is taken up by a discussion of until what point prior to the start of the sabbatical year you can get away with continuing to tend to your commercial fig orchard. The general upshot is that if your orchard is still capable of producing a fig cake of “60 Italian maneh” (a maneh was roughly half a kilogram, so a 30 kilogram/66 lb fig cake), you can continue to do all the usual orchard maintenance and even harvesting throughout the year preceding the shmita, “as long as the orchard continues to produce fruit”. Once production drops below the point where you can harvest for that fig cake, you switch to only tending to sufficient trees to supply your family with figs.
- Chapter 2 – If I’m following this correctly, in the year before the Sabbatical, you can time your planting in order to have a certain amount of crops for yourself. But only certain plants – like rice, millet, sesame, Egyptian beans (favas), melons, and gourds. The cereal crops must have taken root and started to grow before the New Year, the others must have already formed the pod, fruit, or vegetable before the New Year. Then you can harvest and tithe them during the Sabbatical year to support your family, though you are limited to basic farming practices like watering and weeding, no tilling of soil or training of vines or grafting of shoots. Any which haven’t formed their pod, fruit, or vegetable prior to the New Year must be left for the animals.
- Chapter 3 – One of the goals of the sabbatical year is to allow the soil to recuperate. Fertilization is a big part of that, and as a way of getting around the proscription on tending to the fields, the system the rabbis designed is allowing you to create dung-heaps out of manure and other fertilizer at certain intervals around the fields, before the New Year, and then they will naturally, during rain and such, fertilize the fields. Further, you aren’t prohibited from grazing your flocks on whatever happens to grow, nor to let them just happen to fertilize various parts of your fields as the defecate. You can move them around from place to place in the fields over the course of the year.
- Chapter 4 – Basically a treatise on the care of one’s olive trees – when the olives can be harvested and for what purpose, e.g., eating, or making olive oil. Obviously some level of maintenance must be done during the sabbatical year so that they don’t die, but it’s kept to a minimum – enough that they survive, and thrive, and also a limited amount of harvesting for familial use, but not commercial.
- Chapter 5 – There are different rules for different types of figs and onions, but these seem of little import. Of interest to me, this shmita year has an impact on other professions. Not just incidentally because of lack of produce, but, for example, potters are limited in the number of wine and olive oil jugs they are allowed to produce and sell to any one family – fifteen wine jugs and five olive oil jars. No more. Except when they do. Then, maybe, it’s permitted.
- Chapter 6 – While produce cannot be harvested for commercial use, even for foreign sale, produce from other countries can be brought in and bought and sold. At the same time, seeds from that produce cannot be replanted (though nothing says they can’t be stored until the sabbatical year is over for planting). This seems somewhat antithetical to the behind the scenes commitment to not encourage or abet non-Jews to break Torah law, something we’ll see down the line in tractate Avodah Zarah.
- Chapter 7 – As this chapter talks about various preserved fruits, vegetables, blossoms, and spices, and what can or cannot be made or used during the Sabbatical year, I find myself a little at sea. It’s clear that some of these are used for consumption, but others for medicinal, or aesthetic, uses (perfumes, perhaps?), though the details aren’t spelled out. My general sense is that you can’t make new stuff during the sabbatical year. Except when you can, and it’s not clear why those things are set apart without a non-provided cultural context.
- Chapter 8 – Produce which is used for food cannot be used for drink, nor anointing (e.g., oils), and in turn, the various other combinations of that statement. That’s not to say that you can’t use a carrot for all three, just that when you harvest, each batch of carrots has to be designated as to which of those it is intended to be used for. This is specific to the sabbatical year to make sure that only limited quantities for familial use are made of each thing, and not for commercial sale.
- Chapter 9 – Herbs and roots which are not typically cultivated, but rather gathered wild, are exempt from tithes. Also, they are basically exempt from the sabbatical year prohibitions on harvesting and production. Within reason, of course.
- Chapter 10 – One of the questions that comes up about the sabbatical year is the cancelling of debts. I can’t say that this passage makes it any less murky, as the sages opine that debts to a store, wage debts, and work debts (i.e., indentured servitude) are not cancelled, as long as they have not been “converted to a loan”. Loan debts are cancelled, which relates to moneylending. Though not spelled out, I’m guessing that the “conversion” is akin to what we see in movies, of some mafioso type walking in and saying “you know how you used to owe something to Joe, well you now owe it to me”.
Go back to Kil’ayim – Mixed Species
Continue forward to Terumot – “Donations”