The brown and green wood sign announcing “Kefar Gideon” that greets me when I turn off the highway is bland. But, as I drive further into this little moshav and enter the small – maybe nameless – side street to meet Mr. David Ben Tsvi, the natural aspects of the setting becomes ever more apparent.
I try to find the Ben Tsvi house, but the few homes are randomly scattered along the road, and I’m not sure where to look. Some front doors almost meet the street; others are obscured by meters of untamed greenery and unpaved paths. A windowless home surrounded by months of weeds faces a well-groomed, two-story home with an enormous bird cage in its front yard. Two rusty tractors stagnate nearby, perhaps reminiscing about the days before their lumbago prevented them from working the fields.
The paved road leads right up to dunams and dunams of open fields that lend a surreal backdrop to the scene. I’m a city girl, so I don’t even know what I’m seeing. Fields that are fallow? Plowed? Planted? Beyond the first field is an olive grove – even I can recognize olive trees. And there’s a rainbow splashing across the mountain range in the distance.
I snap a picture, but I can’t capture the spirituality of the setting. The kedusha of Eretz Yisrael silently glimmers in the beauty of this agricultural scene.
This is a shemitta year, the seventh year during which the Torah commands us to leave our lands fallow, but I don’t have any land to keep fallow. However, as for an idealistic farmer who works the holy land of Eretz Yisrael, shemitta has significant practical applications.
Drawn to the Farm As a child, Mr. Ben Tsvi’s father spent his summers with farmers in southern France – the farmers who had hid his mother during the Nazi invasion.
In the early 1970s, when the spiritual aftermath of the Six-Day War stirred his soul, he was drawn to Israel. Interested in melding his fond memories of farming together with his new Torah-observant life, he settled in Kefar Gideon, an agricultural settlement with a large percentage of observant Jews. David Ben Tsvi was raised on the moshav.
He himself was drawn to farming because he’s a naturalist and idealist. “I was always drawn to greenery – to nature,” he says. “And, I see that Torah connects to nature through agriculture.
“Hashem gave the Torah to us on Har Sinai, and much of it relates to farming. Hashem said go to Eretz Yisrael and do mitzvot. What mitzvot? Ones related to agriculture. I was drawn to the ideology of farming in Eretz Yisrael and doing these mitzvot.
“I even do mitzvot with agriculture that don’t seem to be agricultural at all. For instance, I made my own tefillin. We shechted one of our goats and I used its skin to make them.”
Wheat, Clover and Oats Mr. Ben Tsvi divides his farming activities into two: work done on the land around his house where he grows oranges, grapes, vegetables and herbs like mint and lemongrass; and work done on his field where he cultivates produce to market. For all halachic issues related to his field and the community, Mr. Ben Tsvi follows the rulings of the rav of Kefar Gideon, Rav Avraham HaLevi Lipshitz.
His primary field consists of 50 dunams of land, five of which are dedicated to a young olive grove. The other 45 are planted with wheat and clover; one year wheat and the next clover. He switches between these two crops because consistent use of one field for the same crop leeches it of its nutrients and reduces its fertility.