But now, Mr. Ben Tsvi is growing oats.
“During shemitta, we don’t work the land,” Mr. Ben Tsvi explains. “After Rosh Hashanah, we can’t plow or plant. The only thing we can do is exterminate the weeds and unwanted sprouts.
“So, we plant the oat seeds before Rosh Hashanah using a special tool to make sure they’re deep in the ground. They have to be deep because the seeds need to wait for the rain.
“The oat seeds are very durable. If a light rain falls early in the season, they usually won’t sprout. But, even if they do sprout, they won’t die while they wait for the real, strong rains to start.”
The oats that grow on their own during shemitta are called sefichin and it is prohibited to use these oats for commercial purposes.
If we were living in an agriculture society during the times of the Beit HaMikdash, private individuals would gather a few portions of oats at a time from his field for their personal use.
But, that doesn’t happen today. So, a Beit Din is in charge of the field, appointing someone to harvest it so that the oats and the proceeds from its sale can be used for the public good and supporting the poor. It so happens that Mr. Ben Tsvi is the Beit Din‘s shaliach, representative, to harvest his field. When the oats are sold, Mr. Ben Tsvi will be paid by the Beit Din for the hours of work he invested in the planting and harvesting.
If he could, Mr. Ben Tsvi would prefer to leave his land untended during shemitta. But, he knows that in the fertile land of the Jezreel Valley a year of fallowness equals a jungle of weeds. He estimates that it would take 3-4 years to overcome this damage to the field.
“The idea of shemitta,” he says, “is to return to how things were before agriculture was even started – to the time of Adam HaRishon in Gan Eden. He didn’t have a field; he just went out and collected whatever grew naturally.
“That’s what happened thousands of years ago during shemitta. People left their fields unseeded and fed their families with wild plants. They collected mushrooms, things that grew on the untended trees.
“They couldn’t do what I do – planting before Rosh Hashanah and then just killing the weeds, because today’s pesticide technology didn’t exist back then. In those days, the process of getting rid of the weeds was much more complicated: They would first plow and let the land sprout all of the wild seeds that had fallen. Then they would plow the fields again – killing all these unwanted sprouts. Only then were they able to plant their own seeds and harvest their crop. All of these actions, the two sets of plowing and the planting, are prohibited during shemitta.
“The idea is to understand that we are only guests on the land. With agriculture we think we take control of the land – but it’s not true. The Creator is the one who provides us with food.”
Mitzvot HaTiluyot Ba’aretz As a Torah idealist, Mr. Ben Tsvi sees that the agricultural reality today is dissonantly different than that of the times of the Torah and Mishna. This change dramatically affects the fulfillment of the mitzvot hatiluyot ba’aretz – the commandments that are dependent on Eretz Yisrael.
“Take shiatsu,” says Mr. Ben Tsvi, who also works as a shiatsu therapist. “It doesn’t entail intrinsic mitzvot. Of course, I’m helping people and I make sure to do business with integrity – but the shiatsu itself doesn’t involve a specific mitzvah.