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 – 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 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
Go back to Kil’ayim – Mixed Species
Continue forward to Terumot – “Donations”