Israeli farms, it’s time to change hands

Moshav Sharsheret, Israel -- Moshe Amar grows peppers, tomatoes and lettuce on large tracts around this farming community in southern Israel, but a biblical injunction is posing a challenge to him this year.

The injunction states that every seven years farmers in the biblical Land of Israel must let their fields lie fallow, a sabbatical year known in Hebrew as shmita that began in September at the start of the Hebrew calendar year 5768.

“Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield,” says a passage in the book of Exodus. “But in the seventh you shall let it rest and lie fallow. Let the needy among your people eat of it, and what they leave let the wild beasts eat. You shall do the same with your vineyards and olive groves.”

The commandment is problematic for religiously observant growers like Amar whose businesses could be seriously damaged by abandoning fields, vineyards and orchards for a year.

“The Torah was given to us to live by, not die for,” Amar said.

A solution to the problem was first devised in the late 19th century after early Zionist settlers in Ottoman-ruled Palestine appealed to leading rabbis for a ruling that would enable them to continue farming during the shmita year and maintain their struggling communities.

Rabbi Yitzhak Elchanan Spektor of Russia, a leading authority on religious law, approved an arrangement whereby land owned by the Jewish farmers would be temporarily sold to non-Jews for the sabbatical year and later revert to its original owners. As land owned by gentiles, it could be farmed during the shmita year, the rabbi ruled.

The arrangement was endorsed by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the founder of religious Zionism who served as chief rabbi of Jaffa and surrounding Jewish settlements in the early 1900s.

For Amar, who markets his vegetables locally and abroad, the land-sale arrangement is vital for the continued functioning of his business, which also includes a company that sells herb and vegetable seedlings.

The arrangement has been institutionalized in Israel. A representative of the Chief Rabbinate, acting with signed authorization from farmers, sells their tracts across the country to a non-Jew for the sabbatical year. This year the land was sold to an Israeli member of the Druze sect, an offshoot of Islam.

“The sale is actually a way to get around shmita,” said Rabbi Zeev Weitman, who was appointed by the Chief Rabbinate to deal with sabbatical issues this year. Most farmers in Israel participate in the arrangement, Weitman said.

However, the land-sale method was opposed from the start by some prominent rabbis and today is rejected by many ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, who say that it is too susceptible to fraud. Ultra-Orthodox leaders have pressed for increased imports of fruits and vegetables from Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and other countries to substitute for produce grown by Jewish farmers.

But Amar and other farmers say that the influx of cheaper produce would deal a heavy blow to Israeli agriculture and lead some farmers to economic ruin.

“We’re a small country, and any change in supply will drive down prices to the point where it won’t be worth our while to pick the produce,” Amar said.

Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon has weighed in on the side of the farmers, saying he will block any flood of imports that would go beyond the needs of the ultra-Orthodox population.

The problem has been complicated by a decision by Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, to allow local rabbis who reject the land-sale arrangement to disqualify produce grown on Jewish farms during the sabbatical year as non-kosher. The move was widely seen as a result of ultra-Orthodox pressure.

Israeli farmers organizations have petitioned the Supreme Court to rescind the chief rabbi’s decision on the grounds that they could lose sales in the tens of millions of dollars.

A group of religious Zionist rabbis announced that if local rabbis refused to give the kosher seal to produce grown by Jewish farmers under the land-sale arrangement, they would do so.

Rabbi David Stav, a member of the group, known as Tzohar, accused the Chief Rabbinate of being taken over by the ultra-Orthodox. “The Chief Rabbinate is not fulfilling its function as a rabbinic authority for the entire Jewish nation,” Stav said at a recent news conference.

Amar said he was growing some of his produce differently this year to accommodate ultra-Orthodox demands. In some plots, greenhouse vegetables will be grown in pots on platforms, with the earth below covered in plastic, to maintain a separation between the plants and the soil.

Even in fields sold under the land-sale arrangement, agricultural activity forbidden during the shmita year, such as plowing and planting, will be carried out by non-Jews: Israeli Arab or Thai laborers, Amar said.

“We should always find a solution according to Jewish law,” he added, “but it should be appropriate for this time and place.”