Shabbat Parashat Behar-Bechukotai - 5783

Shabbat Parashat Behar-Bechukotai - 5783

Rabbi Hal Miller It is a yovel, the fiftieth year, for you it shall be, you shall not sow, you shall not harvest its aftergrowth and you shall not pick what was set aside of it for yourself. For it is a yovel, it shall be holy to you, from the field you may eat its crop. [Vayikra 25:11-12] At first glance, there are some contradictions here. We can understand "you shall not sow". But the verse goes on with "you shall not harvest" and "you shall not pick", but then, "from the field you may eat its crop". So how do we feed ourselves during yovel? The Torah tells us that for a regular shemittah year, we will have enough food stored from the prior year to get us through both the year we cannot farm and the year following while the next crop is growing. Presumably, we will get enough in the year before shemittah that is followed by yovel to get us through even one more year, but what does our verse mean about eating the crop of the field? Looking back, Shemot [23:10-11] describes the shemittah situation, which is very much analogous to yovel: "Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce. And in the seventh you shall leave it untended and unharvested and the destitute of your people shall eat, and the wildlife of the field shall eat what is left, so shall you do to your vineyard and your olive grove." From this we know that the unfortunate of our community get to come eat. When we make it all ownerless to allow them to come in, we make ourselves poor and therefore we get to eat from our field as well, in the same way. But the phrase "untended and unharvested" is analogous to our yovel phrase, "you shall not harvest its aftergrowth". Does this rule out our ability to go pick and eat? Rashi begins with the latter phrase in our verse, "you shall not pick what was set aside of it for yourself." He explains that it means "grapes that have been kept. But you may pick from those that have been rendered ownerless." This reinforces the comment above about making ourselves poor and enabling us to eat too. He then delves into the second verse, "from the field you may eat its crop", which almost then seems redundant. He explains that so long as an untended crop remains in the field, we may eat that same food that we have in the house. Once it is gone from the field, we have to dispose of what we had taken in. Ramban places emphasis not on our ability to pick food, rather on our doing so only alongside the poor. It is a reminder Who actually owns all the land. Sforno comes to a similar conclusion from a different angle, that even though the land returns in the yovel year from a purchaser to the original (Jewish) owner, even he is not allowed to work it during yovel, and the land rests from all of us. Rashbam writes, "freely growing grapes that have fallen off the vines must not be harvested." The key is that the word harvest refers not to picking for our own use, but picking for commercial sale. That we cannot do. We are allowed, alongside everyone else, to pick food to eat.