Deactivating Holiness

Here’s a recently-asked question for you. Since you’re not allowed to give holy produce to a non-Jew, why is it ok for the Rami Levy supermarket in Gush Etzion to sell kedushas shvi’is produce, when it could be bought by Arabs?

I thought that the answer was quite beautiful. Only a Jew activates the holiness of Shemittah.

Many mitzvos have an element of the cheftza and an element of the gavra. A mitzvah on the gavra means that the person must acquire an item in order to perform that mitzvah with it. A mitzvah on the cheftza means that when a person has the object in their possession, they have to do the mitzvah with it.

For example, tzitzis is on the cheftza—namely the four-cornered garment. A man is not obligated to wear a garment with four corners so that he can wear tzitzis, but when he wears a four-cornered garment, he has to put tzitzis on it. Shaking the arba minim on Succos is a mitzvah on the gavra. Even though you cannot do the mitzvah without arba minim, man is obligated to get hold of them in order to do so, rather than doing it if he happens to have them in his possession.

Shemittah involves elements of both gavra and cheftza. If a tomato grows in Israel during the Shemittah year, it is a holy tomato. You have to treat it with respect, eat and enjoy it and dispose of it in a respectful way. It’s forbidden to let Shemittah produce go to waste. So it’s a mitzvah on the cheftza.

But that tomato is only holy if it’s owned by a Jew. When it’s owned by a non-Jew, its holiness is deactivated. But when he gives it to his Jewish neighbor, suddenly the kedushah becomes live and it’s all holy tomatoes again. Which gives Shemittah an element of the gavra too, because it needs a Jew to make it holy.

This cheftza/gavra duality is why Rami Levy doesn’t need to do anything to prevent a non-Jew buying kedushas shvi’is produce. Once a non-Jew buys it, it has no holiness. (Note that fruit and vegetables which grow during the Shemittah year are hefker (ownerless). This is why everyone is allowed to help themselves from food growing in the fields, both Jew and non-Jew. The kedushas shvi’is produce sold through the Otzar Beis Din is also still hefker, so anyone, Jew or non-Jew, can buy it.)

And this segues neatly into something which is relevant (finally!) for everyone reading this in chutz l’aretz.

It’s forbidden to export kedushas shvi’is produce. Because of this, Jews living outside of Israel are (mostly: some rabbonim may rule differently) told not to buy Israeli produce during Shemittah, so as not to risk buying holy fruit or vegetables that were exported in violation of the halachos.

So you could wonder why it’s better to leave all this potentially holy produce for non-Jews to fail to treat with the proper respect, when it could instead be bought by Jews who would eat it and enjoy it (and possibly get very excited and write articles about the experience)? Even though it should never have been exported, once it has made it to Diaspora supermarkets, isn’t it better that it be bought by Jews than by non-Jews? But no, because of the cheftza/gavra duality. If a Jew buys it, it’s ‘illegally exported’ holy produce. If a non-Jew buys it, it’s just a tomato.

It’s beautiful to think that the ownership of a Jew is all that is needed to activate a tomato’s latent holiness. Let’s try to activate holiness in all areas of our lives.

Of Cockatiels and Washing Clothes

Before Rosh Hashanah, I thought that Shemittah would mostly affect me in the kitchen. I made sure that I understood what to do with my carrot peelings and leftover salads, and discussed with my husband what kind of Shemittah produce we would buy (more on that topic in a moment).

My kids spent an afternoon doing a pre-Shemittah craft activity - I opened up an old cracker-box and they painted the inside. We wrote 'Shemittah' on it, and then I taped it up into a box shape again, with the painted side on the outside. We lined it with a plastic bag and - voila! Our special Shemittah bin, for us to put our holy vegetables and fruit into. Actually, we made two. Since Shemittah produce is holy, you are not allowed to do anything to destroy it or make it disgusting - even the peels and even the leftovers. Instead, you have to leave holy Shemittah produce to rot before throwing it out, so we put it into a separate 'Shemittah Bin' (some people say that it should have a more respectful name than Shemittah Bin. Shemittah Receptacle? Shemitta-cle? Suggestions welcome, please!). But if you put your fresh peelings in with your two-day-old, partially-rotted-but-not-yet-fully-rotten-so-you-can't-yet-throw-them-out peelings, then you are making your fresh peelings disgusting. So your fresh peelings need to go into a different bin. And, possibly, the next day's ones might need yet another bin before you can empty the first bin (so far we've managed fine with two).

So, I was totally ready (ha! Or so I thought) for Shemittah In The Kitchen. I didn't realise though just how much Shemittah would affect me outside the kitchen.
First: the day after Rosh Hashanah (well, the day after Shabbat), instead of pouring the bucket of dirty water that I just used to wash the floor out over the roses, I had to pour it down the drain. Because I can't water the roses beyond what is needed to keep them alive.

Then: I went to turn on the washing machine, and realised that our washing machine drains directly into our garden. Well, this wasn't a surprise, I knew this before, but I had not realised that this had Shemittah implications. Cue phone call number two to the rabbi: If our washing machine drains into the garden, is that as though we are watering the garden during Shemittah? (His answer, as it turns out, was that we should put a stone or tile beneath the stream of water so that it doesn't run directly into the ground.*)

And the next day, my son discovered that his cockatiel had died during the night. He was very upset, and the only thing that would do was to give the cockatiel a full burial in the garden. We put the bird inside a small cardboard box and got ready to dig a grave, when - wait!
"It's Shemittah! We can't bury anything during Shemittah!" said my daughter. Hmm. I suppose that when the cockatiel decomposes, it will fertilise the ground. Perhaps that IS a Shemittah issue. Phone call number three brought permission to bury the pet, as long as it's clear that we aren't digging for agricultural purposes.


I wonder what's going to come up next?


*Any halachic opinions mentioned here are only the answers given to me in our situation, or are my own way of explaining my understanding of the halachos of Shemittah. They should not be treated as a general halachic ruling, nor as a substitute for learning the rules from your own rabbi or a respected halachic work.

Preparing For Shemittah: Battle of the Bougainvillea

Since Shemittah comes every seven years, we all knew well in advance that Shemittah was coming, and everyone living in Israel knew that we had to prepare our gardens for Shemittah. Mainly, this means cutting all our trees and plants right back, because you're not allowed to prune them during the Shemittah year unless they might die without pruning (it turns out that having your gate blocked by your rose bush is not a good enough reason to prune your roses during Shemittah).

But, even though we all knew that Shemittah was coming, we all still ended up doing it at the last minute. Every gardener in my neighbourhood was booked solid for the two weeks before Rosh Hashanah. It was a good thing that my neighbour has a good relationship with her gardener, so that a week before the end of Elul, she was able to get him to chop off some ivy that had taken over a shared wall and was turning into a home for hornets. My husband spent a busy day cutting back our lemon trees and clementine tree, and I had a tough fight cutting the roses down to size. Even on erev Rosh Hashanah, there was still a flurry of last-minute pruning and tidying going on. 

Our biggest problem was our bougainvillea. When we moved into our house a year ago, it came with a massive, monster bougainvillea which blocked the sunlight and was threatening to bar all entrance to our garden. A bougainvillea is a hardy, tough plant with beautiful deep pink flowers, but killer 3-inch-long thorns. Shortly after we moved in, we got someone to remove it. It took four men almost four hours to cut it down and drag it down the steps outside our building. I felt like I had witnessed the death of King Kong. 

Well, we brushed off our hands, enjoyed the new experience of seeing the sunlight finally penetrating our garden, and thought that that was the end of it. Oh, how wrong we were. It turns out that bougainvillea is almost impossible to kill. The poisoned stump continued to send up new green shoots every week. After a couple of months, my husband realised that the green shoots coming up on the other side of the garden were actually young bougainvillea suckers, sent out by the old, poisoned, officially-declared-dead, stump. It was the beginning of a war of attrition between us and the bougainvillea. Every time we thought it was eradicated, it sprang up in a different part of the garden. 

Well, it was only a few days before Rosh Hashanah that we realised that if we just resign from our private bougainvillea war for a year, then by the end of Shemittah we won't even be able to get out of the front door. My husband worked so hard to dig up and destroy every bougainvillea sucker, and poisoned the stump yet again. But despite our efforts, it was not even Yom Kippur before we spotted the first new baby bougainvilleas popping up underneath our trampoline. Cue the first of many, as it turns out, sudden Shemittah questions that we asked our Rabbi. (Thankfully, he told us that yes, we were allowed to destroy the bougainvillea during the Shemittah year, if it would be causing us significant damage to leave it for twelve months.)

The need to prepare for Shemittah has had other interesting results. Normally, the trees and bushes that line our streets get trimmed just after Succos, but this year they got their yearly haircut early - before Rosh Hashanah. It all became so normal that when a friend in the UK told me that she'd mowed the lawn that day, I said yes of course, for Shemittah, before remembering that that didn't actually apply to her!

More odd questions came up after Shemittah began ...

*Any halachic rulings or opinions mentioned in this blog are only my own understanding of the halachos of Shemittah, or else are specific rulings given by our Rabbi for our particular case and should not be extrapolated for use as general rulings. Please refer to your own competent halachic authority or a reliable and reputable Shemittah book. 

Shemittah Shemittah here we come!

So for those of you who live outside of Israel and/or may have missed out on this information, this year - Hebrew year 5775 - is a Shemittah year. I'm neither a posek nor the daughter of a posek, so i am not going to answer anyone's halachic questions, but i shall give you enough background so that you'll understand the Shemittah experiences I'll be sharing with you. Please note that there are different opinions and rulings for almost every aspect of Shemittah, so if your rabbi tells you something different, or your neighbour does, that's totally normal for Judaism.

In Israel, every seventh year is called a Shemittah year. It is for the land what Shabbat is for people - a year off, to rest, recharge, and connect to G-d. For one year out of every seven, we are commanded to let the land rest, and to refrain from actively working it. During the year of Shemittah, one may not work the land at all, beyond what is needed just to keep the plants and trees from dying. This means that you can't water your garden any more than needed to keep it alive, or prune your trees, or spray your roses to keep off the aphids (if, indeed, that's what those insects are).

Note: If you are a farmer, Shemittah has much bigger ramifications, but I'm not a farmer and I also don't understand what all those implications are. So I'm sticking to domestic Shemittah-observance in this blog. 


Also during the Shemittah year, any produce that is grown is holy and must be treated with holiness. This means that you can't throw any leftovers in the bin - you have to dispose of them respectfully by wrapping them, or put them into a special receptacle until they rot, and then throw them out. However, to keep us all on our toes, vegetables (and fruits such as bananas and pineapples) are 'holy' from when they are picked; or in other words, they begin their holiness period straight away from Rosh Hashanah, while fruit is holy from when it begins to grow. Since the fruits that are being picked this year began to grow last year (before Rosh Hashanah), they do not have holiness yet. Instead, the fruits that will begin to grow this year, will be holy when they are picked, next year (after the end of the Shemittah year).

Confused? So are many people that I run into in the supermarket. Despite the fact that the Shemittah year began two weeks ago, and it was not exactly unexpected, i still see lots of people asking basic Shemittah questions on Facebook, and I have conversations with puzzled-looking women in the produce aisles, who wonder aloud whether this cabbage is kedushat shvi'it (holy), and if so, what that means they have to do with their leftover cabbage salad.

It is actually, really hard to keep track of when each produce item begins and ends its holiness period. I was so excited to get my copy of a gorgeous glossy calendar (produced by Rabbi Rimon of JobKatif) that shows the date when each fruit and vegetable begins to be holy. I've hung it up prominently in my kitchen, and all of us have now read it carefully, including my children. I still check it every week, though.

Living in Israel during the Shemittah year brings a lot of challenges, a lot of new and previously unthought-of dilemmas (unthought-of by me, anyway), but also a whole new level of holiness, and a whole new awareness of how we treat food, its significance and its specialness. We only made aliyah two years ago, so this is my first Shemittah year, and I'm excited to experience and share some of the ups and downs.

*Any halachic rulings or opinions mentioned in this blog are only my own understanding of the halachos of Shemittah, or else are specific rulings given by our Rabbi for our particular case and should not be extrapolated for use as general rulings. Please refer to your own competent halachic authority or a reliable and reputable Shemittah book.