Parshat Reeh contains
the mitzvah of Shemitah. Every seventh year, farmers in Israel are instructed
to leave their fields fallow as a reminder that God is the true owner of all of
the land. For close to 2,000 years this mitzvah remained unfulfilled, as there
were no farmers tilling the land among the small remnant of Jews that remained
in Israel. It was not until 1889 that this mitzvah became relevant once more,
and the Jewish community in Israel had to navigate the fulfillment of this
mitzvah with the need to cultivate and develop the Jewish presence in Israel at
that time. The upcoming Jewish year of 5782 is a Shemittah year. Over the
course of the year I look forward to teaching the laws and lessons of Shemitah
in our day. Below is an excerpt from an article in the OU’s Jewish Action by
Peter Abelow that tells the story of Mazkeret Batya. (Full article available
here: https://jewishaction.com/jewish-world/israel/on_and_off_the_beaten_track_in_mazkeret_batya/)
Mazkeret Batya, came
into being during the First Aliyah. Of the many generous individuals who made
the First Aliyah possible, there is probably no one whose name is more
recognized than Baron Edmond (Binyamin) de Rothschild. The Baron was instrumental
in funding many of the twenty-eight new moshavot (settlements) built during the
First Aliyah, including Zichron Yaakov, Binyamina, Bat Shlomo and Mazkeret
Batya, all named in honor or in memory of members of his family. Many of the
new immigrants who arrived during this aliyah were Religious Zionists, members
of the Chovevei Tzion (“Lovers of Zion”) and BILU (“Beit Ya’akov Lechu
Venelchah”) movements, inspired by the goal of working the land. During this
period, 90,000 acres of land were purchased, thereby launching Israel’s future
as an agricultural society.
One of the leaders of
Chovevei Tzion was Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever. Born into a rabbinic family in Vilna
in 1824, he was ordained in the famous yeshivah of Volozhin and became the
rabbi in Bialystok, Poland, in 1883, a position he held until his death in
1898.
In September of 1882,
Rabbi Mohilever met with Baron de Rothschild in Paris, where they laid plans
for the establishment of a new settlement to be named Ekron. He returned to
Poland and on October 19 recruited ten pioneering families, each of whom signed
a letter indicating their readiness to move and their willingness to refund the
money provided to cover the costs of travel and of reestablishing themselves.
The ten heads of the families were to leave within four weeks, with their
families to follow at a later date. Once in Palestine, they underwent training
in farming for a year, sponsored by the Baron, and began to work the land the
following November. The Baron himself visited Ekron in 1886, and renamed the
moshavah “Mazkeret Batya” in memory of his mother, who had recently died.
During the
two-thousand years of living in the Diaspora, the Jewish people had yearned to
be able to fulfill the mitzvot that were dependent upon being in the Land of
Israel. In 1889, with the arrival of the first shemittah year since the First
Aliyah, the religious pioneers were presented with a long-awaited opportunity.
The mitzvah of shemittah requires letting the land lie fallow for a year, and
the moshavot—whose agricultural enterprises were barely getting off the
ground—were confronted with a halachic dilemma. Many aligned themselves with
the opinion of the Rabbanut of Jerusalem, which insisted that shemittah be
strictly observed with all of its stringencies. The Baron and his
representatives, on the other hand, felt strongly that economic considerations
mandated the more lenient approach advocated by other Torah authorities
(including Rabbi Mohilever) authorizing the sale of the land to a non-Jew
(“heter mechirah”). In the end, Mazkeret Batya, in defiance of the Baron,
became one of the few moshavot that strictly observed the shemittah that year;
its farmers refused to work the land, choosing to endure the economic
consequences of that decision.
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