Pe'ah 009

1:
In order to understand our mishnah we must also use our imagination a little. Imagine a farmer about to reap his field. It is almost inevitable that just outside the entrance to his field a whole crowd of people will be waiting to reap 'their' Pe'ah. The only problem is that they don't know where and when the farmer will leave them their part of his field.

2:
The Torah [Leviticus 19:9] says:

From the language of the Torah one might have thought that Pe'ah is the last portion of the field that is left unreaped by the farmer after he has reaped the rest of his field. In our present mishnah Tanna Kamma states this is not the case and that the farmer may designate any part of his field as Pe'ah: he can delineate a portion right at the beginning and declare that part of his field to be Pe'ah (which will mean that the onlookers will not have to wait); he can delineate a portion in the middle of his field or he can wait until the field is almost completely reaped before leaving the indigent their Pe'ah.

3:
Rabbi Shim'on bar-Yoĥai does not disagree with Tanna Kamma [the unnamed sage whose view is first quoted], but he adds a proviso. The meaning of his proviso seems to be that the farmer may designate any part of his field as Pe'ah provided that when he completes his reaping he has left at least one sixtieth of the total yield of the field for the poor. If this is not the case he has not fulfilled the mitzvah of Pe'ah. However, this is not the way in which the Gemara [Pe'ah 16c] understands the proviso of Rabbi Shim'on. According to the Gemara, Rabbi Shim'on is saying that the farmer may designate any part of his field as Pe'ah provided that he leaves a portion of his field unreaped at the end and that that unreaped portion is equal to at least one sixtieth of the field. Halakhah here follows the proviso of Rabbi Shim'on in the interpretation given by the Gemara.

4:
In his commentary on our mishnah Rambam explains that this is in order to thwart unscrupulous farmers. When they are asked which part of their field will be Pe'ah they designate an area (but do not yet let the poor into their field in order to reap). However, when someone else asks them which part of their field will be Pe'ah they indicate a different part of the field – and continue thus until the whole field has been reaped and none has been left.

5:
Rabbi Yehudah bar-Ilai disagrees with Rabbi Shim'on. His view is that if the farmer leaves at least one stalk unreaped at the end of his field as Pe'ah all the rest which he has left from the beginning of his field or from the middle is joined to that stalk, as it were, as has become Pe'ah and the farmer has fulfilled the mitzvah of Pe'ah. However, if he fails to leave even one stalk at the end of his reaping then everything that he left earlier on is not considered Pe'ah: it is considered hefker – ownerless property which may be claimed by anyone (and not just the poor).

6:
Halakhah here follows the view of Rabbi Shim'on and not that of Rabbi Yehudah.

Quite a backlog of your comments and queries has built up over the past few days. Here we make a start.

Mark Lautman suggested that it would have been appropriate if the sages had enacted a kind of sumptuary law preventing overly lavish celebrations of life-cycle events such as bar-mitzvah and marriage. He wrote: There should be limits on the sums spent on bar mitzvah parties. Amounts of $10,000 and $20,000 are quite common. These parties have turned the whole ceremony of bar mitzvah into a subject of ridicule among Gentiles and functions of 'social pressure and an innate sense of competition' among Jews.

Judith May comments:

I don't know where Mark Lautman lives, but here on Long Island the sums he quotes for Bar Mitzvahs are low. People are spending those princely sums not on the mitzvah, but on the bar. Spending a lot for a genuine mitzvah is rarer, and rarely a subject of ridicule by the gentiles.

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On the same subject Ed Frankel writes:

Although not applied here, it seems that this was the principle at work when Chazal (Sages) demanded moderation in the funerary practices of our people.

More of your queries and comments next time.