Pe'ah 026

1:
At first glance it seems that the Reisha [first clause] of our mishnah is just a repetition of the Seifa [last clause] of the previous mishnah. In this case, even more surprising will be the realization that the two seemingly identical clauses have a different halakhic outcome. Mishnah seven says that "if he [the farmer] harvested half [the field] and bandits harvested [the other] half it is exempt [from Pe'ah]", whereas mishnah eight says that "if bandits harvested half [of the field] and he [the farmer] harvested [the other] half he must give Pe'ah from what he harvested". Obviously what seems to be the case at first glance cannot be the case at all.

2:
We must note that in mishnah seven it is the farmer who reaps half his field first; for some reason (perhaps the onset of darkness, or some other reason) he did not complete the harvesting of the field. When he returns to complete the harvesting he discovers that the rest of his field has been illegally harvested by thieves. Under such circumstances even the amount that he had already harvested before the theft is exempt from the duty of Pe'ah. The halakhic reasoning is that he was not obliged to give Pe'ah from what he did manage to reap since, as we have had several occasions to note, according to the understanding of the sages the duty of leaving Pe'ah only falls at the completion of the reaping of the field (the view of Rabbi Shim'on that we noted in Peah 009, explanation 3 and again in the response in Peah 025), so the farmer was not required to leave Pe'ah for the portion of the field which he harvested. On the other hand, he was not the 'you' that completed the harvesting of the field so neither is he liable for the Pe'ah of the second half of the field. Admittedly this halakhah certainly was to the benefit of the hapless farmer who had lost half of his crop.

3:
It must now be clear that the opposite is the situation in our present mishnah, mishnah 8. Here it is the thieves who were unable to complete their harvesting of the field – perhaps their nefarious activity was disturbed in flagrante delictu. The farmer is required to give Pe'ah from the portion of the field that he does manage to reap – but what he reaps is considered to the the whole field and he does not have to give Pe'ah from the portion that was stolen by the robbers.

4:
If the farmer reaped part of his field and then sold the field to a purchaser before completing the harvest it is the purchaser who must give Pe'ah to the value of the whole field: the field had not yet become subject to Pe'ah at the moment the sale was made and this was obviously known by the purchaser because he could see that the harvest had not yet been completed.

5:
The same halakhic logic applies in a situation where the farmer reaps part of his field and then in a fit of pious generosity decides to give the remainder of the field's yield as a donation to the Bet Mikdash. Obviously, the administrative authorities of the Bet Mikdash are not required to give Pe'ah from produce that technically belongs to God; but if someone buys this produce from the Temple authorities he must give Pe'ah to the value of the total yield of the field – information which was presumably carefully noted in advance by the Temple bureaucrats.

This concludes our study of Chapter Two of this tractate.

Adam Rosenthal writes:

Were the poor and farmers expected to be experts in Pe'ah to fulfill this mitzvah? If not, how was this mitzvah likely performed, so that the farmer would know what to leave for Pe'ah, and that the poor would know what to collect?

I respond:

We may rest assured that the farmer knew that he had to give at least one and two thirds percent of his field as Pe'ah; we may also rest assured that he knew how to roughly calculate this amount. But most certainly we may rest assured that the indigent would be most expert in calculating – from just outside the edge of the field – whether what was being left for them answered the criteria set by the sages. (We shall visit the technical details of how the poor realized their rights over Pe'ah in chapter 4.)

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Ed Frankel returns us momentarily to the question of the sumac tree:

There is a North American sumac tree as well. (I am not sure from the picture if it is the same as shown in Peah 021.) The North American variety has clusters of pink berries that hang from it. According to hiking guide books, when one squeezes these berries into water and adds sugar one creates a beverage with a flavor that resembles lemonade. If this is anything as the sumac described in the last discussion, it seems that it was a very useful tree.