5:
We must now turn our attention to the
seifa of our mishnah. Whereas the
reisha dealt with a problem arising from the possibility of at least one stalk being
shikheĥah the
seifa now returns us to the topic of
leket. Here is an imaginary situation which, hopefully, will help to define the dilemma which is addressed by the sages in this mishnah.
6:
A farmer harvests the crop from a section of his field, stacks the harvested grain and these stacks are then bundled into sheaves. Now the poor, waiting at the gate, are permitted to enter the field in order to glean in the vacated section of the field. It's a windy day and one woman gleaner loses her grip on an ear of produce that she has found and the wind blows it away from her onto one of the bundled sheaves which belong to the farmer. Obviously, it is not possible to identify which of all the ears of cereal crop is the one that belongs to the woman. However, that ear of produce legally belongs to the poverty-stricken woman; this means, of course, that the farmer has no right to use it for his own purposes.
7:
I dare say that our modern ways of thought would suggest that either the woman relinquish her claim over that unidentifiable ear of crop or that the farmer give her any ear in order to replace it. Neither such solution will work. The woman will not relinquish her claim because she is so needy that every single ear of the crop that she can get counts. (This is an unemphasized theme running throughout the tractate: the poverty is so dire that the poor will take anything, however small, even eaten by ants and so forth.) Neither can the farmer offer her a replacement ear – let's say it is wheat. The reason why he cannot give her any other ear of wheat is because 'her' ear of wheat does not have to be tithed and all the other ears must be tithed. (On several occasions [for example in Peah 012] we have mentioned that all produce which becomes the property of the poor under the 'poor law' [matnot aniyyim] is free from the duty of tithing: why should the poor have to give up ten percent of their produce?)
8:
Two solutions to this dilemma are put forward in the seifa of our mishnah: that of Rabbi Eli'ezer and that of Tanna Kamma. We shall return to the solution offered by Tanna Kamma in a moment. At this stage let us just say that he has the farmer give our poor woman a replacement ear of wheat. Rabbi Eli'ezer objects to this solution on technical grounds: it is a specific ear of wheat that belongs to the poor woman and it is not in her possession. How can she exchange what is not in her possession for something else offered her? The solution of Rabbi Eli'ezer is that the farmer must make over to her, as a conditional gift, the the whole sheaf; she can then return it to him – minus one ear! (A 'conditional gift' is an halakhic concept: party A gives something to party B so that it is momentarily completely in B's possession but the legal understanding is that B will return the gift to A's possession at some later stage. This is different from a loan in that if A were only to loan B something that something would still legally belong to A.)
9:
This is a neat solution, but halakhah chooses the less neat solution offered by Tanna Kamma. The problem here is that there is no common understanding among the commentators as to how to understand, in practical terms, what Tanna Kamma is saying. In order to make a presentation that is reasonably clear I shall offer here what seems to be the most likely interpretation of the solution of Tanna Kamma, as developed in the Gemara [Pe'ah 18d].
10:
The farmer takes two ears of wheat, at random, from the sheaf. He then holds up one of them and says, "If this ear is that gleaned by you, well and good" – I can give it back to you and there is no need to tithe it; "if it is not that gleaned by you then the tithes that are due from it" – before I can give it to you – "are contained in this second ear of wheat." He now gives the one ear of wheat to the woman and will eventually give the other to a priest together with all his other tithes.
11:
I have greatly simplified here what is discussed and rediscussed by the later sages. The interpretation I have given seems to be that accepted by Rambam and codified in Mishneh Torah [Matnot Aniyyim 4:10]. Let me permit myself one final comment before we leave this mishnah: the plethora of detail that is offered in this tractate must give us pause to consider how important this topic was in a society whose economy was based on agriculture and where extreme poverty was widespread. Living, as we do, in a 'post-industrial' economy it is sometimes difficult for us to understand why such details are necessary. We must assure ourselves that we are not dealing here with academic legalistic 'games' of intellectual pursuit: we are dealing here with real problems that were part and parcel of the lifestyle of our people two thousand years ago.
