Pe'ah 075

נושא: Pe'ah

Pe'ah 075

BET MIDRASH VIRTUALI

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If someone dedicates his vineyard [to the Bet Mikdash] before olelot could become recognizable in it there are no olelot for the poor; but if [it were dedicated] after olelot were seen in it the olelot belong to the poor. Rabbi Yosé says that they must give the value of their growth to the Bet Mikdash. What is considered to be shikheĥah on the lattice? – anything which one cannot take by [just] stretching out one's hand; and [in the case of] a runner from the moment [the harvester] has passed on from them.

1:
This is not the first time in our studies that we have encountered the concept of people dedicating their property to the Bet Mikdash [hekdesh]. Four years ago, when we were studying Tractate Sanhedrin, for example, I wrote:

The promise to make a donation to the Bet Mikdash is different from a vow in the sense that we usually ascribe to the term. It would be more helpful in this context to compare the vow to an undertaking to contribute to a charitable cause in modern times. In other words, something material is involved whose ownership is to be transferred by the person making the undertaking to the cause involved. In Halakhah, the moment one makes a promise to donate something to the Bet Mikdash – money, goods, a sacrifice – the "something" technically becomes the possession of God, in the keeping of the Temple Treasurer. The article is termed hekdesh. Hekdesh refers to commodities that owners have donated to the Bet Mikdash. From the moment that the donor so decided in his or her mind the commodities become the property of the Bet Mikdash and anyone eating them is guilty of sacrilegious embezzlement [me'ilah]… Hekdesh is the status of material goods or monies declared by their owner to be dedicated (i.e. donated) to the Bet Mikdash. From that moment they cease to be the property of their erstwhile owner and become the property of the Bet Mikdash under the control of the Temple's treasurer – or, in more picturesque language – they become the property of Heaven. From the moment the vow is made the property becomes "the property of Heaven" and profane use of it constitutes Me'ilah.

The first clause of our present mishnah is concerned with what happens if a farmer dedicates his vineyard to the Bet Mikdash as hekdesh: are the poor still entitled to the olelot which would be their right if the vineyard still belonged to the farmer?

2:
Our mishnah defines two possibilities: if the olelot were already recognizable as such before the property was turned over to the Temple treasurer the poor are entitled to their olelot because these had become their 'property' while the vineyard still belonged to the farmer, thus he could not rightfully transfer them together with the rest of the vineyard because they did not technically belong to him. However, if at the moment of dedication no olelot were as yet to be seen in the vineyard the poor cannot claim them later on when they do appear, because they were transferred to the treasury of the Bet Mikdash, as it were, with the main transaction.

3:
It is not clear whether Rabbi Yosé is clarifying what Tanna Kamma has already said or is in disagreement with him. Rambam and Rabbi Ovadya of Bertinoro assume that he is in partial disagreement with Tanna Kamma: he agrees that if the olelot were there on the vines before the property was declared hekdesh that the poor are entitled to these olelot. But he adds a rider: from the time that the dedication was made until the time that the poor were able to actually reap their olelot they had technically been 'using' dedicated property of the Bet Mikdash, because these grapes were growing in dedicated land. Rabbi Yosé says that the poor must make a compensatory payment into the treasury of the Bet Mikdash in order to avoid the sin of me'ilah.

4:
Apparently Tanna Kamma does not think that such a payment is necessary, for in the Talmud of Eretz-Israel [Pe'ah 20c] we find a discussion concerning a reasoning of the great Amora of Eretz-Israel Rabbi Yoĥanan: technically speaking the poor should not have to pay anything for the realization of their right – which would the the view of Tanna Kamma. However, the Gemara says that the poor do have to make the payment required by Rabbi Yosé because "on one occasion the sages so decided" when a case came before them.

5:
The last clause of our mishnah takes us back to the rules and regulations concerning shikheĥah. (See what we wrote on 4:8 [Pe'ah 057] in explanation of this concept.) When grapes are growing 'normally' there is no problem in identifying which clusters have been overlooked by the vintners and therefore belong to the poor. But often farmers would train their vines over a kind of lattice-work in order to make it easier to gather the grapes. Our mishnah states that grapes on a lattice frame would only become shikheĥah when the gatherer had already passed them and they were already further than an arm's length away from him; thus he would not be able to retrieve them without backtracking.

6:
Another manner in which vines were grown was to trail them over the ground – what is called in our present mishnah a 'runner'. In such a case, says our mishnah, the grapes would become the property of the poor when the vintner had already passed on from that vine.

This concludes our study of the seventh chapter of this tractate.

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