Parashat Ki Tavo: Farmers and City Dwellers

Hebrew

In Deuteronomy, the ceremony for bringing first fruits is described simply:

You shall take some of every first fruit…. put it in a basket and go to the place…
You shall bring it to the priest in charge at that time and say…. (Deuteronomy 26:2-5).

Five common verbs, leaving room for interpretation and adaptation to personal or local circumstances and tastes.

The Mishnah, as usual, fills the void:

How were the first fruits taken up [to Jerusalem]?

An ox would go in front of them, his horns bedecked with gold and with an olive-crown on its head…. When they drew close to Jerusalem they would send messengers ahead, and would adorn the first fruits. The governors and chiefs and treasurers [of the Temple] would go out to greet them, according to the rank of the entrants they would go forth. All the skilled artisans of Jerusalem would stand up before them and greet them… The flute would play before them, until they reached the Temple Mount. When they reached the Temple Mount even King Agrippas would take the basket and place it on his shoulder.... (selected from Mishnah Bikurim 3:2-4)

Elements of the festive procession are still present in Israeli culture. In agricultural communities, the decorated bull has been replaced by a tractor, which is also usually decorated. Urban and rural children continue to sing Levin Kipnis’s song that begins “Bearing baskets on our shoulders, with wreaths on our head....” which draws many details from the Mishnah (especially the flute and carrying the basket on the shoulder, which do not appear in the Torah).

But an important component of the Mishna’s ceremony is missing. In the days of the Temple, the residents of Jerusalem – the people of the large city who bought their food in the market, whose lives were cut off from the fields and perhaps saw rain as a nuisance – would stop their daily routine and go out to greet the farmers and celebrate with them.

About a century ago, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook interpreted this Mishnah and expressed concern about the alienation between city-dwellers and farmers:

When the nation is morally depraved, when individuals’ eyes and heart are only upon money, these two types, those who engage in nature and those who engage in artifice become alienated from one another. The farmers, who dwell in villages close to nature, will be the object of disrespect on the part of the professionals who have figured out how to live by civilization divorced from nature. (Ein Aya)[*]

Since then, the situation has not improved. Supermarket shelves are full of industrialized food; the newspapers constantly publish articles about meat grown in test tubes and wheat raised in laboratories, and more. People demand cheap food in abundance without thinking about the price of inputs and the cost of labor that farmers invest in crops. Instead of applauding farmers, like the people of Jerusalem in the days of the Temple, modern society starves them. This is not how to build the future.

 

Dedicated to our daughter Leah, who has just completed a doctorate about tomatoes growing in arid conditions.

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[*] As translated by Bezalel Naor and cited by Leiba Chaya David, “Ki Tavo: First Fruits.”)