Israeli Garden Is Grounds for Debate

JERUSALEM —  The carefully tended garden that surrounds Israel’s parliament is a national showcase, a colorful display of seasonal blooms that usually provides a respite from the raucous, arm-waving debates inside.

But now the periwinkles, begonias and roses have become unlikely bit players in Israel’s angry culture war, the intensifying struggle between the religious and the secular that many Israelis consider the most significant threat to their state.

In recent days, for instance, as the government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak teetered on the brink of collapse, Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, an ultra-religious legislator, had something else on his mind: Was the garden at the Knesset, as the parliament is known, ready for its biblically mandated year of rest?

The year, known in Hebrew as shnat shmita, or the time of “letting go,” comes every seven years, according to the Bible, and begins with the Jewish New Year in late September. For religious Jews, the coming year--5761--must be one of rest for the land in biblical Israel, a year in which most forms of work on the soil or its products aren’t allowed.

“For Jews, it’s a way of expressing the fact that the land is a gift from God; a way of showing that there are limitations to human control over it,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish thought at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “And it’s closely related to the Sabbath itself,” which falls every seventh day.

Traditionally, religious Jews are prohibited from plowing, planting, sowing or otherwise working the land in biblical Israel during the shnat shmita. (The restrictions don’t apply outside Israel.)

But in modern-day Israel, observance of the year of rest, like the day of rest, gets complicated.

That began in the 20th century, Halbertal said, when Jews, driven by the Zionist dream of a national revival based on agriculture, arrived in large numbers to settle and work the land. Soon after, the farmers appealed to religious leaders for relief from the seventh-year restrictions, which they said would destroy their livelihoods.

“The rabbis came up with the idea, really a legal fiction, that allowed the farmers to sell the land to a non-Jew for that year and circumvent the problem,” Halbertal said. “Then the Jewish farmer can work the land because it doesn’t technically belong to him.”

The vast majority of religious farmers in Israel now utilize this arrangement. Others have chosen to grow crops on elevated platforms so they don’t touch Israeli soil during the prohibited period.

But strictly observant farmers--who number about 1,000, according to the Agriculture Ministry--don’t accept the new rulings and adhere to the biblical prohibition against working the land at all. They receive financial support--which will total about $3.8 million next year--from the government, a ministry official said.

Many of the ultra-Orthodox, the most strictly religious among Israeli Jews, also don’t buy fresh produce, canned goods or grains that were grown in Israel during the seventh year. According to Israeli media accounts, the government pays an additional $21 million each shmita year for special storage and cooling facilities, one-time contracts with Palestinian or Jordanian farmers and the salaries of thousands of extra food inspectors.

Now, with the intensifying conflict between religious and secular Israelis, the special funding is attracting growing criticism from secular politicians.

“My belief is that no one in Israel should be treated differently from any other,” said lawmaker Yossi Paritzky, a member of the secular Shinui party. “If someone chooses not to work his land, fine. That’s between him and his god. But I should not have to pay for it.” Paritzky said he will investigate the funding in next year’s budget.

And for Paritzky and Ravitz alike, the Knesset’s garden is a special symbol in the struggle.

Ravitz believes that the Knesset should plant perennials that might survive the religious year with water but no other care.

“Of course, the leadership must take these sensitivities into account,” he said. “The Knesset is a symbol for everyone.”

Just so, retorted Paritzky. And it should be allowed to grow whatever flowers it wants.