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Torah Portion -
behar
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Written by d fine
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As we pointed out, Shmittah is an intesnive emunah course. Not only that, but it is one of the proofs that the Torah is, indeed, from HaShem - and that it could not have been made by man. How so? For it seems impossible that humans could have made up the mitzvah of Shmittah. How could we get together and tell people that they must keep their lands fallow for a year, promising that God will give them three years’ worth of crop from the sixth year? If such a thing could not be guaranteed then anyone who observed this law would die of starvation - there would be no-one left to keep this mitzvah! Only HaShem could command such a mitzvah and give people the necessary crop yield to survive the year. And this promise has been fulfilled countless times across history. For example, in 1957 the Jewish Agency decided to plant orchards in kibbutz Moshav Kommemiut, which the Moshav accepted on condition that they would observe the Shmittah. At the end of the Shmittah of 1959, a representative from the Ministry of Agriculture told the Moshav’s Rabbi (Rav Mendelsohn) that their orchard had flourished more than all the orchards which had been worked during the Shmittah year. And a similar story is told about a farmer who kept Shmittah during the 1950s and miraculously saw that the tremendously destructive widespread locust infestations of those times did not descend upon his field.
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