One of the central requirements of shemittah is to leave the produce of one’s field open to anyone who wishes to eat it. While some opinions thought that meant that the owner of the field would have to make openings in his fence to allow the public into his field, the general consensus is that leaving the gate open is good enough. Beyond that, if the person is worried that the traffic trampling his field will damage the field, he (or she)may leave the field locked, with a sign announcing that the produce is hefker (available to all) and giving directions on how to arrange to gain access to that produce.

While that is what applies to the owner of the field, the notion of hefker raises possibilities for non-owners; for example, can a non-owner enter someone else’s field and take his produce even without permission? This would depend on whether we see the requirement to renounce ownership of the produce as a mitsvah or a decree of the Torah. If it is the former, then as long as the owner has not made that produce hefker, it would be theft for anyone else to take from it. In addition, if the owner did not render them hefker, they should be obligated in the various tithes ordained by the Torah. On the other hand, if it is a simple decree of the Torah, then people should be allowed to eat that produce even without the owner’s permission (although here a middle position is possible; it might be that the produce was made hefker by the Torah and nevertheless required people to obtain permission before eating it, so as not to completely forget the notion of property rights), and it would not be obligated in tithing. One more issue that is relevant to this question is whether the produce raised by non-Jews has the status of shemittah produce (here, we do not mean in terms of being automatically hefker, since the Torah did not demand that the non-Jews give up their produce as well; but if the Torah declared the Land’s produce to have the status of shemittah, that decree, as applied to Jews, would affect even the non-Jewish produce); this last question will become relevant again when we discuss the issue of the heter mekhirah, in a future issue.

Aside from questions of hefkerut, we can wonder as to how we are required to treat produce that has been grown in an improper way, either because the owner of the field guarded it rather than leaving it hefker or actually worked on its growth in prohibited ways. This obviously affects us (in the Diaspora), since we may suspect that the Israeli produce that comes here (although actually one of the forms of sanctity that applies to shemittah-produce is that it should not be transported outside of Israel; since the Israeli rabbinate relies on the heter mekhirah, which is meant to remove the shemittah status from the produce, it would be allowed to export that produce as well; again, we’ll discuss the notion of selling the whole Land in the future, be"H) was improperly treated in its growth. In the case of shamur, guarded produce, the majority opinion is that we may use such produce. In the case of ne`evad, produce which has been worked on during shemittah, there is a less clear majority, but there is still room to allow leniency. In particular, Hazon Ish was of the opinion that we can use an etrog (which we don’t use for eating, but for a mitsvah performance) even though it was worked on during shemittah.

Of course, in using such produce, we would be required to treat them with kedushat shevi`it, meaning that we are required to treat the produce of shemittah differently from ordinary produce, in a couple of ways. First, we need to recognize that the status of shemittah-produce is inherent to the produce; while we can redeem other items that have kedushah to them, if we try to redeem shemittah-produce, the money and the produce then become required to be treated in the ways we will discuss. If we then purchase some item with that money, the item will become infused with shemittah-kedushah and the money will no longer be. The original produce, however, always retains its kedushah. R. Rimon suggests that the reason for this might be that there are no owners of the original produce to allow for redemption. In the case of usual hekdesh, the owner decides to dedicate some item to the Temple. In our case, however, as the item grew it never belonged to anyone. The lack of human ownership also explains, for R. Rimon, the prohibition of actively destroying shemittah produce. The right to destroy something stems directly from ownership; since we do not own shemittah-produce, we cannot destroy it, either.

In terms o fwhich produce should be considered shemittah-produce, there are three kinds of growth: grains and olives, which follow what’s called hava’at shelish, meaning that at least a third of its growth happened during shemittah (even though the majority happened in the eighth year); vegetables, which are determined by when they are picked; and fruits, which depend on hanatah, a term that is a matter of debate, but is a fairly early stage of the fruit’s growth.

Fruits also differ from othe rshemittah-produce in that they grow on trees and that (as we hopefully remember from grade school) trees have a different beginning o fthe year than the rest of the world; their Rosh haShanah is the 15th of Shevat. Some opinions thought that we need to be mahmir both ways (meaning that any fruit that reaches the hanatah stage from the 1st of Tishrei of the shemittah year until the 15th of Shevat of the following year—almost 1 1/2 years) would be treated as shemittah produce. My understanding is that the practice in Erets Yisrael is to go the other way, ruling that it is only those fruit that reach hanatah between 15 Shevat of the shemittah year and Rosh haShanah of the next year that are treated as shemittah produce. On the one hand, this means that issues of fruit and shemittah do not arise until the latter half o f the shemittah year; on the other, it means those issues continue on into the following year (glancing at the chart R. Rimon provides, I noticed that oranges, which are apparently a summer or late spring crop, continue to have shemittah-produce status until Heshvan of 5763, more than a full year after the conclusion of shemittah.  Shabbat Shalom.