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Kilayim Perek 2
Sep. 8th, 2024 11:39 amKilayim 2:1
If you have a bucket of seeds and the majority of them are one min, and a few of them are another min, does the majority nullify the minority? Apparently D'oraysa bitul works, but the Rabbis add a fence. If there is more than a quarter of the second min, you have to pick out seeds until you have less than a quarter. But wait! When we say a quarter, we don't mean a quarter. Artscroll handily explains here, but otherwise you wouldn't figure out until a few mishnayos later, we are evaluating this in terms of a se'ah of seeds, and within that se'ah, a quarter kav is the smallest unit we are interested in doing math on. There are 6 kavin in a se'ah, so actually we are saying if you have less than 1/24th of a se'ah in your se'ah, you are okay, and if you have more than 1/24th of a se'ah, you need to pick out seeds.
R' Yose holds that if you have less than a 24th of a se'ah, bitul works just like the Tanna Kamma, but as soon as you have more than 24th, you need to completely pick out the seeds, not just reduce below a 24th, because he thinks there is a perceived kavanah to plant kilayim if you don't get rid of all the seeds once you're aware of them. This idea of perceived kavanah seems to be a recurring one in this whole perek.
The final machloket is between R' Shimon and the Chachamim about whether or not two kinds of minority seed that are each less than a quarter kav combine to count as kilayim. So if you have a se'ah of wheat that has an eighth kav of oats and an eighth kav of rye, do you need to pick out seeds? R' Shimon says no, the Chachamim say yes.
Kilayim 2:2
Here we say that the previous rule only applies to classes of seeds. Less than 1/24th nullifies grain with grain, less than 1/24th nullifies kitniyot with kitniyot, less than 1/24th nullifies vegetable seeds with vegetable seeds. At first I thought this was an idea limiting the intent of the Torah's rule of kilayim, that the only thing that counts as kilayim is grain with grain, but the following bit makes it clear I was misreading. Actually what it means is that different kinds of plant have different amounts of spread and require different amounts of seed to fill a field, so you can only use the 1/24th rule if your zeraim are the same kind of seed and otherwise you need a scaling factor.
The Rabbis define a unit of land area called the beis se'ah, which is circularly defined as the amount of area in which you would plant a se'ah of wheat. But if you had a se'ah of vegetable seeds, you would plant a much larger area with it because vegetable seeds produce proportionally larger plants per seed volume. So you can batel a much smaller amount of vegetable seeds in a se'ah of wheat seeds because otherwise the vegetable seeds would overwhelm your beis se'ah. And on the other hand, R' Shimon teaches that flax seeds produce proportionally smaller plants compared to their seed volume, so you can batel a larger amount of flaxseeds in your se'ah of wheat.
Kilayim 2:3
If you plant wheat seeds and then decide that you screwed up and you would rather plant some different seed in the field, you have to wait for the seeds to root before you turn up the soil and get rid of them, because otherwise there might still be wheat seeds that would grow and make the field kilayim.
You might say "Oh, I have to plow the field to uproot these rooted wheat seeds, and then I have to plow the field after I have seeded it with, say, barley, to distribute the barley in the soil and aerate it, so how about I kill two birds with one stone and just spread the barley and then do the ploughing? It will uproot the wheat and aerate the soil for the barley." This is forbidden, presumably because one might forget to go back and make sure the wheat is all gone or something like this.
The Tanna Kamma holds that the uprooting is sort of pro-forma, it's a demonstration that you don't intend to grow wheat anymore, so you just go through the whole field with your plow and it's okay if you miss some spots. Abba Shaul teaches you have to go through and thoroughly plow to uproot all the wheat.
Kilayim 2:4
If you plant wheat and it's rooted and grown, and then you want to switch over to make your field a vineyard, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. And if you have a vineyard and you want to turn it into a wheat field, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. But there is a leniency that you can just chop down the above ground vines until they are at shoe level and then uproot. I guess if you do that, the grapevine won't grow back, so you know you're good?
Kilayim 2:5
If you've got a field with a plant that takes years to germinate, like karbas or luf, you have to actually wait out the years with a fallow field before switching it.
If you have a field of wheat and various known weeds, like something it calls isatis, grow in the field, there's no problem of kilayim because it's a weed, not something the farmer planted themself, and there's no problem of mar'is ayin because anyone will look at it and think "Poor Farmer Jim, he has a weed problem," rather than "Sinner Farmer Jim planted kilayim." But if the farmer goes through and partially weeds the field, but leaves some of the apparent weeds, people will start to think that they wanted the kilayim, and apparently the Rabbis think that in addition to the prohibition of planting kilayim, there is a prohibition of maintaining a field of kilayim.
Kilayim 2:6
If you plant two strips of land with two different crops, you need to maintain a gap between them sufficient that people won't think you planted them together. It's a funny disagreement between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammi- Beis Shammai says it's two furrows wide, Beis Hillel says it's one yolk wide, the Tanna Kamma says look, those are basically the same thing.
Kilayim 2:7
If you plant two fields of grain, one wheat and one barley, and they're oriented so that they touch in one place but mostly are separated, because they're oriented differently, that's sufficient separation.
If you plant a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, they can literally touch each other at your land boundary because the Torah prohibits an individual from planting kilayim, there's no communal ban on kilayim. And the Mishna goes one step further. If you have a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, and your neighbor's field goes up to their land boundary and you have a gap between your field and the land boundary, you're permitted to plant barley to fill the gap, because it won't look like kilayim.
This is one of those halachos where if I'm the Rabbi and someone asked me if they could do this, I'd say, technically yes, but I forbid it because this might be fine from a kilayim perspective but it's going to lead to disputes over land boundaries.
You can't plant a third plant in the gap, because it would look like kilayim, but you can plant flax in the gap because as discussed earlier flax grows small and so you would never fill a small gap with flax if you're growing a field, so clearly the understanding would be that you're just planting flax to test the field, and are planning to uproot it once it takes.
Kilayim 2:8
On the other hand, you cannot plant hardel or haria in a gap like this- Artscroll translates as mustard or saffron, I thought saffron famously could only be grown in Iran, but apparently it just grows optimally in Iran but can be grown elsewhere in Mediterranean climates. The reason is that these are crops that are grown in small fields, so the understanding would be that you do intend to cultivate these crops as crops. But you can grow hardel or haria in the gap between your field and your neighbors field if both are vegetable fields rather than grain fields, apparently because hardel and haria somehow interfere with the growth of vegetables so the understanding would be that this is a test growth and you're planning to uproot it once it takes.
Kilayim 2:9
We've been talking about gaps that were sort of rectangular in shape. If you split up your field into squares, so that your beis se'ah field is divided into 24 beis rova sections, you can plant 24 different crops in each square, apparently without any gap, because the square shapes will make it clear that they're all separately planted crops. But if you have empty sections, you need to maintain gaps. Rabbi Meir says only two squares can be a separate crop, the Chachamim say if you have empty squares, you can only plant 9/24 squares, arranged in a checkerboard pattern so they only contact each other on diagonals and are otherwise separated by a square length in each direction. R' Eliezer ben Yaakov says you can't mix up squares in a beis se'ah in any way.
Kilaym 2:10
According to the Chachamim's position that you can plant 9/24 squares, any seeds in that square make it count as a planted square, even if part of the square is taken up with a rock or a grave or a fallow area required by a certain crop.
Kilayim 2:11
If you have maintained the proper separation between two species, but they grow so that one covers the other, it's still okay as long as it's not the greek gourd, because the egyptian gourd has vines that entangle themselves too much with the other plant. R' Meir says he was taught by his teachers that the cucumber and egyptian bean also entangle too much, but he would otherwise lean toward the Tanna Kamma's position.
If you have a bucket of seeds and the majority of them are one min, and a few of them are another min, does the majority nullify the minority? Apparently D'oraysa bitul works, but the Rabbis add a fence. If there is more than a quarter of the second min, you have to pick out seeds until you have less than a quarter. But wait! When we say a quarter, we don't mean a quarter. Artscroll handily explains here, but otherwise you wouldn't figure out until a few mishnayos later, we are evaluating this in terms of a se'ah of seeds, and within that se'ah, a quarter kav is the smallest unit we are interested in doing math on. There are 6 kavin in a se'ah, so actually we are saying if you have less than 1/24th of a se'ah in your se'ah, you are okay, and if you have more than 1/24th of a se'ah, you need to pick out seeds.
R' Yose holds that if you have less than a 24th of a se'ah, bitul works just like the Tanna Kamma, but as soon as you have more than 24th, you need to completely pick out the seeds, not just reduce below a 24th, because he thinks there is a perceived kavanah to plant kilayim if you don't get rid of all the seeds once you're aware of them. This idea of perceived kavanah seems to be a recurring one in this whole perek.
The final machloket is between R' Shimon and the Chachamim about whether or not two kinds of minority seed that are each less than a quarter kav combine to count as kilayim. So if you have a se'ah of wheat that has an eighth kav of oats and an eighth kav of rye, do you need to pick out seeds? R' Shimon says no, the Chachamim say yes.
Kilayim 2:2
Here we say that the previous rule only applies to classes of seeds. Less than 1/24th nullifies grain with grain, less than 1/24th nullifies kitniyot with kitniyot, less than 1/24th nullifies vegetable seeds with vegetable seeds. At first I thought this was an idea limiting the intent of the Torah's rule of kilayim, that the only thing that counts as kilayim is grain with grain, but the following bit makes it clear I was misreading. Actually what it means is that different kinds of plant have different amounts of spread and require different amounts of seed to fill a field, so you can only use the 1/24th rule if your zeraim are the same kind of seed and otherwise you need a scaling factor.
The Rabbis define a unit of land area called the beis se'ah, which is circularly defined as the amount of area in which you would plant a se'ah of wheat. But if you had a se'ah of vegetable seeds, you would plant a much larger area with it because vegetable seeds produce proportionally larger plants per seed volume. So you can batel a much smaller amount of vegetable seeds in a se'ah of wheat seeds because otherwise the vegetable seeds would overwhelm your beis se'ah. And on the other hand, R' Shimon teaches that flax seeds produce proportionally smaller plants compared to their seed volume, so you can batel a larger amount of flaxseeds in your se'ah of wheat.
Kilayim 2:3
If you plant wheat seeds and then decide that you screwed up and you would rather plant some different seed in the field, you have to wait for the seeds to root before you turn up the soil and get rid of them, because otherwise there might still be wheat seeds that would grow and make the field kilayim.
You might say "Oh, I have to plow the field to uproot these rooted wheat seeds, and then I have to plow the field after I have seeded it with, say, barley, to distribute the barley in the soil and aerate it, so how about I kill two birds with one stone and just spread the barley and then do the ploughing? It will uproot the wheat and aerate the soil for the barley." This is forbidden, presumably because one might forget to go back and make sure the wheat is all gone or something like this.
The Tanna Kamma holds that the uprooting is sort of pro-forma, it's a demonstration that you don't intend to grow wheat anymore, so you just go through the whole field with your plow and it's okay if you miss some spots. Abba Shaul teaches you have to go through and thoroughly plow to uproot all the wheat.
Kilayim 2:4
If you plant wheat and it's rooted and grown, and then you want to switch over to make your field a vineyard, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. And if you have a vineyard and you want to turn it into a wheat field, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. But there is a leniency that you can just chop down the above ground vines until they are at shoe level and then uproot. I guess if you do that, the grapevine won't grow back, so you know you're good?
Kilayim 2:5
If you've got a field with a plant that takes years to germinate, like karbas or luf, you have to actually wait out the years with a fallow field before switching it.
If you have a field of wheat and various known weeds, like something it calls isatis, grow in the field, there's no problem of kilayim because it's a weed, not something the farmer planted themself, and there's no problem of mar'is ayin because anyone will look at it and think "Poor Farmer Jim, he has a weed problem," rather than "Sinner Farmer Jim planted kilayim." But if the farmer goes through and partially weeds the field, but leaves some of the apparent weeds, people will start to think that they wanted the kilayim, and apparently the Rabbis think that in addition to the prohibition of planting kilayim, there is a prohibition of maintaining a field of kilayim.
Kilayim 2:6
If you plant two strips of land with two different crops, you need to maintain a gap between them sufficient that people won't think you planted them together. It's a funny disagreement between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammi- Beis Shammai says it's two furrows wide, Beis Hillel says it's one yolk wide, the Tanna Kamma says look, those are basically the same thing.
Kilayim 2:7
If you plant two fields of grain, one wheat and one barley, and they're oriented so that they touch in one place but mostly are separated, because they're oriented differently, that's sufficient separation.
If you plant a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, they can literally touch each other at your land boundary because the Torah prohibits an individual from planting kilayim, there's no communal ban on kilayim. And the Mishna goes one step further. If you have a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, and your neighbor's field goes up to their land boundary and you have a gap between your field and the land boundary, you're permitted to plant barley to fill the gap, because it won't look like kilayim.
This is one of those halachos where if I'm the Rabbi and someone asked me if they could do this, I'd say, technically yes, but I forbid it because this might be fine from a kilayim perspective but it's going to lead to disputes over land boundaries.
You can't plant a third plant in the gap, because it would look like kilayim, but you can plant flax in the gap because as discussed earlier flax grows small and so you would never fill a small gap with flax if you're growing a field, so clearly the understanding would be that you're just planting flax to test the field, and are planning to uproot it once it takes.
Kilayim 2:8
On the other hand, you cannot plant hardel or haria in a gap like this- Artscroll translates as mustard or saffron, I thought saffron famously could only be grown in Iran, but apparently it just grows optimally in Iran but can be grown elsewhere in Mediterranean climates. The reason is that these are crops that are grown in small fields, so the understanding would be that you do intend to cultivate these crops as crops. But you can grow hardel or haria in the gap between your field and your neighbors field if both are vegetable fields rather than grain fields, apparently because hardel and haria somehow interfere with the growth of vegetables so the understanding would be that this is a test growth and you're planning to uproot it once it takes.
Kilayim 2:9
We've been talking about gaps that were sort of rectangular in shape. If you split up your field into squares, so that your beis se'ah field is divided into 24 beis rova sections, you can plant 24 different crops in each square, apparently without any gap, because the square shapes will make it clear that they're all separately planted crops. But if you have empty sections, you need to maintain gaps. Rabbi Meir says only two squares can be a separate crop, the Chachamim say if you have empty squares, you can only plant 9/24 squares, arranged in a checkerboard pattern so they only contact each other on diagonals and are otherwise separated by a square length in each direction. R' Eliezer ben Yaakov says you can't mix up squares in a beis se'ah in any way.
Kilaym 2:10
According to the Chachamim's position that you can plant 9/24 squares, any seeds in that square make it count as a planted square, even if part of the square is taken up with a rock or a grave or a fallow area required by a certain crop.
Kilayim 2:11
If you have maintained the proper separation between two species, but they grow so that one covers the other, it's still okay as long as it's not the greek gourd, because the egyptian gourd has vines that entangle themselves too much with the other plant. R' Meir says he was taught by his teachers that the cucumber and egyptian bean also entangle too much, but he would otherwise lean toward the Tanna Kamma's position.