The Baal Shem Tov tried more than once to reach Eretz Yisrael, and every time he was turned back. An axle cracked on the road.

A storm rose on the sea and a captain refused to sail further. Once he arrived in Istanbul with his daughter Udel and his attendant Reb Tzvi Sofer, penniless just before Pesach, and after the holiday passed he said quietly that Heaven did not want him to go, and turned for home. He had spent his life teaching Jews how to find Hashem inside a piece of bread, inside a business deal, inside the noise of a marketplace, and still there was one particular stretch of ground he wanted, more than almost anything, to stand on.

Chazal had already asked why Moshe Rabbeinu pleaded so hard to cross the Yarden. Rabbi Samla’i answered that it was not for the fruit: “Did Moshe need to eat of its fruit or enjoy its goodness? Rather, Moshe said: Yisrael have been given many mitzvot that can be fulfilled only in Eretz Yisrael. If only I could enter the Land, so that I could fulfill all of them” (Sotah 14a). Not the view. Not the air. The mitzvot themselves.

That is the strange claim sitting underneath the twenty-eight mitzvot hateluyot ba’aretz, the commandments that depend on the Land: terumah, ma’aser, leket, shikchah, pe’ah, kilayim, shemitah, and the rest. Halachically, these are the laws of the harvest. Kabbalistically, they are closer to plumbing: the channels through which a Jew standing on this one piece of ground can move real holiness through the world in a way that is not available anywhere else on earth.

The Holy Land under different management

Devarim describes Eretz Yisrael as “a land that Hashem your G-d attends to; the eyes of Hashem your G-d are on it always, from the beginning of the year to the year’s end” (Devarim 11:12). The Ramban, in his commentary on this verse, reads it as a statement of governance, not sentiment: outside the Land, providence over the nations of the world runs through an appointed sar, a supervising angelic force assigned to each people; inside Eretz Yisrael, it comes directly from Hashem, without an intermediary, which is why Scripture can call Him there “Elokei ha’aretz,” the G-d of that land, in a way it does not phrase things for any other territory.

Ramchal develops the same thought in Derech Hashem, describing Eretz Yisrael as the point at which Hashem’s providence over the whole world is most concentrated and least filtered, the ground through which the rest of creation receives its flow.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov says something close to this from the side of faith rather than governance. In Likutei Moharan he writes that the root of emunah (faith), and with it the root of tefillah (prayer) and of open miracle, exists in its fullness only in Eretz Yisrael: “The essence of faith, which is the aspect of prayer, which is the aspect of miracles, is only in the Land of Israel, as is written, ‘Dwell in the Land and cultivate faith’” (Likutei Moharan I, 7). Exile itself, he notes, is called by the name Mitzrayim, from meitzar, a narrow and constricted place, precisely because it sits cut off from that direct root.

If the Land carries this kind of concentrated closeness to Hashem, then a mitzvah that can only be performed on its soil is not a technicality of geography. It is a mitzvah that exists only where the channel is open.

Halacha divides the twenty-eight mitzvot into a few families. There are gifts owed to the Kohen and the Levi, taken from the grain itself: terumah gedolah, ma’aser rishon, terumat ma’aser.

There are gifts owed to the poor, removed from the field before the owner ever lays claim to them: pe’ah, leket, and shikchah, with their counterparts in the vineyard, the dropped grapes and the incomplete clusters. There is ma’aser sheni, which the owner eats himself in Yerushalayim, and ma’aser ani, given outright to the poor in the third and sixth years of the seven-year cycle. There is the prohibition of kilayim, keeping species apart within a single field or vineyard. And there is shemitah itself, the seventh year, when the owner steps back entirely and the land answers to no one.

Ma’aser: a tenth that returns as wealth

Take ma’aser first, since the Torah’s own wording points toward Kabbalah before any kabbalist does. “Aser te’aser,” tithe, doubled for emphasis (Devarim 14:22), which Chazal read as a promise folded into the command itself: “aser bishvil she-titasher,” tithe so that you will become wealthy (Shabbat 119a). On that very page of Talmud, Rebbi is asked why the wealthy of Eretz Yisrael merit their riches, and the answer given is bishvil hama’aser, because of the tithe.

Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, the Ben Ish Chai, comments on this exact passage in his Ben Yehoyada and finds three things folded into the single Hebrew word for wealth, osher (עושר): the shin of Shabbat, the ayin of ma’aser, and the reish of Torah. Bavel, he notes, had no ma’aser to speak of, so its wealthy attributed their riches to the honor paid to Torah; in Eretz Yisrael, where the tithe applies and Malachi’s challenge, “bring the whole tithe… and test Me now by this” (Malachi 3:10), is spoken directly of the Land, the wealthy attribute their riches to ma’aser instead.

All three, he writes, are hinted at within the letters of the one word osher (Ben Yehoyada, Shabbat 119a).

The number itself is not incidental. Ma’aser means a tenth, and the sefirot are counted in tens, with Malchut, the sefirah through which every level above it finally reaches the physical world, standing as the tenth and final one.

A Jew who sets aside a tenth of his grain is doing, in miniature, what Malchut does without pause: taking a whole amount and releasing precisely the portion that keeps the entire structure in flow, so that what remains is not diminished by the release but sustained by it. This is the deeper sense behind the teaching that wealth increases specifically through tithing: not that giving away a tenth leaves nine by simple subtraction, but that the act mirrors, inside an ordinary field, the very channel by which the sefirot stay joined to the world beneath them.

Leket, shikchah, and pe’ah: gifts that were never really his

The gifts to the poor work through a different channel, though the field is the same. Leket, shikchah, and pe’ah are not, strictly, given at all. The Torah does not have the farmer hand anything to anyone. He is commanded simply to stop: to leave the corner of his field unharvested, to walk past the fallen stalks, to not turn back for the forgotten sheaf. “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not fully reap the corner of your field… you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger” (Vayikra 19:9-10). Halacha calls that portion hefker, ownerless, from the moment it fell; the farmer never had a claim on it to begin with.

It is a well-known teaching in the Kabbalistic tradition that Malchut, the Shechinah, holds nothing that is truly her own; everything she has, she receives from what is above her. Pe’ah, leket, and shikchah are structured to mirror exactly that in the open field: a portion of the harvest that was never the owner’s to keep, waiting only to be released to the one who has less.

The Baal Shem Tov taught, in the language his students preserved, that every object in the physical world carries within it a hidden spark of holiness, and that a person’s task is to use the world in a way that frees the spark rather than burying it deeper in matter. Grain left standing in the corner of a field, gathered by a poor man with his own hands rather than handed to him as a favor, is a spark released with unusual gentleness, since it costs the poor man no shame and the owner no deliberation about who deserves it.

Kilayim: the one mitzvah that holds a line

Kilayim moves in the opposite direction. If the gifts to the poor are about release, kilayim is about keeping a boundary intact. On the Torah’s prohibition against sowing a field with two species of seed together (Vayikra 19:19), the Ramban writes that Hashem assigned to every kind of plant, at creation, its own supervising koach (force) above it, one that maintains the species and allows it to reproduce after its own kind without end.

To plant two species entangled in a single furrow is to force two of these supervising forces into one channel that neither was built to carry, and the Ramban treats this as a quiet act of tampering with the boundaries fixed at creation, not merely a rule of horticulture. Kilayim is the one mitzvah on this list that protects order rather than releasing abundance, and a field in Eretz Yisrael, precisely because it draws so directly from the channels above it, needs that boundary guarded with more care than a field anywhere else.

Shemitah: the field’s own Shabbat

Once every seven years, the entire structure changes direction. Shemitah is not a larger version of pe’ah. It is the field’s own Shabbat, and the Torah says so in as many words: “the land shall rest, a Shabbat for Hashem” (Vayikra 25:2). In Lurianic Kabbalah, Malchut, the sefirah identified with both Shabbat and Eretz Yisrael, spends six ordinary units, days or years, receiving from what is above her; on the seventh, she herself ascends a level, and the ground beneath the Jewish people’s feet rises with her.

This is why the Torah does not simply ask the owner to give the produce away in the seventh year, as with pe’ah, but to relinquish ownership of it altogether, and why he may not work the land at all, not even for his own upkeep. For one year in seven, the field is not running under its ordinary chain of command, and no one, not even the man who owns it, is meant to act as though it is.

A number of Kabbalists, among them the Ramban and Rabbeinu Bachya, extended this into what is known as sod hashemitot, the secret of a six-thousand-year shemitah of the world itself, one great cosmic cycle mirrored in every seven-year cycle a Jewish farmer keeps. It was never a unanimous view; Rabbi Chaim Vital records his own hesitation about it in the name of the Arizal.

It is brought here only as a widely-held position among the classical Kabbalists, not as settled law. But the underlying structure needs no such extension to stand on its own: the shemitah year is the single beat, in the seven-year rhythm of a field, that belongs to Hashem the way Shabbat belongs to Him among the days. Fittingly, it is the only segment of the twenty-eight mitzvot fulfilled largely by doing nothing at all.

What was true at the Yarden

Put the pieces beside each other. Grain retained for the Kohen. A tenth released for the poor and, through that release, drawn back as wealth. Corners and fallen stalks that were never the owner’s. Species kept apart so that the forces above them are not forced together.

A field permitted to rest as though it, too, were a soul entitled to a Shabbat. Each is a different motion, holding, releasing, dividing, resting, but all of them are variations on a single claim: that the physical Land is not neutral ground on which Torah happens to be kept, the way a stage is neutral to the play performed on it. It is an active participant in the mitzvah, the way water is an active participant in tevilah and not merely the place where it happens.

This may be why the Chida, born in Yerushalayim and sent out again and again across Europe and North Africa as an emissary of its scholars, spent a lifetime persuading Jews who would never see the Land that they still had a stake in it.

And it is why a Jew standing today far from Eretz Yisrael, who will never plow a field in the Sharon or prune a vineyard in the Shomron with his own hands, can still, through halachically recognized ownership of land there, become obligated in these very mitzvot: not a symbolic gesture toward the Land, but an actual channel opened, the same channel the Ben Ish Chai describes wealth moving through, the same one Rebbe Nachman describes prayer rising through most easily.

The mitzvot are waiting inside the ground itself, the way Chazal said they were waiting for Moshe. What was true for him at the bank of the Yarden is still true now. The fruit was never the point. The channel was.

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A note on sources: Citations above draw on the Talmud (Sotah, Shabbat), the Ramban’s Torah commentary, Rabbeinu Bachya, Rebbe Nachman’s Likutei Moharan, the Ben Ish Chai’s Ben Yehoyada, Ramchal’s Derech Hashem, and the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov as preserved by his students. Where a teaching reflects a broadly held Kabbalistic tradition rather than a single pinpointed source (for example, the description of Malchut as possessing nothing of her own), it is presented as such rather than attached to a citation it cannot bear.

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