Zera‘im (Seeds)

The first and shortest of the six orders of the Mishnah, Zera‘im (Seeds), contains eleven tractates. The first, Berakhot (Blessings), contains rules for the ritual recitation of various blessings and prayers, including the twice-daily recitation of the Shema‘ (based on Deuteronomy 6:4–9) and the core element of the communal Jewish liturgy known as the Amidah (the “standing prayer”), consisting of eighteen (shemoneh ‘esreh) or nineteen benedictions; see Rabbinic Communal Prayer (Tefillah). The remaining ten tractates in the order Zera‘im deal with topics relating to the commandments regarding agriculture: the obligation to give charitable donations at various points in the agricultural process, to donate a portion of one’s produce and one’s dough to the priests, to tithe one’s produce, to avoid certain mixtures of diverse seeds, to leave fields uncultivated in the sabbatical year, to abstain from harvesting the produce of trees for the first three years, and to prepare a firstfruit offering. The passages excerpted here are from tractates Berakhot, Pe’ah, Demai, and Terumot.