Positive Commandment 201 (Digest)
Allowing Employees to Eat from the Crops
"When you come [to work] in your fellow's vineyard, you may eat grapes... When you enter your fellow's standing grain, you may pick the ears with your hand"—Deuteronomy 23:25.
An employer must allow his worker to eat, while working, from the produce which he is working on.
(See Negative Commandment 267 for more details on this allowance.)
The 201st mitzvah is that we are commanded to allow a hired worker to eat, when he is working, from the produce he is working with. This applies only if the produce is attached to the ground.
The source of this commandment is G‑d's statement (exalted be He), "When you come [to work] in your neighbor's vineyard, you may eat grapes...When you come [to work] in your neighbor's standing grain, you may take the ears with your hand."
In tractate Bava Metzia it is explained that these two verses teach that one may eat from the produce that is attached to the ground when the work is finished, and that neither verse would be sufficient without the other. This is similar to what was previously mentioned regarding the phrase of the Sages, "these are two verses, and without them both we could not derive the law." This is therefore a single positive mitzvah — i.e., that a hired worker is allowed to eat from produce which is attached to the ground — that is derived from two verses.
Our Sages explicitly stated that "they are permitted to eat by Torah law."
The details of this mitzvah are explained in the 7th chapter of tractate Bava Metzia.
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