In this Mishnah, we'll talk about how the laws of building a wall between two properties also apply to a vegetable garden or a grain field. It talks about the need for neighbors to collaborate in certain instances in order to divide up property. Here, we'll talk about a case where a man was purchasing a garden that was attached to a bigger garden. In a way, he's annexing that new garden and making it his own. A wall is going to be built between those two gardens, or in the standard case from the last Mishnah, where two partners are agreeing to divide up a garden and build a wall in between them.
The Mishnah says that a vegetable garden is considered a place where a person wants privacy. If the custom was to build a wall in between the gardens so the outside people can see, we require the neighbors to collaborate and build a wall separating the two halves of the garden so that people from the outside won't look into the garden, notice the fully ripe, beautiful vegetables, and cause ayin hara (evil eye). We want to make sure that nobody wishes evil onto this man, and therefore we build a wall in between them. Of course, they'd have to share the land under that wall. Both neighbors would have to contribute to this wall.
We're talking about a valley, a grain field, where the custom was not to build a wall because of the ayin hara, because people didn't want to look. We didn't require them to build a wall. When it comes to a grain field, there's not much of a problem of people looking in and being jealous of your field. The ripe grain was only there for a very short amount of time, so that was not required. It wasn't really a chashash. It wasn't really something the hachamim (Sages) were nervous about, because people weren't really going to look in for that brief period of time, as opposed to a vegetable garden. A vegetable garden has all different types of vegetables that become ripe at all different times, and therefore damage could happen through ayin hara. So a wall was needed for the vegetables, but not for the bik'ah, not for the grain field.
But if someone wants to build a wall, they go inside it and build it and make a wall from the outside. If somebody wanted to build a wall around their grain field to prevent people from looking in and causing them ayin hara, the wall they built would have to be on their side of the fence, on their own property. They'd have to build it within their own property. They wouldn't be able to coerce or force their neighbor to also have the fence or wall built on his side of the property. He would have to build it with his own materials, because it wasn't considered to be a necessity.
When he built that wall, he could put a sign on the outside of the wall to show that it was his wall, that he built it himself. We'll say why that matters. Why does it matter? Why should you put a sign? Because if the wall eventually falls down around that grain field, we say, “Oh, there was a sign there.” And that sign tells us that the wall was built by the person who had the grain field. Therefore, since he built it alone and didn't collaborate with one of his neighbors, the land under it and the stones do continue to belong to him.
But if both of these owners—the neighbors who had grain fields next to each other—collaborated and built a dividing wall between both of them, then they would build that wall in the middle, each neighbor contributing a small piece of his land, with the wall built on top of them. They would put a sign on both sides of the wall, indicating that they both contributed to the building of this wall and did it together. Lefichach, im nafal ha-kotel, ha-makom veha-avanim shel shenehem, and as a result of that, if the wall eventually fell down and there was a double sign on both sides so people knew that they both built it together, they would divide up the land and the stones equally between them.