If somebody rented a field from his friend and was supposed to give him a fixed amount, for example, he told his friend, “I’m going to rent your field. I’m not going to be a sharecropper; I’m going to give you a set amount of produce.” The produce would belong to the owner, or the renter would pay a fixed monetary amount to rent the field.
The renter did not want to weed the field. When he doesn’t weed it, the soil is going to get destroyed. It’s going to get weakened, and later on, there’s going to be an inability to produce crops the right way. The renter says to the owner, “What do you care if I don’t weed the field? You’re getting what you’re supposed to get. I’m paying you. The set amount of produce you’re supposed to get doesn’t affect you at all. The weeds here don’t really matter. They don’t really matter. If I don’t want to weed the field, I don’t have to.”
We do not accept the renter’s argument, and we insist that he weed the field. The owner could tell the renter, “Even though you’re technically right that these weeds don’t affect me right now, tomorrow, at some point you won’t be my renter anymore. You’ll leave the field. If you don’t weed it now, the weeds will grow and leave seeds behind, even if I clear them one day, and that will be very damaging to my field in the long term. They’ll affect later crops. More weeds will sprout from the seeds, and more weeds will be left over from the current weeds.” Therefore, we do not allow the renter to leave the field unweeded. He is obligated to make sure it gets cleaned up and taken care of.