This morning’s Torah portion has inspired some of the most important economic initiatives to reduce, or in some cases cancel, the burden of debt borne by many developing countries. It should not be surprising that religious and community leaders, not just economists and politicians, participated in Make Poverty History campaigns, such as Jubilee 2000, based explicitly on our text and on the commandment of the biblical Jubilee during which slaves were freed, and land returned to its ancestral owners. Rarely has an ancient idea more effectively proved its relevance to the contemporary world: concern for economic justice, debt relief, welfare and humane working conditions, speaks with undiminished power to the problems of a global economy. The Jubilee is a glorious idea, the relevance of which lies in the fact that even today it inspires leaders far beyond the Jewish community.
What our sidra addresses is the long-term inequalities of the financial markets. Poverty creates the need for loans, and the burden of debt can become cumulative and crippling, leading many people to sell their land and even their freedom: in ancient times this meant selling oneself into slavery. Today, it is called domestic servitude – another term for slavery – or ‘sweatshop’ labour at less than subsistence wages. The logic of the Jubilee demands periodic redistribution: the cancellation of debts, the liberation of slaves, and the return of ancestral property. In Judaism, the state exists to serve the individual, not the individual the state.
I am not claiming that there is a direct line from the Torah to contemporary politics.
Jews have identified with all shades of the political spectrum: from Leon Trotsky to Milton Friedman, from socialism and communism to neo-conservatism and laissez faire capitalism. The Torah is not an economic theory nor a party-political programme. It is about long-term, not short-term, change, setting the parameters of a society based on the eternal values of equality and freedom.
Our Torah portion commends that the governance of society be based on moral considerations, above all, the dignity of the individual, based on life-enhancing virtues. This does not mean undervaluing yourself. It means valuing other people. It signals the willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness wherever one finds it, to have the capacity to admire; to be open to something greater than oneself and not take yourself too seriously but rather take with utmost seriousness that which is not I.
Our Torah portion emphasizes human dignity that no one must suffer humiliating poverty. No member of the community must be condemned to perennial slavery or permanent debt. No one must lose their share in the land. Beyond the specific halakhic parameters, is the larger ethical vision of what a decent society should look like. This has not ceased to be compelling in an age of international corporations, technological behemoths, and fears of financial crises.
Ultimately, we learn that all things belong to God. In relation to land. Precisely because ownership is vested in God, what we possess, we merely hold as God’s trustees. One of the conditions of that trust is that we do not use wealth or power in ways incompatible with human dignity. This is the concept that leads to the creation of a just society and the release of slaves. To be “in the image of God” is to be summoned to a life of freedom. God alone, not even Arsenal, has the claim of our service.
Not being slaves to anyone else was a radical and even revolutionary overturning of the foundations of religion in ancient times. The early civilizations – Mesopotamia, Egypt – were based on hierarchies of power which seemed to adhere to the very nature of the cosmos. Religious rituals and the building of monuments such as the Pyramids were designed to endorse these hierarchies. In this respect Karl Marx was right: religion in antiquity was the robe of sanctity concealing the naked brutality of power.
At the heart of this weeks’ Torah portion is an idea almost unthinkable to the ancient mind: that God intervenes in history to liberate slaves – that the supreme Power is on the side of the powerless and the vulnerable. It is no accident that Israel was born as a nation under conditions of slavery. It has carried throughout history the memory of
those years – the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of servitude – because the Exodus from Egypt serves as an eternal reminder to all of us of the moral necessity of freedom and the vigilance needed to protect it. The free God desires the free worship of free human beings.
Yet the Torah does not abolish slavery. Yes, it was limited and humanized – every seventh day, slaves were granted rest and a taste of freedom. In the seventh year, Israelite slaves were set free. If they chose otherwise, they were released in the Jubilee year. During their years of service, they were to be treated like employees. They were not to be subjected to back-breaking or spirit-crushing labour. Everything dehumanizing about slavery was forbidden. Yet slavery itself was not banned. Why not? If it was wrong, it should have been annulled. Why did the Torah allow a fundamentally flawed institution to continue?
As so often, when in difficulty, we find guidance from Moses. Not the biblical Moses, but Moses Maimonides the great medieval Jewish philosopher, who explained the need for time in the transformation of society. All processes in nature, he argued, are gradual. The foetus develops slowly in the womb. Stage by stage a child becomes mature. And what applies to individuals applies to nations and civilizations.
God did not ask of the Israelites that they suddenly abandon everything they had become used to in Egypt. “God refrained from prescribing what the people by their natural disposition would be incapable of obeying,” he wrote in Guide for the Perplexed. But we might ask, surely God can do anything, including changing human nature. Why then did God not simply transform the Israelites, making them capable immediately of the highest virtue?
Maimonides’ answer is simple: If it were part of God’s will to change the nature of any person, the Torah would have been superfluous. In miracles, God changes nature but never human nature, otherwise the free worship of free human beings would have been rendered null and void. There is no greatness in programming a computer to obey instructions. God’s greatness lay in taking the risk of creating a being, man and woman, capable of choice and responsibility – of obeying God freely.
God wanted mankind to abolish slavery but by their own choice, and that takes time. Ancient economies were dependent on slavery and slavery was not abolished in Britain and America until the nineteenth century and in America not without a civil war. The question which Torah answered is: how can one create a social structure in which, of their own accord, people will eventually come to see slavery as wrong and freely choose to abandon it?
Its answer lay in a single deft stroke: to change slavery from an ontological condition (“what am I?”) to a temporary circumstance. The entire complex of biblical legislation is designed to ensure that neither the slave nor his owner should ever see slavery as a permanent condition. A slave should be treated, “like a resident,” the ger toshav in other words, with the respect due to a free human being. The Torah did not abolish slavery, but set in motion a process that led people to conclude that it was wrong and slavery was eventually abolished. How it did so is one of the wonders of history.
And this brings me to the final lesson from today’s Torah portion. Who is the ger toshav, the resident alien, whom we are commanded to support and sustain? It is one who has not adopted the religion of Israel but who lives in the land of Israel. Not only does he or she have the right to live in the holy land, but the right to share in its welfare provisions. The Ger toshav legislation is one of the earliest extant forms of minority rights. It is based not on pragmatism but religious principle. According to the Torah you don’t have to be Jewish in a Jewish society and land to have many of the rights of citizenship.
Indeed, although the Torah commands us in one place to love our neighbour, on 36 separate occasions we are commanded to love the stranger (Baba Metsia 59b). This was what we are meant to have learned from the experience of exile and suffering in Egypt, of being strangers. The Israelites were oppressed. Therefore, they knew “how it feels to be a stranger.” They were not to inflict on others what was once inflicted on them.
The Torah teaches us that minority rights are the best test of a free and just society. Since the days of Moses they have been central to the vision of the kind of society
God wants us to create in the land of Israel. How shameful to see that they are not being taken seriously today.
In an age of vast inequalities of income within and between societies; in which more than a billion people lack adequate food and shelter, clean water and medical facilities, including in Gaza; our Torah portion challenges us with its ideals. Wealth and power are not privileges but responsibilities, and my hope and prayer is that, like the Children of Israel, we are summoned to become God’s partner in building a world less random and capricious, more equitable and humane; a society more just and compassionate; a society of freedom and equality, of tolerance and dignity.
Kein Yehi Ratzon – may this be God’s will. Amen
