Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in Twenty-First-Century America

This section ofTikkun on “Jubilee and Debt Abolition” is meant to function as a thought experiment, opening up conceptual space for thinking afresh about our world. By envisioning what it would be like to implement the periodic Sabbatical Year and Jubilee called for within the Torah’s laws on debt, we can experience the true tension between the way the world is and how it should be.So start by stretching your imagination.Imagine that every seventh year, most workplaces are closed so that nearly everyone in your society has a year of freedom and the earth itself is given a year for regeneration. The Torah calls this the Sabbatical Year. During this year, your basic needs for food and shelter will be adequately met. How will you spend your time and energy? What are you currently not able to participate in because you don’t have the time?Now imagine that all debts are forgiven every seven years. This is another aspect of the Torah-mandated Sabbatical Year. Will you avoid paying an outstanding debt before the end of the seven years? Or do you feel a commitment to pay back your loans as part of your desire to live with integrity? Do you feel differently about different kinds of debt?At this very moment we are in the middle of a Sabbatical Year. The Jewish year 5775, which began in September, 2014, and runs through September 13, 2015, is, according to Orthodox Jews, who have kept track of this for the past 2,000-plus years, a Sabbatical Year. But currently the practices associated with the Sabbatical Year only apply to agriculture grown in Israel. Imagine if they were part of Western societies and applied to all work.Next, join me in imagining that every fifty years, the wealth of individuals and nations will be redistributed to ensure that everyone has a roughly equal share. This is what it means to have a Jubilee. Now that you know about this periodic redistribution, will you feel less motivated to create, produce, and innovate, even if your work gives you opportunities to be creative and serve the common good? Don’t answer according to what the media have told you other people would do—answer for yourself.This thought experiment is useful because right now our society is created in a way that plays to our smallest, most fearful, and pettiest selves. It plays to our fear that there is not enough and urges us to hoard resources such as money, food, and land. In our current system, some of these fears are well founded: a few people in our society have way more than they need, while many others are not able to obtain what they need. To protect themselves, the few on the top create systems and structures that perpetuate existing inequalities.What if we created a world based not on our fears but instead on the desires of our highest, idealized selves? What if, as the Torah prescribes, we forgave all debts every seven years, observed a Sabbatical Year every seven years, and redistributed wealth every fifty years? These practices would play to our most generous, loving, and compassionate selves, rather than to our fearful selves.Please join me in this thought experiment. At least for a minute, let yourself imagine that it is possible.Imagine biblical fundamentalists uniting with environmental activists and spiritual progressives in a coalition to institutionalize the Torah’s most revolutionary economics. Such a coalition would be capable of so much! Together we could abolish debt, redistribute wealth, and transcend the logic of global capitalism.A campaign to reinstitute the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee could create an amazing opportunity for a left-right coalition that could fundamentally transform and transcend the global capitalist system. Just as the traditional, weekly Jewish Sabbath rules allow the many people who observe them to turn from seeing the earth in purely instrumental terms and respond instead with awe and wonder at the miraculous universe, a societal-wide Sabbatical Year would allow people to transcend narrow utilitarian approaches to nature and reconnect us in ways likely to make us all environmentalists. We’re not about to achieve these goals in the next decade or two, but the process of campaigning would powerfully reframe what progressives are really about, present a critique of capitalist values in a totally unexpected and profound way, and help make environmentalism far more accessible to many Americans.The Torah is very clear in its call for the observance of a Sabbatical Year. Check out Exodus 23:10–11, which says, “In the seventh year thou shalt let [thy land] rest and lie fallow, that the poor of thy people may eat.”Similarly in Leviticus 25:20–22 these commands are repeated and expanded to make clear that the Sabbatical Year is simultaneously a year of rest for the people who normally toil on the land, a bonanza for the poor, and a vital rest for the land itself. And there is this edict in Deuteronomy 15:1–3:According to the Torah, after seven sabbatical cycles (forty-nine years) came the Jubilee. In it all wealth (in the form of land ownership, which was the primary form of wealth in the ancient world) was redistributed to restore the original equal distribution of land among the families and tribes of Israel. As Dayan Isidor Grunfeld relates in his book Shemittah and Yobel, the purpose of Jubilee was to avoid the accumulation of land (wealth) in the hands of a few; Jubilee thus prevented the creation of a landless proletariat. In addition, it prevented Israelites from acquiring the arrogance to which rich landowners were often prone.The Torah asserts that people who resist this redistribution of land are in the wrong: God says, “The whole earth is mine,” so humans obviously have no standing to assert a “right” to ownership of land. Thus, the Torah refutes early capitalist ideas such as philosopher John Locke’s claim that when a landowner “mixes his labor” with the land he gains a “right” to it. Rather, the Torah makes clear that there is no right to private property, and God counters the arrogance of landowners by reminding them, “You are only sojourners on this land.” No matter what legal arrangements landowners dream up to keep land under their personal control, they are still subject to the Jubilee, which was announced by the blowing of the Shofar on Yom Kippur with the pronouncement, “Thou shalt proclaim freedom in the land to all its inhabitants” (a pronouncement later inscribed on the Liberty Bell).Historians debate whether these practices were ever fully implemented. But the debate in the Talmud that led Rabbi Hillel to intervene with a ruling that allowed debts to survive the seventh year—thereby subverting the Torah command—is some indication that at least the release of loans was in fact practiced. And Hillel’s subversion, famously called prozbol, was subverted in turn by the practice of setting up interest-free-loan committees, which persists today in most major Jewish communities, including those in Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Panama, Ottawa, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, and many more locations around the world.The Torah explicitly forbids lending money for interest to “your brethren,” and who fits into that category is a matter of richly debated interpretation. Most liberal and progressive Jews believe that our “brethren” includes all people on the earth; many conservative Jews like to hold on to a narrower picture, sometimes pointing out how few non-Jewish countries came to our aid when Jews were being wiped out during the Holocaust.All these practices are manifestations of trust that there will be enough wealth to go around if we restructure the world in accord with the principles of generosity, love, and caring for each other and the earth. In other words, these practices are spiritual progressive acts, reflecting a shared faith that if we create a moral universe, the environment will be repaired by a humanity united through a shared ethical commitment to the well-being of one another and of the earth.From our standpoint as spiritual progressives, a campaign to bring back the Sabbatical Year, the periodic forgiving of all debts, and the Jubilee is exciting because it challenges what counts as productivity, efficiency, and rationality in our society. The old bottom line of capitalist society defines these concepts in terms of the maximization of money. There’s no clearer way to see the ideological nature of contemporary economics than to recognize that there is no objective proof that maximizing money is efficient, rational, or productive—economists just accept that premise as a matter of faith. Some have argued that economists’ embrace of this premise is not a faith commitment, but rather a practical recognition of the alleged psychological truth that money is what most people “really want.” However, that is an unsubstantiated claim. If you ask random people to rank the priority they place on money, love, health, joyful relationships, world peace, the survival of the planet, a sense of purpose, and a fulfilling connection to the spiritual reality of the universe, you’ll find that money doesn’t usually win first place.“Wait,” you might challenge, “even if people value loving relationships and meaningful projects over money, this idea of a Sabbatical Year is never going to work. We need everyone doing what they are doing now in order for us to survive.”The fun part of this thought experiment is wrestling with this idea that all the work that’s being done is necessary for our survival. To assess whether that’s true, let’s divide the world of work into three categories:Observing the Sabbatical Year would create time for communities to discuss the coming six years, developing proposals on how to structure the economy, the operations of corporations, the education system, health care, the legal and social service systems, and all forms of governmental services and policies.Throughout the six years leading up to each Sabbatical Year, food would be canned, frozen, or otherwise preserved, to prepare for decreased food production during the Sabbatical Year. Volunteers of all ages would be invited to spend part of the Sabbatical Year working on farms to develop a less alienated relation to their food sources and contribute to the well-being of the society. During this time, all essential goods and services would be free and allocated as needed to everyone on the basis of their needs. Consumer goods would still be purchasable from large consumer stores, but there would be no profit-making.During the Sabbatical Year, some individuals would choose to explore new fields of work through training courses and volunteer work. Retirees and people who take so much joy in their work that they would choose to continue to do it during the Sabbatical Year could serve as mentors to these individuals. Voluntary adult and child education could be provided by responsible volunteers as well. Others would use their time to vacation, travel, read books, watch movies, play, relax, cook, garden, make love, and learn to play new instruments. I believe that plenty of people would volunteer to help each other with these projects because they love sharing what they know with others. Yet others would use this time for meditation and other forms of spiritual or religious practice. And it is my guess that many people would also use this time to learn to recognize each other as embodiments of the sacred and to try to develop the empathic and compassionate skills they need to be more loving and to generate more love from others!I know this vision sounds unrealistic, and I’m sure that you can think of all kinds of problems with this—but help me out. Let’s think through how we could make it work. Send me your soaring dreams and visions, as well as your practical ideas for baby steps we can start taking in this direction. I’ll try to paint an even fuller picture of this dream in a Tikkun issue a year or two from now, once I’ve had time to absorb all your objections and your good ideas. In the meantime, we can also digest and discuss the many approaches to debt and Jubilee offered in this issue of Tikkun.Even if we never implement the Sabbatical Year or the Jubilee, the act of thinking through these possibilities is worthwhile because it helps develop a new consciousness in our society. When we allow ourselves to think through what we would be willing to give up in order to have every seventh year off, we are one step closer to living in the joyous simplicity that is necessary to save the earth from being further ravaged by our excess consumption of the world’s remaining resources.When we allow ourselves to think in terms of eliminating all debts, we take a major step toward being able to think outside the box of contemporary capitalist thought. Many people believe that “socialism doesn’t work,” but we can tell them that this is not socialism—it is spiritual progressive biblical economics, without any religious requirements attached. It is a way of getting beyond an instrumentalizing way of looking at the world, at work, and at other human beings, so that we can see the beauty that surrounds us. It’s not a bad way to open up a discussion that most people are afraid to enter when it is presented in terms of capitalism and anti-capitalism. This is one way of thinking that a local chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives could help encourage. So join us as a dues-paying member at spirtualprogres-sives.org. Or come intern or volunteer with us at our office in Berkeley, California (more info at tikkun.org/interns). Put your money, your time, and your energy behind this kind of visionary thinking!

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