by Rachel Adler
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Reform Voices of Torah)

"Proclaim release throughout the land . . .," says Leviticus 25:10. This is not exactly the translation engraved on the Liberty Bell. There, the word d'ror is translated as "liberty." D'ror is probably traceable to an ancient Akkadian verb darāru, like the Hebrew, dalet-reish-reish, meaning "'to move about freely,' referring in this instance to the freedom granted those bound by servitude" (see Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus JPS Torah Commentary Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989, p. 171). Relief from unendurable financial burdens is one of the features of the jubilee year, the fiftieth year following a cycle of seven times seven years.

For H, the holiness school writers, liberty and freedom require that a society live within an economic balance. The jubilee year is intended to prevent Israelites from becoming permanently enslaved after having exhausted all their collateral other than their very bodies and those of their children. It was all too easy for a small farmer to get into this state. Small farmers are likely to borrow against the profits of their harvest. If there is a drought or a crop disease, they cannot repay their debt and must contract another debt (see Gregory C. Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East [Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], p. 62). Excessive taxation and having to serve in military campaigns or labor corvees are other reasons why small landowners could go deeply into debt (Ibid, p. 123). Hence, every fiftieth year, the land is to revert to the way it was originally distributed when the Israelites entered the land. The dispossessed are to repossess ancestral holdings that were sold or mortgaged or seized. They are to return to their families and their clans and begin anew as God's tenants.

Just as the jubilee system was to prevent an extreme of poverty, it was also to prevent people from accumulating too much wealth. Land, which was a principal source of wealth in ancient Israel, could never be owned in perpetuity. God commands, "But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me" (Leviticus 25:23). There is a balance, then, for Israelites between regarding themselves as owners and natives of the land and continuing to see themselves as strangers dependent wholly upon God, just as they were as wanderers in the wilderness. You could think of this also as a balance between security and anxiety. The wealthy are never able to feel utterly comfortable. The alienation of being strangers is meant to abide in the depths of the soul.

From the testimony of the prophets, the wealthy seem not to have taken to heart the role of God's tenants. "Ah, those who add house to house and join field to field till there is room for none but you to dwell in the land!" thunders Isaiah (5:8). Amos condemns those who say, "'We will buy the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals'" (Amos 8:6). Micah accuses, "They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away. They defraud men of their homes, and people of their land" (Micah 2:2). In our own time, as hedge fund managers and bankers have devastated our economy and foreclosures are at an unprecedented high, the prophets do not sound so ancient.

In our own time, people can become destitute but they cannot be made debt-slaves. In ancient Israel, however, in years other than the jubilee, it was lawful to take as slaves Israelites who could not pay their debts. Leviticus 25 asks for a balance between the entitlement to hold debt-slaves and the ethical demand to treat the dispossessed as brothers rather than as chattel. "You shall not rule over them ruthlessly" (lo tirdeh bo b'farech); "you shall fear your God" (Leviticus 25:43). Rashi points out that this use of the term b'farech echoes Exodus 1:13-14, "The Egyptians ruthlessly imposed upon the Israelites (Vayaavidu Mitzrayim et B'nai Yisrael b'farech)--the various labors that they made them perform" (Rashi on Exodus 1:13). Other Israelites are not yours to hold as possessions: "For they are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt (Leviticus 25:42). Israelites must be free, because only free people can serve God.   

The land itself must be accorded a balance between productivity and rest. Leviticus 25 sees both the sabbatical year and the jubilee year as times for the land to rest and replenish itself. Years of intensive irrigation, as was common in ancient Near Eastern agriculture, left concentrations of alkaline minerals, such as sodium, in the soil. Letting the land lie fallow corrected the imbalance. Land that had a sabbatical year was more productive afterwards (see Baruch A. Levine "Excursus 10," Leviticus JPS Torah Commentary [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989], p. 272).

There is a population even Leviticus 25 does not see clearly--the non-Israelite chattel slaves who may be owned without a time limit. They do not have to be treated like brothers. Nevertheless, they have entitlements in ancient Israel that they would not have in other societies. They have a day of rest on which they do not labor (Exodus 20:10); if they are maimed by the master, they go free (Exodus 21:26-27); if the master kills one of them, he is executed (Exodus 21:20, see Rashi ad loc). Finally, restoring a runaway slave to his owner is prohibited (Deuteronomy 23:16-17) (see Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East, pp.144-185).

Leviticus 25 asks us to balance the human desire to have more and consume more against the ethical demand to consider the impact of our power and appetite for "more" on those from whom we are taking. Perhaps a jubilee year is not the answer. W. Gunther Plaut doubts that the jubilee year was ever practiced (The Torah: A Modern Commentary, rev. ed. [New York, URJ Press, 2005], pp. 856-857). But we should learn from the model of the jubilee year to make some economic arrangements that reign in our desires for more, to look around and see at whose expense we have had our fill. There are still people who could qualify as slaves in some parts of the world: children used in cocoa production, people taken as sex slaves, child soldiers, and prison laborers. And there are still sweatshops in parts of the global economy. It is still time to "Proclaim release throughout the land."

Rachel Adler is professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles. She was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into the interpretation of Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics. She is the author of Engendering Judaism, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought, and many articles.

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