Juneteenth and a New Jubilee

• 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the last class I taught in a year-long Jewish studies course for 8th and 9th graders. I felt like the learning we did and what the students got out of it was striking and worth sharing about. Yet, I waited to share because I didn’t see how it was relevant to what our country is experiencing (and it feels disrespectful to be irreverent in that way) – until now. On June 19th, the anniversary of the union army’s 1865 proclamation that all slaves in Texas were free, this topic is particularly pertinent. I’ll share our learning and then why it matters. 

After a year of “indoctrinating” my students into my particular brand of Judaism – getting advice from trees on Tu b’Shvat (“Jewish Arbor Day”), dreamwork when discussing the story of Jacob, and fire meditation for Lag b’Omer – we covered what might be the most radical Torah portion, which has the most incredible relevance to our current epoch. At our last class, which focused on the revelation Moses received on Mount Sinai, we looked closely at the incredibly profound message of the passages Behar and Behukotai. In this Torah portion, the practice of shmita is introduced. Shmita is like a 7-year sabbath: not only should individuals work for 6 days and then rest every 7 days, but they are also supposed to work the land every 6 years and then let the land rest on the 7th year. No sowing seeds – a break from domination. Additionally, in this 7th year, all debts are released. 

Incidentally, I had noticed some conversation in our media recently about this practice. On March 21, economics professor and author of “… and forgive them their debts” Michael Hudson advocated in the Washington Post for a  “debt write-down” as a way to keep our economy afloat. In the first weeks of coronavirus quarantine, he suggested that the “outbreak is serving as a mind-expansion exercise, making hitherto unthinkable solutions thinkable. Debts that can’t be paid won’t be. A debt jubilee may be the best way out”. Just a few weeks after Hudson, John Nichols wrote in The Nation about the UK-based Jubilee Debt Campaign which demands the immediate cancellation of debt payments for the poorest countries, which would “free up resources to tackle the urgent health, social and economic crises resulting from the Covid-19 global pandemic”. While jubilee – which we will come to in a moment – is a different phenomenon from shmita in the bible, it makes sense that these authors use an English term (rather than a Hebrew one) in our current context. 

Now, while the bible offers shmita as a model of debt release every 7 years, the jubilee (yovel in Hebrew) is actually supposed to occur every 7×7 years, meaning every 50th. During this time, ancestral holdings of land are returned. And slaves are set free. Not to rationalize the slavery of the time (from our modern moral vantage point, any slavery = bad), but it was somewhat different than the slavery that existed in the Americas over the last half a millennium. The slavery mentioned in the Torah is not a chattel slavery based on white supremacy and generational trauma. Rather, the text goes into detail as to how slaves could free themselves; could pay for their redemption. If they did not free themselves, however, “if he has not been redeemed in any of those ways,” it says in Leviticus 25: 54, “he and his children with him shall go free in the jubilee year”. Every fifty years, social relations with various levels of inequality would return to 0, to the beginning again. Starting fresh.

This year, Juneteenth’s celebration of liberation feels even more strikingly pertinent, as we as a country reckon with the legacy of slavery and centuries of inequality made manifest particularly by the police system’s inequitable meting out of justice. After 500 years of slavery on this continent, the generational wealth gap between whites and blacks reverberates in all types of ways. Whereas the slavery of ancient times was likely pretty gruesome in some ways, a returning of land and liberation every 50 years ensured that no one could be so exceptionally wealthy to the detriment of others. This was a stop gap of the 1%. Perhaps it is time to return to this ancient effort to equalize. 

And yet the laws of shmita and yovel – which we might depict in this present time as one phenomenon of Jubilee – are not all that is read one Shabbat morning by Jews across the world in this paired parshah (this year, it was about a month ago). The second, perhaps even more striking, Torah portion that comes on the heels of Behar is Behukotai. Here, Moses relayed: “if you follow [G-d’s] laws, [He] will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit”. In other words, fertility and abundance and peace occur. HOWEVER, if you reject and spurn G-d’s rules and break the covenant, “your strength shall be spent to no purpose. Your land shall not yield its produce, nor shall the trees of the land yield their fruit”. 

Importantly, it is spelled out in the next line that: “Then shall the land make up for its sabbath years throughout the time that it is desolate […]; then shall the land rest and make up for its sabbath years.” I started to inquire into this concept since our coronavirus quarantine time began. As a world community, we have been in constant overdrive to produce, reap, and sow; never resting or letting our land rest. Since we have all been forced to dwell indoors, it has been pervasive in news stories worldwide that the land has been getting a chance to regenerate; and, hopefully, we have rested in our communities, as well. 

I call this “Jewish karma” – not to connote that there is a divine tally of reward and punishment, but that our heritage which is derived out of agricultural seasons and cyclical rhythms points to a need for alignment with these rhythms. When we are sufficiently out of alignment, I believe, the earth shakes us back into place.

I shared this possibility with my students, unsure if they would get the punchline. Thankfully, it really resonated. They certainly got that the Torah, which perhaps all year was somewhat removed from their lives, has ancient wisdom for modern times. Most importantly, this class drove home the specific realization that our pandemic might have more method than the apparent madness; maybe there is meaning to discover in tough times, and our traditions can help to uncover it.

The earth may be shaking us into alignment with its needs; but there is more work to be done for us to re-align with each other. As my students discovered, our ancient wisdom has modern relevance. Technologies of time which liberate people, land, and resources are not unprecedented. After weeks of protest in response to militaristic racialized violence, it seems that it is not only the coronavirus which, as Hudson wrote, makes “hitherto unthinkable solutions thinkable”. The zeitgeist of our time has opened up possibility and there is work to be done – perhaps so that, one day, our work will be complete and we can finally rest.