Torah Economics: A blueprint for the 21st century

Paradoxical as it might sound, the more humanity looks ahead at the enormous economic and ecological challenges of the 21st century, the more we need to draw from the well of the ancient story of our people for solutions and resolutions. Since we Jews have always been at the forefront of economic debates, after all, the leading capitalists were Jewish bankers (the original Rothchilds come to mind), alongside the leading thinker on communism and socialism (Marx), it would make sense to excavate the ancient biblical stories of our people to search for artifacts that might help launch a future that repairs the relationship between Adam and Adamah: human and humus, earthling and earth. Perhaps the wisdom of our own Torah can provide us with seeds to plant a healthy and modern economic system that is socially just, protects the planet, averts climate change disaster and provides for the basic needs of each and every human.

The economic system outlined in the Torah is based on such pro-social principles as care for the vulnerable and respect for the sacred. These principles are expressed in the concepts of shemitah (seventh year land sabbatical), tithing, leket shichicah and peah (leaving some of the harvest for the poor) and the Yovel or Jubilee, which is an economic reset button. All of these biblical mandates also address modern day economic and ecological concepts and concerns. 

The grand outline for how Israelites should treat the land was set forth in Leviticus, the book that most Bar Mitzvah age kids despair of because it seems so dry and dusty. But dig below the dust, and we find richness and depth that is waiting to be uncovered and recovered. In Leviticus 25:23, God spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai and said, "...FOR THE LAND IS MINE; for you are strangers and sojourners with me". God said the land is His. This has been misinterpreted by generations into a belief that God has given the land to humans and specifically the land of Israel to the Jewish people. But if we take seriously the injunction in Leviticus that the land belongs to God and if we understand it in the indigenous sense of the Native American tradition that the land is sacred then we can’t help but come to the conclusion that we cannot own the land because it is sacred. We cannot make profit off owning land. Property and the concept of private property is stealing the land from the original owner – from God.

It is a profound change in economics to see the land as sacred – belonging to the Holy One - rather than owned privately by humans. It shifts our understanding of the way property is bought, sold and managed. It is the antithesis of capitalism which centralizes the concept of private property – or capital - in the hands of an individual. French philosopher, Proudhon said that “property is theft.” Who are we stealing from? From God; God is the Landlord. And there are consequences to stealing from God. Consequences which we are seeing today as climate change becomes more acute. Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained it colorfully when he said:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people na?ve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.[1]”

In practical terms, this sacred approach to the land in Biblical times led to a system of shemitah in which the land rested and lay fallow every seven years.

For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in its produce. But in the seventh year, the land shall have a complete rest, a Sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field, you shall not prune your vineyard, nor shall you reap the aftergrowth of your harvest . . . And [the produce of] the Sabbath of the land shall be yours to eat for you, for your male and female servants, and for your hired worker and resident who live with you . . . (Leviticus 25:3–6)

Today we would call this practice “rewilding” and if we were to reinstate this concept we would be going a long way towards sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and alleviating climate change. Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. However, industrial farming is degrading the soil and killing the organic material that it contains. By allowing nature to reclaim the land every seventh year, we would be rejuvenating the soil and sequestering carbon which could alleviate some of the extremes of global warming. Scientists and farmers around the world are pointing out that we can regenerate degraded soils by switching from intensive industrial farming to more ecological methods – not just organic fertilizers, but also no-tillage, composting and crop rotation. As the soil recovers, it regains its capacity to hold CO2 and to actively pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. These methods are harmonious with the biblical shemitah concept.

Shemita was not just a rest for the land it was also a mechanism by which social and income inequality could be addressed. Reduction of income inequality – as measured by the Gini Index - is perhaps THE social justice issue of our time. Inequality is linked to almost every social issue known to humanity according to sociologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett whose research shows that “almost every social problem common in developed societies - reduced life expectancy, child mortality, drugs, crime, homicide rates, mental illness and obesity - has a single root cause: inequality”[2] and this brings us to another ancient biblical economic precept, which addresses income inequality: tithes.

Today, many churches practice tithing and Jews are known for giving tzedakah (charity); however, the third tithe was a distribution not left to the discretion of the individual but was a community project to which everybody had to contribute. The third tithe was the tithe for the poor, given only every third year to the Levite, sojourner, father-less, and the widow. (Deuteronomy 14:28, 29). To institute a modern day third tithe would be the equivalent of instating a Universal Basic Income. A Universal Basic Income is a sum of money that is paid to each and every citizen regardless of income level, regardless of employment history, without any strings attached. The UBI would provide a safety net or a floor below which no one could sink.

A UBI is in keeping with the tithe to the vulnerable in the Torah. Some people question how we would pay for such a project, however many economists have found creative answers to that question. One idea is to allocate a percentage of taxes on corporate earnings. Others suggest a tax on use of natural resources so that polluters of air and waterways would be forced to pay into a collective pool from which the UBI would then be distributed, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund disbursement that every citizen of Alaska receives for the extraction of oil from the land. In Namibia, the government experimented with giving a UBI to every citizen of one village for two years from 2008-2009 and the results were remarkable: childhood malnutrition declined, school dropout rates declined, and crime went down by 42%. At the same time entrepreneurial and activity and self employment went up by 300%[3]. The UBI is a game-changer and today there is a grassroots movement dedicated to promoting the UBI and even a longshot presidential candidate (Andrew Yang) running on this platform. It would be in keeping with our Jewish tradition if the leading Jewish institutions would embrace and endorse the instatement of a UBI as the third tithe provided by the community to all its citizens.

Another Biblical precept which would alleviate poverty and reduce income inequality but also address some of the other powerful injustices of capitalism is Leket peah u’shichecha

 “When you [plural] reap the harvest of your land, you [singular] shall not reap all the way to the corner of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger; I the Lord am your God. You shall not steal; you shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another.” (Leviticus 19:9-11)

Leket peah u’shichecha is the practice of the poor being allowed to glean from the corners of the fields of the more affluent and from the stalks that were dropped during the harvest. This is a forerunner of the later medieval practice of the poor being allowed to glean from a common area of land whether it was a pasture, a woods, a river or any other land commonly held by a town or village. Before capitalism there was an economic system based on a commons. The Commons guaranteed that the poor or vulnerable of a community would always be able to collect food and fuel thus creating a safety net that would ensure basic needs even for the most vulnerable. Gleaning can be seen as another word for “commoning,” which included social rules that dictated how the commons would be managed just as the halacha dictates social rules and sanctions if you didn’t abide by the rules. Some people still cite the misperception of the “tragedy of the commons” saying that inevitably people are self-interested and take more than they need. However, this has been debunked by economists, particularly by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom who proves that groups can avoid the tragedy of overusing the commons when working together with an awareness of the good of the group.

Israelites lost the economic system of Leket Peah and Shichacha – or the practice of commoning in the corners of the fields - when we lost the land of Israel during the Roman dispersion. If the modern-day State of Israel is ever to be a true beacon and light unto the nations, then how powerful it would be if Israel were to pioneer the new and ancient economic system that restores justice to the people and to the land by expanding and reinstating the Commons. And this is not any longer just an agricultural practice but one which applies to all forms of property: intellectual, and virtual too. We need to cease aggressively privatizing intellectual property, and instead allow entrepreneurs to glean from the collective intellectual DNA which should never be privatized; we must always allow a corner for others to build on and to survive on. Lewis Hyde explains the concept of the commons in his book Common as Air like this: a Commons is "....a promise that more than air can be like air, always there for the inhaling lung: infinite bandwidth, unlimited acorns and deer, all of literature instantly available on the computer screen, unfenced prairies stretching to an unknown ocean...there are psychological, spiritual and mythical elements of the 'commons."[4]

As mentioned above, the Shemitah year was a time in which the land lay fallow, but it was also a release for debtors.

 At the end of seven years you will make a release. And this is the manner of the release: to release the hand of every creditor from what he lent his friend; he shall not exact from his friend or his brother, because the time of the release for the Lord has arrived. (Deuteronomy 15:1–2)

The Shemitah year waives all outstanding debts between Jewish debtors and creditors. And in the Jubilee – the Yovel year - along with cancellation of debts, all landed property was returned to the original owners.

'You are also to count off seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years, so that you have the time of the seven sabbaths of years, namely, forty-nine years. 'You shall then sound a ram's horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land. 'You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

In our global neoliberal capitalist system, wealthier countries of the north have been extracting resources from the south for decades. Perhaps the most important step we can take today to make amends for colonization, to rebalance the inequality between the global north and the global south created by the neoliberal capitalist system is to establish a debt Jubilee which would abolish the debt burdens of developing countries. This move would roll back the power that rich countries exercise over poor countries and restore sovereign control over economic policy at the national level transforming the current system in which institutions like the IMF, The World Bank and the World Trade Organization control poorer and developing countries. If we released the debt burden on these countries, it would free them to spend more of their country resources on education, health care, and poverty reduction efforts. This would go so much further towards decolonization than current attempts at sending aid and development which always reeks of colonialism. It would liberate hundreds of millions of people. As Jason Hickel writes in his book The Divide “If we abolish the debts, nobody dies – the world will carry on spinning. Debts don’t have to be repaid and in fact they shouldn’t be repaid when doing so means widespread human suffering.”[5] We can call this debt relief in keeping with the decree of the Jubilee year, however, it is incumbent upon us to do this because the debt was never agreed to in the first place by those who suffer the most under it. The austerity measures imposed by the wealthy countries has been devastating to millions of people around the world. Abolishing debt would be the single most effective way of achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal no 1 – Reducing Poverty. 

The genius of the Jubilee concept was that it created a reset button. An individual or a nation can only accumulate capital a set number of years but not forever. The Jubilee thus levels the playing field every fifty years allowing those enslaved by debt to be released and to build their lives as free men and women. As the Torah says tzedek, tzedek tridof: justice, justice shalt thou pursue. By reinstating the ancient Israeli precepts of Shemita, Tithes, Leket Shcikcah upead and Yovel we are going far to rectify the injustices and to humans and to the planet created by our global capitalist system.

We are now experiencing what some are calling “late-stage capitalism.” Late-stage capitalism implies that this capitalist economic system is nearing its own end and accelerating its own demise. Late-stage capitalism is a term that refers not only to our economic systems but also to our western industrial society with its emphasis on consumerism and commodities, which fetishizes money for its own sake and not for the actual things it can buy. The term also challenges us to rethink the concept of work itself and the absence of meaningful jobs with the advent of the gig economy and the ever-increasing rise of automation. Gig economy jobs do not provide security, stability nor any possibility of advancement; and automation continues to replace humans in the job market. Returning to the precepts of our ancient economic system would go a long way to alleviating the impacts of late-stage capitalism.

According to Rabbi Arthur Waskow,[6] one of the most important aspects of Jewish tradition and practice is that time is seen as a spiral and not as a straight line progressing endlessly forward to triumph or oblivion as modernity views it. When time is understood as a straight line, yesterday becomes outdated and tomorrow always hints at a promise of improvement. Nor should time be seen as a circle like in fundamentalist societies, where time is understood to be spinning endlessly in the same groove and returning always to the same place in the past. But if we do as Rabbi Waskow suggests and see time as a spiral then we are always drawing on the past in order to move into the future. Thus, although we may be living in a much more complex time than our ancient forbears could have envisioned at the time of the Torah, the blueprint they created can help us do the work of tikkun, repair, as we continue to spiral into the future. 

[1] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. The Essential Rousseau: The Social Contract, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, The Creed of a Savoyard Priest. New York :New American Library, 1974. Print.

[2] Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.

[3] Scharmer, Otto and Kaeufer, Katrin. Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies. Barrett Koehler Publishers. 2013, p. 88. 

[4] Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. 2011, p. 24.

[5] Hickel, Jason. The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets. W. W. Norton and Co. 2018, p. 245.

[6] Waskow, Arthur Ocean and Berman, Phyllis Ocean. A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life-Spiral as a Spiritual Path. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2002.