The Jubilee and Henry George

As our Orthodox friends point out relentlessly, there are 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah from God that we are obligated to perform. Some of these commandments seem straight forward: Thou Shalt Not Steal, for instance. As simple to understand as this commandment is, if we start to think about exactly what constitutes theft the subject can become very complicated.

Just think about copyright law. If something is under copyright and we use if without permission, is that stealing if we don’t take possession of it? Is use alone theft? If the copyright has expired, are we allowed to use the thing without acknowledging the source even if we have no financial obligation? The idea of theft implied the idea of property and so we cannot properly understand what theft is unless we can define what property is and what rights the property holder has and doesn’t have in relation to their property.

In this week’s first Torah portion Behar we have the mitzvah of observing the Jubilee year and the special obligations of that year. The verses on the Jubilee are these (Levitcus 25:8-17):

“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years.

Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.

That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, neither shall you reap the aftergrowth or harvest the untrimmed vines, for it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you: you may only eat the growth direct from the field.

In this year of jubilee, each of you shall return to your holding.

When you sell property to your neighbor, or buy any from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another.

In buying from your neighbor, you shall deduct only for the number of years since the jubilee; and in selling to you, that person shall charge you only for the remaining crop years: the more such years, the higher the price you pay; the fewer such years, the lower the price; for what is being sold to you is a number of harvests.

Do not wrong one another, but fear your God; for I יהוה am your God.”

The Torah does not rank the mitzvot by importance. The rabbis of the Talmud make it clear that we cannot know the relative importance of one Mitzvah or another.

I would say that the importance of a Mitzvah is in the timely observance of the Mitzvah. A Mitzvah done at the moment when the effects of the Mitzvah are most beneficial seems to me more important than a Mitzvah done merely to fulfill a commandment, regardless of how profound the Mitzvah might seem to be to us. However, there is a hint, at least, of God’s concern that we would fail to observe certain Mitzvot. Perhaps this is because those Mitzvot are more important than others.

But there is another concern that might have motivated God more than relative importance. Perhaps God realizes that certain Mitzvot will be more challenging for us to commit to. These Mitzvot are followed by the phrase: “I יהוה am your God.” The Mitzvah of the Jubilee year is followed by a special expanded version of this formula that is not seen elsewhere in Torah: “Do not wrong one another, but fear your God; for I יהוה am your God.” The Jubilee is a big deal to God.

In modern times, the San Francisco philosopher Henry George based his redistributive philosophy on the law of the Jubilee. George believed that property holding leads to economic inequality. (Adam Smith, struggled and ultimately failed to provide a logical rationale for the prices of rent. This failure points to the disconnect between fair value and the amounts that land holders charge for the use of land and the fact this is one of the most powerful engines generating inequality.) His economic philosophy was that, “people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.” 

George’s belief that land should be owned in common shares a notion that is common in primitive societies and among Native Americans. In ancient Israel the notion of common ownership of the land is different. The actual owner of the land is God, who tells the Israelites, “the land is mine, you are but strangers resident with me.” (Lev. 25:23) Land tenure, if not ultimate ownership, is distributed to the tribes who each have holdings. Within the tribes families are assigned specific holdings within the larger tribal holding.

In verse 25:10 we have the famous quote that is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, “You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.” On the bell, the word release is written “liberty.” Liberty is a powerful word in the American imagination. It implies all of the various liberties that comprise what we view as freedom. When we look at this verse as Americans, we read American ideas about freedom into the biblical text in ways that the verse did not entirely mean. What the release/liberty consisted of was the freeing of those Israelites from a slavery that their poverty forced them to sell themselves as slaves to resolve, and the return of all of the Israelites to their ancestral land-holdings with their rights to their use restored. 

We may want the Jubilee year to be our model for social justice in the United States, but the Biblical version of the Jubilee year is more limited than that ideal. Although each family in each tribe had their holding, the holdings themselves were not equal. The amount of land that each tribe got was not equal, nor were the sizes of the tribes. The quality and the resources available in different parts of the land varied, as did the efforts needed to defend that land. God said that the Israelites would not need to worry about how they would survive in the Sabbatical years when there would be no agricultural production, but not in the Jubilee year which was a second Sabbatical year in a row. God also said that if the Israelites followed God’s laws, the land would provide for them. Nevertheless, a certain inequality based on land tenure was inevitable. The inevitable inequities of the natural world always help some more than others. Even Torah believes that the poor will always be among us. Also, all that the Israelites gained in the Sabbatical year applied only to the Israelites and not to other peoples who lived as slaves in the Land of Israel. 

While the Biblical description of the Jubilee year is inspiring, we can do better. Henry George answered the question of how to adapt the Biblical vision into the world beyond the Land of Israel and its particular conditions. His answer demanded a revolutionary redefinition of property rights and is unlikely to be adopted in the United States any time soon. Libertarianism, without any element of social responsibility, has infected too many of the minds of our fellow citizens.

However, if we consider the idea that those who fulfill only the letter of the law and no more are scoundrels, a very Jewish idea, we can build a program for a just social with equal rights and fairly demanded responsibilities up from the bones of the Mitzvah of the Jubilee year. We should quote our source and move past its limits. In this we should not be overly proud of our sacred inheritance and focus instead on our sacred obligations. We must not wrong one another, but fear God; for God יהוה is our God.