Because the Hebrew Scriptures are rooted in a landed community
that had to deal with the everyday issues of food and money, they
describe in considerable detail what might be called a path of
"holy economics." At one level, there is the
transformational vision of Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15: Every
seventh year, debtors were released from their debts and the land
itself was released from human control, so that it could make its
own Sabbath rest for an entire year.
And in the 50th year (seven times seven plus one), a Jubilee
was to be proclaimed: The land should lie restful for yet another
year, while every family returned to the equal share of the land
it had been assigned when the people of Israel first came into
the Promised Land. Thus the rich were to be released from the
extra land they had acquired, the poor were to be released from
their landless status, even indentured servants, no matter where
they stood in their own seven-year term of service or a life-long
obligation, were to be released to return to their original
family landholding. (This "release"—in Hebrew, dror—is
what is encoded on the Liberty Bell: "Proclaim liberty [dror]
throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.")
But what about the time between transformations, between
sabbatical years and Jubilees? As we lead our
"ordinary" lives today, we certainly need to look at
the Bible's notion of ordinary economic history as well as the
times of transformation.
At first glance, it seems like six years of free enterprise.
For six years at a stretch, the land could be worked and the land
could be bought. Some could get poor enough to need to borrow
money, some could get rich enough to lend it. For 49 years at a
time, some could get rich enough to hold a great deal of land and
to supervise a large number of indentured workers.
Even during these ordinary years, there were two socioeconomic
requirements that set limits to poverty and wealth: Everyone was
entitled to work, and everyone was both entitled and obligated to
rest.
Honoring Work, Promoting Equality
How did the Bible provide that everyone was entitled to work?
Says Leviticus 19:9-10: "When you reap the harvest of your
land, you shall not complete the harvest in the corners of your
field, nor shall you gather the gleaning of your harvest...or of
your vineyard. ... You shall leave them for the poor and the
foreigner; I am YHWH your God!"
And indeed in the book of Ruth we find this command carried
out. Two penniless widows, one a foreigner from a despised
community—the Moabites—arrived in Israelite society.
The foreigner, Ruth, was welcomed onto the fields of Boaz, where
she gleaned what the regular harvesters had left behind. Boaz
knew that even this despised foreigner was entitled to a decent
job at decent pay. And the work she did was not menial or
undignified; it was exactly the kind of work that most people did
in the world of ancient Israel.
Boaz acted with great generosity, but he was not free to act
ungenerously. It was the law of his society, not his private
generosity alone, that guaranteed Ruth a place in gleaning his
crops. Everyone—not only one extraordinary woman—had
the right simply to walk onto a field and begin to work for a
decent income, begin to use the means of production of that era.
Notice that Boaz could not order his regular workers to be
economically "efficient." They could not harvest
everything, not what grew in the corners of the field, not what
they missed on the first time around. Social compassion was more
important than efficiency. No downsizing allowed.
When Ruth went one night to the barn where the barley crop was
being threshed, Boaz spent the night with her and decided to
marry her. With him the penniless foreigner became the
great-great-great-grandmother of King David, and therefore (in
both Jewish and Christian traditions) the ancestor of the
Messiah.
IF RUTH CAME TO America today, what would happen? Would she be
admitted at the border? Would she have to show a "green
card" before she could get a job gleaning at any farm,
restaurant, or hospital? Would she face contempt because she
spent a night with Boaz on the threshing floor?
Through the book of Ruth, the Bible affirms that in a decent
society everyone is entitled to decent work for a decent income.
Everyone—even, or especially, a despised immigrant.
Everyone—not just 95 percent of the people.
Ruth was entitled not only to a job, but to respect. Boaz
reminded his workers: No name-calling, no sexual harassment.
And she, as well as Boaz, was entitled to Sabbath: time off
for rest, reflection, celebration, love. She was entitled to
"be" as well as to "do."
How do we know that Ruth was entitled to rest, as well as to
work at a living wage? In both the places where the Ten
Commandments of Sinai are recited (Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy
5:12-15), it is made clear that the whole family, all servants,
and "the foreigner within your gates" are all to rest
one day of every seven. In the second recitation, the Bible
explicitly says that the reason for this Sabbath rest is to
remember what it was like to be a slave in Mitzraiim (the Hebrew
word for Egypt means, more generally, "the tight and narrow
place"), where it was never possible to rest.
Yet America today sneers at immigrants; blames the poor for
their poverty; keeps at least 5 percent of its people officially
unemployed, and in fact far more (prisoners and those who have
given up on ever finding a job, for example); dumps many, many
more from jobs long held into jobs far beneath their abilities
for the sake of "efficient" management; subjects others
to exhausting overwork that leaves no time for rest, reflection,
celebration, family, love, community—and drives them to
alcohol or television to relax. In that America—this
America—what is the obligation of those who, like Boaz, are
well-off?
BECAUSE RUTH and Boaz, the outcast and the solid citizen, got
together, they could bring Messiah into the world—the
transformation that brings peace and justice. What does that
teach us today?
It teaches us to make sure that every human being can find
decent work and be decently paid for it. To make sure that every
human being has time for calm and reflective rest, time to live
in the midst of a loving family and community. Only through a
rhythm of worthy work and reflective rest do human beings grow
into moral and ethical people.
For individuals to be ethically responsible, their society as
a whole must be ethically responsible. We create an irresponsible
society if we tell individuals they are responsible for
themselves—and then deny them the jobs, the decent incomes,
and the time for rest and renewal that we all need in order to be
responsible human beings.
No one offered Ruth a pile of food, free for the taking. She
was both entitled and obligated to glean the food, even though
she did not own the land on which it grew. That was
responsibility.
Restful renewal is also an aspect of responsibility. Ruth,
like every other citizen or foreigner, like every worker, even
the earth itself and all its life forms, was entitled and
obligated to rest on the Sabbath. Time to repose and reflect,
time for family, community, and citizenship.
But today we keep millions of our people unemployed, and force
others to be overworked. For millions, no gleaning. For millions,
no Sabbath.
The point is not to go back to the failed policy of a
"welfare" system focused on preventing the poor from
either working or resting. That system failed because there were
no jobs and no support for the places where people can rest and
reflect on their lives and themselves—neighborhoods,
families, religious congregations, grassroots politics, picnics,
folk festivals, forests.
HOW DO WE PROVIDE jobs and rest for all? There is a great deal
of honorable work that American society needs to get done, but
has committed few resources for the doing:
- The physical work of replacing rotting sewers, creating
effective mass transit, cleaning up chemical dumps, and
replacing factory-size, alienating schools with schools
built on a human scale for human interconnection.
- The person-to-person work of human interchange and
learning done by teachers and teachers' aides, child-care
workers, paramedics, and recreation leaders.
Universal employment can be achieved without creating swollen
bureaucracies. For instance, new grassroots enterprises can lend
investment capital and supply expert advice to new businesses
owned and operated by the poor.
Increasing the number of jobs is only half the task, for the
sharing of rest by everyone is just as crucial as the sharing of
jobs. A reduction of work hours could be accomplished in several
different ways:
- Set as a new standard, for example, a 30-hour work week
with little or no reduction in pay (a proposal put forth
by Jeremy Rifkin).
- Require that employers provide all workers with a certain
number of paid leave hours every week to invest in
community service and family support, just as many
businesses now provide their executives with paid leave
time to serve on university or museum boards and the
like.
- Pay large numbers of workers to spend years in
self-enrichment through education, as America did in the
1940s when it had far less wealth, by providing millions
of veterans with the GI Bill.
- Allow (or even require) everyone to take a paid non-work
true sabbatical year, supported by Social Security
pension funds, sometime between their 40th and 50th
birthdays.
- Shut down the entire "work economy" for perhaps
one day a month, one week a year, or for the official
holidays that are now venues for frenzied sales and
purchases. Instead, for that period of time, strongly
encourage neighborhood festivals, local family outings,
and similar celebrations. (The shutdown should include
gasoline stations, airlines, television; life support
services would of course be exempt.)
- Require all businesses to provide time for teams of
workers to reassess the role of their work in their
company's production, and the role of their company and
its products in the world at large.
- Provide college scholarships in amounts and numbers
proportional to those in the post-World War II GI Bill.
- Give tax rebates to people who give volunteer time to
civic organizations (another Rifkin proposal).
- Require periodic "rest periods" (moratoria) on
the introduction of new products that may have a massive
impact on the environment, setting aside time for
environmental impact assessments to be made and
published.
- Require periodic "rest periods" (moratoria) on
technological research and development, except that
focused directly on the cure of lethal diseases, while
scientists and engineers join in an examination of the
ethical and environmental impact of various technologies
and reassess which directions are likely to be the most
nurturing and the least damaging.
- Set aside each year a focused week of reflective
discussion in town meetings and in all media of one major
institutional structure of American society, to assess
the impact of that structure on the well-being of
individuals, society, and the Earth.
- Put the sabbatical year itself into full observance,
going the whole biblical distance (as Michael Lerner has
suggested).
If we did all this, Ruth the Moabite could make a decent life
in America. And then, who knows? She and Boaz, and all of us
together, might be able to give birth to a Messianic era.
When this article appeared, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader
of the movement for Jewish renewal and the author of Godwrestling—Round
2: Ancient Wisdom, Future Paths, traveled widely with his
wife, Phyllis Berman, to speak, lead religious services, and do
Bible-based storytelling.
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Waskow, Arthur
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