Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/20/)
If we are going to demand just and fair debt relationships no longer hijacked by power plays, perhaps we need to instill in our systems and ourselves an understanding of childhood and adult development and build toward a capacity for perspective-taking.
Economic forms of Jim Crow continue to exist throughout the credit industry today. A modern call for Jubilee would seek to level the racial playing field.
Once we expand the definition of debt beyond material considerations, the idea of Jubilee becomes more than just debt cancellation—it becomes a broader push to institutionalize the fulfillment of our debts to humanity and Mother Earth.
What would it mean to take seriously the Torah’s call for the cancellation of all debts and the equal redistribution of property every fifty years?
You evaded the fire-storm, reaching the shore / Of the New World long before, so nothing / To speak of has shaken you more than the rage / In my father’s voice or my brother’s infant fist / Shattering a pane of the china closet, leaving you / Unharmed (the shards swept away, the glass / Replaced in a day).
Jubilee was God’s alternative to empire, to Wall Street, and to the patterns of injustice. Let’s commit wild and joyful acts of Jubilee every day.
How might we update the Bible’s call for the periodic redistribution of wealth? Could we use estate taxes to create a trust fund for every child?
A campaign to reinstitute the Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in industrial societies could fundamentally transform the global capitalist system.
Why is the Education Department not treating the exponentially increasing student loan debt and astonishingly high default rates as a national crisis?
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Many thanks for yet another inspiring and stimulating magazine, for Winter 2015.
I believe it’s time to develop an African American hermeneutic for approaching disability language and metaphors of brokenness in religious discourse.
Considering our society from a disability perspective forces the question of why we seem so bent on forging a society in which so many are marginalized, stigmatized, or deemed somehow unworthy.
Long before Judaism and Christianity entered the world, ancient peoples celebrated the waning of the sun as winter deepened by creating celebrations of light and ceremonies to encourage the sun to return. Jews and Christians took this spirit of hopefulness and applied it to social, economic, and political contexts. Chanukah originated to celebrate the victory of a small group of people in Judea who rose up to overthrow the power of the Seleucid empire (one of the remnants of Alexander the Great’s Greek empire). Christmas originated to celebrate the vision of a small infant born in the most modest and powerless of circumstances—an infant who was to bring tidings of peace and the triumph of the powerless, who were suffering under the rule of the arrogant Roman empire that dominated Judea at that time. Sadly for humanity, the revolutionary visions behind these two holidays did not translate into a lasting victory over suffering and domination: the Hasmonean dynasty that took root in Judea after the Maccabean victory over the Seleucids became yet another corrupt ruling force, and those who inherited the Christian message twisted it to justify Western imperialism, the oppression of Jews, and the burning alive of women deemed too powerful and outspoken (alleged “witches”).
“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Who shall live and who shall die, who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by Roman soldier and who by cancer…”
“No, that’s not how it goes,” I wearily chided myself from my hospital bed. I knew I was making up my own words. But alone in the wee hours of the morning, as the High Holidays approached, that was the best rendition of the Unetanah Tokef (the central prayer of the High Holiday service) that I could muster. And my brother Jeffrey later told me that spending the eve of Yom Kippur with me in the hospital was the most meaningful Yom Kippur of his life.