Jubilee for the Soul

Is Life a Gift or a Debt?

We do not continue [our ancestors’ stories]; we act upon them. We consecrate and we plunder.

Menachem Kaiser, Plunder

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 (achuzato) and each of you shall return to your family (mishpachto). 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. (Leviticus 24:10-12)

If your kin, being in straits, come under your authority, and are held by you as though resident aliens, let them live by your side: do not exact advance or accrued interest, but fear your God. Let your kin live by your side as such. Do not lend your money at advance interest, nor give your food at accrued interest. (Leviticus 25: 36-37)

To read of the commandment to keep the Jubilee is to experience cognitive dissonance. We do not live in a world in which debts are forgiven every fifty years. Nor do we live in a world in which we can say with any certainty or consensus that we have a natural holding (achuza) to which we can return. One premise of Jubilee is that certain things which belong to us are inalienable. The land of Shimon will always be the land of Shimon. Since Shimon does not own his land through merit, but through inheritance or gifting, it is not really his to give away. Shimon can self-alienate for a time, but not forever.

In the world as we experience it, however, we can self-alienate for much longer than fifty years, and lineage is far more complicated and contested than what the results of a 23andMe can reveal. Ownership claims are more a function of “nurture” than “nature.” The cop-out from the commandment to jubilee is to say that we can’t keep it so long as we don’t live in the land of Israel. But the deeper reason for Jubilee’s impracticality is that we do not live in a world where people know, accept, and agree upon their place in the world. What, in fact, is an ancestral home? What, in fact, is a holding? And once much time has passed, it can seem just as unjust to remove the current occupants of a place as to let them stay. This is one of the many themes explored in my friend Menachem Kaiser’s astounding memoir about his journey to lay claim to a family building owned in Poland before the Holocaust all but obliterated them.

Another commandment that reads with a certain level of irony and dissociation is the ban on charging interest. By the time of the middle ages, the sages had already worked how to justify complex financial interactions without running afoul of the Biblical command. Yet, on their face, these practical work-arounds, necessary for a thriving, complex economy, require a certain amount of alienation and self-alienation. The level of abstraction needed to sell different tranches of (someone else’s) debt, for example, seems to fly against the spirit of some of the laws in our parasha. Both the institution of Jubilee and the ban on interest are scarcely implemented. We are torn between an ideal to which they point and a reality that would collapse under their idealistic pressure.

At the same time, the law has something to teach, and it can’t just be the paradoxical point: “Don’t self-alienate even as you self-alienate. Don’t lose your connection to land even as you engage in commerce and civilization building. Don’t abandon familial legacy even as urban life pushes you towards atomization.” Perhaps the law instructs us at the level of consciousness, if not always at the level of policy: what looks like merit is often predicated on something deeper, something like a gift. What looks like invention is often just discovery. The restoration of achuza (one’s natural holding), in theory or in practice, means that something like the assigned, the unchosen, does have—and at times, should have—a hold on us. Not everything is transactional.

It’s unfashionable to insist that some things, indeed, the greatest things make demands on us, whether or not we choose them, but that seems to be a core lesson of Jubilee. You can’t consent to giving away your holding. Yet we do consent to this all the time. What happens, then? Metaphorically, Jubilee is a powerful idea. No matter how much we deface or warp ourselves, we always have some hidden truth, some pintele yid, some pure soul, to which we can return. If Jubilee doesn’t operate at the level of property law, it does operate at the level of personal psychology.

In German, the word for authenticity is Eigentlichkeit, self-owning. One can change one’s habits, one’s friends, one’s location, and many other things, but one cannot change the self that is doing the changing. In this sense, we always have an achuza, a holding, in ourselves, no matter what. Jubilee is a day of mass liberation. It’s also an idea we can cultivate in our day to day lives when we realize that some part of ourselves does not need to earn love, but simply is loved. On the other hand, the Jubilee occurs rarely, because a permanent one would de-motivate. The ratio of 49:1 or 7 squared to 1 suggests that we need both ambition and forgiveness, work ethic and debt relief, merit-based competition and unconditional love.

Some will bemoan the lack of Jubilee in our time. Others will imagine it as part of a messianic future to come. But a third way, which doesn’t negate these possibilities, is that Jubilee is a kind of hidden transcript or subtle teaching about finding personal and interpersonal release in a world that is demanding.

The ethic of a post-Edenic life is “by the sweat of your brow shall you labor.” But Jubilee is a kind of collective experience of a return to Eden, to a natural holding, to a sense of life as gift rather than life as debt, which we also need.

Nietzsche notes that moral language is often economic in its root. The word for guilt comes from what we owe. Owing can be a motivator. Some moral saints walk around with a constant sense of “what do I owe?” But owing is the moral pyschologist’s floor, not the ceiling. Those who are gifted, but not indebted, will be motivated to give rather than repay. Religion, especially Judaism, is often anchored in chiyuv, obligation (“liability” on the balance sheet). But Jubilee teaches us to imagine a world in which it might be anchored in n’diva, devotion of the heart. Chiyuv grounds us, N’diva reminds us to look up.

For the sake of simplicity, we might say that we can take two views of our life—one that sees us as primarily in the red, the other as primarily in the green. Countless thinkers can be categorized accordingly. Luther: red; Rousseau: green. But with the law of Jubilee, we may say something more nuanced. Metaphysically, our liabilities are only apparent; practically and ethically, we must acknowledge them as real.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

P.S.—Happy to share my podcast conversation with Matt Levine, author of Money Stuff.

Also, Caleb Ontiveros interviews me on Stoicism, Heraclitus, Judaism, and more, for the Stoa. And here are Some ruminations on Lag B’Omer