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Back to Question of the Week Q: What does the Talmud say about the Jubilee? Is Jubilee still practiced anywhere? Dennis |
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A: And, for those of us who have forgotten, what is Jubilee, exactly? The Jubilee, in Hebrew the yovel, is described in Chapter 25 of Leviticus as a cyclical return of all Israelites to possession of their ancestral property. Since the land ultimately belonged to God, and God had ordained a certain distribution of land among the tribes and their families, no permanent sale of land was allowable. Rather, the "sale" of land amounted only to the sale of the use of the land until the next Jubilee year. Every 50 years (or according to some interpretations every 49), a shofar was sounded throughout the land, and the people would "proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof" (Leviticus 25:10). The economic clock was reset at an egalitarian state, and the process of accumulation and impoverishment started again. At least that's how it worked in theory. We don't know for sure how long the Jubilee was practiced, if at all. We do know that it wasn't practiced in the time of the Second Temple (6th century B.C.E.-1st century C.E.) The rabbinic tradition derived from the phrase "unto all the inhabitants" quoted above, that as soon as the first tribes of Israel were displaced from their land, "all the inhabitants" were no longer available, and the Jubilee was no longer in force. The first tribes to be uprooted from their land were the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and part of the tribe of Menasheh, who were conquered and exiled in the mid-ninth century B.C.E. Jubilee has not been practiced since. As to the first part of the question, the Talmud doesn't say very much at all about Jubilee, nor indeed about most of the agricultural laws that apply only to the land of Israel. (When people say "Talmud," they usually mean the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud does have a bit more on Jubilee in the Tractate called "Shevi'it," dealing with the laws of the sabbatical year and Jubilee.) I have often wondered what the modern equivalent of a Jubilee would be. It seems such an interesting compromise between, on the one hand, the 'freedom' and efficiency of competition and markets, and, on the other, the sorts of human rights that various socialist and egalitarian movements have argued for. Would a Jubilee in an economy based on capital consist of an equal distribution of stocks every 50 years? The rabbinic tradition, it seems to me, cautions against such facile dreaming. For the restoration embodied in the Jubilee to make sense, say the rabbis, it must be a restoration of a divinely-ordained, perfect starting point. In an imperfect world, such as the one we have lived in (at least) since the exile of Reuben, Gad, and half of Menasheh, we can't rely on God to provide a means to produce and distribute wealth in a just, efficient fashion, and in a way that preserves the dignity and human rights of all people. (A task we certainly have not accomplished yet!) We'll have to figure it out amongst ourselves. written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz |
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