Freedom and Equality
In his book Moral Tribes, Joshua Green asks us to imagine four very different groups of people, each living at a different edge of a giant forest.1Joshua Green, Moral Tribes (London: Atlantic Books, 2014), 1–3.
They have limited contact with one another and each has its own way of running its affairs.
To the north of the forest is a tribe where each family has its own plot of land, surrounded by a fence. The plots vary greatly in size and productivity, partly because some families are wiser and more industrious than others and have thus been able to buy land from their less prosperous neighbours. Some families are poor because they have worked less hard or less wisely, others because of plain bad luck. There are vast differences in wealth. The council of elders of the tribe ensures that people keep their promises and respect one another’s property, but beyond that they do little. The result is that some members of the tribe die each winter for lack of food or warmth. But the tribe as a whole prospers.
To the south, there is a tribe where people share their land and animals, as well as the fruits of their labours. The council of elders manages the fields and flocks and is kept very busy. There are frequent complaints that various members of the tribe are lazy or careless and do not carry their fair share of the common load. Most, however, work hard, moved by community spirit or by fear of their neighbours’ criticism. The tribe is, as a whole, less prosperous than their counterparts in the north, but they survive, and no one has ever died for lack of food or warmth.
These are, of course, two extreme ways of structuring a society (the two others in Green’s fable are intermediate options), and they are deeply incompatible with one another. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out,2Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). the great ideals are not necessarily capable of being realised simultaneously. We value freedom and cherish equality, but it does not follow that we can have both. Green’s parable of the tribes shows us schematically how they work out. The northerners have much freedom but little equality. The southerners have much equality but little freedom. That is the classic choice between a free market economy and a communist or socialist state.
I argued in the previous essay, though, that Torat Kohanim, the priestly voice that dominates the book of Leviticus, has a novel way of dealing with contradiction. Freedom and equality are both fundamental values. The fact that they cannot be realised simultaneously does not mean that they cannot be realised sequentially. This is precisely what the social legislation of Parashat Behar does. It sets out a programme that combines liberty with equality by introducing periodic corrections to the market every seventh and fiftieth year.
Leviticus 25 creates a mechanism whose aim is to correct the tendency towards radical and ever-increasing inequality that result from the unfettered play of free market economics. There is the sabbatical year in which debts are released, Hebrew slaves set free, the land lies fallow, and its produce, not to be harvested, belongs to everyone. There is the Jubilee year in which, with some exceptions, ancestral land returns to its original owners. There is the command to help the needy: “If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you” (Lev. 25:35). And there is the obligation to treat slaves not slavishly but as “hired workers or temporary residents” (Lev. 25:40).
As Heinrich Heine pointed out, “Moses did not want to abolish ownership of property; he wished, on the contrary, that everyone should possess something, so that no man might, because of poverty, be a slave with a slavish mind. Liberty was forever the ultimate thought of this great emancipator, and it still breathes and flames in all his laws which concern pauperism.”3Israel Tabak, Judaic Lore in Heine (1948; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 32.
Despite the sheer antiquity of these laws, time and again they have inspired those wrestling with issues of liberty, equity, and justice. The verse about the Jubilee year, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Lev. 25:10) is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The international movement that began in the late 1990s, involving more than forty nations in a campaign for cancellation of Third World debt, was called Jubilee 2000 and was directly inspired by this parasha.
The approach of the Torah to economic policy is unusual. Clearly we can make no direct inference from laws given more than three thousand years ago, in an agricultural age and to a society consciously under the sovereignty of God, to the circumstances of the twenty-first century with its global economy and international corporations. Between ancient texts and contemporary application comes the whole careful process of tradition and interpretation that we call Torah Shebe’al Peh, the Oral Law in its broadest sense.
Nonetheless, there are some important parameters. Work – making a living, earning your daily bread – has dignity. A psalm (128:2) states: “When you eat of the labour of your hands, you are happy and it shall be well with you.” We say this every Saturday night at the start of the working week. Unlike aristocratic cultures such as that of ancient Greece, Judaism was never dismissive of work or the productive economy. It did not favour the creation of a leisured class. “Torah study without an occupation will in the end fail and lead to sin” (Mishna Avot 2:2).
Another principle is that unless there are compelling reasons otherwise, one has a right to the fruits of one’s labours. Judaism distrusts large government as an infringement of liberty. That is the core of the prophet Samuel’s warning about monarchy: A king, he says, “will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants…. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves” (I Sam. 8).
Judaism is the religion of a people born in slavery and longing for redemption, and the great assault of slavery against human dignity is that it deprives me of the ownership of the wealth I create. At the heart of the Hebrew Bible is the God who seeks the free worship of free human beings, and one of the most powerful defences of freedom is private property as the basis of economic independence. The ideal society envisaged by the prophets is one in which each person is able to sit “underneath his own vine and fig tree” (Mic. 4:4).
The free economy uses the fuel of competition to sustain the fire of invention. Long before Adam Smith, Judaism had accepted the proposition that the greatest advances are often brought about through quite unspiritual drives. “I saw,” says the author of Ecclesiastes, “that all labour and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbour.” Or as the Talmudic sages put it, “Were it not for the evil inclination, no one would build a house, marry a wife, have children, or engage in business.” The rabbis even favour the free market in their own sphere of Jewish education. An established teacher, they say, cannot object to a rival setting up in competition. The reason they give is simply: “Jealousy among scholars increases wisdom.”
The market economy is the best system we know for alleviating poverty through economic growth. In a single generation, its adoption lifted 100 million Indians and 400 million Chinese from poverty. The sages see poverty as a moral issue, not just an economic one. It is, they believe, incompatible with human dignity. Poverty is not a blessed or divinely ordained condition. It is, the rabbis say, “a kind of death” and “worse than fifty plagues.” They say, “Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, because he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.”4On the subjects of this chapter, see Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference (London: Continuum, 2002) and “Wealth and Poverty: A Jewish Analysis,” in Tradition in an Untraditional Age (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1990), 183–202.
However, the market economy is better at producing wealth than at distributing it equitably. The concentration of wealth in a few hands gives disproportionate power to some at the cost of others. Today in Britain, it is not unusual for top CEOs to earn at least four hundred times as much as their employees. As I write, inequalities have increased dramatically in most market economies in the past decade. At such times we need to be acutely aware of the responsibilities wealth brings to alleviate the condition of the poor. That flows directly from the principle of eminent domain,5See “Eminent Domain,” above. that what we possess we do not own. We merely hold it in trust from God, and one of the conditions of that trust is that those who have more than they need should share their blessings with those who have significantly less. That is why tzedaka in Judaism means justice, not just charity.
The legislation in Parashat Behar represents the architectonics of a just society. It tells us that an economic system must exist within a moral framework. It need not aim at economic equality but it must respect human dignity. No one should become permanently imprisoned in the chains of debt. No one should be deprived of a stake in the commonwealth, which in biblical times meant a share in the land. No one should be a slave to his or her employer. Everyone has the right – one day in seven, one year in seven – to respite from the endless pressures of work. None of this means dismantling the market economy, but it may involve periodic redistribution.
At the heart of these laws is a profoundly humane vision of society. “No man is an island.” We are responsible for one another and implicated in one another’s fate. That is fundamental to the ethics and politics of covenant. We are bound by a common fate. We are jointly responsible to God for social conditions. We are, as Parashat Behar reminds us five times, “brothers” (and sisters) to one another. Covenant sees society as an extended family. The welfare of all is the concern of each. That is what was to make biblical Israel different from its neighbours. They were greater in terms of size, population, power, and wealth. But in Israel, everyone mattered. All were to be equal citizens under the sovereignty of God.
Jeremiah put the connection between religion and society bluntly in his assessment of two kings, Josiah and his son Yehoaḥaz. The son pursued personal wealth at the cost of social justice. Jeremiah said of him: “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labour” (Jer. 22:13). He was about to be punished, said the prophet, by being led into captivity where he would die an ignominious death.
About the father, Josiah, Jeremiah said: “He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know Me? declares the Lord” (Jer. 22:16). This is a stunning sentence. To know God, says Jeremiah, is not a matter of abstract theology or conspicuous piety. It is to defend the cause of the poor and needy, to work for social and economic justice and a fair society.
In an age of vast inequalities within and between nations – in which a billion people lack adequate food and shelter, clean water, and medical facilities, and thirty thousand children die each day from preventable diseases – the vision of Parashat Behar still challenges us with its ideals. Wealth and power are not privileges but responsibilities, and we are summoned to become God’s partners in building a world less random and capricious, more equitable and humane. The Torah shows us one way of combining freedom with equality. There may be others. But the overarching principle remains. Mankind was not created to serve markets. Markets were made to serve the image of God that is mankind.