Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have long been promoting the idea of a foreign policy based on generosity, not domination. The central program would be a Global Marshall Plan. Utopian? Yes. Necessary for American security? Also yes. Essential for creating one world in which all are included, basic needs are met and we can together address the perils of global warming which will fall heaviest on the poor? Yes, yes and yes.
Others are having big ideas too, and this one is very apt for Tikkun readers, being based on the Biblical idea — and not just an idea but an actual societal practice at one time — of the Jubilee. Our friends at Jubilee USA have sent us this about an teach-in and action this Thursday night and Friday noon in Washington, DC.
Proclaim the Jubilee: A lesson from the story of Joseph
By Nate Kratzer, Outreach and Congregations Fellow, Jubilee USA
When I was a child, the story of Joseph that I was told ended with Joseph being happily reunited with his father and brothers. But that’s not where the story actually ends. After the reunion, Joseph sold food from his storage bank in exchange for the money, livestock, and land of the Egyptian people. Having taken their possessions he then made slaves of them and required them to give one fifth of all they produced to Pharaoh (Gen 47: 14-25). Joseph instituted a form of economic slavery over the Egyptians. Unfortunately, the roles were soon reversed. After the death of Joseph, a new Pharaoh arose and decided to oppress the Israelites, using the very mechanisms of forced labor and tribute that Joseph had originally implemented to enslave the Egyptians. It’s not quite as pleasant as the story I heard in my childhood, but it does explain why the Hebrews came out of Egypt with a healthy suspicion of centralized economic power.
This concern manifested itself in the laws of the Torah. Every seven years debts are to be forgiven (Deuteronomy 15) and every fifty years there is to be a Jubilee, “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.”(Lev 25:10). Out of the experience of having been in bondage to debt and forced to till the fields for the profit of others, the Israelites enacted laws to prevent the accumulation of wealth and the centralization of economic power.
These laws are part of an economic system in which the primary concern is to prevent people from being trapped in a cycle of poverty. It is God’s economy that lifts up the poor and marginalized and stands in stark contrast to our world of economic brokenness in which ‘developing’ countries pay more in debt service each year than they receive in foreign aid. We live in a world in which children are born with a debt burden that a lifetime of work in the field cannot repay. Kenya’s debt service is equal to the combined budget of the departments of health, roads, water, agriculture, transport, and finance.
Jubilee USA takes its mission from God’s vision of a just economic order. Jubilee is committed to fighting against international debt and an economic system that keeps the poor trapped in a cycle of poverty. This Thursday, October 7 and Friday, October 8 Jubilee USA is sounding the call for Jubilee once again; Jubilee participants will stand together with partners from around the country and world to protest the unjust economic policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We are calling on the IMF and World Bank to end conditions that put profits over people and to demonstrate transparency and accountability in their lending practices.
On Thursday night Jubilee is hosting a teach in covering issues that keep impoverished countries trapped in a cycle of debt such as IMF/World Bank policies and climate debt. On Friday at noon we will be holding a peaceful rally and march during the IMF and World Bank Annual Meeting. The march will begin around the IMF and World Bank buildings and conclude at the White House, signaling that the Obama administration must take the lead on debt relief. For more information or to register for these events please visit www.jubileeusa.org/mobilization.
Within the past few years there have been food and fuel crises, and then most recently the global economic crisis. When faced with a time of crisis after the exile, the people of Israel complained to Nehemiah that they were mortgaging their livelihoods and being forced to sell their children in to slavery. Nehemiah unequivocally proclaimed to the nobles and officials of the day, “I and my brethren and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us leave off this interest. Return to them this very day their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the hundredth of money, grain, wine, and oil which you have been exacting of them.” (Neh 5:10-11).
As a global community we too are currently faced with a crisis in which millions of people are being forced off their lands and governments are spending more on debt relief than on social services. I hope that like Nehemiah we will have the strength to draw upon the Jubilee tradition, and to leave off the interest on our loans and return a means of living to the people.
We march, because as Chilean theologian Pablo Richard says, “The Jubilee is a theology with energy, with spirit, with strength, with power. It is a theology not to be read but to be announced, proclaimed, shouted at the top of one’s voice.”
The chains of debt must be broken and the system must be transformed. The story of Joseph does not have to become our story. We hope you’ll join us as we attempt to repair the brokenness of our current international economic system.
Nate Kratzer can be reached by emailing nate@jubileeusa.org or calling 202 783 3566 x. 105
There is alot of touristinformation out there about Egypt, such as where to go Snorkeling in Hurghada and alot of other things. Just so much information and so little time 🙂