By Jonah Fox
Trippy, exciting, reminiscent of Native American concepts, if I didn’t know better I’d say Moses was on peyote. But what does it imply when no land can be sold permanently?
“During this Jubilee year, you shall return, each man to his property.”
No land can be sold for more than fifty years. You can do business as you please, but no matter what, every time the Jubilee comes around, all land is returned to its ancestral owner. When the Israelites conquered the land of Canaan, it was divided among the tribes so that everybody got their own share of the land. This means that every jubilee, everybody got to go back to more or less where they and their parents started, aka equal footing. And here, reader, is where we can make a connection to our own lives.
In a society where all of your economic gains revert to their original owners about once every generation, it is impossible to pass on your monetary gains to your children. This leaves the parental generation with only two gifts to leave their children: a level playing field and the wisdom to use it. In our world, even when we are not required to do this by law, we can still live by it’s message. We can acknowledge that wisdom and equality are the two best things to foster in the world, and, considering the transience of property, the only two things our offspring can truly inherit. As youth, as the generation that is only now starting to come into its own, we may not have received either of these two things. Our civilization is far from equal, and most people aren’t great in terms of knowledge or wisdom. This makes the Torah’s message even more urgent. We can only begin to build a better world if we can pass on our achievements to our children, and we can only pass on achievements in those two categories. This is how we can truly build freedom, how we can finally have that new social order we’re always talking about. We do not have these things ourselves, but it is imperative that we acquire them soon.
What we have not been given, we must now take, for if we don’t our children will also be impoverished.