the Old Testament provision that can repair contemporary America

COVID-19 has crippled the American economy. Businesses are shuttering. Unemployment is growing. More than 160,000 people have died. Hundreds of thousands of families fear eviction and falling into homelessness.

Trust is crumbling, and people all over the country wonder if our system can pull itself out of this death spiral – whether we will unceremoniously crash or, with determined effort, survive.

As a 100 percent non-religious person, I can say this sincerely: the political and economic way forward is contained in the bible. The jump-start the country needs is inherent in the concept of jubilee framed out in the Five Books of Moses.

The jubilee, outlined most fully in the book of Leviticus and reiterated in Deuteronomy, is a once-every-49-years commandment to rein in speculation and re-establish ethical economic norms. Proclaiming “liberty throughout all of the land unto all the inhabitants" (a phrase inscribed on the Liberty Bell), the jubilee commands that we restore people to their properties (“return every man unto his possessions”), forgive all debts (“this is the manner of the release: every creditor that lendeth aught unto his neighbor shall release it”), free all slaves and prisoners (“return every man unto his family”), make reparations (“give again the price of his redemption”) and generally agree to treat each other fairly and equitably, politically or economically (“not oppress one another.”)

The jubilee is not some impossible utopian paradise. Indeed, a number of societies in the ancient world were organized around regular jubilees. Babylonian rulers, for instance, celebrated many occasions when they wiped outdebts, freed prisoners, and broke up concentrated land holdings, a process some historians have dubbed “clean slates.” The Theodosian Code, elaborated in the Byzantine Empire some 1700 years ago, also called for similar forgivenesses. And, for thousands of years, the great dynasties of China presided over mass amnesties, during which various emperors freed prisoners, forgave debts, and paid reparations.

There are modern examples as well. You might call what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did during the Great Depression a mini-Jubilee. He used a little-noticed law called the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to close every financial institution in America for two weeks, giving them a clean slate during which the Federal Reserve could recapitalize them so they could withstand sustained withdrawals. And here’s a more recent mini-jubilee: in 2016, when a hacker exploited a bug to steal $56 million worth of the ‘ether’ cryptocurrency, the managers of the currency essentially opted for a clean slate – though they called it a “hard fork” – which involved a Star Trek-style reversal of the space time continuum to turn the clock back to the moment just prior to the rip-off, allowing the currency to continue as if the theft never happened.

Now look at many of the demands people are making today:

·       Ban evictions and cancel rent: this is a call for a modern jubilee in housing.

·       Have government provide a universal basic income or make continuing direct payments to all Americans – most particularly to the unemployed and financially burdened: this accords with a description of the jubilee in Deuteronomy -- “if there be among you a poor man … thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: but thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him.”

·       End the carceral state (the prison population pipeline that incarcerates so many people of color), abolish the police, and stop imprisoning undocumented kids and adults: this is essentially a demand for a jubilee in so-called criminal justice – an amnesty and legal make-over as we figure out how to do public safety and immigration with true equality and equity.

The pandemic has shown that we need to make an exodus from our unfair system. We need to create a new economy of giving to replace the old, punitive economics of taking. We need to create a politics of inclusion as we excise the old, oppressive and repressive politics of exclusion.

The genesis of our renewal is in the bible: a 21^st century Jubilee.