There Shall Be No Needy, part 5: The dignity of labor

 One thing to remember about Torah and work: Don't be like Pharaoh. Be like Boaz.

According to chapter 5 of Rabbi Jill Jacobs' There Shall Be No Needy, if we want a model of what NOT to do as an employer, Pharaoh is the perfect negative example. Why?

 

Anyone who has ever read the Passover Haggadah knows that in the biblical story of slavery in Egypt, Pharaoh made the Israelites work "with rigor" (b'farech). Jacobs cites a midrash that reads that word with different vowel points, as b' peh rach, "with a gentle mouth." In the midrash, Pharaoh goes out and inspires them to work hard as a team--then requires them to work that hard every single day! 

 

Don't be like Pharaoh. Don't ask your workers to be Stakhanovites, and don't tell them "We are all one family here," because you are not going to treat them as family. You know that.

Another midrash says that Pharaoh put a heavy burden on a child and a light burden on an adult. What is cruel about this is not only that the child (or in other examples, the elderly person, or the woman) is being overworked. It is also that the stronger worker is forced to witness the degradation of the weaker and do nothing about it. It dehumanizes both, and it also dehumanizes the boss who "by extension, questioned the value of all humans, including themselves" (102). I see a striking parallel to Marx's theory of alienation here, as I've explained it in chapter 5 of Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish Question.

 

Don't be like Pharaoh. Hardening your heart against your workers makes you less human yourself.

[There are other lessons I could draw from the biblical text of Exodus itself: 

• Don't work your employees so hard for so many hours that they cannot have satisfying sexual relationships with their spouses (a theme explored at length in Aviva Zornberg's The Particulars of Rapture, which I have blogged about here.)
• Don't retaliate against workers for making demands, as Pharaoh does when he hears Moses and Aaron say "Let My people go." Pharaoah responds with a worker speedup, forcing the Israelites to go out and gather the straw they need for their brickmaking while requiring the same number of bricks from them as before.
•  At the simplest level: don't enslave people. Or do anything that even resembles slavery, like debt peonage, indentures, or trafficking.]

Boaz--not a Ruthless employer!

Much later in the Tanakh, in the Book of Ruth, we get a story of a man that Rabbi Jacobs thinks can set us a positive example. Boaz (whose name means "in him there is strength") is Ruth's kinsman, and a wealthy landowner. He notices the widowed Ruth working in his fields, protects her, and eventually marries her.

It is not just the one employee that Boaz treats with dignity. As Jacobs points out:

First, it is clear that Boaz visits the fields often. He is familiar with the workers, and he even notices the appearance of a new gleaner [Ruth]. Second, Boaz invokes God's name in greeting his workers...[in the workplace, in] a situation where we might not expect to sense God's presence....Third, Boaz's insistence on enforcing the biblical permission for the poor to glean shows his awareness that his wealth is not his own, but is a loan from God, meant to be shared with those who do not enjoy such wealth. (107)

Don't be like Pharaoh. Be like Boaz.

There Shall Be No Needy, part 4: What Are Needs? How Do We Meet Them?

Two things become clear as I go through Rabbi Jill Jacobs' book There Shall Be No Needy: how much society has changed since the classic Jewish texts were written...and how much we can still learn from them.

How much about poverty has changed

On the first point, it's clear that in Torah and rabbinic commentaries, there's a presumption that poverty is temporary. Everyone will normally have the means to make a living (most often, land that they can farm). Everyone will normally be able to survive, thrive, and participate in the community as a dignified member of a household.  Yes, at any given time someone is likely to need help, because their land's fertility is exhausted, or their own bodies are. But for a Jewish society to allow families to live in need from one generation to another would be unthinkable. 

Today, most Jews live as a tiny minority within a non-Jewish, non-agricultural society and the State of Israel runs on civil law, not Jewish law. So, we do not have systems that make poverty temporary. Realizing this, we can ask: what would it take to set up systems like those? And we can advocate for them as policy.

There is also a presumption that tzedakah is a communal activity: neither just private, not just governmental. Primarily, one is responsible to give to the Jewish community tzedakah fund (and there are lots of rules to prevent favoritism in distributing money from that fund), and only then does one consider private charity. This made sense when Jews primarily lived in ghettos, or under the authority of a Jewish communal leader, and when the national government was foreign to us. As Jacobs writes:

If considered at all, the larger government is seen as an impediment or as an active threat. At best, the government leaves the Jewish community alone. At worst, the government demands excessive taxes or even sponsors persecution.  (94)
 

Today, thank God, in most countries we do not have to regard the government with such trepidation. In the U.S., there are liberal Jews active in high elected and appointed positions. There is also a limited, wavering, but still clear commitment to social welfare through government action. Realizing this, we can ask: what can we learn from Jewish tradition that can inform our advocacy on issues of poverty and inequality? 

What we can still learn from Jewish sources

Once again, Jacobs' discussion is erudite and subtle, and I recommend reading it in full. A major point that I take away, however, is that there is no simple rule for whose needs to meet, which needs, and how. We are called on to exercise judgment and balance our concerns.

Whose needs?

• Jews vs. non-Jews
• The poorest vs. all the poor
• Where I live vs. other places

There are sources that stake out a clear preference for the first choice in each of these binaries. Other, perhaps wiser heads point out that that there are both moral and practical reasons not to give exclusively to Jews, the poorest, or the people nearby. 

• Giving only to Jews makes us odious to our neighbors, and we no longer live in a place where the broader society will ignore Jews' needs. 
• Giving to the poorest might mean funding food pantries to the exclusion of everything else, since a person who has nothing to eat cannot benefit from other help for long! 
• And given the level of housing segregation by race and class, the poorest people where I live might not be very poor on a global scale, and they might be mainly white people. 

 

All of these would be problematic, so we must exercise good judgment and not automatically follow an algorithm.

Which needs? 

Again, there's more here than I can summarize, but Jacobs makes it clear that bringing people up to their customary level (if they are in straits temporarily) or at least up to the community level is mandatory. Taking care of subsistence needs is laudable but not nearly enough. This has strong policy implications!

Also, not all needs are material. It is appropriate to spend some communal tzedakah money, and some personal, on books that can be lent to the poor. This is spiritual sustenance, and it is just as important as physical nourishment. The Friends of the Somerville Public Library will be happy to hear about this!

Not every contribution is tzedakah, however. It may be a great idea to send your local high school kids on a field trip, and you might donate toward that, but unless you live in an impoverished area you should consider it a different kind of communal activity (and not take it out of your tzedakah budget).

How should we meet those needs?

Jacobs makes it clear that the Jewish tradition endorses helping people currently in need, collecting funds for people who may need help in the future--think the next pandemic!--AND changing society so that "There shall be no needy." All three. One does not absolve me, my community, or the United States from energetically pursuing the other.

I note that the same Torah portion that says "there shall be no needy," only a few verses later commands tzedakah because "the poor will always be with you." Deuteronomy 15:11 This is not a contradiction: it is a moral imperative.

As Jacobs puts it:

In designing social systems, we should strive to prevent extreme poverty, to allow each member of society the opportunity to support himself or herself in a dignified and productive way, and to care for those who still fall through the cracks. Some of our tzedakah money should go toward creating this society. But even in this ideal society, some people will still need emergency assistance, especially in the face of health challenges, job loss, or other crises. A combination of governmental assistance and individual tzedakah would address these issues. And even if, against all expectations, we create a world in which there is no poverty at all, we should still maintain our practice of giving tzedakah both to reap the spiritual benefits of cultivating generosity and to ensure that a system of tzedakah will be available to respond to needs that might arise in the future.

There Shall Be No Needy, part 3: Taking time, place, and person into account

What constitutes poverty? Is there such a thing as "the" poverty line? And is it always based on the amount a person owns, or do social conditions tell us what a person or household really needs?

Rabbi Jill Jacobs discusses these questions in detail in chapter 3 of There Shall Be No Needy, and I cannot capture the richness of her discussion of traditional Jewish sources. She shows how there is debate on each of these points. Still, just as in the classic rabbinic debates between Hillel and Shammai we study both positions but follow those of Hillel, I think we can safely say these are normative positions in Jewish thinking:

1. Ideally, we should live in a society where poverty is a temporary condition, due to a bad harvest or some other transient turn of events. That we do not live in a society like that today is partly a reflection of industrialization, but it is also a reflection on our tolerating a system that produces chronic poverty.
2. Poor people are not worse than rich people. Poverty is not a punishment. Nor, for the most part, is it an uplifting experience. We don't distinguish between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor: there shall be no needy!
   
3. Poverty is about not being able to live the dignified life that one is accustomed to (or that is customary in one's time). It is immoral to say to someone that they are not really poor because they have a car, a house, or even their grandmother's silver dishes.
4. What it takes to live varies from place to place, too. The standard of living that includes you in the community in one country, or even one region, would make you an outsider in another, and programs to address poverty must take that into account.
5. What I owe, I don't own. Even what I have invested in making my business a going concern is not mine. So, it should not count toward the determination of need.
6. On the other hand, communal resources are limited, too. So, people should voluntarily and ethically take only what and when they need. It is also legitimate to ask about the recipient's own resources when they are not in danger of going hungry or homeless, with great caution and limitations to the questions asked.
7. Err on the side of generosity.

I want to add a teaching that is not mentioned in this chapter, which is that a poor person, too, has the obligation to give to the communal tzedakah fund, because there may be someone poorer and in more need than she is!

There Shall Be No Needy, part 2: Righteous Rulers and Prophetic Voices

 Along with tikkun olam, another oft-repeated motto of Jewish progressives is "Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof." I remember it on a banner that fellow New Jewish Agenda members marched with in the 1980's. The slogan has often been translated as "Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue." But what does tzedek really mean?

According to Rabbi Jill Jacobs, tzedek is not an abstract notion of justice: it is a relational one. She cites Moshe Weinfeld of Hebrew University:

...the concept refers primarily to the improvement of the conditions of the poor, which is undoubtedly accomplished through regulations issued by the king and his officials, and not by offering legal assistance to the poor man in his [sic] litigation with the oppressor.

 Jacobs herself concludes, "The task of the just sovereign, whether human or divine, is to establish a system of government that protects the vulnerable." (42)

Now, we may remember that in biblical times, many Jewish sovereigns did not establish that kind of government. Prophetic voices called them to task. "The prophetic quality consists of an ability to imagine the world as God might see it and to measure the existing world against the divine ideal of a world without oppression or inequality." (47) 

Sometimes, prophets call on God to do justice; more often, they call on human rulers to be righteous. Sometimes, they inveigh against empty rituals, but nearly always, they point to the potential of ritual to sharpen our sense of what it means to do tikkun olam.

How do these concepts help us shape modern-day institutions and make policy? That is what the rest of the book is all about.

There Shall Be No Needy, part 1: What Tikkun Olam means in depth

I came to read Rabbi Jill Jacobs' book There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law & Tradition because Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg referred to it in her book on teshuvah and because I respect Jacobs' work at Truah. 

I expected an inspiring but somewhat dated book I somehow hadn't read when it came out, so I could fill a gap in my education with just a little attention. It is so much more than that! 

Jacobs' book is written for the general public, but it is definitely a work of scholarship. Despite my Jewish social justice background over decades, I am learning so much by reading it--slowly--that I thought I would share some lessons with you, and help my memory by taking notes at the same time! 

Four meanings of Tikkun Olam

Ever since I was in college, when I get to the passage at the end of the Aleinu prayer, I say the part l'taken olam b'malchut shaddai, "to perfect the world under the kingship of the Almighty," out loud. (I do this in memory of my teacher Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf.) Tikkun olam has become a byword of Jewish progressives. In some circles, as Jacobs laments, it has become divorced from anything specifically Jewish. But what does it mean?

Establishing the Divine Kingdom

In the prayer I just mentioned, tikkun olam is about everyone recognizing the sovereignty of God and putting away idol worship. That might sound like it means everyone becomes Jewish, but nothing could be farther from the truth! Modern-day idol worship, as so many of us recognize, is the idolatry of money, power, and social superiority, As Jacobs interprets it, tikkun olam in this sense could mean "an end to all the 'impurities' such as poverty and discrimination that hamper the manifestation of the divine presence." (27)

 

The Preservation of the World

In some of the midrashic literature (for instance, B'reishit Rabbah 4:7), tikkun olam means the physical fixing and stabilization of the planet, and perhaps the larger universe, "such as global warming, deforestation, or the extinction of animal species," as Jacobs interprets it. (40)

The Preservation of the Halakhic System and the Social Order

In the Mishnah, the base text of the Talmud, tikkun ha'olam often refers to problems in divorce law. Specifically, it applies in cases where a man divorces his wife and attempts to change his mind, or where the get (divorce decree) might be technically invalid. If these cases were left unchecked, soon no one would know who was legally married and who was not, and the whole community would be disrupted. So, rabbis in the Talmud stated they could close the loopholes even where they didn't have explicit authority to do so. Why? For tikkun ha'olam, the greater good of having a legal system that worked for the community, and especially for the most vulnerable members of the community.

 

Restoring Divine Perfection

In the Lurianic Kabbalah, there is a notion that the process of creating the world went dramatically wrong, and that everything we see around us as reality is merely the shattered vessels that were supposed to make up one whole, unified Creation. In this conception, it is up to human beings, especially Jews, to lift up the shards and reunite them--and in some sense, reunite God, who is in exile with us in this imperfect world--through prayer and observing the commandments (including the ones to help the poor and to do justice, but also the ritual commandments about Shabbat, holidays, etc.)

A Synthesis

I suggest a reimagining of tikkun olam that combines the four understandings of the term we have seen in tradtional text:

1. the Aleinu's concept of tikkun as the destruction of any impurities that impede the full manifestation of the divine presence; 2. the literalist midrashic understanding of tikkun as the establishment of a sustainable social order; 3.  the rabbinic willingness to invoke tikkun ha'olam as a justification for changing laws likely to create chaos, and 4. the Lurianic belief that individual actions can affect the fate of the world as a whole. (38)