A Reason for Jubilation? (Vayigash)
I have a gratitude practice, and last night I actually wrote that I was grateful for credit cards. I mean, I am, but…
This week in Torah, Joseph breaks down crying and reveals his true identity to his brothers—not exactly in that order. Pharaoh hears about it because Joseph’s crying is so loud that his courtiers hear it and pass along the information.
The other thing revealed? The famine is as bad as Joseph predicted. Pharaoh, like a mafia capo taking care of his people, invites Joseph’s family to live in the land, hooks them up with wagons and all the provisions they’ll need. He tells them even to leave behind their own stuff.
He guarantees them all the food they will need to get through the rest of the pandemic—oops, I mean, the famine.
Meanwhile, the rest of the people in the lands around Pharaoh come back again and again begging for food lest they die.
In exchange they give away everything they own, little by little, until finally they have even given their land to the kingdom; they owe their very lives to Pharaoh, remaining enslaved until they die.
Joseph is the one who orchestrates this entire thing.
Yet the Israelites and their sheep-herding are abhorrent to the Egyptians, enough that they will not eat in the same room with them. (It will not take long before a future pharaoh will scapegoat and enslave the entire people as they become “too numerous and powerful.”)
This morning on Democracy Now! I watched the new, illustrated mini-film, “Your Debt is Someone Else’s Asset.”
The makers of the film are advocating for another movement to cancel debt in the U.S.—student loans, medical bills, back-rent—for regular people.
They’re calling for a Jubilee, as described in the Bible. (The only criticism I have of this fantastic little film that it implies that the concept of Jubilee, or Yovel, originated in Christianity, while it's described in the Torah first.)
My favorite quote from this 6-minute film is from Thomas Jefferson, who said in 1803: “We shall be glad to see the good and influential among them run in debt because we have observed that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop off by a cession of lands.”
This was a strategy used as a weapon against indigenous people to steal their territory.
Our government continues encourage debtors to steal ordinary people’s money by putting us in debt.
Jefferson advocated “natural limits,” but for white men like himself—people like Donald Trump, companies like Exxon and Walmart that have had their “bad debt” bought up by the government since the pandemic began, and others like them given “forgivable loans.”
Obama bailed out the entire banking industry, which caused the crisis of 2009 to begin with, and Biden is continuing many Trump policies.
Somehow our government can afford all that and to increase military spending by $27 billion above what Biden even requested, a bill just approved by Congress. This makes it the largest military budget since WWII!
Meanwhile, they cry poverty when it comes to helping the ordinary people, saying it gives the poor and struggling “dignity.”
Debt and credit cards are sold as a lifeline, just as Pharaoh so “graciously” provided food for the starving in surrounding lands—but it is really an anchor, dragging people down, as the film points out (watch it “share” it, please!)
Let’s have a reason for jubilation! Let’s not continue the oldest form of enslavement in The Book, and call for a Jubilee.
To do it during this Shmita year, when something of the same, but on a smaller scale than the Jubilee, is supposed to happen, would be perfect.
Shmita means “release” in Hebrew, because debts are released.
We should continue any gratitude practices we all have because we all need to stay sane, especially during a pandemic, but we can also call for action. We don’t need to be like Joseph and uphold the system that enslaves us and others.
And let us say Amen.
