A Jewish Response to the Economic Crisis of Confidence

FDR, as much as I admire him, may not deserve full credit for his response to the economic crisis caused by the Great Depression. Truth be told, he had a role model in our sage Hillel who dealt with a similar crisis nearly two thousand years earlier.

In the century of Jesus's death, under Roman occupation of the Holy Land, the Sanhedrin maintained significant power over a fractured Jewish people. Surely there was distention among the rank and file, and somewhat like today's various Jewish streams, then the splintering had to do with two main issues, the degree of literality of scriptural interpretation and the form of response to outside aggression.

The more familiar conflict had to do with interpretation. The Seduces and Pharisees fought it out over the meaning of Biblical text and it's role in everyday Jewish practice. The Essenes were cave dwelling eunuchs who never had a chance at a future and the Nazarenes were followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

The other segmentation of the Jewish demographic in Israel was over how to deal with the Roman occupiers. When Yochanan ben Zakai decided to leave Jerusalem and sued the Roman general Vespasian, later turned Caesar, for peace, he did it because Jewish zealots and dagger wielding fanatic “Sicarii” were burning Jewish food in order to cause a general uproar.

During the years leading up to this chaos, there was also a terrible crisis is the economics of the Jews of Israel. The cause was a common Biblical commandment related to the Shabbaton, the Sabbatical year. In this year, we are commanded to forgive all debt (Leviticus 25), among other things. Forgiving debt every seven years became a problem under occupation and lenders started to limit their lending. Hillel, recognizing that the release of debt was a divine commandment, decided to create a legal fiction to get around the forgiveness of debt in the seventh year. Instead of canceling all notes, the religious courts would take control of the notes for the Sabbatical year and then return them to their owners. By doing this, money still flowed and the Jewish economy was saved, as much as possible under Roman occupation.

In a way, I wish the current leadership would do more like the Sanhedrin. Instead of bailing out banks who made predatory loans and are now about to go bust because their borrowers can't pay these notes, I think the notes should be bought by the government.

I know – BIG pause. Catch your breathe. Make some snide remark about my socialist sentiments...But this is how I feel.

Why should we help the people who got us into this mess to begin with? Why not use the $700 billion dollars to create jobs that will insure that people can pay their mortgages? Why not hire a lot of people to regulate banks and commodity exchange more seriously? Why not build some jails for these white collar criminals? Or better yet, put them in with the existing criminals and build schools.

Ever since my adolescence when Reagan became president, I have heard that government is bad and big government is really bad, and I don't get it. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, just told Senator Biden in their debate that paying taxes was unpatriotic. I don't get this either. The founders of this great country had some very progressive ideas, and I particularly like the one that said “government for the people by the people.”

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he likes paying taxes because with them he buys civilization. I agree with the judge. Taxes and public schools are the two best things going for our society. With them we pave our roads, put police and fire people on our streets and teach our citizens the values of our union. As my daughter, Sahar, likes to ask, “How cool is that?”

In many ways, Hillel and FDR were very similar in that they both saved existing systems that failed. The current bailout or rescue, however you call it, is a temporary fix. It may save the system on a temporary basis but somebody needs to ask the tough questions about the system that got us here.

During my college years, just as the Soviet Union was breaking apart, I went to a concert of the British folk rocker Billy Bragg. He said a lot of memorable things that night. Among them, he said that isms are taking a beating right now, “especially the ism that has inspired him his whole life; socialism.” Then he went on to say that whether you call it socialism or humanism or simply chocolate, he sticks to his believe that every human being has a natural born right to the fruits of the Earth and that, even if human beings choose a system that allows some humans to acquire more wealth than others, he believes that every human being desires their basis human needs met. He listed health care, food, shelter, education and fair government that looks after the interests of the majority.

I so agree with Billy Bragg.

One of the things that puzzles me in the current election campaign is the fact that Barack Obama says he will only increase taxes on the top 5% of Americans, but he fails to share with us the fact that the top 5% of Americans control over 80% of the wealth of this country. Don't get me wrong, I support Obama, but what is the big secret. Why hide this terribly disgusting fact? It is simply wrong that any human being should be deprived of their basic necessities when others are comfortable. Yes, there are some who don't try to improve their lot. Some want to live off unemployment. Some drink or shoot their salaries into their awful addictions. But that doesn't mean that they are less than human and less than deserving of their basic needs.

FDR and Hillel were both great leaders in their understanding and leadership by empowering government to intervene and take an active role in the management of their economies for the benefit of the majority. I think they both failed by returning us to the existing system with out asking the tough questions about wealth and equity, about prosperity and equality and about the limits of accumulation wealth at the expense of other human beings.

My hope is that the next leadership, whoever it may be, learns from the examples of these two great leaders and goes one step further. I don't care about the ism attached to it, although I think is comes from my favorite ism - the one that starts with a J. I just want to be sure it raises the bar for all human beings.