economics – Sim Lev

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was brought before the Roman Inquisition and instructed to recount his heretical views. Galileo had said, contradictory to the views of the established Church, that the earth rotates around the sun. He had to retract this claim or face death.

So, to protect himself, Galileo assured the Church that he was wrong. The earth remained still.

As he left the courthouse where he had been tried, Galileo raised his eyes to the sky, then back down to the earth. He stamped on the ground beneath his feet and muttered: Eppur si muove: yet it moves.

Yet it moves.

For we who stand on this rock in the solar system, it does not feel like the earth is spinning. We can understand how people once thought the sun moved around them.

We, educated in our modern world, understand that the globe is rotating, and that this rotation is responsible for times and seasons.

But if you don’t know the laws of the earth’s orbit, every winter feels like a divine abandonment.

The earth feels static. And yet, the earth moves.

Hundreds of miles beneath the ground where we stand, plates are shifting in the earth’s mantle. For millennia, continental landmasses have drifted apart and pushed back together. Their pace is imperceptible from where we stand, so we cannot know what a profound impact they are having on the structure of our planet.

We, educated in our modern world, know that migration in the oceanic lithosphere explains mountains, lakes, and volcanoes.

But if you don’t know the laws of tectonic shift, every earthquake will feel like an act of God.

The ground beneath us feels static. And yet, the tectonic plates move.

Right now, the forces of history are at work.

Since the dawn of civilisation, people have arranged themselves into complex societies with varying levels of specialisation and hierarchy.

Within those systems, they have developed new technologies, made laws, and created cultures. They have struggled over resources, sometimes to the point of complete social overhaul, and sometimes to the point of common ruin.

We, educated in our modern world, know that the science of sociology explains how civilisations operate. We have learnt to recognise economic trends, like that spikes in oil prices result in increased interest rates. We have also learnt grand trajectories, like what causes empires to collapse.

But if you don’t know the laws of history, every rupture to the social order feels like a curse.

The social order feels like it will never change. Our world feels stuck on the same trajectory. And yet, the people move.

To everyone in ancient Egypt, the rule of Pharaohs felt like an unshakable fact. By the time the Israelites were enslaved in Goshen, the Egyptian empire had already existed for 2,000 years. The pyramids had already stood for a millennium.

Every Pharaoh was called Ramses and every Pharaoh declared himself a god. He claimed that he controlled the flooding of the Nile and the rising of the sun. He could not be moved.

When Moses killed a slave driver, he did not only have to fear Egyptian retribution. The Hebrews themselves were ready to mete out punishment.

Moses’s own people, turned on him and demanded: “who made you ruler and judge over us?”

Moses had rattled the social order, and this terrified even his kin. He could not be the ruler and judge over them. Their ruler was supposed to be the slave master and their judge was supposed to be Pharaoh. They could not even imagine moving.

In the Torah story, we only hear what happened forty years later, when Moses returned from his years as a goatherd for Jethro.

Yet, on his return, tens of thousands of Hebrews, and many others, were ready to leave the only land they had ever known for a barren wilderness.

In fact, even the ordinary Egyptians were in a revolutionary mood. They handed the Hebrews wealth and resources for their journey. They were co-conspirators in sedition against Egypt.

Hebrews and Egyptians alike were willing to bring down a structure that had lasted for twenty centuries, and risk existence itself.

We might attribute this sudden change of mentality to acts of god: those Ten Plagues the Eternal One wrought upon Egypt to bring down the might of Pharaoh.

But I wonder what else happened in those forty years. What were Aaron and Miriam, Moses’s siblings, doing in the four decades when their brother was absent? What did Shifrah and Puah, the rebel midwives, do in the time when all seemed lost?

I can think of no other explanation: they organised.

With Moses gone, the dissidents were preparing the Hebrews for the great exodus to come. They had faith. They knew that the slave system could be defeated. They knew that people would move.

I imagine they were knocking doors, spreading the word in the marketplace, gathering slaves for secret meetings, building alliances across the divides of race. I imagine they were keeping hope alive; sowing seeds of possibility; encouraging people to imagine a future without domination and toil.

To those who do not know their history, the Hebrews’ decision to leave would have felt like a greater miracle than the plague of locusts.

But we know that people can shift the way tectonic plates do: so imperceptibly that anyone higher up might not even notice.

The more they move, the more they realise they have been kept captive. And then they realise they can move some more.

Then what was impossible suddenly seems inevitable.

What was unalterable becomes intolerable.

Then, it is a law of history that they will come crashing against the structures that bind them, like an earthquake.

Yes, the downfall of Egypt at the hands of rebel slaves was a seismic rupture of earth-shattering proportions.

It showed the immutable Pharaoh that everything moves.

Everything, even whole social systems, move. But today, it is easy to feel stuck.

I look at the world around me and feel afraid. It seems that, in every country, our leaders are set on a course to global war. Everywhere, antisemitism is rising and hatred is spurting out on the streets. Everywhere, governments are determined to pursue authoritarian policies.

All of this can be explained by the laws of history. When people do not have enough to live, they turn on each other. In our own history, we know that they often turn on Jews.

When people feel like the world is ending and there is no hope, they become apathetic enough to let cruel demagogues take control.

And when governments fear that their power is threatened, they can quell all dissent with a war.

Fascism and chaos both drink from the same pool of despair.

Some nights I go to sleep despairing, too.

And then I remember that is what the Pharaohs of our own time want. They want us to think that nothing can change: that racism and war are the only way.

They want to keep us heading in one direction.

But we move too.

We are the people too, and we will move where we decide to go. We do not have to follow the shift towards tyranny and hate. Like tectonic plates, we can push the other way.

We can point steadfastly towards a world of equality and peace, and insist that we will go nowhere else. If we start pushing, we can lock arms with others, and build a coalition that can defeat every despot.

Yes, we move. And when we move, God moves too.

God, the great hand of history, is always directing humanity towards justice. God’s hand may be the hardest to perceive of all the forces in the universe, but the Power of Moral Truth is always trying to push us forward.

The Eternal One, revealed through history, is most visible in eras when we decide to do God’s will.

There may be days when it feels like nothing can change.

But, everywhere, at all times, the earth spins, the tectonic plates shift, the people move, and God guides us.

We will not fall into despair. We will not stand still.

We are going to get our way out of Egypt.

We will move.

A peasant farmer was my father

When my mind wanders, I like to think about where I would go if I could travel in time. Have you ever considered this? When you would want to visit?

Personally, my first thought is Paris in the 1890s. In my higher moments, I project myself into medieval Andalus, the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in Spain.

And, of course, I’d love to go back to biblical times. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to see the First Temple in all its glory? What would it be like to inhabit that world of prophets and visionaries?

But this time travel thought experiment always comes with a corollary. I’d have to be a rich man. No matter what spot of history I got dropped in, the only way to enjoy it would be to be part of the elite.

If I were sent back to biblical times without that condition, I’d probably be a peasant farmer. We like to imagine our ancestors as great kings and high priests. In reality, they were less than a small fraction of the ancient Israelite population.

95% of people in the biblical period worked the land. Dropped back to the time of David and Solomon, we probably wouldn’t be in their courts, but in the fields.

I take a perverse pride in this knowledge.

Think how hard they must have worked to bring that ancient society into being!

As a peasant farmer in the ancient world, you would have about 3 acres, growing different crops, including grains, fruit trees, and olives. You would, almost certainly, have a chicken run and a small herd of goats.

If you were really fancy, you might also have a cow.

Your home would be a collection of huts and tents, stretching out to include your extended family. Each would be a bustling, cramped place, with pots and pans and a fire stove. Your animals would potter in and out of your sleeping quarters.

I am not trying to paint a romantic vision of any of this. Your life would be hard. You would pull a plough with your own hands and sow seeds with your back hunched over. You would cultivate and cut and glean your trees in the searing heat.

You would spin your own wool, stitch your own clothes, bake your own bread, build your own dwellings, subsist on whatever you needed to survive.

Yes, all that is true for women, too, with an additional burden. You would give birth to ten children and breast feed all of them. You would count yourself incredibly lucky if all of them lived past the age of 5. If they did, they would likely be married off in their teens.

No, there is nothing romantic about the lives of our real ancestors.

But we should be proud of them.

Peasants, labourers and serfs might not be the subject of great poetry and sagas, but without their efforts, nothing exists. There could be no food, no shelter, no community, and no culture, without their graft. That gruelling work made civilisation possible.

This week’s parashah tells us something of how they built ancient Israelite society.

If they had just stuck to their own homesteads, they would have had to survive on the paltry gains of subsistence farming. In a bad year – if rains failed to fall or crops failed to grow – they would simply perish.

So, our family, the farmers of the ancient world, signed up to participate in the agrarian state.

The agrarian state was responsible for distributing food and creating common irrigation and transport systems. In ancient Israel, the centre of that state was the Jerusalem Temple.

Our parashah explains the criteria for participating in its systems. You must not glean your fields right to their edges, so that you leave enough for travellers and strangers. You must donate a tenth of your grain and livestock to support those in the community who are most vulnerable, like widows and orphans.

In some ways, this is the foundation of the earliest welfare state.

But the poor are not the only beneficiaries of this redistribution.

In fact, they were not even its primary targets.

Our parashah begins with a ritual that Israelites must undertake each year. At each harvest of the year, you must collect your first and best fruits. You must bring these, the choicest of all the crops you worked so hard to create, and give them to the priests.

You must lift them above your head and say: “A wandering Aramean was my father. He was enslaved in Egypt, but God brought him out into this land of milk and honey. Now, I bring before you, the first fruits of the soil that God has given me.”

The priest will sacrifice it, perform closed rituals, and eat it in front of you.

That priest did not work to produce those fruits. He did not share in the exhausting work of raising children in a hovel, or run ploughs over the land. In fact, he wasn’t responsible for any land.

The priest’s sole job was to be the leader of the ancient cult. He was in charge. He profited from your work.

That great Temple in Jerusalem, with all its priests and writings and rituals, only existed because the poor majority paid in and made it happen. That entire society functioned on the basis of our ancestors’ labour. How could they have done it without the work of the people who harvested the grain, built the bricks, and cared for the sick?

I don’t resent the ancient priests.

That work made possible great cultural developments. At that time, we couldn’t have had literary culture, organised society, music or scientific discovery without a class who had the leisure time to devote to such pursuits.

We then wouldn’t have benefited from the innovations in agriculture, technology, transport and trade that makes our lives today less horrible than they were in ancient times.

But, while resentment for ancient figures might not be productive, we should feel entitled to be critical.

After all, their world is our world. For all the social progress we have made, the divisions that defined civilisations millenia ago are only greater than they were then.

Far fewer people profit far more from the work of the majority than ever did in the biblical period.

Almost all of us, I know, are worried about how energy price gouging, interest rate rises, and higher costs of living will affect us. Some are already feeling the effects of an economy where wages won’t rise but prices keep going up.

Meanwhile, the energy companies and their shareholders are making record profits. These last few years, which have been so frightening for most people, have been a period of great abundance for the world’s richest.

This is not accidental. The rich are not rich in spite of the poor. They are rich because of the poor.

Perhaps those inequalities were essential to create our current world. But how much greater would society be if we decided to eradicate them? Just imagine what we could accomplish if nobody had to worry about heating their home or feeding their family.

We could unleash the great talents of everyone, whether priest or pauper; shareholder or sharecropper; king or taxi driver. We could enjoy this world, with all its bounties, without the constant friction of struggle.

On reflection, if I could travel in time, I don’t think the past would be the place for me. I would prefer, instead, to make my way to the future.

I want to go to the time when technology is harnessed to benefit everyone in the world, regardless of who they are and where they live. An era in which it is not just a small minority that creams off the profits of the many, but when everything is redistributed between everyone. One in which the gains of civilisation are shared with all humanity.

We can’t change the past. We can’t go back and rescue our ancestors from the harsh realities of peasantry. But we can build a different future for the next generation. We can make it so that the future is not defined by the same problems of the past.

Let us travel to that point in time together.

Shabbat shalom.

Ki Tavo 5782, South West Essex and Settlement Reform Synagogue