Suppose you woke up one morning and discovered, to your surprise, that you had inherited an enormous mansion.
The lord of the manor has welcomed you as a guest to his entire estate. You have no need to pay rent.
This country villa has plush places to sleep, wonderful waters to swim in, and endless entertainment.
More than that, this house is magical. It provides for your every need. Its luscious garden grows your favourite fruit and vegetables. There is plenty of space to graze and raise whatever animals you desire.
It belongs to you and your descendants forever.
What if I told you that you had indeed been bequeathed such a home, and that you were already living in it?
It is this Earth.
That is how Moses understood the planet on which we live when he instructed the Israelites in Deuteronomy. Moses wanted to impart to the people what a miracle it was to be alive, and to get to live in this abundant and fertile world.
So, says Moses, “the Eternal One your God is bringing you into a good land – with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where you can eat bread and never run out, where you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”
This is the biblical mindset. You are guests in God’s mansion.
You have inherited a paradise and it is the whole world. The seas, the ice caps, the deserts, the mountains, and the forests. They are all yours. And they are all everyone else’s too.
Every human being was granted this world as a gift. Every living creature was placed here by their loving Creator.
Now, if you inherited a mansion like that, you wouldn’t trash it on the first day. You’d want to look after it and make sure your children and theirs got to enjoy it the way you did. You’d want to make sure the grass stayed green and the water kept flowing and the fruit trees kept producing. You’d want to know that everybody would be able to dwell in it for all time.
So, says Moses: “Keep faithfully every commandment I am giving to you this day, so that you can thrive and increase and come and inherit this land which was promised to your ancestors.”
Yes, this land requires no rent, but it does have conditions attached. You have to tend to it. You cannot be violent or greedy or deceitful. You must regularly redistribute the land, and make sure that everyone who lives in it gets their fill, and make sure everyone gets plenty of time for rest.
Well, these are small stipulations, given how wonderful my portion is. I get to live on this earth, which is so abundant, and all I have to do is look after it and share it? It sounds like a fantastic deal.
It is, but there is a trap. You see, you might get used to how great this mansion is. You might forget who gave it to you.
You might commit the gravest sin: you might think that this is yours, and yours alone.
This, says Moses, is a terrible error. “You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” Instead, remember the Eternal One your God, for it is God who gives you the power to produce wealth.”
You might think that you earned the mansion, and you built it, and you can do with it as you please. Well, then, you would become a threat. A threat to the mansion and everyone that lives there. A threat to its babbling brooks and fig trees.
If you fool yourself into thinking this is yours, warns Moses, then “your heart will become proud and you will forget the Eternal One, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
Yes, you have a dark past. A history of slaves and masters. There was a time when people claimed ownership over everything. They declared that the Nile River and the rainwater belonged to them. They hoarded the grain and took possession over the vineyards. They owned the animals. They even owned you.
Do you want to go back there?
Now, look around at our home, here in Surrey. This place truly is wonderful. Working here, I have had the chance to paddleboard down the River Wey, walk on the Surrey Downs, and watch others swim in Divers Cove. I can really believe this county was a gift from God.
And yet this county is certainly not treated as a common treasury.
How did it happen that God’s creation became so gated?
You see, Moses’s description of the world as a common heritage bequeathed by God wasn’t just an idle fantasy. That was how many people saw the world throughout a large part of history.
Until the start of the 17th Century, large swathes of English land were held in common by all people. This meant that everyone could graze the land together. They could rotate crops together; care for the land together; and make sure everyone got fed.
It’s not that England was one great egalitarian utopia. Far from it. There had been kings, paupers, lords, peasants, and landless workers, for centuries. But, at least a part of it was treated as a shared inheritance.
Then, in 1605, the government began a process called Inclosure. They took all that had been previously common and handed it over to the already wealthy. They stripped the poor from their land and forced them into the cities to work in factories. They destroyed whole ways of life.
This mansion, already divided, became the possession of just a few. Just as Moses had warned, the wealthy imagined that their power had come about by their own hands. They thought of themselves as more than lords; more than pharaohs: as gods.
Now, right here in Surrey, a group of people tried to resist them. In 1649, on St George’s Hill, and at Little Heath near Cobham, a group of religious dissidents got together, and decided that they would take the land back from the lords. They were called The Diggers.
Their leader, Gerard Winstanley, has a memorial plaque near Weybridge Station, and there is a tour you can take with historic placards, showing where the Diggers went.
The Diggers wanted a return to the Law of Moses and the biblical attitude.
In the Levellers’ Standard, Gerard Winstanley wrote: “The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”
Like Moses before him, Winstanley was adamant that God was not a propertarian but a generous host, and human beings simply welcome guests. How, then, could some divide up the land and force others off of it?
The Diggers lost their battle for the land, and the world we inherit is made according to the laws of those who enacted Inclosure.
But there is a message, that rings out through time, from the era of Moses through the 17th Century, and right up to today.
That message is that this world is a paradise, bequeathed to us all. And we need to act like it is so.
Shabbat shalom.
Sim Lev 