Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2005-2006
Session #3

Scripture Forum
Session #3
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
January 6, 2006

Texts:
     Deuteronomy 15:1-18
     Matthew 20:1-16

The first text: Deuteronomy 15:1-18 (NRSV translation)

Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because the LORD's remission has been proclaimed. Of a foreigner you may exact it, but you must remit your claim on whatever any member of your community owes you. There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the LORD is sure to bless you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the LORD your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today. When the LORD your God has blessed you, as he promised you, you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow; you will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you. If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, "The seventh year, the year of remission, is near," and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the LORD against you, and you would incur guilt. Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land." If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. And when you send a male slave out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the LORD your God has blessed you. Re-member that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; for this reason I lay this command upon you today. But if he says to you, "I will not go out from you," because he loves you and your household, since he is well off with you, then you shall take an awl and thrust it through his earlobe into the door, and he shall be your slave forever. You shall do the same with regard to your female slave. Do not consider it a hard-ship when you send them out from you free persons, because for six years they have given you services worth the wages of hired laborers; and the LORD your God will bless you in all that you do.

The discussion begins:

• Remark: Except for the part about the awl in the earlobe, I like it.
• Introductory remarks: There are lots of different ways we can go in this text. To get the ball roll-ing, we could look at the apparent conflict in the text in verses 4, 7, and 11. Verse 4 says, "There will be no one in need among you, because the LORD is sure to bless you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a possession to occupy." Verse 7 begins, "If there is among you anyone in need," which is already a deviation from v. 4. Then there is a more exaggerated deviation in v. 11: "Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth …" Is there any way to understand these apparent contradictions?
• Response: It seems in v. 4 that there is "no one
  in need among you"; whereas in v. 11 "there will never cease to be some in need on the earth." There's a little bit of a distinction there.
• Remark: In v. 4 it appears that the condition of no one's being in need is unique to the occupation while they're in the land.
• Remark: Verse 4 has a condition to it: if only you will obey.
• Remark: Maybe God's sensibilities are Presbyterian, because the possibilities of obeying are beyond human capability. The condition will never be met; therefore, there will always be those in need. There's a logic the text is following: All this is premised on obedience, and obedience is an impossibility; therefore, there will always been need.
• Response: The question is, does that still conflict with v. 4, because v. 4 itself is not conditional, unless it is read as inextricably linked to v. 5: "if only you will obey the LORD." It seems like v. 4 is a more powerful claim, and it seems like vv. 4 and 5 are actually different claims.
• Question: Does the grammar of the text support a reading of v. 4 as "there need be no poor people among you"? In other words, if you take care of the poor people among you, then they will not be poor. That's how the TNIV renders it: "There need be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God has given you to possess as your in-heritance, he will richly bless you." God is going to richly bless you such that you're going to be able to share with those in need. That's actually being commanded.
• Response from a Jewish participant: I think that is the point that Kushner draws out from this text in Etz Hayim, which is the new Conservative Chu-mash. [The respondent checks the commentary, then continues:] No, I'm wrong, I guess.
• Response: He should've.
• Response: He should've. He could've. He does go in that direction with v. 11. He says, "Therefore, you must build a solution to poverty into the social structure." So he's kind of playing around with that idea.
• Remark: I don't know what the Hebrew does here, but if there is, in fact, a distinction in the text between "in the land" in v. 4 and "on the earth" in v. 11, it seems to me that the text is pressing for a concern beyond the land, i.e., beyond your own. Early on I read that as being the thrust of the text, that in your land there should not be need because you should attend to that; but on the earth there will always be need, and you have
  an obligation there as well.
• Response after checking the Hebrew text: It's baaretz in both cases. [Scribal note: The NRSV translation appears to have a theological taint to it. The RSV translation of v. 11 reads: "For the poor will never cease out of the land"; and the
  JPS Tanakh translation reads: "For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land" (emphasis added).]
• Remark from a Jewish participant: The way the Hebrew reads, I think you have to read vv. 4 and 5 together. You can't separate one from the other. The first word in v. 5 in the Hebrew is raq, which means "only." It's attached to the previous verse. There's really no other way to read it.
• Remark: So we read vv. 4 and 5 to say that if you obey the commandment of the LORD, there will be no need. If you do not obey, you have an obliga-tion to the needy.
• Response: So maybe we resolved the contradic-tion, but we still have the problem with v. 11 because the words "earth" and "land" are the same. Do we go back to the so-called Presbyterian reading? Does v. 11 suggest that there will never be sufficient obedience because it says the poor shall never cease out of the land? Does it suggest that we can never be obedient enough to allow the system to work the way it's supposed to work?
• Response: I don't think what's in view here is
  that people are not going to be able to obey. There are always going to be needy people (v. 11), but others will take care of those who are needy (v. 4). God will provide the resources that make obedience possible.
• Remark: There will always be a need for compas-sion in caring for the poor. You can't say, "I took care of the needy last year." The need for com-passion is ongoing because there will always be someone to whom you'll need to show compassion.
• Remark: The text needs to be taken in the context in which it is embedded, namely, the sabbatical year. The people are going to be reluctant to let the land lie fallow and to lend in the fifth and sixth years because they know it will all come due in the seventh year. This is an encouragement to ob-serve the sabbatical year, an encouragement -- not withstanding the demands of that year -- to lend and to help one another out. It's not simply a question of taking care of the poor. It's a question of commerce, of lending people money. Why should you do it if you know that every seventh year there's going to be a remission of debt?
• Question: And why should you do it?
• Response: Because God commands you to. And then because Jewish law fixes it so that you don't have to worry about it too much.
• Response: Explain that.
• Response: If you go to court and the collection of the debt is no longer your responsibility because the court has assumed that role, then you've fulfilled your obligation of remitting the debt. The court will collect it and give it to you. It's called prosbul.
• Question: I find it intriguing that there's a dis-tinction being made between those who are foreigners and those who are in one's community. Is "neighbor" somebody who is in your community? Or can a foreigner be a neighbor?
• Response: Tradition assigns these verses to He-brews. The slave that goes free at the seventh year is a Hebrew slave.
• Question: And the application of this vis-à-vis the foreigner …?
• Response: You bought a foreign slave, you bought the foreign slave. He's your property.
• Remark: And you may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel the debt of any
  of your people.
• Remark: It's interesting staying with v. 11 with that as a backdrop.
• Response: But you can't think of the stranger the way we think of a stranger. Stranger is not some-body of another religion. It's somebody who just doesn't dwell among you.
• Response: Right, but this is the distinction in v. 11 that came to me as you were talking: There's always going to be need on the earth. The text doesn't say, "Therefore, take care of the needy of the earth." It says there's never going to cease to be need on the earth, therefore open you hand to you needy neighbor.
• Remark: In that culture and time period, those are the needy that you're going to be dealing with, the ones who are immediately adjacent to you. It's not the global world that we live in, where we can be aware of the needy across the world.
• Response: So it isn't that there's an obligation beyond the boundaries of my land, if you will. The text is saying there will always be needy on the earth. You are commanded to see to it that your neighbors are not needy. Am I reading that cor-rectly?
• Response: It says there will always be poor people in the land. The word is eretz, which can have a global context. But it can also have a local con-text, and earlier it seems pretty clear that it has
  a local context.
• Response: So I should read it as, "Since there will never cease to be need in the land, open your hand to your neighbor in your land." OK.
• Remark: But the neighbor in your land is your people. In other words, there is not to be poverty among your people even though there is poverty in the land. I don't have the Hebrew, but in v. 7 when it talks about "a member of your community," does it not use the word "brother"? (Yes.) So this is almost a family relationship: There is not to be poverty among your clan, tribe, people. So if you "open your hand to your needy neighbor," the neighbor is your people.
• Remark: It's not that you can't let your neighbor live in poverty, but you can let other people live in poverty. You can't let anyone live in poverty. But when you give your neighbor a loan, you can't charge him interest. When you give others a loan, you may charge them interest; although, in the end, that might cause poverty for them. That's the reason you have to be warned, because you as a human being might say to yourself, "The sabbatical year is coming up and I know the debts are going to be remitted, so I don't want to lend money to someone if he's not going to pay me back." It's not smart business practice to lend in the sixth year. The Torah knows that you're a fallible human being and that you're going to tend to think that way, so you're warned specifically that you can't do that.



• Questions: So if we were to move the text now, what do we do with what the text is saying in its time in our own time? What obligation does the teaching of the text place on us in the world in which we live? Is it even feasible living like this Who lives like this, where in the seventh year everything is remitted? Whether it ever was the case, who knows? But as a vision of how one ought to live, it seems to me this is pretty roundly discounted because it's stupid economically.
• Response: For the person who has something,
  it's stupid. For the person who doesn't, it's not.
• Response: Right, but the person who doesn't is powerless, and therefore the text is really trying to address the "haves."
• Question: Does the system work in such a way that, given the natural uneven distribution of talent, appetite, etc., there are always going to be some who will amass greater levels of wealth than others. So you're always going to have a drift towards inequity. What the sabbatical does is periodically level the playing field again. Built into this system, if you will, is a kind of corrective that would certainly make the Bush administration unhappy.
• Response: It doesn't seem to level the playing field altogether. It does seem to alleviate the great gap between those who were indebted and those who lent, but it doesn't necessarily mean that those who asked for a loan were going to be wealthy or even at the same economic level as the ones who lend them the money. It's going to alleviate their debt, but it's not necessarily going to give you an equal economic playing field. There's still stratifi-cation permitted economically.
• Question: Are we focusing on the wrong thing? It seems to me that the focus is not necessarily on the poor but rather on our responsibility to be obedient to God. God has provided a sufficiency; the issue is one of distribution. There's no magic
  in the numbers -- seven years, five years, eight years. God is saying, "You are all my children equally. You all have equal purchase on my bless-ing, on what I have provided you in the land on the earth. You are responsible for dealing with it, for distributing it fairly. That is what I'm insisting on as your God. I'm insisting on that degree of obedience. You handle it; it's your earth."
• Response: I guess I want to read this as implicitly more condemning of the "haves." God is saying, "Look, I know left to your own devices, you're going to keep the money for yourself. You're not going to take care of the poor. So I'm going to build an obligation into our relationship: You have an obligation to obey me, and you have an obliga-tion to remit debt." The fact is, if people have to do this every seven years, something is not right. If we were obedient, we would have one seven-year remission, and then we would learn that unequal distribution somehow is not what God wants. The fact of remission every seventh year implies that God is going to guarantee that at least the vision is such that people will be required to do it. In the fifth and sixth years the people are going to be tempted not to do it, there will still be tremendous inequity, but there will be an obliga-tion to try to put the situation right. Nevertheless, that doesn't get at what's implicitly wrong. Not to say anything against Mother Theresa, but simply attending to the dying does nothing to talk about why there are millions of people in gutters dying. There's no systemic impetus in all of that. We need to step back and say, "Why are we having to do this in the first place? Shouldn't we be building an economic order that is more just so that we don't have to have a seventh year?" Isn't it my job and my community's job to declare this text out-dated, to live in such a manner that we don't need a seventh year?
• Remark: Not only does the debt system fail to solve the problem, but we also see that some people have to sell themselves into slavery and thus go to a further level of indebtedness. The first step intended to deal with the poverty is
  not adequate: The people sink even lower, into slavery.
• Response: Except that in the sabbatical year, Hebrew slaves will be redeemed from their slavery. So the system guarantees that every seven years at least that particular location economically will be ameliorated. There is also -- I don't want to say eschatological anticipation here -- but there is a systemic anticipation of a corrective. There are anticipations of the system actually somehow either succeeding in ironing out the problems or in providing a completed vision: "When the LORD your God has blessed you, as he promised you, you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow" (v. 6). Not only will there not be people indebted within the community individually, but the whole nation itself will not be in a position where it is indebted.
• Response: But others will.
• Response: OK. You're giving a systemic critique that the system doesn't actually address the bottom-line problem that gives rise to need, and that's an interesting critique. All I want to suggest is that, while implicit in the text is a particular problem that gives rise to this kind of circum-stance, the text also anticipates that somehow that implicit problem will be resolved and that the system will resolve it. To a certain extent, there's a confidence that we needn't worry about what causes this particular problem because somehow built into the halakhic system is a way to eradi-cate the problem of those who have. Somehow they will learn how to no longer be this way.
• Response: I would never read v. 6 the way you are. You're a much nicer person. What I see in v. 6 is that there are nations that are going to need resources, and you'll be able to lend to them. So there will be a sort of inequity on a grander scale.
• Question: Why is inequity inherently a bad thing? What in the text tells you that inequity is inher-ently problematic?
• Response: Because we're all equal in the eyes of God.
• Response: Well, you're much better looking than I am.
• Response: You couldn't have said that I was much better looking than Julia Roberts.
• Getting back on track: Again, why is inequity in-herently a bad thing?
• Remark in agreement: The text does not imply that it's bad if there are some poor people and some wealthy people in your community. It's a given. That's the way it is.
• Remark: It's a part of life. And because it's a part of life, we are called to address that by being compassionate.
• Reaction: I can't believe that poverty is a part of life. What the heck is that?
• Response: There are some people who, because
  of the condition of their life, are going to get themselves in economic trouble. Whether they're mentally ill, whether they just made poor business choices …
• Response: And I'm not connected to that?
• Response: But it's not because of the system.
• Response: But I'm connected to it.
• Response: When that happens to someone, you're not to turn your back on him. You're to be com-passionate and to respond to him because he is your neighbor, your brother; she is your sister.
• Remark: Think about the people you claim are in the better position. In v. 6 it appears that the Hebrews will be in a better position because they will be lending and not borrowing. But think about who these folks are: These are people who are functioning obediently. This isn't necessarily an eschatological vision, but it's a future vision suggesting that these folks will have successfully operated within their system. Wouldn't you rather have the people who are poor borrowing from people who function obediently within a com-manded life?
• Response: Yes, absolutely I would. But what I really want is that there aren't any poor people. I'm complicit in their poverty … (At this point a great many people begin talking at the same time in response to the point made.)
• Remark: What intrigues me about this conversation concerns the place of a utopian imagination and how that fits with the religious imagination. It seems to me that there is something about this text that puts a check on excessive utopian dreaming. Maybe that's a failure of imagination. Maybe it's a failure of being able to recognize the fundamental equality and dignity of every human being. Or maybe it's a recognition that the ulti-mate quest for the utopian reality is beyond what we can do. Therefore, let's deal with the reality on the ground that we experience day in, day out, and make sure we don't get so captivated by these fantasies that they distract us from the nitty gritty work that needs to take place right here and now.
• Remark: David Hartman told an ICJS group once that God is not a Jeffersonian Democrat.
• Remark: The other thing is, the poor are part of God's creation. To turn you back on the poor is
  to turn your back on the Creator.
• Response: I have no argument with that. That's not my issue.
• Response: What I'm saying, though, is that they're not poor necessarily because they are evil or be-cause others have been evil to them.
• Response: They're poor because this shirt should be costing me $75.00, but because it's made in wherever, it only cost me $25.00.
• Protest: Come on. Look, you can't constantly bring our current sensibilities to an ancient text and try and read it and understand the text that way. This text is entirely practical. I think the notion of utopianism in terms of reading the text is correct. You're making a category out of "poor," and you're imposing that category in investment and social democratic terms. There are going to be poor people and rich people. The poor people are no different than the rich people; they bungled it, they blew it. The rich people are people who managed to husband their resources, they're better businessmen, or what have you. The poor person who sells himself into slavery overextended himself and borrowed too much. He's not poor by nature. He wasn't born poor. He paid for his bad business by selling himself into slavery at the going rate. The notion that this has to do with obeying the LORD … All the commandments in Torah have to do with obeying the LORD. That notion underlies the whole presentation. Poor is not a category, as rich is not a category.
• Response: Maybe I needed to preface my concern by saying that this has been a swell discussion about the text, and you helped me just now to have better insight into what the text is supposed to be doing. But if this is the living word of the living God for me today, then somehow I need to take this text and ask of it what it is obligating me to do or to be.
• Response: Very simple. I'll tell you.
• Reaction: All these years and these gray hairs, and he's going to tell me.
• Response: I'm telling you the following: that people are people. The difference between poor and rich is simply a temporary phenomenon. It should not be built in to the economic system under which you're working. Your obligation is not simply to take care of a poor person, but to help create a context within which poor and rich are more equal. Equality should not be viewed simply in terms of who has more and who has less. This
  is serious economic and social legislation. As you said about Mother Theresa, it's not simply a question of helping the beggar on the street. It's
  a question of creating an economic system where there are fewer beggars on the street. This is not simply about the individual. God has to assure the people that if they're going to adopt such a sys-tem, they're not going to be cheated.
• Response: Within the Israelite community I think you're right. But v. 6 could still be problematic within the text. What is the relationship of Israel to the other nations in this particular text? The portrait you just drew was one that concerns the interior community. It's interesting, however, to read v. 6 not just economically but also theo-logically. [Verse 6: When the LORD your God has blessed you, as he promised you, you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow; you will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you.] I think it's easy to expect that what this ultimately suggests is that the Israelites are not actually indebted to anyone. But what the text at large suggests is that the Israelite indebt-ed relationship is bound covenantally. That is, God had already redeemed them. They're always to a certain extent indebted to God. Theologically their economic infrastructure is bound by covenantal terms. So the real difference between the Israelite nation and the non-Israelite nation is, to a certain extent, not just economic but also theological and covenantal. That holds open the possibility that to the extent that the nations outside of Israel are also bound covenantally to a certain extent, per-haps they, too, will become nations that no longer have to borrow but are only in a weakened posi-tion, so to speak.
• Response: That may leave open a possibility, but that possibility isn't articulated in the text. (No.)
• Reaction: The nations you're talking about are pagans.
• Response: Clearly, the outside covenantal possi-bility is not suggested in the text. It wasn't within the theological imagination.
• Response: What was within the theological imagination was the recurring phrase, "because the earth is mine." That's underlying all of this.
• Response: That's true, yes.
• Reaction: Except there's a clear distinction in the Leviticus passage that we read at our last meet-ing. Every time the land is mentioned here it is "your land." No, it's not God's land. He says, "It's your land." (Much opposition arises over this point.) There's a transfer, an emphasis of respon-sibility on the people: "I blessed you as a people. This is your land, and you are to care for the people amongst you."
• Response: But the Torah as a whole reads that as: It's your land as opposed to being somebody else's land. God says, "It's not your land, it's my land. Therefore, you have to live by my rules in terms of how you conduct yourselves."
• Response: If we read the Torah as a whole, yes,
  I would agree with you. But I think the author of this passage is specifically emphasizing "your land, your responsibility." And if you do not accept your responsibility, you have to answer to God.
• Remark: God reminds the people in v. 7 that this is "the land that the LORD your God is giving you."
• Remark: In v. 4 it not only says that it's the land that the LORD is giving you, it's also the LORD blessing you in the land. God will guarantee prosperity. The whole economic system is backed up by God, making it possible for the whole nation as a nation to prosper. Those who fall into poverty will be well taken care of by the others who didn't fall into poverty but who prospered. Moreover, all the nations around them are going to see what's going on with this nation: It's healthy and pros-perous, and it wins all its battles.
• Response: My point is that, grammatically, there are different ways of saying it. You can say: "I gave you the land," or "I gave you your land." In this passage, even in v. 7, which you cited, it specifically says "your land." It's not "the land," which is what occurs in the context of Leviticus 25 where it outright says, "You do this because
  it is my land."



• A point that returns to remarks made earlier: You were articulating a reading of this text that pre-sents an economic and social vision that would very much contest the status quo.
• Response: The sense is that this is meant to be the status quo. The status quo gets out of shape because of who people are, and periodically you readjust to go back to what God meant the status quo to be.
• Remark: My own assessment is that this text has not been applied within either the Jewish or Chris-tian traditions to call to account the reigning systems of social and economic arrangements.
• Response: For one thing, there's no evidence that it even obtained in ancient Israel. The question is, can you do it? You don't need this particular text to go at the system we're living under. We have done it, and you guys have done it, too. You look at a poor person and see him in a category, and it's our obligation to help the person in this cate-gory. No, no, no. The Torah will say, in terms of justice, that if a poor person or a rich person comes to you and it's a question of what is just,
  it doesn't matter who's poor and who's rich. You don't favor the poor person just because the other guy is rich. We're talking about what's just.
• Response: That's another conversation.
• Reaction: You bet it is.
• Response from a Jewish participant: I would be comfortable using this text sermonically to talk about the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country, and that one of the things the Torah seems to be interested in doing is preventing that kind of gap from growing. It seems to be interested in correcting for that process.
• Remark: I share the post-French Revolution zeal for liberty and equality, but I think the text is much less concerned with the condemnation of the rich than it is with care of the poor. This is a whole system where there's only one reason you lend, and that's because somebody else needs. And you lend money at no profit to yourself. So this is not a business system of lending within the community. It's meeting genuine need.
• Response: I think it's also a recognition that lend-ing is not only about justice and taking care of the poor. It's also the act of giving or letting go. It's an acknowledgment that what is lent does not belong to the lender. The effect of the transaction on the lender is a piece of the equation. It's not just equalizing stuff out.



• Returning to an earlier part of the conversation: You asked the question somewhat rhetorically, what's wrong with inequity? I would want to differentiate: There are some inequities that are sustained by injustice and that promote injustice. There are other inequities that seem part of the natural order of things.
• Remark: And there are some that are just luck.
• Remark: We define inequity based on our own purely subjective judgments. We consider things unequal due to the value we put on them.
• Response: Right, but it seems to me that the text is recognizing that there are certain inequities that are hardwired. First of all, this text implies that there is always going to be an inequity in terms of wealthy and poor.
• Question: But is that hardwired, or is it because of how we are?
• Response: My own reading of the text at this point, and that could change in fifteen minutes,
  is yes, that is taken as an assumption. But there's also an inequity, it seems to me, hardwired into this between those who are in your community and those who are out of your community, those who are Israel and those who are not Israel.
• Response: I agree with the second one, and I think the first one makes sense and no sense to me -- that we're hardwired. I don't think we're hardwired that way at all.
• Question: Does the text suggest that we're hardwired?
• Reaction: If it does, the text is wrong.
• Proposed example: All of us have a hundred dollars. We live next week with that hundred dollars, and then we come back. Will we all have the same amount of money left? No. Some may gain money, some may lose money …
• Reaction: I'm accused of being utopian. We don't all start with a hundred dollars.
• Response: In this system you do.
• Another response: Every fifty years, all the land gets reset, and land is the primary form of capital.
• Response: I'm just saying for the hardwiring that there are going to be differences. Even if you start with a level playing field, within a short period of time it's going to be unequal.
• Another proposed example: We all set out walking toward Seattle today. In a month we're going to be at different places.
• Reaction: Yeah, I'm going to be maybe at the beltway.
• Response: So the text is saying that for those who are only at the beltway, you give them a ride.
• Remark: Assuming that v. 11 is God speaking, God doesn't say, "Since I have ordained there must always be poor on the earth …" It is almost as if God is saying, "Since I have observed that there will always be poor on the earth, I am commanding you …" To me, hardwiring implies creation.
• Response: I want to say that's descriptive, not proscriptive, which is a very different thing. I look around, I read the newspaper, and I say, "This is the way it is." But that's very different from say-ing, "This is the way it's supposed to be." I want to live in a community in such a way that the text becomes irrelevant.
• Response: The text wants you to live in that com-munity, too, if you read v. 4 properly. If you read v. 11 as descriptive it says that in the current environment there is a surplus of the poor. Once this system is implemented, however, that situa-tion will change over time and there will be no needy among the people. I don't think that the system suggests that there's any kind of hard-wiring at all. If we thought so, there'd be no way to understand v. 4 whatsoever. I think that im-plicit in the text is an anticipation that the system will permit the emergence of circumstances in which there will be no needy in the community, that in fact the system is designed to create that particular result.
• Objection: There's a difference between saying there will be no needy and saying everybody's going to have exactly the same.
• Response: I'm not saying everybody's going to be exactly the same.
• Question: Isn't inequity where people don't have exactly the same things? (No.) OK, help me understand it.
• Response: There might be an equitable range. The extremes are not OK, but a range in the middle could be equitable.
• Remark: The issue is not inequity. The issue is, what does inequity carry? I don't even know if "inequity" is the right word. I don't happen to look like so-and-so or be the same gender as so-and-so. That's incidental. It's not essential to whether or not we should live as sisters and brothers in a just world and that we should work for that. Does the fact that we don't all look alike, act alike, have the same intelligence, have the same sexual preferences, or whatever, mean that we should order our society based on certain subjective decisions or assumptions about difference?
• Question: Who orders that society and how is that ordering accomplished?
• Response: We order it. (How do you order a society?) We order a society in a democracy by voting certain people in office and voting others out when we can.
• Objection: But that's a tiny sliver of how society as a whole works, isn't it?
• Response: No, I don't think so. The way I vote and the way I live every day should somehow be related. How I am in church should somehow be related to how I vote and how I deal with people.
• Objection: We're going too far afield. What's that got to do with the text?
• Remark: I want to make a connection between what we're discussing and this text by picking up on the idea of utopianism that we brought up earlier. I read this text as representing the ideal
  of a community of believers who are called to go beyond business as usual by systemically incor-porating into business as usual the idea of generosity, both individually and collectively.
  In that broad sense as an abstraction, we hear this text as a challenge to be a community whose members go beyond business as usual because of their theological convictions and because they face the reality of the poor and needy.
• Remark: If you go to extremes or you try to create a utopian situation, you're going to lose your audi-ence. You're going to create something that they can't understand and relate to, or something they don't want to relate to.
• Remark: It would seem to me that a text like this is not only directed to the "haves," but is also a very important text for the poor because it legitimizes the rightful claims that they have.
• Response: No only that, but there's fluidity in the economic position: Those who are currently en-slaved may soon be people who could be in the position of those who have an obligation to the needy.
• Remark: It is important for the poor to hear this text, but they are not the "you" addressed by the text. The text doesn't say, "If you have had to sell yourself into slavery, you can be redeemed; and if you have to borrow money, it can't be at too much interest." The "you" in this text always refers to those who have.
• Mild objection: There is a reference back to the grounding: Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. Therefore, the notion of the line between the slave and the impoverished and those who …
• Immediate response: You were this, and now you have this, so don't do that to those who don't. I think that's the connection that's made. It's interesting to me that the fact that as strangers and foreigners they were slaves doesn't translate into "you can't keep foreigners enslaved in your own land." That transition doesn't happen.
• Remark: You said you didn't like that thing about the awl through the ear. But what do we do about the slave who wants to stay a slave out of love and because he is being well provided for by his master? What is neediness? We would say being enslaved is the ultimate neediness, but the text as I understand it is saying that's not necessarily so. In our definition, slavery is giving up moral agency. But here's someone who is choosing to give up moral agency because on some level her needs are being taken care of and because of her affection for the people to whom she is indentured and their social location. There is a dissonance here with respect to what we've been discussing up to this point.
• Remark: We should also point out a subtlety in the text: Slaves are treated differently than those who go into debt. Those who go into debt in the fifth year are released in the seventh. A person who goes into slavery serves as a slave for six years. The sabbatical year doesn't make a differ-ence. So the text is dealing with slaves on a different level than with those who go into debt.
• Reaction: I don't think that's rabbinic.
• Response: I'm just reading the text. It's in the text.



• Remark: This is our joint scripture. We have a text here and we're interpreting it. A Christian comes
  at this text with a gospel kind of midrash. A Jew comes at the text with a rabbinic midrash on what it means. So we're really not talking so much about the text anymore, we're talking about how our traditions have used this text to make it alive. At some point, we simply have to say, "We're going to look at this text for what it says. Then let's see what our two traditions make of it." It's no good sparring back and forth with different interpretations, not recognizing that we're both coming with different interpretive mechanisms.
  We have to make those distinctions as we move along. I think we could first agree on what the text means, and then move on to discuss midrash as midrash.
• Response: So would it be helpful, then, to struc-ture the conversation in such a manner that we try as best we can to say for the first "x" number of minutes we're going to squeeze the text to determine its parameters, and then see what we make of it reading the text through our Jewish and Christian lenses?
• Response to the above remark on text before midrash: I think that's really a helpful comment, but there is one other move I'd want to press. Neusner would conclude that Christians and Jews are always taking about different things, different people, that there's never really been a dialogue. So what would a dialogue presuppose? I think it would presuppose that how your tradition reads the text and moves the text into its community is going to be different than how mine does; but after we've taken the text into our respective communities, can we challenge each other's reading? Is there a way we can ask each other, "Internally, is that reading consistent with your tradition?" And what are the long-term ramifica-tions when you apply that reading of the text to a vision of how our economy ought to be organized and how our social system ought to be configured? We have different ways of coming at that. Do we have ways in which we can learn from each other, challenge each other? Is a real dialogue possible, given the fact that we live in disparate systems?
• Response: I think, absolutely. We come at the text and we establish two different approaches. Now we can dialogue about it, but according to what criteria? I might say that this text is about an economic system and it tells us that we have to be practical. So, for example, in terms of jus-tice and love, I would say that society progresses when what people consider to be love becomes justice. It's not according to how much love there is or isn't in the world; it's when what love dic-tates becomes justice and, therefore, has to be distributed equally among people. A Christian might say, "The text is wrong." It may well be, but that's irrelevant. There are things in Torah that I think are wrong; but either you explain them away, or you make homiletical jumps that are ridiculous, or you just say, "Yeah, I understand why it's there, but it doesn't apply." We're talking about slavery here; it doesn't apply. As slavery. But the text is still practical.
• Remark: I think I would add, and this is of course self-evident, that we're speaking as if there is a Christian interpretation and a Jewish interpreta-tion. Clearly, different Christians look at things through different lenses.
• Response: That's the really fascinating part, because that's the third level, which we haven't been discussing. There aren't just different Chris-tian views; there are different Christian views within the same denomination. So you have the text, and you have the two traditions of inter-pretation, and then you have that third level of interpretation. Going in that kind of orderly fashion is hard.
• Reaction: But if we're more intentional about it, we may learn more from one another in the process.
• Remark: On the coattails of this methodological discussion, let me say that my vote would be to spend even a little bit more time on reading the text as a text and, to the extent possible, doing
  a kind of Rawlsian veil of ignorance for a certain period of time with respect to our own traditions. Maybe the ultimate lesson that we can extract from this discussion is that we should try to be more mindful of when we're imposing our respec-tive midrash on the text and try to siphon out when we're approaching and wrestling with the text qua text, and when we may be running the risk of imposing our respective traditions onto it. So let's switch to the Matthew text and try to wrestle with it and pretend, to a certain extent, that we're seeing the text for the first time. When you do impose your tradition on the text, be mindful of that and maybe say, "In the Christian [or Jewish] tradition, we read it this way."

The second text: Matthew 20:1-16 (NRSV trans.)

"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vine-yard. When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same. And about five o'clock he went out and found others stand-ing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

The discussion continues:

• Immediate reaction from a Jewish participant: I just love this text.
• Question: You do? Why do you love it?
• Response: Because it's the first example of the CCC. (What?) Civilian … you guys are so young. The Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Remark: I've always had a problem with this text, so I'll be interested in everybody's remarks. This has always troubled me as a story of what I call "selective generosity." Maybe I don't like the theology that's implicit in that. Here is an owner who is both just and generous, but he's just to some and generous to others. That's what upsets those who worked all day, that he's not being generous with them. The landowner asks, "Are you angry or envious because I am generous?" I think they are. But he's right when he says, "I have done you no wrong. This is what we agreed on. I've given you what is your due. I am just to you; I am generous to them. That's my business. Go in peace."
• Question: Is your reading instinctively informed by identifying with the laborers who were there early in the day?
• Response: I think that's part of it. But, speaking of what we bring to the text, in my own theology, however idiosyncratic it may be, I think of the reality of God's being generous to all as a starting premise.
• Question: Do we all know what the story is say-ing? Is the story itself within the parameters of the text self-evident?
• Question from a Jewish participant: The second time the landowner goes out, he hires laborers at the marketplace. We don't know where he hires them when he first goes out, we don't know where he hires them when he goes out later. Is there anything in here that suggests that they were purposefully standing out idle doing nothing all day, or were some people at one laborers' stop, some at another? It is possible to understand that the laborers all went out early in the morning looking for work and just hadn't been hired?
• Response: That's the implication, because when the landowner asks them at one point why they've been standing around all day, they say that no-body hired them. One of the things that interests me in this story is that the landowner goes back multiple times and there's nothing that says why.
• Question: Is he going to different locations?
• Question: I'm trying to see if implicit in your query is whether we can make assessments about the character of these different workers. In other words, are some of them lazy?
• Response: In that culture the marketplace was where one went to be hired. It's to the credit of these laborers that they stayed there all day, making themselves available to be hired if an opportunity came up.
• Remark in response to the point about "selective generosity": It's interesting to follow up on your point by suggesting that the economy in this text is quite similar to what we saw in the text about the sabbatical. Your problem is that there seems to be generosity and justice at play at once, and that makes you uncomfortable. But I think the behavior of the landowner is quite similar to God's in the sabbatical year. That is to say, there are folks who voluntarily got themselves into a position where they owed other people money. Every seven years God guarantees that the folks who owe other people money are going to have that slate wiped clean, even though it seems like that's not necessarily fair since they got themselves in that situation to begin with. So God is going out on a limb for these folks, and he incorporates that into a system. All the while, the people who "have" are responsible to the people who got themselves in trouble. So it seems like God is being just with the people who have, and he's being generous with the people who don't have. The same kind
  of dual standard seems to be at play in this text as we saw in the text about the sabbatical, yet we didn't call that standard into question in the sabbatical year because we saw it as incumbent, as part of the responsibility of the lender. Here
  the workers who expected the daily wage get annoyed, but the haves in the former text don't get annoyed at having to remit debt, although God expects that they might because he warns them that they must lend the money. I see a lot of parallels between the two texts, even though
  at face value they seem to be rather different.
• Remark: In this text there's no attribution to those who have not been hired that they have done anything voluntarily for that not to happen. They simply were not hired. I think that's a significant piece of this: There is no judgment here about being hired or not hired, and there's nothing in the text that explains why one person was selected over another.
• Response: It's clearly important that they be hired. Like the slave in the Deuteronomy text, it's important that they be able to work, that they be part of the system.
• Response: The system thinks that this landowner continues to hire people throughout the day.
• Question: What's that all about?
• Response: Jesus is giving a parable. This is example A#1 why we're not supposed to read the parables as being about what the world is like, but as being about what God is like. If the landowner knows he needs so many people to work, or so many labor hours, he's going to go out in the morning, hire the people he needs, and be done with. He's not going to keep going back. This is not realistic. This is a deliberately absurd story designed to show how absurd God's grace is.
• Response: How do you know it's so absurd? Maybe there weren't enough folks there to begin with.
• Question: But who would ever do this?
• Response: A stupid landowner.
• Remark: We can begin to read this text by saying, let's make a distinction between an allegory and a parable. If we don't do that first, then we can't understand the full meaning of the text. But there's a kind of elitism built into that that I want to press against. I want my Aunt Connie to be able to pick this up and get something out of it without having to know the fine distinction be-tween a parable and an allegory.
• Response: It's not a fine distinction. And if Aunt Connie were around two thousand years ago listening to Jesus tell the story, she would be laughing along with him because it's ridiculous. It's a funny story. We have to realize why it's funny. That's your job, as somebody who knows this, to help Aunt Connie realize why this is ridiculous, why she shouldn't look at this as an economic story.
• Question from a Jewish participant: Isn't the key to the story the first verse? [For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.]
• Remark: When Jesus says "the kingdom of heaven is like," that's a signal that he's going to tell a parable, which is not going to be about how the world really works. This isn't a business manage-ment class. Jesus is telling his hearers what God
  is like and how God treats people.
• Response from a Jewish participant: Except if you premise this text on the notion that it is totally absurd, that undoes the Deuteronomy text and the system in which people are supposed to re-spond willingly when other people are in need. The people who are in the marketplace need work. The landowner is responding to that need and paying them as day laborers. This may be the fulfillment of the Deuteronomy text, an example of somebody acting as that text requires.
• Response: I don't agree. I think there's a dif-ference between hiring people and giving them charity. If the landowner were following Deutero-nomy, he wouldn't be hiring everybody. He would be giving bread to all the people who hadn't got-ten hired at the end of the day because they were hungry.
  (Many objections arise at this point.)
• Response: The Deuteronomy text isn't about giving charity; it's about hiring people.
• Another response: In part, it's about a slave no longer being a slave. That is, a slave being able to work no longer for a human master, but having his work incorporated only covenantally. So there is a transformation in both texts from not working to working.
• Remark: The absurdity doesn't seem to me to be in hiring people seriatim throughout the day. That might have been a perfectly understandable kind of practice in Jesus' day. I don't know. It's the pay scale that is supposed to make you slap your thigh. If you work a quarter of the day, you should be paid for a quarter of the day instead of the whole day. That's the absurdity.
• Question: You say this parable is an indicator of what God is like. When you read it, do you find any messages for human behavior?
• Response: Sure, because the question God asks is, literally, "Is your eye evil because I am generous?" If you're in the position of somebody who's worked faithfully and you're grumbling against those who have been taken care of while you've been work-ing, you have to ask what it is about you that makes you have that attitude, what it is about you that needs some correcting.



• Remark: There's a way of reading this text that would really make me go crazy. Actually, there are several ways of reading this text that would make me go crazy. But one way would be to say that a person lives a righteous, upright life, and then along comes a character like Eichmann, who, at the last moment, converts and says, "I made some terrible decisions, terrible mistakes"; and he, in es-sence, gets the same reward.
• Response: Not your business.
• Response: What I'm trying to get at here is the theological scandal. I don't find this to be a nice knee-slapper. I find this to be an outrage, if ulti-mately God's love embraces Eichmann. As far as I'm concerned, there is accountability, there is justice that needs to be exercised. To model my-self on this kind of generosity, it seems to me, is an invitation to enabling cheap love, cheap grace.
• Remark: I'd like to differentiate that from my point earlier. It's not the generosity that's attributed to God in this text that's the problem. The difficulty in this text for me is the selectivity of God's deal-ing with people differently.
• Remark: Is not God allowed to do what he chooses with what belongs to him?
• Remark: There's a move here that, from my per-spective, is not very subtle at all. That is the assumption that people are complaining because they're jealous. They may or may not be jealous, but the issue is one of equity, of justice. The story doesn't address the unfairness of what's going on. If you work for someone, and he gives more charity to a poor person who comes to the door than he pays you, you wouldn't say anything. It's none of your business. But if everybody is working for the same person and that person is being inequitable, it's not fair. You don't resent the other person's getting the money, but you should get the same money. What kind of business is this? Is this how you run the world?
• Question: What about the implication here that there are other landowners? It seems fine to this landowner that someone else would have hired the laborers. I find it interesting theologically to think about what that means. If we read this landowner as God, and God's concern is that everybody come into God's kingdom and work in this particular vine-yard, God would hire them all from the beginning. This landowner doesn't seem so worried about that. He seems more worried that all the laborers work; and if they're not working somewhere, they can come and work for him, even at the end of the day. That seems to imply that other vineyards are fine, too.
• Remark: And all these workers want to get work. Even though they weren't in the field working, it's accounted to them in what they are paid that they were in the marketplace looking for work.
• Remark: If we are reading theologically rather than economically, perhaps the text is suggesting that there isn't anybody else who can hire them. The only distinction is between God's hiring them and not being hired at all.
• Response: It seems to me that there is room for multiple ways.
• Reaction: Your reading would seem to contest the claims of monotheism. You would want to say there's the God of Israel, if you will, the God that's articulated here, and then there are other …
• Response: … or whether it's monotheism or various paths to God.
• Question: Where do you get that in the text?
• Response: There's an implication that there are other landowners, other people who could have hired the workers. It doesn't say, "I'm the chief landowner and everybody else works for me."
• Remark: Or "I'm the only landowner."
• Remark: There's another implication, and it gets back to what counts. The landowner did not go knocking on doors looking for people who were not standing in the public square looking for work. What counted was that you actually took yourself into the public square, that you were available for work, and when the landowner called you, you answered. What that meant ultimately is that the landowner dealt with you, not necessarily with equity, but with equality. That bothered people, and I would suspect that it bothers all of us because, as much as we would all like to look like Julia Roberts, we're not going to. Julia Roberts is probably glad she looks like Julia Roberts, but the rest of us may not like that as much.
• Response: No, she actually does want to look like me, I was told. (And well she should.) I want you to be my landowner.
• Finishing the earlier point: This seems as a parable to make a distinction between what God and the kingdom of heaven are like, and what human na-ture is like. Those are not the same thing at all.



• Remark: What does the text tell us about the laborers? For one thing, they're there, they make themselves available. Maybe out of desperation, maybe out of need, but they go to the place where it's possible for them to be hired. But secondly, they're persistent. They don't leave the marketplace after the first hiring, and that may be significant. I know there's a way of reading this as God's grace and God's grace alone. I'm from a bit of a different tradition, and I'm making a move toward interpretation now, but maybe there is some connection between the pay and the fact that the workers remained there until five o'clock. I don't mean that so much in terms of reward, but in terms of the persistence of just being there.
• Question: Doesn't that eliminate the punch line here, "The last will be first, and the first will be last"?
• Remark: I've never understood that punch line. It does not necessarily follow from the text.
• Response: It doesn't follow from the text because it was a floating line that got attached in different Gospels to different things. (I understand.) God knows why Matthew put it here: He needed it, or he had something left over.



• Remark: I'd like to step back about ten minutes
  in the discussion to think about what Matthew is consistently doing. This is early on in the process of Jewish Christians becoming Christians and no longer being seen as part of the Jewish tradition.
  I think Matthew is arguing from within the tradi-tion. This is the same writer who says, "Not one letter is going to fall from the law until it is ful-filled." Not trying to throw too much fuel on the fire, but thinking about this text from that per-spective, I think that Matthew is looking at the laborers who agreed to the daily wage as those in covenant. Matthew is pushing that tradition from the inside and saying, "God might be more gen-erous than that." That adds a very difficult layer to our conversation, but I see it as very con-sistent with what Matthew is trying to do throughout his Gospel.
• Question from a Jewish participant: What does that mean, that God could be more generous?
• Response: This text reminds me of Jonah. Jonah goes to the Ninevites and gets very upset that God would actually save these Ninevites who've just turned and put on sackcloth. Suddenly God says, "OK, I'm not going to destroy you after all." Is there a different way of understanding God's justice, God's freedom to act? And how do we relate to that?
• Remark: So to put this ethnically, religiously, those who were there at the beginning were Jews, and those who were brought on late in the game were gentiles.
• Response: I don't necessarily think that way, but Matthew may have been thinking of the Jews in what he would see as kind of the Jerusalem establishment. Others may be ethnic Jews who also want to be part of the tradition but who
  have been, in Matthew's view, excluded from it.
• Remark: One of the things we think we know about Matthew's community is that it was being torn apart by these two groups of people: Jews who were followers of Jesus and gentile followers of Jesus. It wasn't so much Jews who were not followers of Jesus; it was an internal community issue. Now we read that differently, of course,
  but that's an interesting take -- that this "last
  and first" is scandalous. It's absolutely scandalous that gentiles, who have come to the God of Israel through Jesus, should be equal to Jews, who have come to the God of Israel through Moses. That gives us another spin in addition to the economic spin and the generosity-justice spin.
• Response: But implicit in what you're saying is that the understanding of the relationship with those who came first is a contractual understanding and not a relationship of generous self-giving. (At this point there are many objections.) Well, the story says, "Friend, you've agreed to this; these are the wages we entered into." Matthew's trying to sort out the division between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians; and basically he's categorizing the first group as people who had a contract with God, who carried out that contract, and then the second group comes in. It just seems to me that implicit in the way you're dealing with the story is that you're taking the covenant and interpreting it as a matter of contract and a matter of justice.
• Objection: They were the first, the ones who were chosen in the morning. There was a relationship. It's not simply contractual.
• Response: That's gift, too. (Yes.) That's the struggle I have. Maybe I'm demanding too much
  of the text.
• Remark: This might be putting a Calvinist-Presbyterian reading on the text, but I think the whole story presupposes that God's generosity is consistent throughout. This may be controversial to say, but if we think about even those of us who work in the vineyard all day as not really deserving a wage, then what we end up doing is celebrating God's generosity as opposed to talking about God's being generous to some and not to others. Maybe God is more generous than we could first have imagined.
• Remark: There is a difference among the laborers. Those in the first group agreed to a daily wage. The landowner says to the second group, "I'll pay you whatever is right." There is no negotiation there. He doesn't even say to the later groups,
  "I'll pay you what is right"; he just tells them to
  go to the vineyard, and they go.
• Remark: Implied in this story is that the reward is unchanging. In other words, there's one reward. So the question is, do you have accessibility to it?
• Remark: Harry Emerson Fosdick said -- I jotted this down because I knew you would need it at this very moment -- "The divine judgment is not alone according to the measure of work done, but according to the measure of opportunity." So when you get your chance to work and you take it, you're going to get the same reward, because the issue is whether you responded to the oppor-tunity, not how much work you've done.
• Remark: I think we're anchored in an economic system that plays off scarcity, and this is play-
  ing off an economics of abundance.
• Remark: There's a vineyard full of grapes.
• Response: It may be that we're working out of an economics of scarcity, but we're also working out of an economics of injustice that plays into the knee-jerk reaction to reading this text. Maybe part of the challenge in teaching this text is to open up the conversation to discuss who it is that I resent for coming in new.
• Remark: We have two entirely different texts here, I think. The first text is a directive from God to a people telling them how they are to behave eco-nomically. The second is a story that's supposed to give us an insight into the reality of God.
• Response: It's not just this is the way God is. This is how my community is supposed to be living. I don't want to confine the teaching in this text to "now I have an insight into God that I didn't have before about grace and abundance." There's an obligation here. It's about God, for sure, but that doesn't mean it's not also about how we have to behave in the world.

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