A Jewish Response to Globalization (Rabbi Micha Odenheimer)
2009-02-24 21:31
Rabbi Micha Odenheimer is a contributing editor for Eretz Acheret Magazine. The
founding director of the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews, he currently runs
Tevel b’tzedek, a service and advocacy program for Israelis and Diaspora Jews in South
Asia. His articles have been published widely in newspapers and magazines in the
United States and Israel.
Although history is full of surprises, my bet is that the globalization
of the economy will be remembered in centuries to come as the
most significant development of our era. The definition of economic
globalization is the integration of all the economies of the world into a
single international market. In today’s model, this means the control
and domination of the world’s economy by giant, politically powerful
multinational corporations. Increasingly, these corporations decide
what we grow and eat, what information we encounter, and even
which laws will govern our increasingly small world. The struggle to
determine the shape that economic globalization will take is thus a
sacred struggle for the human future.
As Jews, we belong to a tradition that has fought against a market-
centered vision of social life. For us, globalization clearly presents
a grave challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. The globalization
of the economy is a process that began five hundred years ago with
European colonialism, but the end of World War II, the concomitant
expansion of American economic power, and more recently, the fall of
Communism and the subsequent international trade and banking
agreements imposed by the World Trade Organization mark astounding
new phases in the totality of its scope. The process of globalization
has gained exponentially in velocity at the very moment at which the
majority of Jews are, for the first time, fully empowered citizens of
democratic countries—first and foremost the United States and
Israel—that are key participants in the global economy. We thus have
the opportunity, the freedom—and the urgent responsibility—to influence
the future face of humankind.
The predominant voices in the mainstream media claim that
globalization creates economic growth that will eventually wipe out
poverty and increase democracy. But what I have witnessed in fifteen
years of reporting from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the
Caribbean does not allow me the comfort of believing that globalization,
in its present form, is good for the poor and oppressed. In country
after country, I have seen how the viselike logic of profit
maximization crushes the poor and destroys their culture and
dignity.
From Thailand to Mexico, farmers living in semi-communal villages
have been forced off their land by a combination of violence,
trickery, and the degradation of their environment and have been
forced to sell their labor to factories, mining companies, or plantation
owners. This process has been driven by governments, usually corrupt
ones, that take huge “development” loans from Western powers and
must now produce what can be sold for dollars in order to service
these loans. Economists who judge economic success in terms of
“growth” and Gross National Product have not devised ways to measure
what it means to lose forever the chance to fish in a clean river, to
raise children in a safe environment and transmit to them your ancient
culture, or to grow food on your own land. Nor do their statistics
account for the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of nonrenewable
natural resources that have been extracted from developing countries
over the past few decades, or the cost of the devastating pollution that
is the byproduct of growth.
What does Judaism have to teach about all this? The notion that
economic power must be diffused and democratized runs through the
Torah like a spine, beginning with the Garden of Eden narrative.
Whatever else the multilayered story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden is about, it can be read as a symbolic account of the emergence of
humankind from prehistory, marked by innocence and nakedness, into
the long era of “By the sweat of thy brow thou shall eat thy bread.”
Food Is the Original Capital
Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is connected,
on a compressed, symbolic level, to the end of the huntergatherer
period and the beginnings of agriculture. One of the great
differences between gaining one’s food supply through agriculture and
acquiring it as a hunter-gatherer is that staple foods offer a diet that is
less varied, but always safe, while hunter-gatherers, who typically utilize
hundreds of kinds of plants and fruits, must always be aware of
the possibility of poison. On the simplest level, God’s warning to
Adam that if he eats from the fruit of a certain tree he will “surely die”
might be read as an allusion to this constant presence of danger in a
hunter-gatherer’s food supply.
Over the past century, archaeological anthropologists have traced
the ways that the beginnings of agriculture often turned on the human
ability to transform a specific species from a poisonous to an edible
state through, for example, the chance discovery and the subsequent
cultivation of a harmless mutation of a poisonous fruit or plant.
Perhaps this transformation is encoded in the snake’s assurance: “No,
you shall surely not die.” And if, as Kafka says, Adam and Eve’s punishment
was not immediate death, but consciousness of mortality,
would not this consciousness coincide with the kind of conception of
time necessary for the long-term calculations of horticulture and the
domestication of animal species?
Whatever the merit of these interpretive conjectures, one fact is
clear: the emergence of agriculture created, for the first time, the possibility
of surplus, of the storage of food. Food is the original capital.
Storage prevents starvation during lean times, and also facilitates the
possibility of permanent human settlements with populations far
larger than that of the largest hunter-gatherer collectives, which never
exceed 150 to 200 people. But with the possibility of surplus and the
resultant growth of the population came bureaucracy, social class, specialization,
hierarchy, and oppression.
The Economic Meaning of Egypt
The vector leading from the end of hunter-gatherer society to the hierarchical
centralization of power and concomitant exploitation can be
seen as defining the narrative arc of the Book of Genesis. Opening
with the parable of Eden, the last third of Genesis is devoted to the
Joseph story, which brings to denouement the book’s thematic leitmotifs,
such as jealousy between siblings, recognition, and mistaken identity.
The artistic and emotional power of the Joseph story is so great,
and its culmination so heartrending, that it is easy to lose sight of the
fact that it ends with the enslavement of the Egyptian people to
Pharaoh through the instrument of the storage of food. We are barely
done wiping the tears from our eyes from Joseph’s reunion with his
brothers and father when the Torah tells us the following:
And there was no bread in all the land, for the famine was
sore.… And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found
in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the corn
which they bought and Joseph brought the money into
Pharaoh’s house. And when money failed in the land of Egypt,
and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph
and said, Give us bread.… And Joseph said, Give your cattle….
When that year was ended, they came unto him the second
year, and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how
that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle;
there is not ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies,
and our lands: And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for
Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the
famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh’s. And
as for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of
Egypt to the other. (Gen. 47:13–16, 18–21)
Could the subsequent enslavement of the Israelites have been accomplished
without the prior centralization of power and resources in the
hands of Pharaoh? In Jewish tradition, Joseph is known as Yosef ha-
Tzaddik, “Joseph the righteous one,” both for his feat of chastity in
refusing the advances of Potiphar’s wife, and for saving his family and
296 THE SEVENTY NATIONS: GLOBAL CONCERNS
Righteous_In_text 10/26/07 1:50 PM Page 296
the Egyptian people from starvation. But the Torah has complex
undercurrents running through it. According to Jewish educator
Joshua Lauffer, there are some striking affinities between the snake—in
our reading, the catalyzing agent in the transformation of human society
from hunter-gatherer to agricultural means of production—and
Joseph, who utilizes the capacity for concentrating and storing the
wealth that agriculture unlocks in order to create an unprecedented
conjunction of wealth and political power.
In its promise to Eve, the snake says, “You will be as God
(Elohim), knowing good and evil.” As Lauffer points out, unlike the
heroes of previous stories in Genesis—Noah, Abraham, Isaac, or
Jacob—Joseph never speaks to God or hears God’s voice. Instead, he
seems to function as a virtual stand-in for God, recalling the serpent’s
prediction, “You will be as God.” “For doth not God (Elohim) have
the answers,” Joseph says to his fellow prisoners. “Tell [the dream] to
me” (Gen. 40:8).
Moreover, in describing his predictive powers (the same powers
that enable him to store food and thus power for Pharaoh), Joseph uses
the root N-Kh-Sh—the very same letters as those that form the word
snake—doubling the word for emphasis. “Did you not know,” he asks
his brothers—“SheNakhesh YeNakhesh Ish asher Kamoni”—that a person
like me would surely divine [what you have done]?” (Gen. 44:14).
Here the narrative, through the voice of Joseph himself, conflates prediction
and manipulation—Joseph here claims to have foreseen a theft
when actually he has presided over a frame-up. In the interpretation of
Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph takes the “knowledge of good and bad” that
the snake predicts for Adam and Eve and realizes this knowledge within
the realm of time—good and bad, fat and thin, become good years and
bad years, fat years and thin years. Knowledge of good and evil is
revealed as manipulation, calculation, planning, and strategy.
The juxtaposition of slavery and accumulation—the concentration
of capital that is a sign of an oppressive society—continues in the
book of Exodus, in which the Children of Israel are forced to build
“storage cities” for Pharaoh. In the description of Israelite slavery, the
Torah uses some of the same vocabulary that will be used to describe
the struggles of the poor within Israelite society. The suffering of the
slaves is called oni—poverty. And their taskmasters, those assigned to
ODENHEIMER / A Jewish Response to Globalization 297
Righteous_In_text 10/26/07 1:50 PM Page 297
extract their labor, are called nogshim, the same word as that used
later in the Torah to describe a person attempting to squeeze money
from the indebted poor. Thus, accumulation and the concentration of
capital come to be associated with oppression and poverty.
What Manna Means
Redemption, along with the giving of the Torah, is marked by a new
means of sustenance. The Israelites are lifted out of the by now seemingly
inevitable economy and culture of hoarding through the story of
the manna. In the narrative arc we have begun to follow, the manna is
a crucial watershed. The Sages rightly saw the manna as creating a
preparatory, material basis for divine revelation. “The Torah was not
given,” says the Talmud, “but to the eaters of the manna.”
What is the essential quality of manna? It is a sustenance unmediated
by a human economic system. It cannot be stored or hoarded. Left
overnight, it spoils, corrupts, and crawls with worms. Each and every
person is charged with gathering just enough manna to eat for one day.
The Torah calls this “d’var yom b’yomo”—“each day’s matter on that
day” (Exod. 16:4). Pharaoh uses this very expression after imposing
heavier burdens upon the Israelites after Moses’s initial intervention on
behalf of the beleaguered people. There, “each day’s matter” refers to
the arbitrary quota of bricks that each person was to produce—bricks
for a giant storehouse (Exod. 5:13). In the story of the manna, to
emphasize the revolutionary nature of the Exodus—in which Egyptian
reality is stood on its head—the phrase is used again, but this time it
refers not to the gross accumulation of resources, but to the modest
amount of sustenance each person needs for that particular day.
Time, instead of becoming reified (“Time is money and money is
time”), is renaturalized, measured according to the rhythm of the
human body and its biological needs. The measure of manna required
by each person is an omer, which we are told is “a tenth of an ephah.”
This is the only place in which the Torah gives us a key to its system of
measurement—to teach us, it would seem, to keep actual human need
at the basis of all our calculations.
To emphasize the centrality of the manna principle in Judaism, God
commands Moses, at the very end of the manna narrative, to place a jar
298 THE SEVENTY NATIONS: GLOBAL CONCERNS
Righteous_In_text 10/26/07 1:50 PM Page 298
with exactly one omer of manna in the Ark of the Covenant, alongside
the tablets of the law, in the holy of holies. The story of the manna
evokes the idealized essence of the hunter-gatherer era. In its immediacy,
in the total economic equality it represents, and in its negation of
accumulation and stockpiling, it repudiates those cultures in which economic
and political power are centralized and conjoined through the
storage of food and other forms of capital. The presence of the manna,
and thus of the trace memory of hunter-gatherer society, is felt in
numerous ways in the Torah’s legislation: in the injunction against the
planting or storing of fruits of the Sabbatical year, in the commandment
to allow the poor the right to “gather” for themselves the remnants of
a harvest, even in the prohibition against delaying the wages of a
laborer—“on the same day you shall pay him what he is due”—as if the
money, left in the employer’s hands, would rot like the manna.
Seen in the light of the narrative arc stretching from Eden to the
giving of manna, the meaning and direction of the economic justice
legislation of the Torah becomes more readily apparent. The Torah’s
purpose is to create an “anti-Egypt,” in which exploitation is not
allowed free reign because land, wealth, and the means of production
have not been concentrated in the hands of the few. Rather than the
consolidation of land in the hands of one person, the Torah commands
that the land of Israel be divided, so that each family has its own plot
of land, of a size appropriate to the needs of the family. As with the
manna, the principle of land distribution is, “To each according to his
needs.” The land is meant to provide each family with its own independent
source of wealth and blessing and can only be sold in time of
need, if the family has become impoverished. As if to emphasize the
nature of this society as opposite that of Egypt, the priests are the only
group not allotted land; ironically, in Egypt the priests were the only
group that was allowed to keep its land in the face of Joseph’s feudalization
of the Egyptian economy.
The Torah allows for the sale of land under special circumstances.
But the laws of the Jubilee (Yovel) mean that every fifty years, the
wealth of society and its primary mode of production are redistributed
and equality reestablished—the land returns to its original owners. The
Jubilee is called freedom, dror, the very opposite of slavery. The Jubilee
law is an attempt to legislate against the development of wealthy classes
ODENHEIMER / A Jewish Response to Globalization 299
Righteous_In_text 10/26/07 1:50 PM Page 299
and impoverished, landless classes. It also ensures that land will not
become a reified commodity. Instead of a constant increase in land
value, the Jubilee law makes certain that land is priced according to
its use value, “for it is a quantity of crops that he is selling to you.”
In other words, land, the major source of wealth and means of production
in Israelite society, can never become a source of financial
speculation.
The Jubilee is not the only legislation designed to correct the tendency
of agricultural (and certainly industrial) societies to concentrate
wealth and thus power. In four different places, the Torah also emphasizes
the prohibition against taking interest on loans of money or food,
expressed as a continuation of the laws of the Jubilee:
If your brother grows poor, and his means fail with you, then
you should strengthen him, though he is a stranger or a
sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no interest from
him, nor take any increase, but fear God, so that your brother
might live with you. I am the Lord your God who brought you
out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, and to
be your God. (Gen. 25:35–38)
The Torah repeats the phrase live with you three times, suggesting that
the prohibition against taking interest is a strategy aimed at creating a
society based on at least rough social equality, without divisions into
separate social classes. As Rabbi Shimon Federbush, a rabbinic luminary
writing just before the creation of the State of Israel, says:
At the foundation of the prohibition against taking interest is
the Torah’s desire to prevent the formation of a class of
extremely wealthy people who have gained their riches at the
expense of the economically weak. In doing this, the Torah legislates
on the one hand against the possibility of the rich using
interest to continuously enhance their wealth, and on the other
hand, prevents the emergence of a class of people struggling
under the weight of debts that continue to grow as the poison
of interest causes economic collapse and finally even slavery.
[REF TK]
300 THE SEVENTY NATIONS: GLOBAL CONCERNS
Righteous_In_text 10/26/07 1:50 PM Page 300
The Pharaoh of Globalization
How can we, as faithful Jews, fight against a form of globalization created
to maximize the accumulation of wealth by multinational corporations?
How can we raise up our brothers and sisters who are victims
of this form of globalization, who are growing poorer, losing their
ways of life, bearing the brunt of environmental destruction? Battling
for a different kind of globalization will take clarity of purpose and
strength of conviction. A clear and strong reading of the Torah’s teachings
on economic justice can serve as a crucial ethical and spiritual bulwark,
a place to stand as we reach outward to make new alliances.
These teachings have far deeper and more complex psychological
and economic implications than can be sketched in a single schematic
essay. However, it is my contention that the overwhelming economic
direction of the Torah, evidenced through the integration of its narrative
and legal strands, is not only to insist on the equitable distribution
of resources but also to stand against the kind of concentration of
wealth that inevitably leads to abuses of power.
The entrance into the land of Israel, unfortunately, does not result
in the establishment of the kind of society prescribed by the Torah.
The prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Micah, Hosea, and
others—spend much of their energy in the remaining books of the
Tanakh railing against the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the
rich. In particular, the prophets expose the nexus of political and economic
power that perverts justice in order to serve the greed of the
wealthy. The prevailing Western ideology—that the free market is
really free of political influence and will eventually uplift the poor—
would have evoked the bitter ire of the prophets.
Today, as modern Jews, it is our responsibility to bring Jewish ethical
wisdom to bear on the analysis, exposure, and repair of the current
international economic order. We will need to focus on the regulation of
international corporations and the promotion of grassroots democracy,
and on the nexus between the battle for a clean environment and the
struggle for social justice. And we must not forget that the prophetic
voice of justice emerges from a faith that human beings have within us
the potential for something better, deeper, and ultimately more pleasurable—
both as individuals and as a society. If we listen closely to the
ODENHEIMER / A Jewish Response to Globalization 301
Righteous_In_text 10/26/07 1:50 PM Page 301
deepest layers of our tradition we will begin to realize this truth: none
of us will be free until all of us are. When we gain awareness of how
enmeshed we are with all of humanity, economically and thus ethically,
we will begin the work, in partnership with other spiritual traditions, of
creating a new ethic for the global age.
302 THE SEVENTY NATIONS: GLOBAL CONCERNS
