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Economics of Joy 7/ The Sabbath of the Jubilee helps us understand when we are becoming our own pharaohs. To learn how to let all our beauty blossom
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on June 3, 2025
The sabbatical culture, which is the foundation of the Jubilee, contains a very important anthropological message because it touches on elements that are crucial for the flourishing of individuals and communities. This is because the Sabbath, and therefore the sabbatical year, is intertwined with that deep underground layer of the Bible that is the tradition of wisdom. Without wisdom, the Sabbath cannot be understood, and biblical wisdom cannot live and mature without understanding the Sabbath, in a wonderful reciprocity. Wisdom is one of the most tenacious golden threads of the Bible. That spirit which manifested itself in Greece as sophia and philo-sophia, more or less at the same time, between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, became wisdom, which reached great heights in the biblical texts. Philosophy originates from wonder at a world that could not be but is; wisdom, on the other hand, arises from the discovery of a reality deeper than that which is revealed to the senses, and which contains different words that teach us the craft of living. In wisdom, too, man marvels, but his first and fundamental wonder arises from the unveiling of another world. It includes the wisdom inscribed in the times and moments of nature, in recognizing a bird's nest, in knowing how to repair a plow or a motorcycle with one's hands, in learning ‘how much salt is enough’. It is an upward movement, low as the earth, humble as humus, popular, teaching life by remaining close to the ground and there, on some different day, sensing a more intense fragrance, that of life coinciding with the smell of God and his spirits. The biblical man is a dreamer of a different Adam because he was dreamed by a different God.

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This wisdom is the breath that guided, together with the spirit, the hand of the writers of many biblical pages. One of these can be found in the Books of Kings, particularly in the stories about Solomon, son of King David. The parable of his reign and his life can only be understood in the light of biblical wisdom. God had given Solomon wisdom as an abundant response to what he had asked for at the beginning of his reign: “God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure... He was wiser than all men” (1 Kings 5:9-11). Because of his wisdom, “Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms” (1 Kings 5:1). The Books of Kings begin by showing us Solomon at the height of his splendor and glory (1 Kings 4:20).
However, as we continue reading, we realize that the peak of his success coincided with the beginning of Solomon's decline. In fact, on another day, that wise king lost his wisdom, the great talent of his life: “When Solomon was old... his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God... Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord and did not follow the Lord completely” (1 Kings 11:4-6).
The Bible does not tell us why the moral decline of its wisest king began. Perhaps it is silent in order to give us an important and universal message: many wise people lose their way without realizing it, leaving the right path while thinking, for many miles, that they are still walking on the right road. If we then read these chapters on Solomon's decline in the light of wisdom and the Sabbath, an important clue to that decline may emerge—though not the only one. We sense that the decline perhaps began when Solomon decided to complete his masterpiece, the temple in Jerusalem: “Solomon began to build the temple and completed it” (1 Kings 6:14). And this is where the culture of jubilee and therefore of the Sabbath that underpins it comes into play. Incompleteness and imperfection are fundamental dimensions of biblical humanism. Moses, after freeing the people from Egypt, his greatest work, died without reaching the Promised Land. The patriarchs, David, are imperfect men, as presented in the Bible, as are the matriarchs and many women in the Bible. They are wonderful, amazing, because they are imperfect, full of flaws, mistakes, and limitations. Biblical holiness is different from Catholic holiness because it is perfection in imperfection.
And here we come to ourselves. When one day we discover what appears to be our greatest task, the masterpiece of our existence, along with this fantastic discovery-revelation, the conviction also arises and grows that the flowering of our life, its fulfillment, consists in carrying out that task, that our happiness lies in the fulfillment of that vocation. And so, from that moment on, we direct all our greatest and most beautiful energies toward this goal—it could not be otherwise, it is good that it is so, especially when we are young. Then, however, on another day and much later, we sometimes sense something new. That within the masterpiece we are building, along with our salvation, our defeat is also hidden. We understand, vaguely at first, that that wonderful task had over time become a ‘curse of abundance’, that that great youthful grace was becoming our condemnation. When this insight comes, which by its nature is never clear enough, we often curse the past, the gift and the task, which we suddenly feel we are servants or slaves to, perceiving them as masters who have deceived us and stolen our lives. Until, on another day, and this one truly wonderful, we manage to understand that within that deception there was also a blessing, one that in pain allowed us to come to understand what we now feel as the great secret of life. And there a new prayer is born, we learn to truly thank God, or at least life. It is the day of the Shabbat of the heart. A special and invisible Sabbath, entirely intimate and secret, which blossoms naturally like a beautiful flower in its own time, if and when the seed has been sown in good soil that has welcomed and nurtured it. It comes as a strong and painful light, illuminating the future more than the past, because it points to the only possible way to continue living well, forgetting past and future fruits.
In these rare and necessary moments, we finally understand a mysterious human law, one of the truest, which only the practice of wisdom can reveal to us. When life has given us great talents, and one greater and more precious than all the others, the adult day comes when exercising them begins to take something essential away from us, especially if that talent is called a vocation—religious, artistic, scientific, familial... We find ourselves, in fact, suddenly and without warning at a decisive crossroads. It is the crossroads that separates the wide, downhill road where we could continue to push forward with the successes we have achieved so far, from the other road, much smaller, bumpy, and uphill, which is called self-subversion. It is a second humble little road that tells you: 'Do not consume your success to the end, do not continue to exploit your talents, leave a space in your heart uncultivated. Let it go free in its finest hour, and start again from scratch, poor and naked as on the first day of your youth. This is the only way for you to end your journey on earth lightly. Celebrate Shabbat.' It is the day when Sister Giovanna realizes that she must return to being Giovanna in order to continue truly and differently as Sister Giovanna; when Mario, the poet, realizes that Mario is worth more than the poet. We realize that the vocation-talent that made us fly as young people has suddenly become a burden as adults, and that in order to continue on our journey, we must simply throw it into the sea, after thanking it. We return to the places we were before our vocation in search of that something that was there at the beginning because we know it must still be there.
It is the day when the butterfly thanks the caterpillar, the risen one thanks the crucified one. And they would never go back. Our vocations, our talents, and our greatest task are fulfilled if one day we discover that different kind of chastity that does not allow us to consume our vocation/talent to the end, even when we remain in the same house we have always lived in. And we understand that this incompleteness is simply the fulfillment of our vocation. And perhaps we even reconcile ourselves with that community, which has become less luminous and prophetic than the one we entered as young people, but which is in fact fulfilling its task.
The center of this Shabbat, then, lies entirely in a new form of chastity, because we can no longer use our talents for ourselves, because if we continue to do so, we become the pharaoh of our own lives, and we extinguish them. And so, after spending a lifetime seeking purity and perhaps chastity, we realize that true chastity is something else entirely. It is the chastity we must live towards ourselves, which allows us not to devour ourselves by exploiting our whole soul and our beauty—chastity is not devouring the beauty of others, we know, but first it consists in not devouring our own beauty. We understand that the seventh day has finally arrived, the seventh sabbatical, that of true gratuitousness, and we say: shabbat shalom; that the land that is not to be exploited and finally allowed to rest after 49 years is our heart, and that we are the slaves to be freed. And then many discoveries begin, all daughters of this sabbath of the heart. That our most beautiful symphony is the unfinished one, our true masterpiece is what we have not achieved in the forms we had thought and wanted, the most beautiful book is the one we have not written and will never write. This Shabbat is a tenacious non-work that consists in letting oneself work; it is a time of meekness, of accepting and welcoming the hand of the good shepherd passing over the back of the heart. It is the day of the gift of adult wisdom.
Only wisdom can teach us this logic. We are greater and more beautiful than the most beautiful and greatest things we can do; we are greater and more beautiful than our talents, our tasks, our masterpieces, even our vocation. Because we were created for love and not for utility, not even to be useful to the Kingdom of God and his temples. Shabbat teaches us all this.
 
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    [text] => 
Economics of Joy 7/ The Sabbath of the Jubilee helps us understand when we are becoming our own pharaohs. To learn how to let all our beauty blossom
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on June 3, 2025
The sabbatical culture, which is the foundation of the Jubilee, contains a very important anthropological message because it touches on elements that are crucial for the flourishing of individuals and communities. This is because the Sabbath, and therefore the sabbatical year, is intertwined with that deep underground layer of the Bible that is the tradition of wisdom. Without wisdom, the Sabbath cannot be understood, and biblical wisdom cannot live and mature without understanding the Sabbath, in a wonderful reciprocity. Wisdom is one of the most tenacious golden threads of the Bible. That spirit which manifested itself in Greece as sophia and philo-sophia, more or less at the same time, between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, became wisdom, which reached great heights in the biblical texts. Philosophy originates from wonder at a world that could not be but is; wisdom, on the other hand, arises from the discovery of a reality deeper than that which is revealed to the senses, and which contains different words that teach us the craft of living. In wisdom, too, man marvels, but his first and fundamental wonder arises from the unveiling of another world. It includes the wisdom inscribed in the times and moments of nature, in recognizing a bird's nest, in knowing how to repair a plow or a motorcycle with one's hands, in learning ‘how much salt is enough’. It is an upward movement, low as the earth, humble as humus, popular, teaching life by remaining close to the ground and there, on some different day, sensing a more intense fragrance, that of life coinciding with the smell of God and his spirits. The biblical man is a dreamer of a different Adam because he was dreamed by a different God.

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    [title] => True freedom is always a gift. The Jubilee helps us understand this
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Economics of Joy 5/ - The Holy Year as a favorable time to remember our own liberation and become liberators for others
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 06/05/2025
Freedom is a special good. We love many things, but what we love is beautiful and good if and because we are free. And if we are not free, we sacrifice all other goods, even our lives, to become free, even though we know that we will never become fully and definitively free, because the journey of existence is a continuous passing from one liberation to another. There is, in fact, a deep connection between freedom and liberation. Even if we are not always aware of it, what we experience as freedom—freedom of, freedom from, freedom for, freedom with...—is the result of a liberation, of many liberations. We are free because we have been liberated, starting with that first wonderful and essential liberation from the womb, continuing with the many liberations of childhood and youth (from ignorance, economic, material and emotional dependence). Then, throughout our lives, liberation takes the form of escaping the 'traps of poverty' where the hand of life, of others and/or our own hand lead us. Until the final liberation at the hand of the angel of death. One day in our adult lives, we discover that the nostalgia that surprises us on some evenings, or that creeps into a recurring dream, is nothing more than a deep desire for liberation. We find ourselves longing to be freed by someone. And finally we understand that even in what seemed to us, and perhaps were, self-liberations, there was, invisible, the presence of another hand supporting ours: “The drawbridge is on the other side, and it is from the other side that they must tell us we are free” (Jacob Taubes). The essence of faith lies in the awareness, or at least in the hope, that not only life is a gift, but freedom is too. And this is true even when it is the hand of a real person that has freed us, or when we have freed ourselves—this “second-degree liberation,” which attributes our liberation to God, is a collateral gift of the gift of faith, because it frees us from the great spiritual and moral debts we owe to our earthly liberators: we are grateful to them, but we do not feel indebted to them. Feeling liberated then frees us from the pride—hybris—of self-sufficiency and omnipotence of our own hands, which is becoming the most widespread religion of our time, where the ego becomes the only believer, priest, and god. The capitalist market loves this new mass 'religion', which in the West has already taken the place of Christianity.

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Liberation is also the other name for the Jubilee and the sabbatical year that is its root. Liberation of slaves from their masters, of debtors from their creditors, of the earth from our yoke. In the Bible, behind every liberation there is always an echo of the great liberation from slavery in Egypt. Every Shabbat is a memorial of that liberation. In every sabbatical year and every Jubilee, Moses lives again, the sea reopens, and the people are free once more and see the first glimpse of the promised land on the deep horizon. The entire Bible speaks to us of the Jubilee; every book is imbued with its spirit. Even the little book of Jonah, where we would not expect it.
Jonah had said no to God's command to send him to Nineveh. He flees, embarking in the opposite direction towards Tarshish. A violent storm breaks out and the ship is about to sink. But, in a phenomenon of 'scapegoating' (René Girard), Jonah is thrown into the sea by the sailors as a sacrificial victim to appease the gods of the waters. The sailors consider him to be the cause of the evil that has been unleashed, and Jonah becomes convinced that he is indeed, because of his disobedience to God, the source of the impending disaster. Jonah ends up in the waves but does not die, because a female fish ('daga' in Hebrew) takes him into her womb and, after three days, brings him back safe and sound to shore. As in the liberation from Egypt, the waters become a place of extraordinary salvation, once again a liberation from death that seemed certain.
The story of Jonah has much to tell us about understanding the culture of the Jubilee. There are two main lessons to be learned. First, while experiencing liberation in the belly of the fish, Jonah prays: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me; from the depths of the earth I cried for help, and you heard my voice... My prayer has reached you... Salvation comes from the Lord” (Jonah 2:3-10). Jonah, the Bible tells us, was a prophet, so he already knew how to pray. But the first and only prayer we find in his book comes after his salvation from death. So in Jonah's prayer we can find a grammar of the art of starting to pray again after a great trial that had taken away our faith or our prayer, often both. Jonah prays because he has experienced liberation, and then—a sufficient condition—he attributes that liberation to his God. He discovers the face of God as a liberator, and so he calls him by his first name. As adults—Jonah's story is also an initiation of prophets into adult life—many people who had a youth of faith and prayer stop praying; prayer does not return unless one experiences liberation and a liberator. Because after being liberated (from a serious illness, from a seemingly endless mourning, from depression, from consuming remorse...), something truly important begins in the soul, an authentic resurrection. We find ourselves praying without realizing it, gratitude blossoms naturally in prayer from the heart—resurrection is at the heart of the Christian faith because faith and prayer cannot be found without resurrection. When this awareness of having been saved by someone comes into our lives, a whole new and wonderful season of existence begins. True gratitude is born, we understand what gratuitousness is, we discover another kind of reciprocity, and a time of good humility begins, which others recognize even when they are unaware of its roots.
For this reason, the Jubilee can become a time to start praying again, with an adult faith, or to discover new dimensions of prayer. And even if we cannot have this experience of being liberated—these experiences cannot be bought on the market, they cannot be ordered or commanded: they just happen, they are entirely a gift—we can still try two paths that bear the same fruit. The first is to remember the liberations we have experienced in our lives up to now, to encounter at least one, to pass through that door, and to find ourselves in a new time of prayer, or at least of humility. Because remembering a decisive event of yesterday and calling it by its right name (liberation) is like reliving it a second time. The other possibility is to become agents of liberation for others, to try to free someone from slavery. In doing so, we play the part of God, imitating him as liberator. The Jubilee will pass in vain if we do not experience at least one of these liberations, if we do not pass through one of these doors.
Finally, the conclusion of the book of Jonah reveals another important dimension of the Jubilee culture. After Jonah is saved from the fish and prays, he finally obeys God's command and goes to preach in Nineveh to announce to the people: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed” (Jonah 3:4). The city—surprising even Jonah, who becomes very angry about this—believes Jonah's words and converts: “They proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, both great and small” (3:5). The king then issues a decree calling for a great general penance of all the people, where we find an extraordinary detail: “Men and animals, herds and flocks shall not taste anything, they shall not graze, they shall not drink water. Men and animals shall be covered with sackcloth” (3:7-8).
Even animals “cover themselves with sackcloth,” so even their penance becomes necessary for conversion and forgiveness. This is a highly prophetic passage, which should speak to us very strongly today, more than yesterday. Animals—and plants and all creation—were not responsible for the sins of Nineveh, just as they are not responsible today for the ecological degradation of our planet. But we will not be able to save ourselves and them without the involvement of all living species in solving the problem. We humans created the problem, but for the sake of objective and real solidarity with all creation, we will not emerge from this very serious environmental crisis unless animals and plants also “put on sackcloth.” Now that evil is common, good must also be common. Those who have attempted a real and serious solution to a collective and communal problem know that analyzing past faults can aggravate the crisis if, one day, all of us together, innocent and guilty, do not decide to 'put on sackcloth' and finally look to the future. This participation of animals in the conversion of Nineveh is a full expression of the culture of the Sabbath: if on the 'seventh day' even animals participate in the rest of creation, if on that day even animals stop working, then the two works and the two destinies are intertwined and inseparable, for better or for worse.
The wonderful news is that animals and plants are already wearing sackcloth. Trees and oceans are absorbing much of the CO2 we produce, thus mitigating the damage that without them would have already made the planet uninhabitable (for us). They, innocent, have already donned sackcloth and begun the penance of the earth: but we humans, when will we don it?
 
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Economics of Joy 5/ - The Holy Year as a favorable time to remember our own liberation and become liberators for others
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 06/05/2025
Freedom is a special good. We love many things, but what we love is beautiful and good if and because we are free. And if we are not free, we sacrifice all other goods, even our lives, to become free, even though we know that we will never become fully and definitively free, because the journey of existence is a continuous passing from one liberation to another. There is, in fact, a deep connection between freedom and liberation. Even if we are not always aware of it, what we experience as freedom—freedom of, freedom from, freedom for, freedom with...—is the result of a liberation, of many liberations. We are free because we have been liberated, starting with that first wonderful and essential liberation from the womb, continuing with the many liberations of childhood and youth (from ignorance, economic, material and emotional dependence). Then, throughout our lives, liberation takes the form of escaping the 'traps of poverty' where the hand of life, of others and/or our own hand lead us. Until the final liberation at the hand of the angel of death. One day in our adult lives, we discover that the nostalgia that surprises us on some evenings, or that creeps into a recurring dream, is nothing more than a deep desire for liberation. We find ourselves longing to be freed by someone. And finally we understand that even in what seemed to us, and perhaps were, self-liberations, there was, invisible, the presence of another hand supporting ours: “The drawbridge is on the other side, and it is from the other side that they must tell us we are free” (Jacob Taubes). The essence of faith lies in the awareness, or at least in the hope, that not only life is a gift, but freedom is too. And this is true even when it is the hand of a real person that has freed us, or when we have freed ourselves—this “second-degree liberation,” which attributes our liberation to God, is a collateral gift of the gift of faith, because it frees us from the great spiritual and moral debts we owe to our earthly liberators: we are grateful to them, but we do not feel indebted to them. Feeling liberated then frees us from the pride—hybris—of self-sufficiency and omnipotence of our own hands, which is becoming the most widespread religion of our time, where the ego becomes the only believer, priest, and god. The capitalist market loves this new mass 'religion', which in the West has already taken the place of Christianity.

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Economy of joy 3/ The culture of the Jubilee runs deep throughout the Bible, as in the two crucial episodes of the Book of Nehemiah
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/04/2025
The culture of the Jubilee should not be sought only in the texts that expressly regulate the Jubilee or the sabbatical year. In fact, several books of the Bible contain passages that are crucial for understanding the humanism of the Jubilee. After analyzing the book of Jeremiah, we now take a closer look at a chapter from the book of Nehemiah, a high official (cupbearer) in the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes (465-424 BC). Nehemiah was a secular Jew born in exile who, like Esther, rose to the highest ranks of the court and then became governor of Judea under Persian occupation. While in Susa, Nehemiah learned of the miserable condition of the Jews in Jerusalem: “The survivors who escaped deportation are there in the province, in great misery and desolation; the walls of Jerusalem are devastated” (Nehemiah 1:3). Nehemiah felt a calling (chapter 2) and asked the king to send him to Jerusalem to rebuild it. When some of the exiles in Babylon returned to their homeland, coexistence with the Jews who had remained in Jerusalem was not easy. There were obvious economic and patrimonial reasons—the lands of the deportees had, at least in part, passed to the families who had remained and were now being reclaimed—but there were also theological and religious reasons: those who had escaped deportation tended to treat the deportees as guilty of having deserved exile (a very common attitude in many communities).

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As Nehemiah begins to rebuild the walls and the dignity of his people in Jerusalem, his book recounts a very important episode: “There was a great cry from the people and their wives against their Jewish brothers. Some said, 'Our sons and daughters are numerous; let us get grain to eat and stay alive! Nehemiah was “very indignant” at what he heard. Then he turned to the nobles and magistrates and said, “Are you demanding interest from your own people?” He summoned his people and said, “What you are doing is not right... Let us forgive this debt! Give them back their fields, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their houses, and the interest on the grain.” They replied, “We will restore them and demand nothing more from them.” Then “the whole assembly said, ‘Amen,’ and praised the Lord. The people kept their word” (5:1-13). A wonderful economic and financial amen, entirely secular and entirely spiritual.
The cry of the “wives” to the men of the community is also very important. These are ancient and powerful words that should make us reflect deeply on a painful constant in human history. It is the infinite meekness and heroic patience of wives and women who, over the millennia, have suffered violence in wars waged by men, and continue to suffer it. A profound and vast suffering that is entirely female, powerless and innocent, which crosses places and times, all cultures. It is a colossal ethical heritage of humanity, a collective pain that has lasted for thousands of years, which deserves at least the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to the women of yesterday and today, who have not only nurtured peace and fought all wars in their homes and in the streets, but have been and continue to be the first to suffer in their bodies and souls the devastation and atrocities of all wars. Men fought and continue to fight wars on battlefields and in death machines, while women fight them in their own flesh and in that of their children and husbands: a suffering that is doubled, multiplied, infinite. “I always remember what Teresa Mattei, the youngest of the twenty-one members of the Constituent Assembly, said: when the Constitution was voted on, more specifically Article 11 on the rejection of war, women, regardless of their political affiliation, took each other by the hand. Even today, I am moved when I read this memory” (Lucia Rossi, Spi-CGIL Secretariat). A wonderful image of the great and tenacious alliance of women for peace, expressing their absolute rejection of war through the silent language of their bodies and hands. That splendid solidarity among women, which still survives with difficulty, matured over the centuries during wars, when they learned to cherish life and hope in a world of men who killed it a thousand times with weapons, gestures, and wrong words—the first power is always that of language, with which all speeches are written and all words are controlled. This lament and protagonism of women reveals to us another fundamental dimension of the culture of jubilee, which we have forgotten throughout the history of Christianity, relegating women to the role of extras in the background of churches, in songs, in liturgical 'amens', in the queues of processions.
This act of Nehemiah and the women is therefore one of the most beautiful episodes in the Bible, telling us, among other things, that the great pain of seventy years of Babylonian exile was not enough to make the Mosaic laws prohibiting lending at interest become a widespread culture among the people - just as today it is not enough to include a few women in politics to change the culture of war. Economic sins continued even after the return to the homeland (538 BC). But from the great trauma of exile along the rivers of Babylon, the people had learned the essential importance of the sabbatical culture and therefore of debt forgiveness and the liberation of slaves. The Bible is also the secret and discreet guardian of a few different gestures, sometimes only one, so that we can transform them into seeds.
The full meaning of this great episode only becomes clear if we read it together with chapter eight of the same book of Nehemiah, in one of the most famous and important passages in the entire Bible, which features the priest Ezra. It is a crucial moment in the religious and communal re-founding of the people, of rare lyrical power. Here it is: “Then all the people gathered as one man in the square before the Water Gate and said to the scribe Ezra, ‘Bring the book of the law of Moses...’ Ezra brought the law before the assembly of men, women, and all who were able to understand... When Ezra opened the book, all the people stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, 'Amen, amen,' raising their hands... All the people wept as they listened to the words of the Law” (chap. 8:1-9). Other beautiful amens—how wonderful it would be to repeat one of these 'amen's as our last word on this earth!
This story is not only a point of origin (perhaps the point) of the tradition of the liturgical and communal use of Scripture; it is also the gift of the word, of the Torah to all the people - the reading lasted many hours, and everyone stood. No longer the monopoly of scribes and priests, here the word becomes an essential element of a new social covenant, of a collective resurrection—the word “people” is repeated twelve times. And the exile is truly over. There have been other moments in the history of Israel when the word was transmitted. But the Bible wanted to give us this different moment, a solemn act presented with the same force as a testament, to mark the beginning of a new time, which may be our time.
There is also an important detail: that assembly of the people takes place “in the square before the Water Gate.” This decisive liturgical and spiritual event does not take place in the temple, telling us that the Word has priority over the temple—it should be remembered that in Jerusalem the temple had never ceased to function. In this passage, then, we find a foundation of true biblical secularism: the word can be proclaimed, perhaps must be proclaimed in the square, in the streets of the city, where it then continues to walk in 'procession'—a civil procession reminiscent of the processions that took place on the occasion of the founding of the first Monti di Pietà (pawnshops) in the 15th century. From that day on, we know that there is no place more liturgical for proclaiming the word of God than a street, a square, or a market. With that square in front of the Water Gate, the first small tent returns, which at the foot of Mount Sinai covered the Ark of the Covenant with the tablets of the Torah inside. That tent one day became Solomon's great temple, but the people never lost their nostalgia for that first mobile tent, for its poverty and freedom, when 'there was only a voice'. And here lies the root of the prophecy with which the Bible closes: in the new Jerusalem, “I saw no temple” (Rev 21:22), and “the tree of life” was “in the middle of the city square” (22:2).
And now let us return to the culture of the Jubilee. The new liturgical community foundation, the secularity of the square that surpassed the sacredness of the temple, was prepared by the economic-social pact of debt forgiveness, generated by the cry of the women in chapter five. Nehemiah first reestablished communion and justice in the order of social relations, goods, and debts, and only afterward did he reestablish the liturgy and give the word. This is a message of immense value. Nehemiah held the assembly in the square because that liturgical assembly was already a political and social assembly.
Religious, liturgical, and “spiritual” reforms that are not preceded by economic, financial, and social reforms are not only useless: they are extremely harmful because they end up giving a sacred character to injustices, wrong social relations, and abuses.
Even this jubilee of ours will not pass in vain if, before passing through the holy doors and receiving plenary indulgences, we are capable of making new social pacts, of cancelling some debts, of freeing at least one slave, of listening to the cry of women and the poor. But, to date, it does not seem that these jubilee acts are on the agenda of our communities.
 
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Economy of joy 3/ The culture of the Jubilee runs deep throughout the Bible, as in the two crucial episodes of the Book of Nehemiah
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/04/2025
The culture of the Jubilee should not be sought only in the texts that expressly regulate the Jubilee or the sabbatical year. In fact, several books of the Bible contain passages that are crucial for understanding the humanism of the Jubilee. After analyzing the book of Jeremiah, we now take a closer look at a chapter from the book of Nehemiah, a high official (cupbearer) in the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes (465-424 BC). Nehemiah was a secular Jew born in exile who, like Esther, rose to the highest ranks of the court and then became governor of Judea under Persian occupation. While in Susa, Nehemiah learned of the miserable condition of the Jews in Jerusalem: “The survivors who escaped deportation are there in the province, in great misery and desolation; the walls of Jerusalem are devastated” (Nehemiah 1:3). Nehemiah felt a calling (chapter 2) and asked the king to send him to Jerusalem to rebuild it. When some of the exiles in Babylon returned to their homeland, coexistence with the Jews who had remained in Jerusalem was not easy. There were obvious economic and patrimonial reasons—the lands of the deportees had, at least in part, passed to the families who had remained and were now being reclaimed—but there were also theological and religious reasons: those who had escaped deportation tended to treat the deportees as guilty of having deserved exile (a very common attitude in many communities).

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    [title] => The Jubilee, a ‘sabbatical’ to give our lives a breather
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Economy of joy 1/ Jewish sources begin the journey into the meaning of an event with revolutionary potential: why we are not the ‘masters’ of anything
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/03/2025
The biblical jubilee was above all an economic and social affair. It was the announcement of a different, extraordinary year, when slaves were set free, land was returned to its original owners, and debts were cancelled. The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew word Jôbel, the sound of the ram's horn with which some great festivals were opened. But perhaps there is also an echo of another Hebrew word, jabal, which meant ‘to give back, to send away’, which emphasises the social and economic dimensions. The jubilee was in fact a sabbatical year squared, which occurred every seven sabbatical years, therefore every 49 years, rounded up to 50.

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To understand the Christian jubilee we therefore need to look at the biblical jubilee, and to understand this we need to start from the sabbatical year and therefore from the shabbat, the Sabbath. The place of the fundamental Scripture is chapter 25 of Leviticus. There we find the three pillars of the Jubilee: the land, the debts, the slaves. In the Jubilee, the gestures of human fraternity (debts and slaves) and cosmic fraternity (land and plants) that are celebrated every seven years in the sabbatical year had to be carried out with greater radicalness. During that special year the land must rest. Furthermore, if a piece of land has been alienated by a family out of necessity, each person reverts to their previous property: ‘You shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. … You shall not sow, nor reap the aftergrowth, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. … But you may eat the produce of the field’ (Lev 25,10-12). Then debts: ‘If your neighbour, who lives with you in the city of YHWH, becomes impoverished and is unable to repay you, you shall support him as a foreigner and a guest, so that he may live with you. You shall not exact interest from him or take any profit from him … You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food at a profit.’ (Lev 25,35-37). The rules regarding the Jubilee do not explicitly mention the remission or cancellation of debts, because the Jubilee being a sabbatical year, it takes for granted what was already to be done every seven years: ‘At the end of every seven years, you shall grant a release. This is the law of the jubilee: every creditor who holds on to the pledge of a loan made to his neighbour shall let his right fall (Dt 15,1-2). Finally, the slaves: ‘If your brother who has been reduced to poverty sells himself to you ... he shall serve you until the Year of Jubilee; then he shall leave you, together with his children, and shall return to his family and to the property of his forefathers ... He shall leave in the Year of Jubilee, he and his children, free of charge’ (Lev 25,39-41,54). And in the book of Deuteronomy we have some important details: ‘If your brother sells himself to you, he shall serve you for six years, but in the seventh you shall let him go free. When you let him go free, you shall not send him away empty-handed. You shall give him gifts from your flock, from your threshing floor, and from your winepress’ (15:12-14). Not only will the slave be freed, but the liberation will be accompanied by the surplus of the gift. One must not remain indebted forever, one is not a slave forever: only for six times, not for the seventh.
The sabbatical year follows the same logic as the shabbat (Sabbath), that marvellous institution of the Old Testament without which biblical humanism is not fully understood. The Sabbath is the ultimate icon of that principle dear to Pope Francis: time is superior to space, because by placing a seal of gratuitousness on one day of the week he has taken time away from the absolute and predatory dominion of men: ‘that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your maidservant, and the stranger, may be refreshed’ (Ex 23:11-12). If you can't exploit your animals, the land, your employees, the stranger, yourself, in a day, then you, homo sapiens, are not the dominus of the world. You are just one of its inhabitants, like all the others: you have more power but you are not the master of the earth, of work, of animals, of trees, of oceans, of the atmosphere. Because the earth is always the promised land never reached, because all goods are common goods. And so is that piece of land belonging to our house, so are the goods we have legitimately purchased on the market, so is our bank account. Before private property there is a law of gratuitousness in the world, a law that is more profound and general and that concerns everything and everyone, a radical prophecy of human and cosmic fraternity. The earth is not ‘Mazzarò's stuff’ (G. Verga), workers are not slaves or servants, animals do not only have value in relation to us: first of all, everything has value in relation to itself. Because, according to the Bible, every property is imperfect, every dominion is secondary, every contract is incomplete, no man is truly and only a stranger, brotherhood comes before debts and credits, and changes their nature.
The Sabbath is therefore a deposit of another time, of the ‘seventh time’ of Joachim of Fiore and the Franciscans, of a messianic time when everything and everyone will be only and always Sabbath. It is therefore the distance between the law of the sabbatical year and that of the other six that is the first indicator of the ethical and spiritual capital of a civilisation, of every civilisation. It is the distance between the citizen and the stranger, between our rights and those of every creature, between the land I use today and the one I leave to my children, that reveal the moral quality of human society. On the other hand, when we forget that there is a different and free day that is not under our control, the earth no longer breathes, animals and plants are only valuable if they can be exploited, foreigners never become part of the family, hierarchies become ruthless, leaders are never followers, work is never brother work but only slave or master.
Jesus was well aware of the Jubilee, as Luke reminds us, showing us Jesus just returned to Nazareth, who in the synagogue reads the chapter of Isaiah relating to the jubilee year: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ... and he has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, and to proclaim the Lord's year of favour’ (Luke 4, 18-19). A ‘year of the Lord's favour’ (aphesis), that is, a year of liberation: a jubilee year. Jesus criticised a Sabbath that was losing its prophetic nature to tell us that the Kingdom of Heaven is a perpetual Sabbath, a seventh time that becomes all new time. What Deuteronomy assigns to the sabbatical year - ‘There should be no poor among you!’ (Dt 15:4) - in the new community of the Kingdom will become the rule of ordinary life: ‘There was no needy person among them’ (Acts 4:34).
It is probable that the people of Israel did not celebrate the jubilee year throughout their history, as we can see from the repeated denunciations by the prophets regarding the slaves not being freed, the debts not being cancelled and the lands not being returned. Not even Christians have managed to make the sharing of goods their normal way of doing things, they have not entered into the sabbatical way of doing things of the Kingdom.
If the West had taken the jubilee culture seriously, we would not have generated capitalism or it would have been very different. Our capitalism has in fact become the anti-Shabbat, its negation, its antichrist, its prophecy in reverse: ‘Capitalism is the celebration of a cult “without respite and without pity”. There are no ‘working days’; there is no day that is not a holiday, in the frightening sense of the unfolding of every sacred pomp, of the extreme effort of the venerable’ (W. Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, 1921). It knows no rest, labour never casts off its yoke; no hour, no day, no season is different from the others, the earth is just a resource to be exploited, preferably to become rare earth.
The presence of the jubilee year is the Bible's main anti-idolatrous device. A civilisation that consumes time as a commodity is technically idolatrous, because by making itself the master of every day and every moment, it makes itself the only god to be worshipped. Capitalism is idolatry because it has marked the definitive death of the seventh day of the week, it has devoured the Sabbath and Sunday, transforming them into the weekend, which is the apotheosis of consumerism.
The jubilee year has already been underway for a few months. However, for a few of us, a different time has begun. We are not allowing the land to rest, we are not freeing any debtors or slaves. In the coming weeks, with this new series of articles, we will make a pilgrimage through the spirit of the jubilee, in its economy of joy.
Perhaps the people of Israel wrote the rules about the jubilee year to commemorate the great liberation from the Babylonian exile, and therefore the slaves' return home and the restitution of the land. The enormous trauma of the Babylonian exile became a forced jubilee year that Israel was finally obliged to observe after having forgotten it for a long time: ‘Nebuchadnezzar deported to Babylon all those who had escaped the sword... until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths’ (2 Chronicles 36, 20). It was during the exile that the people learnt about the jubilee. Will we too be forced to learn a different economy of the earth and of social relations from this ecological exile and from the new wars?
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    [text] => 
Economy of joy 1/ Jewish sources begin the journey into the meaning of an event with revolutionary potential: why we are not the ‘masters’ of anything
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/03/2025
The biblical jubilee was above all an economic and social affair. It was the announcement of a different, extraordinary year, when slaves were set free, land was returned to its original owners, and debts were cancelled. The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew word Jôbel, the sound of the ram's horn with which some great festivals were opened. But perhaps there is also an echo of another Hebrew word, jabal, which meant ‘to give back, to send away’, which emphasises the social and economic dimensions. The jubilee was in fact a sabbatical year squared, which occurred every seven sabbatical years, therefore every 49 years, rounded up to 50.

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