Economy of joy

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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.

[fulltext] =>

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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True freedom is always a gift. The Jubilee helps us understand this

True freedom is always a gift. The Jubilee helps us understand this

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...
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    [title] => When the temple becomes a source and even taxes become a Jubilee
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Economy of joy 4/ - From the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon emerges the simplicity of authentic faith, which is refined and stripped bare over time

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 23/04/2025

In Ezekiel's prophetic vision, the house of God is transformed into a river, symbol of a spirituality that transcends material sacred places and becomes living water, secular and concrete

Spiritual life begins in absolute simplicity - 'And there was only a voice'. Soon, however, it becomes complicated as it enriches itself, because the first naked voice of youth becomes worship, religion, temple, sacred objects, dogmas. But in the end, after a long time, if life works and does not throw us off track at some particularly difficult and blind bend, we return to simplicity and poverty. And there, barefoot, we finally understand that what matters in life is only to try to become smaller and simpler in order to try to pass through the eye of the angel's needle—because any religious object or furnishing we carry with us prevents us from passing through. Only that first subtle voice, perhaps a good friend, and a shred of truth about ourselves will pass through. We spend much of our lives searching for God in temples and sacred places, only to realize, almost always too late or at the end, that what we were looking for was simply inside our homes, in our everyday chores, among the dishes and the cupboard. But we couldn't have known that before passing through the last eye of the needle.

[fulltext] =>

Let us continue our study of the biblical Jubilee. According to an ancient Jewish tradition, the prophet Ezekiel's grandiose vision of the temple came in “the year of the Jubilee” (Talmud Arakhin 12b,6). The Talmud quotes the beginning of chapter 40 of Ezekiel, which contains the account of that wonderful theophany, a center of gravity for the entire Bible: “In the twenty-fifth year of our deportation, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, fourteen years after the city [Jerusalem] had been taken, on that very day, the hand of the Lord was upon me and he brought me there” (Ezekiel 40:1). An event placed on the axes of time and space with the solemnity of a testament—because, in reality, it is a testament.

This Talmudic tradition, placing Ezekiel's vision of the temple in a jubilee year, tells us something very useful for understanding the nature and culture of the Jubilee. Some historical background is perhaps necessary. Ezekiel, one of the greatest prophets, carried out his mission in exile, because at the age of twenty-five he ended up in Babylon during the first deportation (in 598 BC), which affected the technical and intellectual elite. We must also keep in mind another essential element. Many of the words that the Bible has left us about the Jubilee and the sabbatical culture that is its root were written or completed during the Babylonian exile. They would have been very different, certainly less prophetic, without Ezekiel, without the so-called 'second Isaiah' (the author, among other things, of the 'songs of the servant of YHWH'), and, albeit in a different way, without Jeremiah. The rules of the Jubilee are part of the Law, but they cannot be understood without the prophets. The Jubilee is, in fact, Law and Spirit, institution and prophecy, already and not yet. Ezekiel had prophesied the destruction of the temple years before it took place, and he had made that future destruction the center of his prophetic message, which represents a peak, perhaps the peak, of biblical prophecy. In Babylon there was no temple, there were shrines to other gods, false and lying. In Jerusalem, the temple of the one true God would be destroyed, prophesied the young Ezekiel, and so it came to pass. Ezekiel, who was also a priest (without a temple), had the decisive task of teaching the people that the true God, unlike idols, does not need the sacred enclosure of the temple to be present and to act. The factual reality of the absence of a temple in exile and its destruction in the homeland became a theological and ethical reality: the temple is not necessary for faith; indeed, it can easily become an obstacle to it. Exile was an immense creative destruction of the faith of Israel. Returning small, poor, wiped out by the greatest theological and political defeat, something extraordinary happened to those exiles that marked the beginning of a new religious era: the 'age of the spirit,' of God present outside the temple and everywhere, and therefore the era of true secularism, of the religion of the earth. In that vision of the temple, Ezekiel overcomes in an instant millennia of material religion that needed to see statues and images in temples and shrines to feel the presence of the deity. They could not have known it, but in Babylon those deportees began to worship God 'in spirit and truth'.

In fact, Ezekiel's vision begins with a new temple and ends with the wonderful and powerful image of a river, in one of the most sublime passages in all of ancient literature, which still leaves us spellbound: “He brought me back to the entrance of the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east... The water was coming down from under the right side of the temple, from the south side of the altar. He brought me out through the north gate and led me around to the outer gate facing east, and I saw water flowing from the right side... It was a torrent that I could not cross, because the water had risen; it was navigable water, a river that could not be crossed. Then he said to me, 'Have you seen, son of man?'” (Ezekiel 47:1-6). The temple becomes a spring and then a river. A synthesis of biblical humanism. The water of the spirit that fertilizes the earth is not given to wash away the blood of sacrifices under the altar of the temple. And like the Law, the temple is also a teacher, which one day must step aside to make room for immediate contact with living water. The square will be the new name of the temple. Here the young priest Ezekiel dies and rises again in the old prophet.

In reality, we know that despite Ezekiel's vision and the similar words of the Gospels, Paul, and Revelation, the homo religiosus of yesterday and today has forgotten a thousand times the profound meaning of that prophecy. Even Christians have fenced God into sacred places, consecrated things and people to him, and forgotten Ezekiel's vision. Because religious men and women like river shrines more than squares, Mass more than the smell of incense more than the smell of kitchens or factories. And so, every day, we turn faith into a consumer good, the temple into a sofa, the Jubilee into a passage through a door, religion into a comfort zone, and God returns chained to the cramped places we prepare for him without asking his permission. The Bible knows this well, and its prophets certainly know it; and that is why it has preserved for us the vision of a prophet who, now nearing the end of his mission, on a day in his adulthood (he was now over fifty, twenty-five of which he had spent in exile), was shown by the Spirit the new temple-river in the new Jerusalem—and his prophecy is fulfilled. The temple dissolves to become water that irrigates and quenches the earth.

And finally, we return to the Jubilee. It is in this context of the universal and secular temple-spring that we find some economic indications: “Have honest scales, honest efa, honest bat... This shall be the offering you shall take: one sixth of an efa for every homer of wheat and one sixth of an efa for every homer of barley... Ten bat are equal to one homer. From the flock, from the fertile pastures of Israel, one sheep in every two hundred. This shall be given for the oblations, for the burnt offerings, for the communion sacrifices” (Ezekiel 45:10-15). If the temple becomes water, if the place of religion is the street, it is not surprising that for the Talmud these are Jubilee norms. And so, in the heart of these chapters all devoted to one of the greatest biblical theophanies, Ezekiel speaks to us of scales, ephahs, baths, homers (units of weight and measure), coins, sheep, and taxes, because that is what they are in fact.

What do taxes have to do with the new temple-source? We know that in the ancient world, including Israel, the temple was also the center for the collection and use of taxes, particularly tithes on agricultural products. But why is there talk of taxes even in the new non-temple that has now become great waters? The answer is simple. In the Bible, taxes are neither theft, nor usurpation, nor an instrument of war, nor, even less so, duties: they are reciprocity, an expression of the golden rule and the law of communion that must inspire the life of the people. In fact, we do not understand the Bible if we do not read about the liberation from Egypt together with taxes, the Law of Moses with coins, angels and visions together with contracts and debts, the money of Judas and the Good Samaritan with the empty tomb. But we, who have forgotten the Bible and the Gospels, think that the really important things of faith are heavenly words, prayers, apparitions, and so we relegate economics and finance to low matters, to 'things of this world', to secondary matters for experts, to the tables of deacons. We reduce both faith and economics to nothing, both distorted and perverted, and then we place them in a realm of darkness where mammon becomes God, and God becomes mammon. Instead, the Bible tells us over and over again that taxes are Shabbat, that they are as important as the Jubilee, as Ruth's gleaning, as the burning bush and the open sea: “Thus says YHWH: Enough, princes of Israel, enough of violence and robbery! Act with justice and righteousness; remove your extortion from my people” (Ezekiel 45:9).

Only if we hold together the Ezekiel of the vision of the new temple with the Ezekiel who says 'enough' to economic injustice does the Bible become liberation and help us today to say 'enough' to the violence, robbery, and extortion of our powerful and our kings, even if we never do it enough. These are the humble, earthly, and secular truths that the prophets give us, to teach us the true meaning of the Jubilee.

 

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Economy of joy 4/ - From the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon emerges the simplicity of authentic faith, which is refined and stripped bare over time

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 23/04/2025

In Ezekiel's prophetic vision, the house of God is transformed into a river, symbol of a spirituality that transcends material sacred places and becomes living water, secular and concrete

Spiritual life begins in absolute simplicity - 'And there was only a voice'. Soon, however, it becomes complicated as it enriches itself, because the first naked voice of youth becomes worship, religion, temple, sacred objects, dogmas. But in the end, after a long time, if life works and does not throw us off track at some particularly difficult and blind bend, we return to simplicity and poverty. And there, barefoot, we finally understand that what matters in life is only to try to become smaller and simpler in order to try to pass through the eye of the angel's needle—because any religious object or furnishing we carry with us prevents us from passing through. Only that first subtle voice, perhaps a good friend, and a shred of truth about ourselves will pass through. We spend much of our lives searching for God in temples and sacred places, only to realize, almost always too late or at the end, that what we were looking for was simply inside our homes, in our everyday chores, among the dishes and the cupboard. But we couldn't have known that before passing through the last eye of the needle.

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When the temple becomes a source and even taxes become a Jubilee

When the temple becomes a source and even taxes become a Jubilee

Economy of joy 4/ - From the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon emerges the simplicity of authentic faith, which is refined and stripped bare over time by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 23/04/2025 In Ezekiel's prophetic vision, the house of God is transformed into a river, symbol of a ...
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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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The Jubilee begins outside the temple with concrete actions and «in the streets»

The Jubilee begins outside the temple with concrete actions and «in the streets»

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 sab...
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    [title] => Peace and freedom at risk for those who follow false prophets
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Economy of joy 2/ What the biblical story of the liberation of the slaves during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem teaches us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 25/03/2025

The sabbatical and jubilee culture informs the entire biblical humanism. The weekly celebration of the Shabbat, and then of the sabbatical year every seven years and finally of the Jubilee, used the cyclical rhythm to create a true sabbatical culture. For centuries, the Church also used the cyclical method of liturgy and feasts to create Christian culture and Christianity. Every popular culture is born from worship, therefore from repeated, daily and cyclical actions. We can clearly see this with capitalism and its many buying cults, including the latest ritual of entering a shop, paying 20 euros to receive a parcel ‘blindly’ that the buyer has never collected - before the advent of the capitalist religion, we would have organised charity lotteries with these orphan parcels. For this reason, in biblical history, sabbatical gestures didn't only follow the seven-year rhythm. They could also take place outside the sabbatical or jubilee year, as we know, among other things, from an important episode narrated by the prophet Jeremiah - prophets are essential to understanding biblical jubilee culture.

[fulltext] =>

We are in Jerusalem, which has been besieged for some time by Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army, a siege that will lead to the destruction of the city in 587 BC (or 586 BC), and then to exile. The kingdom of Judah had already lost its autonomy. Ten years earlier, at the time of the first deportation, Nebuchadnezzar had deported the then king Jehoiakim and in his place had put Zedekiah, the last king of the kingdom of Judah, a king who ‘did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord’ (2 Kings 24,19). This king, small and weak, during the long months of the siege of Jerusalem, made an important gesture: ‘This word came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after King Zedekiah and all the people in Jerusalem had made a covenant to proclaim the freedom of the slaves, each of them to release his Jewish male and female slaves, so that no one would force any of his countrymen to remain in bondage. All the princes and all the people, who had entered into the covenant, consented to set their slaves, both men and women, free, so that they would no longer force them into slavery’ (Jeremiah 34,8-10). We are probably dealing with a historical fact. Perhaps as a last political-religious resort to avert total defeat, and on the advice of Jeremiah, Zedekiah made a pact with the people, a gesture that closely resembles a sabbatical year. It even seems to repeat the rite of the Abrahamic covenant, with the contracting parties passing between the two parts of the quartered calf (34,17-21). This jubilee gesture was particularly concerned with the liberation of slaves. At that time a Jew would become the slave of another Jew to pay off debts. They were economic slaves. The Law received by Moses established that economic slavery could not last more than six years (the most ancient code of Hammurabi foresaw a maximum of three years: § 117). In that culture slavery could not last forever, economic failure did not have to become a life sentence, the economy was not the last word on life. Slaves are not set free, debts are not cancelled if there is no pact between us that is deeper than contracts. Millennia after the biblical law, we wrote constitutions and codes that in some ways are more humane and ethical than the Law-Torah (thanks also to the biblical seed that became a tree), but we were not able to imagine a different time of liberation for the many slaves and the too many debts of the unfortunate, because we cancelled every pact that was deeper than contracts.

Jeremiah knew that the Sabbath law had not been respected in the past: ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I made a covenant with your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, freeing them from that state of slavery. I said to them, ‘At the end of every seven years, each of you shall set free a brother Hebrew who has been sold to you and has served you six years, and you shall set him free.’ But your fathers did not listen to me or pay attention to me’ (34:12-14). The fathers had not experienced the sabbatical culture. Jeremiah therefore wondered if this time things would turn out differently.

From the story we immediately learn that the people obey, and therefore the slaves are effectively freed: ‘All the officials and all the people who had entered into the covenant agreed to set their male and female slaves free, so that they would not make them continue in bondage’ (34,10). Everything seems to be moving towards a real conversion, the slaves are really set free, after so many past failures. In the face of the greatest tragedy imminent, Zedekiah's pact of liberation seems to have finally succeeded.

But here's the twist: those liberators ‘took back the male and female slaves they had set free and brought them back into slavery’ (34:11). We are faced with an anti-repentance, a perverse conversion that cancels out the first good conversion. The people change their minds and re-establish their original iniquitous condition. We don't know the reasons for this opposite repentance, but probably its main cause was a temporary loosening of Nebuchadnezzar's siege (34,22). A temporary tactical retreat produced a new wave of nationalistic ideology from the false prophets who had always fought Jeremiah. In the summer of 587, Nebuchadnezzar suspended the siege of Jerusalem. The false prophets, always looking for ways to continue to deceive the people to their advantage, had therefore used that temporary event to convince the king that once again (as in the time of the prophet Isaiah and the defeat of the Assyrians) God was intervening, a miracle was coming: David would once again defeat Goliath. The easing of the great fear was therefore enough to violate that pact of liberation, to deny the alliance. The slaves were freed for a moment, the dream vanished, they returned to the house of slavery.

In every pact, the crucial element is time. The pact is an asset of duration. We can and must say to each other on our wedding day ‘forever’ with all the sincerity and truth of which we are capable; we can truly repent and promise to change our lives, to say it to ourselves and to each other. But only God and his true prophets can change the reality of things by saying them. Saying the words to us is not enough to create a new reality: that word must become flesh, individually and collectively, and therefore needs time. Even Mary needed nine months. We cannot know today the degree of truth of the words we are sincerely pronouncing now - this ignorance about the outcome of our sincere conversions is part of the moral repertoire of homo sapiens, even the best ones. Perhaps, only at the end, in the embrace with the angel of death, will we discover the truth of the most beautiful words we have sincerely said throughout our lives.

But the most serious and tremendous perverse regrets are collective ones. When a community or an entire generation renounces the words and gestures that their prophets had said and done in some luminous moments of history. We raise walls that on a brighter day we had torn down, we close borders that on a shining day we had opened, we let children die with a beautiful report card sewn on their shirt (let's not forget) in a mare nostrum that has become a mare monstrum. And then, a fake ‘loosening of the siege’ is enough for the false prophets to convince us that there is no real climate crisis, that we are innocent, that the glaciers and rivers are to blame. A small change in mutual geopolitical interests was enough to erase higher words spoken after great collective wounds, carved into the tombstones of our squares, in our cemeteries, in our constitutions. And we return to the hulls with the sundials of death, we follow the pied piper who convinces us to wage war by quoting the true prophets of yesterday. We return to the streets and go in search of slaves, we imprison them in galleys made of meritocratic and leaderocratic ideologies, we condemn them because they are guilty of their poverty and misfortune. Cain once again triumphs over Abel, fratricide over brotherhood, Jezebel once again eliminates Naboth, Uriah is once again killed by David, Golgotha triumphs over the empty tomb.

For years the false prophets had done everything they could to deny the great crisis and the end of the kingdom, they had convinced (almost) everyone that the real enemy was not Nebuchadnezzar but Jeremiah who wanted to deceive the people with his conspiracy theories and defeatism. They quoted Isaiah to refute Jeremiah, just as we quote De Gasperi to rearm ourselves; we even use the ‘sword’ in the gospel to justify our swords. We build new Bastiani Fortresses, we send new Giovanni Drogo to defend it from imaginary enemies, only to discover, perhaps, in the end that the real enemy to fight was only the fear of dying of our dying civilisation.

The Bible and human history are marked by a deep struggle between honest prophets and false prophets. With one constant: the powerful (almost) always listen to the false prophets. And so, even if sometimes during great collective fears and pains (wars, dictatorships, tragedies, pandemics...), we manage to believe the true prophets and convert, after a few weeks or months the false prophets win again. And we go back out onto the streets to hunt down those slaves we had freed in a better day.

Come back true prophets, come back now, the city is about to be destroyed again.

Dedicated to Pope Francis.

 

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Economy of joy 2/ What the biblical story of the liberation of the slaves during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem teaches us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 25/03/2025

The sabbatical and jubilee culture informs the entire biblical humanism. The weekly celebration of the Shabbat, and then of the sabbatical year every seven years and finally of the Jubilee, used the cyclical rhythm to create a true sabbatical culture. For centuries, the Church also used the cyclical method of liturgy and feasts to create Christian culture and Christianity. Every popular culture is born from worship, therefore from repeated, daily and cyclical actions. We can clearly see this with capitalism and its many buying cults, including the latest ritual of entering a shop, paying 20 euros to receive a parcel ‘blindly’ that the buyer has never collected - before the advent of the capitalist religion, we would have organised charity lotteries with these orphan parcels. For this reason, in biblical history, sabbatical gestures didn't only follow the seven-year rhythm. They could also take place outside the sabbatical or jubilee year, as we know, among other things, from an important episode narrated by the prophet Jeremiah - prophets are essential to understanding biblical jubilee culture.

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Peace and freedom at risk for those who follow false prophets

Peace and freedom at risk for those who follow false prophets

Economy of joy 2/ What the biblical story of the liberation of the slaves during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem teaches us by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 25/03/2025 The sabbatical and jubilee culture informs the entire biblical humanism. The weekly celebration of the Shabbat, and th...
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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.

[fulltext] =>

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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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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The Jubilee, a ‘sabbatical’ to give our lives a breather

The Jubilee, a ‘sabbatical’ to give our lives a breather

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 ...