{Having previously featured an economic critique of the Old Testament prophets (who allegedly helped ruin the economy of biblical Israel by their calls for redistribution of wealth), Pascal the Russian blue cat (with a dollop of Jewish ancestry) here presents a strikingly different analysis by the late, esteemed Jacob Neusner, unofficially the world’s most prolific author (900 books written or edited).}
“When we examine the political economics of the Mishnah,” wrote Jacob Neusner (in The Economics of the Mishnah), “we gain a clearer picture of the power of economics to serve in the expression and detailed exposition of a utopian design for society.” 1 We have, in that sentence alone, a significant departure from the numbers-crunching perspective of Professor Morris Silver (Prophets and Markets). Professor Silver examined Old Testament “social justice” prophets in the context of a market economy and found them wanting; Jacob Neusner, however, believed that ancient Israel’s economy was part and parcel of a larger social vision, one he deemed to have been “utopian”.
The nature of this utopian vision was clear, wrote Neusner:
“In point after point in their system, the framers of the Mishnah declare one conviction. It is that the Israelite world—Jews in Palestine/Israelites in the land of Israel—forms a world unto itself, a world of enduring stasis, in which no significant change will disturb the stable society.”
A static utopia implies, of course, a state of perfection, from which any change can only be for the worse. “This [temporal] world order,” Neusner explained, “attains that enduring, indeed eternal, stasis because it serves to complement and complete that other world order, the one in heaven. In the complementarity and wholeness attained through the union of two opposites—heaven and earth—on the sacred time of the Sabbath and in festivals, creation is renewed; on that account, creation in all its completeness and perfection once more provokes in God the benediction and sanctification of the creator such as the original excellence of creation had elicited.”
Israel was to be a holy people, not necessarily an economic powerhouse. That “fundamental conviction,” Neusner continued, “emphasized the true, intrinsic worth and value of things, the perfect balance in transactions, so that each party to an exchange gets worth equivalent to what he gives, and both parties emerge precisely at the same level of worth as at the outset. The perfection of the steady-state economy is only way in which the systemic principle is expressed in the details of everyday exchange.” Market transactions were not to enable one party to benefit at the expense of the other, and they were conducted under the same protective canopy of justice and equality under which YHWH had placed Israel.
Moreover, wrote Neusner, “The Israelite government was supposed to preserve that state of perfection which society everywhere attains and expresses in economic and other material transactions. The purpose of civil penalties was to restore the injured party to his prior condition, so far as this is possible, rather than merely to penalize the aggressor.” Justice was primarily restorative rather than punitive—at least in the vision of the Mishnah. 2
In market economies (like ours), there is no such thing as “intrinsic value”; the value of any item is determined by what consumers will pay for it. In the society of the Mishnah, however, “true value means that a given object has an intrinsic worth which, in the course of a transaction, must be paid. Usury (the charging of interest) was treated as fraud, as the violation of true value. Usury means profit; any pretense that money increases or has become ‘more’ than what it was violates the conception of true value.” If I borrow an old hammer from my neighbor, I should not owe him an entire set of brand-new tools in return. According to Neusner, “Even when real estate was divided, it had to be done with full attention to the rights of all concerned, so that one party did not gain at the expense of another.”
Neusner frankly acknowledged what critics would surely leap to point out: “The economics of the Mishnah is not an economics at all. Rather, in the Mishnah’s system, economics is embedded in an encompassing structure to which economic considerations are subordinated. Economics can emerge as an autonomous and governing theory only when disembedded from politics and society. Economic institutions, such as the market, the wage system, a theory of private ownership, and the like, in no way could have served the system of the Mishnah because the system builders viewed nothing in its own terms but saw all things in the framework of the social system they proposed to construct.” 3
The lesson here is not simply that Professor Morris Silver erred in criticizing Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, and other prophets of YHWH, all of whom were less interested in Israel’s Gross Domestic Product than in its practice of justice, mercy, and compassion. The lesson is that part of what ails the modern West is that we have allowed economics to be divorced from any larger social vision, utopian or otherwise; we have made profit an end unto itself rather than a means towards achieving a more perfect social order. There is no doubt that the all-but-unrestrained pursuit of profit has led to prosperity—but what is our affluence for? What is our economy for? If we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy?
Economics, wrote Jacob Neusner, is widely considered to be “the theory of rational action with regard to scarcity”. Fair enough, but perhaps we ought to consider what kinds of “scarcity” require our action. We can hardly claim to be suffering from a scarcity of “things”—possessions, objects, stuff. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that there exists a dire scarcity of justice, mercy, compassion, neighborly love, and so on. To quote Richard Thompson: “Some of the people are poor in the purse, / they don’t have the cash at the ready; / and some of the people are crippled and lame, / they can’t seem to stand true and steady. / Some of the people are poor in the head, / like the simpleton fools that you see; / but most of the people are poor in the heart, / and it’s the worst kind of poor, the worst kind of poor you can be.”
An economics of money alone misses the mark; the scarcest resources of all are the very things money can’t buy.
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Jacob Neusner bibliography - Wikipedia
1 The Mishnah is, in Neusner’s words, “the initial statement of the Judaism of the dual Torah”. The older Torah was the written law given to Moses on Sinai; it was then augmented over the centuries by the oral laws and interpretations developed by Jewish rabbis and scholars. Mishnah - Wikipedia
2 This is neither the time nor the place to argue whether God’s treatment of sinful mankind, as recorded in Genesis, met the standards of the Mishnah. YHWH was the God of Israel; he was powerful in the extreme, but no one said he was perfect.
3 One should add, “according to the instructions they believed they had received from YHWH.”
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