NOTES for Deu 15:11

Upon attentive reading of the Torah, it turns out very often that some of its provision refute absolutely the widely spread conceptions, and the hopes not less widely spread. The assertion concerning poor people, who in the people of God (quite as in any other people also) "shall never cease", in the century "of the fight against poverty" (a fight though, alas, more often declarative than real) sounds discouraging.

Of course, it is easy to find in the Bible an explanation of so pessimistic vision on the possibility of a general prosperity: the fall corrupted the relationships of man not only with God, but also with the world created by Him, and now man has to feed from the ground, which formerly fed him willingly "by the sweat of his brow" by having food for himself with struggle and often teetering on the brink of survival. And the attempts to increase the exploitation of the nature in order to receive more, return against the fallen humanity with ecological problems. And the Torah gives in this respect no universal, economic, political recommendations or whatever it may be again. It calls only to mutual help, which allows minimizing the consequences of the fall for the human society. Such a recipe can show itself a little bit archaic to the modern man.

But, if one thinks, hardly we can invent something more modern and timely. It is indeed about this love, which is also current today, as it was current in the time of Moses, and in the time of the earthly life of the Savior. About the love, without which, unfortunately, no plan works and fail the ambitious projects of the general prosperity, seeming so thoughtful and irreproachable on the paper. About the same love, which, at the end of the way, opens to us the Kingdom, where there will be no poor people.

In Deuteronomy the laws about slaves that we also see in Exodus are repeated. They certainly have a definite meaning in the context of the clan-tribal society in which they arose. The point is that debt slavery could easily lead to very serious property stratification, and then social stratification, which, under conditions of predominantly communal landholding, would inevitably have produced social instability. Slaves who, in the end, would have had nothing left to lose, and in large numbers besides, could have posed a serious public danger.

Contrary to ideas that are fairly widespread today, slave labor in antiquity, when it was effective at all, was effective only in certain cases and under very definite conditions, which did not exist in Hebrew society. That is why mass slaveholding was a relatively uncommon and rather local phenomenon in antiquity. The Hebrews never had it. In Hebrew society, slavery always remained domestic and patriarchal, when a slave was regarded as a member of the household, though not an equal one. His status resembled that of an underage member of the family or of a large patriarchal clan.

It is no accident that in Hebrew "slave" and "adolescent" are called by the same word. If slavery had become mass slavery, the consequences would have been completely unpredictable. The laws about slaves made it possible to avoid this.

There was, however, something else as well: the understanding that a person is not simply an element of society, which completely defines him and his existence. A person cannot and must not be a slave of the socioeconomic order in which he has to live. Not even because that order is bad, although in the fallen world it cannot be good in any case; here the only possible choice is between bad and very bad.

A person is first of all the image of God, and only afterward a subject of any impersonal relations whatever. Debts, of course, must be repaid, but a person must not lose himself as the image of God, nor his freedom before God and people, because of debts that for some objective reason he cannot repay. Objective because a normal, healthy person is able in seven years to work off any debt that bears at least some relation to his abilities. If he has not managed to do this in seven years, then he will not manage to do it later either. To leave a person a slave until the end of his life means to ignore the image of God in him, and this the Torah naturally cannot allow. Hence the compromise it proposes between the demands of society and the freedom a person needs for a full life before God.

In the context of the Gospel, the cross means Christ's sacrificial love. The passage from Deuteronomy explains how this love can be embodied in our relationships with our neighbors. Forgiveness is an action in which we are ready to give something up for another person's sake, in order to preserve the love between us. Sometimes we must give up demanding repayment of a debt—recall the Sermon on the Mount—and sometimes our ambitions, wounded pride, or emotional comfort. The greater what we give up and the more we forgive, the greater the love binding us to our neighbor, who may sometimes be someone we barely know. When we understand that another person is more important to us than our other values, whether material or spiritual, we begin to understand what love is...