Shavuot Lesson: Taxes = “Fancy Name for Traditional Values?”

Aaron Keyak — May 28, 2009 – 11:06 am | Domestic Policy | Economy | Republicans Comments (2) Add a comment

This week, the Forward has a great editorial that touches upon the idea that “This year, we need to be reminded of Shavuot, the spring harvest festival with its often-overlooked — or suppressed — teachings about the rights of the poor and the dangerous seduction of wealth.” The editorial continues to outline the biblical origins of these rights and concludes, “Conservatives in Washington these days like to dismiss taxes and regulation as ‘socialism.’ But if you read your Bible, that’s just a fancy name for traditional values.”

An excerpt:

When Leviticus lays out the five major holy days of the year, only Shavuot comes with a specific code of behavior.

The text spells it out as plain as day: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings” — the bits that fall to the ground — “of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. I am the Lord.”

The message of Shavuot is that the harvest you’re celebrating isn’t yours alone. Part of your crop belongs by right to people you don’t even know, simply because they don’t have as much. And if we restate this as a broad principle, as most of us agree the Bible is supposed to be read, the rule is this: A portion of one’s income shall be redistributed to the poor.

Nor is this to be taken as a recommendation of charity or generosity. It’s intended as a legal obligation, “a law for all time, in all your dwellings” — not just on the farm, and not just in the Middle East — “throughout your generations.” It’s almost as if the ancients knew we were going to try to wiggle out of it.

If you listen to the sort of folks who like to thump their Bibles, you might wonder what happened to the sacred principle of private property.

Click here to read the entire article.

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