Do we share values with America?

On Israel’s Independence Day we often ruminate on the values we share with our great friend and benefactor, The United States.

The framers of the US constitution considered the protection of individual liberty and man’s “pursuit of happiness” the central task of an enlightened polity. They found inspiration in a verse from Leviticus, “proclaim liberty throughout the land”. They carved it on the Liberty Bell.

The verse, from the recent portion of Be’Har (“On The Mount”) alludes to the Jubilee Year when the land is not only laid fallow, but all titles to it revert to their original owners, while all its inhabitants, including slaves, must also go free.

It is not by accident that the founding fathers chose to express the sanctity of freedom with a quote from a chapter that relates man’s liberty to property rights. They considered property rights a bedrock of human liberty, because without means a person cannot fulfill himself.

Most Israelis, on the other hand would probably interpret the Jubilee Year as sanctifying a redistribution of property, an effort to curtail its imperatives.

In this difference regarding the sanctity of property lies the basic difference between the American ethos and the Israeli ethos, as shaped by a century of socialist Zionism, whose influence, whether conscious or not, is still predominant.

Surprisingly, the American ethos, sanctifying property, is closer to traditional, Halachic Judaism, while the Israeli ethos reflects a Christian viewpoint, adopted by Socialism. The latter believed that profit results from exploitation and therefore property acquisition is sinful, and the life of commerce essentially immoral.

The institution of Jubilee was framed in a world where land, and the man and the climate that made it fertile, were major elements in the creation of wealth. Without wealth, a person would be considered dead ( “Ani Mashul Lemet” our sages believed). Without wealth a person is a slave to his needs. He is compelled to devote all his time and energy to survival. He has little time or energy left to develop the “superfluity that is man” (motar ha’adam), the divine spark that elevated him above other living creatures.

God delegates his lordship over the land, its climate, its’ inhabitants, to man, not as a right but as a means for expressing his quintessential humanity. When man is commanded in Genesis to lord it over creation, it is not for the purpose of exploitation, but in order to impart to all creation some of the spark given to humanity shaped in the image of god.

Jubilee was instituted to eternalize the sanctity of property, to ensure that no family or tribe lost their title to the land, which was the only means in those days for creating wealth. Property rights were deemed so basic to liberty because only property made people truly independent, masters of their fate. A slave, the property of the others, is not an autonomous actor. He cannot be held responsible for his actions, cannot be a significant participant in a community.

The straight thinking Americans who framed the constitution must known this because they were masters of their destiny. They were also men of action, who besides their deep learning, were also the creators of wealth who had little stomach for hair splitting abstractions or for sterile disputations with which mere academics are so enamored.

When he analyzed the framing of a constitution that will guarantee basic human rights, James Madison warned that factionalism, driven from a desire to promote special interests, may impel governments to put narrow special interests before the good of the commonwealth. And yet he insisted that “the protection of (the different) faculties (that exclude equality) is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately result; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the prospective proprietors ensue a division of the society into different interests and parties.”

Madison believed then that it was not the business of a democratic system to achieve equality or the uniformity of interests, because those negate the need to protect the freedoms that encourage variety. A truly civil society that protects individual rights protects, in effect, inequality and this protection, Madison insists is, “the first object of government”.

For if we want to maintain the freedom to create and to choose, we must accept innate inequality. We must accept that though in the extreme inequality may lead to division and factionalism, it is primarily productive, the basis of all creative life, the same way that competition in sports motivates excellence in those who win while not diminishing the value of the losing team, as long as it did its best and contributed in this way to the achievements of the winners.

“Individuality was revealed as the main secret of creation, and what motivates it, and will always do so, is a basic individual drive to rise above the leveling nature of the collective. Creativity was revealed to be unattainable in a society in which this basic drive was extirpated. Creativity was made possible only in a society where hope smiles on private initiative and promises individual reward.”

Thus wrote Zeev Jabotinsky in his prophetic 1929 essay, “We the Bourgeoisie”, in which he foresaw the eventual demise of communism, both in The Soviet Union and in the Israeli kibbutzim because equality and collectivism run against human nature and neutralize its most creative impulses.

It does not mean, of course, that we have to accept also the extreme consequences of inequality, especially those that harm people who are for whatever reason economically unsuccessful. We must not allow extreme inequality to bring about a dangerous polarity and division in society, even if most often this division is artificially fomented for gain by the promoters of the politics of envy.

Responsible people know that no man is an island unto himself, and that the well-being of every individual is interwoven in a social fabric, indeed, dependent on it. They would therefore search, and find ways, to mitigate the more extreme consequences of inequality. They can do so more successfully, however, in the voluntary framework of charity and good works that Judaism has fashioned. This is a more equitable, a more moral, more effective and more humane framework than the one that has become so popular nowadays: the framework of the welfare state that posits, against all evidence, that using the coercive force of government to “redistribute wealth” can be done efficiently and without forbidding costs, without great inequity, without huge waste and corruption.

How much misery, how many problems could have been avoided if Israelis, so full of talent and energy, would have internalized the insights the founding father gleaned from the Bible and would have constructed a polity that promotes property rights and wealth creation, for the good of all.