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).
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.
