Prophets, not Profits

Tisha b’Av, the Jewish day of mourning has come and gone. Traditionally (though tradition and reality are not always congruent) both Temples were destroyed on the 9th of Av, the first by the Babylonians, the second by the Romans. The rabbis teach that Moses sent spies to scout the Promised Land who reported on its milk and honeyness. But the people wept at the prospect of entering such a formidable land full of giants. God declared, “You wept without cause; I will therefore make this an eternal day of mourning for you.” The day of course was Tisha b’Av. Other events associated with Tisha b’Av are the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt, the expulsion from England, the expulsion from Spain, the beginning of the First World War, the first of the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.

A new reason to mourn is always available, this being planet earth. Our grief this time? The abandonment of basic Jewish principles by the Thatcherite State of Israel. Ol’ Margaret once famously said that “the problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” The problem with that aphorism is that the opposite is also true. After a while the poor will run out of money for the rich to cheat them out of.

In Israel, as you may have read in the last issue of the Voice & Herald Tisha b’ Av was a day of mourning for the heritage of the earliest idealistic days of the new state, of the Yishuv that had preceded it, the Israel of David ben Gurion and the Histadrut and kibbutzim. The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netenyahu has drunk the Reagan/Thatcherite Kool-Aid to the last dregs, believing with them that it is a good thing for the rich to get richer and for the poor to shut up. Thatcherites like Netenyahu and Reagan trickle this treacle down more eloquently but in the end how else are we to interpret the American version that argues that in return for granting another 13 months of unemployment benefits, the super rich receive a twenty-four months re-authorization of the Bush-era tax cuts; more recently, in return for cuts in governmental services, many of which had benefited the growing poor and the shrinking middle class, there are no efforts to tax the rich.

In America we seem to take this lying down, we allow Republican ideologues who ignore the fact that our debt was brought about by Bush era tax cuts combined with a foolish war to trample the economic rights of working and middle class Americans. In Israel privatization has meant that a very few have acquired more money than you know Who. As Leslie Susser put it in the last issue, in Israel “Owners and a select few mega-salaried executives became richer and the middle class relatively poorer. It also led to the rise of the Israeli tycoons, who controlled a great deal of the country's wealth and power. Banks, energy companies, supermarket chains and media properties all were concentrated in the hands of a dozen or so billionaire families. Netanyahu's economic philosophy also entailed a reduction of corporate taxes… while the middle class saw the prices of everything from food to cars to apartments rise considerably. The system produced impressive economic growth but left wealth in the hands of the few. The trickle-down effect, middle-class Israelis said, had failed to materialize.” Of course it failed to materialize. It always fails to materialize. The trickle down effect is to economics what leaches were to medieval medicine. The result was the tent cities, the tens of thousands of young Israelis who demanded more equitable distribution of available resources. They were not violent; they made no demands that were out of line with the traditions of Eretz Yisrael. They want to be able to afford a place to live. After all, they are the conscript soldiers of Israel who daily place their lives on the line, willingly. And in return, the wealthier got wealthier, and they poorer. Jewish this is not.

Shall I quote chapter and verse here? The middle part of Tanach, the prophetic portion, never advocates trickle down economics, never proposes aggregate wealth. Instead Isaiah and Jeremiah, from whose books we’ve been reading the last several weeks as a lead in to Rosh Hashanah advocate the opposite, the care for the poorer classes; they bemoan the powerful’s ruthless exploitation of the poor. Gee, I hope they weren’t Socialists.