The story
The word jubilee comes, through Latin, from the Hebrew yovel, which meant a ram and the ram's-horn trumpet, the shofar. The Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, tells Israel to count seven cycles of seven years, 49 years in all, and to make the fiftieth year holy. It was to be announced by a blast of the shofar on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and proclaimed as a year of liberty throughout the land.
In that year certain servants were released, some debts were forgiven and families returned to land they had lost, while the fields were left to rest. The aim was that no family would be trapped in poverty or landlessness forever, and that wealth would periodically be restored to those who had fallen behind. Other ancient Near Eastern kings sometimes cancelled debts at their coronation, but the biblical Jubilee made release a regular, built-in part of the law. Rabbinic tradition holds that the Jubilee applied only when all the tribes of Israel lived in their land, so it has not been observed for many centuries, though the related sabbatical year is still kept by many religious Jews in Israel.
The idea has echoed through history. Leviticus 25:10, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof", was cast on the bell commissioned in 1752 by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly for its State House in Philadelphia. In the 1830s American abolitionists adopted the bell as their symbol and named it the Liberty Bell, pointing out that it could not truly proclaim liberty while a sixth of the country's inhabitants remained enslaved. William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and many others invoked the Jubilee verse to connect the fight against slavery with the biblical year of release.
In the 1990s the idea inspired a new campaign. Building on a proposal by the writer Paul Vallely, Martin Dent and William Peters founded Jubilee 2000, which grew into a coalition in more than 40 countries calling for the cancellation of the debts of the world's poorest nations by the year 2000. Supported by churches, trade unions and musicians such as Bono, it brought tens of thousands of demonstrators to the 1998 G8 summit in Birmingham. In 1999 the United States pledged to cancel all the debt that qualifying countries owed it, a promise attributed in part to the campaign.
Although Jubilee 2000 did not meet all its ambitious goals, it was widely judged a success, and organisations it inspired continue to work on debt relief today.
Why it matters
The Jubilee ideal of freedom from bondage and a fresh start has inspired movements against slavery and for debt relief for the world's poorest countries.
Sources
- Jubilee (biblical) Wikipedia
- Liberty Bell Wikipedia
- Jubilee 2000 Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.