Parshah Commentary

The first of this week’s two parashiyot, Behar, brings the laws of Vayikra to their culmination with their most comprehensive and radical regulation. According to the laws of land sabbatical and Jubilee, every seven years the land rests untilled—landowner, laborer, slave, and animal alike subsist off what grows naturally, without any claims to ownership. After seven such cycles, the Jubilee reverses all the real estate transactions of the previous 49 years, resetting economic equality and releasing all debt slaves. The Jubilee spirit also animates the intervening years, as the Torah follows up the Jubilee laws with strict regulation of debt bondage, concluding with a warning: “You may not subjugate them crushingly, but fear your God.”

This verse is strange for a number of reasons, principal among them that it’s not clear on its face what is being prohibited. What does it mean to subjugate someone “crushingly”? Given that the United Nations International Labour Organization estimated that, as of 2021, there were 5.8 million people in the world experiencing debt slavery, it’s a concern of practical, contemporary Jewish political ethics to figure out just what our Great Book prohibits. Granted, “crushingly” isn’t a conventional English word, but it mirrors the Hebrew “be-farekh,” which is hardly a normal word, either. Translated by others as “with rigour,” “ruthlessly,” “with crushing labor,” the word appears in only one other passage in the Torah, where it describes Pharaoh’s abuse of the Hebrews: “And Egypt worked the Israelites crushingly. And they embittered their lives with hard work, with mortar and bricks and with all sorts of work in the field—all their work which they set them to work, crushingly.”

One interpretive approach defines “be-farekh” by using the narrative detail sandwiched between its two mentions here: hard, physical labor. This is how the Passover Haggadah understands it, when it reads “Egypt worked the Israelites crushingly” as the referent of Devarim 26’s recollection that the Egyptians “set upon us hard labor.” This interpretation can be buttressed by meanings of “be-farekh” in later Hebrew. These later attestations are a helpful added tool in determining the word’s meaning given that Biblical Hebrew seldom uses this root. It is common in later Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, though, where it similarly means to “crush” or “rub out,” whether literally, such as crushing bread crumbs into fine flour dust or figuratively, such as refuting a spurious argument. Thus, in this reading, Pharaoh subjugated us as chattel slaves with backbreaking physical labor; we, in our parshah, are prohibited from subjugating debtors to backbreaking physical labor.

Other interpretations of “be-farekh” expand the reach of the prohibition beyond work that breaks the body. Observing that Pharaoh’s purpose in imposing slave labor was to disrupt Israelite fertility, these voices argue that Pharaoh’s oppressive labor attacked the Hebrews’ identity and family structure, and therefore, played out not just through hard, physical labor, but also through the identity-destroying assignment of labor mis-aligned with the worker’s age, gender identity, and more. According to these texts, Pharaoh sought to destroy our will, morale, and communal integrity by humiliating us with tasks that upended our self-conception and social role. If we are now in a position to collect from debtors, we are prohibited from humiliating them or crushing their dignity through labor. Much of our economy in the US has traditionally been and continues to be grounded in wealthy people, landowners, and corporations preying on those plunged into debt, who have lost their land and livelihood and are forced to work as day laborers or farmhands, stuck for perpetuity in servitude to a company town or an agribusiness, taking on all liabilities while unable to generate profits for themselves, often incurring debilitating injury—backbreaking, soul-crushing labor. The Torah anticipates that people with power will set up such economies and attempts to interrupt them.

But a third interpretation of “be-farekh” in the Rabbinic tradition goes deeper, seeking the root causes of such labor abuse in much more mundane labor practices. The most radical and farthest-reaching interpretation of “crushing labor” is the mainstream halachic interpretation: pointless labor. Pharaoh didn’t enslave the Hebrews because he needed workers for his public works. He enslaved them in order to break their society. The labor was just a pretext, a boondoggle. Pharaoh’s slavery was the imposition of labor for the purpose of subjugation and oppression. “What is crushing labor” prohibited by our parshah?, the Rambam asks in his legal code. “This is labor that has no demarcated scope, and labor that is not needed, but whose intention is simply to keep the other person working, so as not to be idle.” He follows the classical midrash’s surprisingly banal and evergreen examples: You may not tell a worker, ‘Heat me a beverage,’ if you don’t actually need it. Busy work is prohibited by Jewish law. You may not tell a worker, ‘Dig here until I return.’ Workers have a right to know the scope of the task, to know when they are nearing completion.

You want to understand how we get to a place where a society tolerates massively profitable corporations mangling the bodies and destroying the freedom and spirit of its laborers in order to squeeze every drop of labor out of them? It starts with every time a boss tells a secretary to make coffee in order to show her off to the boys; every time a school teacher imposes an assignment with no educational purpose, to keep the kids from socializing; every time a boss drums up tasks for workers, to keep them from idling and, I don’t know, talking to each other about unionizing. Each of those soul-crushing moments is an echo of the Biblical Pharaoh, who concocted a massive national labor project in order to break up Israelite families.

A whole swath of today’s sinful economic regime, what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”—“pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”—is forbidden by Jewish law. The 19th-century Eastern European commentator Malbim points out that that is why our parshah forbids us to “subjugate [workers] crushingly,” rather than simply, to “work them crushingly”: “‘work’ is for a purpose, but ‘subjugation’ means just in order to subjugate and abuse them.” On a macro, societal level, it is prohibited to impose, as Graeber puts it, “a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital.”

Debt Collective member Amy Czulada boils down debt by defining it as “a tool of oppression” that serves as “a means to silence and coerce the working class.” When the Torah heavily regulates the collection of debt and strictly prohibits the leveraging of debt into a mechanism for subordinating people and crushing their spirit, it points toward an abolition of debt as we know it, debt as an economic engine for wealth hoarding and labor exploitation. If society were to abide by the mitzvah not to subjugate debtors to backbreaking, humiliating, or soul-crushing, subordinating labor, it would be to fulfill Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s abolitionist tenet: “to change one thing: everything.”

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.