I was 16. In my pocket, a new driver’s license and a low-limit credit card for gas and emergencies and nothing else. A motley crew of drama kids lounged all over, watching “Fight Club” at the cast party:
Jack Moore: “The plan, I believe, is to blow up these credit card headquarters…”
Detective Stern: “Why these buildings?”
Moore: “You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank.”
One of my friends, a senior in the thick of applying to colleges and financial aid, wondered, “Do you think it works? Could you really just erase the debt record like that?”
Parshat Re’eh, too, tries to resolve the toxic ramifications of debt, though its solution is less radical than homemade explosives.
“Every seventh year you shall practice shmita (remission of debts).” (Deuteronomy 15:1)
For the sake of justice, God tells us, we must not allow debt to create a permanently disadvantaged underclass in our communities.
“If there is a needy person among you… do not harden your heart and shut your hand… rather, you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs.” (15:7-8)
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Shmita has been on my mind since June 30, when the Supreme Court rejected President Biden’s plan to cancel $10,000 in student debt for most borrowers and $20,000 for low-income recipients of Pell Grants. Had it gone through, this plan would have eliminated the student loan debt of nearly 20 million Americans and reduced the burden on another 43 million.
I agree with those critics of student debt cancellation who say we must consider potential unintended effects. What if it further exacerbates inflation, stokes even higher tuition rates, and costs the government more than it proves to boost the consumer economy? However, many opponents are more concerned with whether it is fair to cancel the debt of some at the expense of all. A valid moral, political, and pragmatic question! Yet it would be cynical and disingenuous to paint our nation’s current crisis as simply a matter of individual choice and responsibility, blaming borrowers for systemic problems and inequalities when they face an economic landscape far different from previous generations.
It used to be possible to work your way through college. But with stagnant wages outstripped by skyrocketing tuition, housing, transportation, and childcare costs, that pathway is no longer widely viable. Many college grads without current student debt benefited from some combination of existing family wealth, proportionally lower tuition rates, and government subsidy programs that have historically excluded people of color. For students of my (millennial) generation and younger, the choice is rarely whether to work or take loans; it has been whether to take loans and work, or not to pursue a college degree at all.
Forgoing college used to be a more attractive option, back when the manual trades offered steady work that paid enough to support your family. But with the undermining of unions, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and severe reduction of vocational training and apprenticeships, that pathway has also become inaccessible. Now students must take out loans to attend vocational and trade schools, a sector plagued with predatory for-profit institutions, just to gain skills they used to learn for free in public school. Helping someone achieve a career that allows them to sustain themselves is the highest form of tzedakah, according to Maimonides, and our society insists on cutting away at that ladder at both ends.
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Re’eh draws a troubling distinction between our obligations to a Jewish debtor (acheicha, your sibling or close kin) and a non-Jewish one (nochri, a foreigner or outsider). The borrower who is like us must be forgiven at intervals, while the borrower not like us must continue paying even through a shmita year. How much of our current strife over student debt cancellation really boils down to whom we perceive as “us” (deserving of holy leniency) and “them” (undeserving, no matter what)?
So much of our political will to act drains away into the fissures between boomer and millennial, white and Black, rich and poor, educated elite and salt of the earth. What could our society accomplish if we worked on expanding the “us,” recognizing that everyone’s moral (and even financial) prospects suffer when we harden our hearts and close our hands to those in need?
Economists and politicians far wiser than me will need to sort out the details of how best to address the student debt crisis. But as a rabbi, I hear the Torah’s call to make it everyone’s concern to avoid a state of permanent debt. We have a moral obligation to resolve this burden collectively, because the current situation is untenable. Student debt suffocates fixed-income boomers who still can’t pay off their loans in old age. Gen X sees their retirement date recede and recede into a mirage on the horizon. Millennials like myself are struggling to become homeowners and delaying parenthood, and Gen Z college graduates have difficulty finding decent jobs at all.
Perhaps in 5783, it seems quaint to think we could blow it all up and start from zero. But we dare not let our will falter in pursuit of an equitable solution, as difficult as it may be. Parshat Re’eh’s aspirational statement,
“There shall be no needy among you,” (15:4) pairs immediately with “There will never cease to be needy, which is why I command you to open your hand.” (15:11)
God entrusts us, flawed mortal beings as we are, with the responsibility to figure it out and take care of each other.
Rabbi Jessica Dell’Era Nussbaum (she/they) is the leader of Temple Shalom in Medford, MA. She is a former bilingual public school teacher and T’ruah Summer Fellow.