Isaiah and Enoughness

Isaiah astonishes.

Even after 2700 years, his language and message grab us.

(What writer today dares to imagine their works will be read and cherished 2700 years from now!)

Fresh from my meeting of the Sustainable Maryland Certified Social Equity Task Force (see 11/30 blog), I bumped into Isaiah 5:7-9. This is a famous chapter about the vineyard, and these verses in particular speak of social wrongs and excessive consumption, pressing them right up against one another.

"God hoped for justice (mishpat)," Isaiah writes, "but behold, injustice (mispah); equity (tzedakah) but behold iniquity (tza'akah). Woe for those who add house to house and join field to field til there is room for none but you to dwell in the land."

Now, as my children will be the first to remind me, correlation does not prove causality. And here, they might say, juxtaposition does not prove relation. But the rabbinic rules of reading biblical text are a bit different. Here, being next to a verse often means being related to a verse.

So, it is not inappropriate to argue that in placing these two verses back-to-back, Isaiah was linking land grab (more broadly defined as excessive acquisition) to a slide into social injustice. Or perhaps even more daring, he may be saying that land grab itself is a form of social injustice.

Of course, there is nothing wrong, indeed there is much right, in building houses and transforming fields to farms. These are good and necessary acts of a civilization. The questions are: to what extent? How shall we balance open space with farms, and buildings with open space? How shall the resources of the world be shared? How much is right for any one person own? What are the social consequences - for both the possessor and the community at large - of over-aggregated ownership and bloated consumption?

These are not new problems. They are part and parcel of the human condition. Drawing boundaries between necessary, rightful and generative possession on the one hand and too-much, diminishing and constricting possession on the other is hard. Isaiah reminds us of the treachery of seduction, that we can all-too-easily slip into doing wrong simply by doing too much of what seems right.

Once again, the ethic of sova, the joy of just-enough, seems to be an antidote to this social ill, knowing that it is only there that true satisfaction can be found.