Some religious leaders have invoked the Hebrew Bible’s (Torah’s) requirement to forgive the payback of all loans at the end of the Sabbatical year (“Shmitah,” year of release), as a moral justification of the plan by President Biden for the federal government to forgive up to $20,000 in undergraduate and graduate student loan debt for those earning up to $250,000 a year. As the Supreme Court now considers the legality of the President’s executive order according to American constitutional law, there is great political controversy and passion on all sides. Regardless of the ultimate legal outcome, it is appropriate for people of faith to discuss the issue in light of Scripture and Tradition.

The most obvious way to do so is indeed by way of analogy to the Torah law on Sabbatical loan release (especially timely as this past year on the Hebrew calendar was a Sabbatical year when many religious farmers in Israel declared their produce ownerless and available to all):

At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: every creditor shall release that which he has lent unto his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother; because the Lord’s release hath been proclaimed (Deuteronomy 15: 1-2).

If there be among you a needy man, one of thy brethren . . . thou shalt not harden thy heart, nor shut thy hand from thy needy brother; but thou shalt surely open thy hand unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need in that which he wanteth. Beware that there be not a base thought in thy heart, saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of release is at hand,’ and thine eye be evil against thy needy brother and thou give him nought (Deuteronomy 15: 7-9).

So there is a Biblical requirement to forgive loans every seven years and the context is to lend to the poor to help them despite one’s natural inclination not to lose money.

But the Mishnah, the rabbinic interpretation and explanation of the Hebrew Bible according to oral Tradition, limits this Biblical requirement in several ways (see Tractate Sheviis, Chapter 10). Collateralized debt, shop credit, unpaid wages, unpaid rent, and the like are not cancelled at the Sabbatical year. Also civil penalties for sexual crimes, and, more broadly, court decrees to repay defaults are exempt. Most significantly, if the loan documents are presented to the court for its enforcement and collection, then the release requirement is not operative.

Indeed, on this latter basis, Hillel, the great first century BCE sage, enacted the “prozbul,” whereby a document is drawn up by a creditor, shielding the debts owed him from cancellation, by formally awarding custody of the debts to the court. The justification for this seeming circumvention of Biblical law is given in Sheviis 10:3, “When he saw that the people refrained from lending money to each other and transgressed what is written in the Torah: ‘Beware that there be not a base thought in thy heart . . .’, Hillel instituted the prozbul.”

One might therefore take the prozbul as a somewhat unfortunate albeit practical realization in recognition of the efficient working of a functioning economy with widely available credit as its lifeblood, against a high-minded ethical and religious imperative to forgive debt. But the Mishnah continues in Sheviis 10:8, “One who repays a debt on the seventh year, the Sages are pleased with him.” So it is also ethical to repay debts, despite the Biblical permit not to do so in the Sabbatical year.

My own interpretation of Hillel’s action is that the Biblical law, although technically applicable to all unsecured loans, is intended mainly to help the poor, as indeed stated. When that understanding was widespread among people, creditors could feel comfortable to lend because they knew that their loans would be repaid by those who were able to do so. This was so even at the, ethically appropriate and likely modest, cost of helping the truly needy. But when social and religious standards and conventions broke down, as they did in many other areas in the late Second Temple period, the intended functioning of Biblical loan release law also stopped, when those who were able to repay loans did not. So as a responsible leader, Hillel, faced with competing ethical goals and considering all the likely consequences, instituted his prozbul solution, as the best thing to do in the circumstances, consistent with Biblical law.

As people of faith, we hope that our political leaders and legal institutions in the United States will operate in the same sensible way as Hillel, finding the right ethical balance in light of current circumstances.

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