7

Today there was pie. Nehemiah and I shared the leftover pie (pumpkin for him, apple for me), sipped coffee, and started talking about unexpected resistance.

“What happens when the people you are leading start whining?” I asked. Not that I was facing that myself at the moment.

“What makes you think they are whining?” he asked.

“Look at what happened to you in the middle of the building project. Some of the families started to complain. It was bad enough to have the outsiders attacking, but now your own people were complaining.”

“What makes you think they were complaining?” he said. He raised his hand to stop my response. “There was an outcry, but they weren’t complaining. They were speaking truth. For the first time in years they finally had someone they trusted as a leader, and they were speaking truth.”

I took another bite of pie.

“The people around Jerusalem had the same mixture of economic and social classes that you find around you. When the Babylonians finally dragged us away, the people they left were poor people, shepherds and farmers.^[1] For years they lived as best they could off the land. Up around Samaria, some of them married the people the Babylonians had brought in.^[2] Some did their best to stay loyal to God. And then, for the past fifty years, people had been returning from Babylon. Some of them came for their own reasons. Some came specifically to rebuild the temple.

“As a result, we had farmers and merchants and nobles and Levites, Jews and Samaritans and distant relatives like the Ammonites, people brought in from other parts of the world and people who descended from the people who had been in the land when Joshua led the Israelites into the Promised Land.” Nehemiah picked up his pie for another bite.

I said, “I’m guessing that some people had plenty of resources and some didn’t. That always happens with people. But how did that cause problems for you?”

He wiped his chin. “Everyone had to feed their families; not everyone had enough food, especially those who returned from the exile. And these people who had grown up in exile had finally gotten to the homeland and wanted to have families. People mortgaged what property they had to buy food. After awhile, these people who had mortgaged their land faced the tax collectors. But whatever they raised in crops was going to the note-holders, and they still had to pay for food.”

I thought about it. “It was like the foreclosure crisis is now. People are upside down on their mortgages,” I said. “And those people are really scared.”

“That’s it exactly,” Nehemiah answered. “But it got worse. People had to get money somehow, so they sent their children out to work. We didn’t have child labor laws. So it looked a lot more like slavery. Or worse. It was a loop. You borrow money to buy food. You borrow more money to pay taxes. And the only way you can pay all that interest is to send your kids to work for the lender.”

I stopped him. “And then you came on the scene.”

“Yes,” Nehemiah said. “When I came as the governor, there was finally a Jewish leader in Jerusalem. So it wasn’t that they were mad at me or complaining without reason. They realized that someone cared.”

“So the tension I run into might be a compliment more than a complaint?” I asked. “And the whining may be a legitimate cry for justice?”

“Absolutely. Parents came to me and started telling me what was happening. I heard story after story of people with resources taking advantage of parents without resources.

“Then I began seeing an aggravating pattern. Sometimes people would borrow from the non-Jewish merchants and have to send their kids into service.^[3] When other Jews had resources, they would redeem the kids. They wanted our kids to grow up with our culture. Then I heard about Jewish merchants who would loan money for food, who would then have kids coming into their service, and who would then receive some of the redemption money.^[4] These merchants were taking advantage of the community.”

I asked, “I’m guessing that they figured that if someone was going to get interest, it might as well stay in the family?”

Nehemiah set his mug down. It hit harder than I expected. “But God said not to do that. It’s what was called usury, charging family for what should be part of what we do for each other, because it all comes from God anyway.”

“Wait, what? You are making this be a big spiritual thing?

Nehemiah sighed. “It is a spiritual thing. It’s all spiritual.”

He took a deep breath. I shuddered. I remembered that when Nehemiah stopped to think, it often was because he was getting angry, and he wanted to respond rather than react.

He spoke quietly. “It’s not you. It’s the whole big story. Our Jewishness was a story. I had spent the last eight months meditating on the story as I was praying and planning and starting to work.

“When Moses talked about coming into the land, way back while we were still wanderers, he gave us instructions about what to do with the very first crop we got.^[5] People were to put the first grain they harvested into a basket and take it to the priest. They were to say to the priest, each of them, ‘My father was a wandering Aramean. His family went to Egypt. They had babies and became a great nation and were used and then abused by the Egyptians. We called out to God, who heard us, rescued us, and brought us to this land. This food is the first food I raised on the land God gave me. And I’m giving it to God to help me remember.’

“The reason God forbade charging interest to family is because he was giving us resources to care for each other. It came from God. People forgot the story. And some people forgot that our identity was rooted in God’s relationship to us.”

I held up my hand. “So the simplest thing would have been to simply give people food rather than the whole elaborate borrowing and interest, right?”

“Exactly. Not borrowing money for food meant that people would have been able to pay taxes without selling their kids into slavery.^[6] When you are a family, you share. You have to work, but you share.^[7] When you start looking at people as business, the family is over. And as someone who had given up his entire life for the sake of the family, the people, I was furious.”

Even though I already knew the answer, I asked, “So what did you do?” I wanted a summary.

“Six simple steps,” Nehemiah said.

“First, I took a very deep breath. I knew I could be violent if I wasn’t careful.^[8]

“Second, I confronted the leaders. That’s where the problem started, with their permissiveness.^[9]

“Third, I called everyone together and clearly outlined the problem.^[10]”

I interrupted. “And they agreed, right?”

“Absolutely. How could they argue, especially in front of the parents of the kids.

“Fourth, I explained what we all could do, looking to the Bible for support.^[11]”

I interrupted again. “You told people to return the land that had been mortgaged, to just eliminate the mortgages. Wasn’t that what God had commanded to happen every seven years anyway?”^[12]

“Yes it was. What I knew was that the Sabbath year that God had commanded, where mortgages were eliminated, was important for two reasons. First, God had commanded it to remind us that the land had been given to us by God. And second, disobeying this command had been part of the reason for the exile. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be part of anything that would send us back to exile.”

I got Nehemiah back on track. “Number five?”

“Fifth, I brought the leaders together and had them make a public commitment.^[13] And then sixth, I made the promises visual.^[14]”

“I loved that,” I said. “Shaking the crumbs out of your robe was visible to the whole crowd. Everyone knew the promise. Everyone knew the results of disobedience.”

Nehemiah stood up and shook the pie crumbs off his lap. “God doesn’t have surprises. He gives plenty of warning, lots of visuals, clear opportunities to obey. In fact, our whole lives were a visual for you.”

And he was gone.

I started thinking through some of the comments people have made to me. I thought it was whining. I started wondering whether I’d been listening closely enough.