When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field to its very border, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and the alien.
This is structural economic justice - not charity (giving from surplus), but structural: your harvest doesn't entirely belong to you. The poor have a claim on it as built-in law.
I work in agriculture, and I started implementing this literally - leaving portions of our harvest unharvested, leaving the edges of fields. It costs us yield. But it places us in a different relationship with land, with wealth, with community. We're saying: 'Not all of this is mine to keep.'
No comments yet. Be the first.