Student debt and the Torah
When I joined Senator Elizabeth Warren’s team in 2019, I found myself thinking a lot about student debt. As a consumer advocate, Senator Warren had long understood the crippling and abusive practices that keep people trapped in a cycle of debt, and she was particularly outraged that we force people to go through this - by federal policy! - in order to get an education.
Around the same time, my spiritual communities started talking a lot about another idea that was new to me: the shmita year, which occurs every seven years in the Jewish calendar. During this year, the Torah instructs us to let the land rest and lie fallow so that it can regenerate. And it instructs us to forgive all debts - to hit a reset button on the economy, too. We are in a shmita year right now, the Jewish year of 5783.
Normally these two parts of my life don’t converge quite that directly. Sitting in the middle of the Venn diagram of people thinking a lot about student debt and about shmita, I realized I had some thoughts to share. You can read more about them here at Jewschool.
I share this learning with huge gratitude to my teachers of the Torah of student debt - Senator Warren, Josh Delaney, Mike Pierce and Persis Yu of the Student Borrower Protection Center, and many others. If you want to get involved in the movement to #CancelStudentDebt, https://protectborrowers.org/ and https://studentdebtcrisis.org/ are great places to start.
