Couples go through a lot together, and learn something new every step of the way.
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“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession . . . . Ye shall not therefore oppress one another . . . . And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him:”—Leviticus 25:10,17,35 (King James Version)
The longer you’ve been with someone, the more times you’ve let them down, hurt them, said stupid shit, and, in a way, incurred debts to them. Perhaps that’s why people who’ve been together for a long time can fight so spectacularly: because they’re not just fighting about what happened yesterday, or last week; they’re fighting about what happened last year, or last decade. Indeed, I’ve heard some couples bring up shit that happened in the 1990s in fights! As you might expect, this makes their fights far more intense than they ought to be.
When this dynamic is ramped up to the group level, you’ve got people screaming and yelling about stuff that happened 400 years ago as if it happened yesterday; you’ve got programs of ethnic cleansing predicated on wrongs that were supposedly perpetrated by the ancestors of your victims; and you’ve got young adults in developing countries crushed by national debts that were incurred by corrupt politicians decades before they were born.
Alas, I propose that we forgive it all!
What could be more beautiful than a periodic forgetting of debts? It could renew our relationships, our economy, our international relations?
How often do we see people split up and remarry simply because the weight of resentment on their shoulders proves too heavy to bear? They start off fresh with a new partner (also recently divorced) and proceed—slowly but surely—to build up a similarly substantial weight of resentment, which, in time, will necessitate another divorce, and another remarriage. But why not break this cycle? Why not forgive the debts, get over it, stop bringing up old shit, and move on?
I’m not, I hasten to add, suggesting that we ignore the claims of justice. Central to the biblical notion of jubilee is, in fact, justice: because debts become too heavy to bear at a certain point, and rates of inequality become untenable. That’s what jubilee is all about! It’s not about people who got rich via slavery saying to their newly emancipated slaves: “Look, can we just let bygones be bygones?” It’s about emancipated slaves and their onetime masters dividing up the resources equitably and THEN agreeing to let bygones be bygones.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
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Photo: Flickr/Jonathan McPherskesen