LEV958 So relevant does this vision remain that the international movement for debt relief for Third World countries by the year 2000 was called Jubilee 2000, an explicit reference to the principle set out in this parasha. Three things are worth noting about the Torah's social and economic programme. First, it is more concerned with human freedom than with a narrow focus on economic equality. Losing your land or becoming trapped by debt are real constraints on freedom. [This is the argument set out by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in his book, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2001).] Fundamental to a Jewish understanding of the moral dimension of economics is the idea of independence, "each person under his own vine and fig tree," as the prophet Micah put it (Mic. 4:4). We pray in the Grace after Meals, "Do not make us dependent on the gifts or loans of other people… so that we may suffer neither shame nor humiliation." There is something profoundly degrading in losing your independence and being forced to depend on the goodwill of others. Hence the provisions of Behar are directed not at equality but at restoring people's capacity to earn their own livelihood as free and independent agents. Next, it takes this entire system out of the hands of human legislators. It rest on two fundamental ideas about capital and labor. First, the land belongs to God: "The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you reside in My land as strangers and temporary residents" (Leviticus 25:23). Second, the same applies to people: "Because the Israelites are My servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves" (Leviticus 25:42). This means that personal and economic liberty are not open to political negotiation. They are inalienable, God-given rights. Third, it tells us that economics is, and must remain, a discipline that rests on moral foundations. What matters to the Torah is not simply technical indices such as the rate of growth or absolute standards of wealth but the quality and texture of relationships: people's independence and sense of dignity, the ways in which the system allows people to recover from misfortune, and the extent to which it allows the members of a society to live the truth that "when you eat from the labor of your hands that you will be happy and it will be well with you" (Ps. 128:2).