When you knock upon the pearly gates, they are going to interrogate you about the life you led. According to the Talmudic sage, Rava, who lived around the year 300 in Mehoza, about 35 km south of present day Baghdad, before they bring you into the world to come, the very first question they will ask you is: הנשאתה ונתתה באמונה/hanasatah v’natatah be’emunah? Were you honest in business? Or to translate the Hebrew idiom a little more literally: did you buy and sell with integrity?
They say Jews are too concerned about money. As an old joke goes, Shmuel and Yankel, a couple of Jews in Mink or Pinsk, and they see a sign on the biggest church in town: 100 Rubles for any Jew who converts. Yankel is horrified, but Shmuel is curious. He is a good Jewת but 100 Rubles is 100 Rubles. So Shmuel goes in and comes out an hour later with wet hair. Yankel can’t believe his eyes. He asks: “Du bist a goy? So now you’re Christian? Did they give you 100 Rubles?” Shmuel says: “Why is it always money with you people?”
I told this joke maybe 15 years ago and got another good laugh. But on the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, she ridicules that very joke as trite and predictable. Well, we’re not all as funny as you, Midge.
In fact, in America today, according to a recent Anti-Defamation League survey, 1 in 4 Americans think Jews have too much financial power and care too much about money. As a famous Minnesota congresswoman, not our friend, in 2019 spoke about Jews by quoting a Puff Daddy lyric, “It’s all about the Benjamins, Baby.”
I wish you all a wonderful, meaningful, transformative, atoneful Yom Kippur. On a day on which we’re forbidden to handle money, let me encourage us all: you should care a lot about money.
Because money is the arena in which almost every value is tested, stressed, and expressed. Our economic relationships – what we pay for, what we sell, how we work, whom we employ, how we pay our debts to others – that’s the preeminent realm in which people either act with integrity, dignity and care, or reveal themselves to be greedy, unscrupulous scoundrels. What are you willing to do for money? What won’t you do for money? In this religion, we believe those are the first questions they’re going to ask you when you pass into eternity. So you need good answers.
This is a moment of tremendous economic uncertainty in this country. An industry and a technology are being born whose downstream economic and social effects we scarcely imagine. Most American households, 54%, hold mutual funds. I’m sure that here on the Upper West Side of New York, very few of us are off the financial grid, so in this room, the number is certainly much larger. The vast majority of us here tonight are investing our financial futures in the success of Artificial Intelligence. Do you hold an index fund? Do you have a stake in the S-&-P 500, or NASDAQ, or Fidelity Contrafund? Then your economic well-being is inextricably tied to Nvidia, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and … Elon Musk. You might hate them. But you invest in them. I know I do. And they totally might put you personally and your grandchildren out of work forever.
And that’s not the only worry. Do you dabble in Bitcoin and Crypto and any of that other strange stuff? I’m no economist, and I don’t claim to understand. But based on what I have read, those instruments exist primarily to enable crime, corruption, and manipulation at an unprecedented scale.
So imagine Rava’s teaching again: when you reach the עולם הבא/olam haba, the world to come, what do we expect they are going to ask us? And how can we even begin to answer?
It’s uncomfortable. In my experience, money is the hardest thing to talk about. What do married people fight most about? What would even good friends never discuss? What are people’s most sensitive and embarrassing secrets? What destroys relationships and divides families? I have spoken with many of you here tonight about private and painful matters. The third rail is not what you might think. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.
Tonight, on the day in which Jews address most directly what we think about virtue and vice, and who we want to be or not be, let’s think together about money. How we should view money and the Jewish values that shape our economic behavior.
I have 4 words that I hope will help you answer the questions you will face as you pass into eternity:
- CAPABILITY
- RESPONSIBILITY
- RESTRAINT
- GENEROSITY
CAPABILITY
The first thing to say about Homo Economicus Judaeus, the Jewish economic human being, is that money – economic life – imparts purpose and dignity. In this religion, you are not supposed to be a beggar. Some religious traditions valorize poverty, mendicants, those who renounce all possessions. In the west we are familiar with Catholic Franciscan monks and Cistercian sisters taking vows of poverty. The loftiest Buddhist monks also survive only by begging, and devoted Jains renounce all property, owning nothing but a robe, a bowl, and a small broom.
There is no such thing in Judaism. I’m not addressing those Haredi communities in which people refuse to work so that others support them in full-time Torah study. Take my word for it, this is not endorsed by sacred sources or common sense.
The Torah tradition expects Jews to be productive people. It expects that we turn trees into chairs and tables. That we turn wool into sweaters. Referring to ancient technology, it expects us to turn olives into oil that lights dark houses. The point of leaving Egypt was to reach the Promised Land, says Deuteronomy 8 where: אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר לֹא בְמִסְכֵּנֻת תֹּאכַל בָּהּ לֶחֶם לֹא תֶחְסַר כֹּל בָּהּ אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲבָנֶיהָ בַרְזֶל וּמֵהֲרָרֶיהָ תַּחְצֹב נְחֹשֶׁת. That God was leading us to “a land in which we would not eat in poverty, a land where we would lack nothing, a land whose stones were iron and from whose mountains we would mine copper.”
I bet everyone here knows the blessing to recite before eating bread. Don’t say it today. Say it tomorrow night when the fast ends. Like all blessings, it begins Barukh Atah. … ha’otzi lechem min ha’aretz, Blessed are You who brings forth bread from the earth. Does that religious metaphor work for you? Do you imagine God as a baker? In fact, like almost everything in the prayer book, this is an allusion to a Bible verse. Psalm 104, a majestic account of creation, states that God created עֵשֶׂב לַעֲבֹדַת הָאָדָם לְהוֹצִיא לֶחֶם מִן הָאָרֶץ
God created grass for human labor, so that humans might bring forth bread from the earth. Humans are not helpless recipients of God’s gifts. We are capable partners who discover the potential in raw material and develop it into something amazing. And sell it. And grow a prosperous economy.
A brilliant midrash [Eliyahu Zuta 2] develops this point with the parable of a king who has both a wise and a foolish servant. The king gives each of them a quantity of wheat and of flax and instructs them to take care of the deposit while he is gone. When the king returns, the fool returns a pile of wheat and a pile of flax. And the wise servant returns a cake covered in a cloth.
Everyone is talking these days about AI, about which I know very little. And since I try to avoid talking about things I don’t know about, I’m not going to address that more than to say that while I am worried about AI enabling bad actors like the Houthi militia in Yemen to make drones, which actually did happen, or other terrorists to make bioweapons, I am even more worried about it sapping our capacity for productive labor. We all hear about the risk that AI will wipe out humanity. If that happens, there is nothing I can do about it. But even if artificial intelligence doesn’t wipe us out, I remain worried that these computers will turn us into computerized people, unable to think for ourselves, outsourcing our dignity and purpose to machines.
RESPONSIBILITY
The next thing to say about the Homo Economicus Judaeus is that money demands responsibility for other people’s money. If you have property, you’re responsible for other people’s property.
Immediately after the revelation of the Torah on Mt. Sinai in Exodus chapter 20, comes the Bible’s first law code beginning in Exodus 21, Parshat Mishpatim. Right after “I am the Lord your God,” “Thou shall not murder,” comes: Here are the rules of employing people. What happens when you accidentally burn your neighbor’s crops? What happens if one person injures another in a fight? Or steals another’s sheep. Or digs a hole, and someone else’s animal falls in because you were not careful enough in covering it.
We tend to think that Judaism is about Shabbat and keeping kosher, and it is. But do you know what the Talmud spends, quantitatively, the most attention to? Injuries. Real estate law. The ox that gores a cow. Disputing the claims of lost objects. Theft. Fraud. Deception. Keeping false weights and measures. Originally, all these topics were treated in a single gigantic super-tractate of 30 chapters called just nezikin or “Damages.” But it was so long and unwieldy that they divided it into three still very long tractates of 10 chapters each, with the very clever names of “beginning,” “middle,” and “end.” To this day, it is the bread and butter of any Talmudic curriculum. And all that massive material concludes with the following Mishnah [Bava Batra 10:8]: אָמַר רַבִּי יִשְׁמָעֵאל, הָרוֹצֶה שֶׁיַּחְכִּים, יַעֲסוֹק בְּדִינֵי מָמוֹנוֹת,. “Said Rabbi Ishmael: one who wishes to grow wise, should study dinei mammonot, the laws of property or money.”
That word mammon probably rings out to you because common English parlance borrows it from the Christian Scriptures, where in the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 6.24], Jesus claims that a person cannot serve both God and mammon.
But the Jewish truth is that you can only serve God through mammon, through the careful, ethical, and scrupulous way you treat people’s property.
As another Mishnah teaches [Avot 2.12] רַבִּי יוֹסֵי אוֹמֵר, יְהִי מָמוֹן חֲבֵרְךָ חָבִיב עָלֶיךָ כְּשֶׁלָּךְ
Said Rabbi Yosi: Let your comrade’s mammon be as dear to you as your own.
RESTRAINT
The next critical Jewish guidance is about restraint. The Christian scriptures do have something of a point about this. If you love mammon too much, you will lose all sense of proportion and quickly lose your mind and heart and become addicted to an unfulfillable greed. As the book of Kohelet, or it’s Latin name, Ecclesiastes [5.9] says: אֹהֵ֥ב כֶּ֙סֶף֙ לֹא־יִשְׂבַּ֣ע כֶּ֔סֶף. Someone who loves money will never have enough money.
We find ourselves at a time when American politicians are, with straight faces, talking about seizing the means of production. Polls find that 66 percent of self-identified Democrats view socialism positively. Many of us in this room are soon to be represented in Congress by a person who – in her youthful silliness, and she’s entitled to grow up – said that the government should seize the property of landlords.
I would like to remind you of the true Jewish views about private property. We have a concept of peah, literally a corner, but figuratively a section of your field devoted to the benefit of other people. It is your field. You own it. That makes you responsible for what grows there. You should turn its grass into bread and its olives into oil and you should keep your family prosperous and safe. But you do not own it under the assumption that all its benefits belong to you. You own it contingently, restrained, dependent upon your working for the benefit of others as well as yourself.
GENEROSITY
Finally a last central concept for how we Jews should think about money: Generosity. Perhaps it is natural for the human animal to be selfish. Perhaps it is natural to want to use all your resources to keep your own family and clan and community safe. But it is wrong.
The great Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov [1772-1810, Likkutei Moharan 2.4] said: “When you first get ready to give tzedaka צריכין לשבר את האכזריות שלו להפכו לרחמנות, you must break your cruelty and transform it to mercy.” It may be natural to be selfish, but that is an impulse for you to overcome. Instead, nurture your rachmones, your mercy, cultivate you generosity.
Let’s go back a few centuries earlier than Nachman, to Maimonides, who lived most of his life in Egypt in the 12th century. In his commentary on Pirkei Avot, Maimonides asks a genuinely hard question: What is ethically preferable: to donate to charity one large sum all at once? Or to give the identical aggregate sum in small portions, day by day by day, over a longer period? A thousand dollars all at once? Or two dollars every day, for 500 straight days. Both positions have their merits. On the one hand, perhaps it hurts to give a lot of money all at once, and that makes such a gift heroic. Maybe a single big gift changes someone’s life right now, and lets them begin a new business or pay off a crushing debt, while two dollars today and two dollars tomorrow leaves everyone equally poor forever.
But that is not the position Rambam takes. Quoting Rabbi Akiva [Avot 3.15], he argues that הכל לפי רוב המעשה, “everything follows the quantity of the deeds.” He argues that regular gifts, every single day, train you in generosity. The rich get richer. That’s an axiom of society. But also the generous grow more generous, and the kind grow kinder, and the loving grow more loving. This year, do not let a week go by in which you fail to give a tzedakah gift. As you think about how to care about money this Yom Kippur, ask yourself how you will train yourself to become more generous.
Perhaps, all this has all been a little abstract and general. So let me bring it home with some specific, practical applications, emerging from Jewish tradition.
How do you make choices about where to give tzedakah? Our Torah tradition has a lot of wisdom but some of its indicators conflict with others. They most definitely do not give us neat answers.
For instance, one key recommendation is מבשרך אל תתעלם. “Do not ignore your own kin [Isaiah 58.7].” If you won’t help your poor relatives, who else in the world would? Prioritize the people you know and love.
But how does that address the needs of the wider world? Another guidance is עניי עירך קודמים, “the poor of your city come first [Bava Metzia 71a].” You are part of this community. Even for those who are not your flesh and blood, you share a local society. You must come through for them.
That is not the last word either. Another guidance is תאב תאב קודם, “the neediest come first [Sifrei Devarim 116.5].” Who are the neediest people in the world? They are not my family members and they don’t live in New York City. They live in Chad, in Bangladesh, in Mumbai. I owe them care as well.
None of these rules of thumb can make sense of all my tzedakah priorities. I must weave them together.
As we speak about our economic choices, and how Jews stress and test our values through actual decisions, and how I hope I prepare myself to answer the questions I will be asked when I pass from this world to eternity, let me tell you some of my own personal tzedakah choices. These are by no means the only answers to these questions. They are one person’s attempt to respond to hard problems.
I try to divide my tzedaka into thirds.
I try to give my fellow Americans one-third of my tzedakah. I devote funds to alleviating American poverty, through organizations including the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, the United Negro College Fund and the Hebrew Free Loan Society.
I try to give my Jewish family one-third of my tzedakah. Especially in the last three years this has skewed larger than one-third. But it is urgent, so I give to the Jewish people’s struggle to be its best self. Most goes to Israel, and some to America. I give to Ansche Chesed, because I believe in our community. I give to the Heschel School and Camp Ramah, for how they helped us raise our children. I give to fight hunger, through organizations like Latet. I give to rebuild what the war has destroyed. I give to organizations like the New Israel Fund who fight for a just and inclusive Israeli society.
And finally, I try to give one-third of my tzedakah to people I will never meet, whose lives are utterly different from my own. We live in the wealthiest city on earth. Even those of us here tonight who are not so affluent, are unimaginably better off than the world’s poorest. And because every human being lives, as Martin Luther King said, in “inescapable bonds of mutuality, in a seamless garment of destiny,” we cannot forget them. So I give to organizations healing malaria and schistosomiasis and blindness caused by vitamin deficiencies. I give to organizations feeding starving people because of war, famine and earthquake. I give to groups like Oxfam and Givewell, who feed and heal people in the poorest corners of the globe.
One of the greatest assets of this religion is that Jews recognize no dichotomy between God and mammon. There is no division between the concrete and the spiritual. The opposite is true. Our job is to join them. The most important thing that should guide you as you think about money, with capability, responsibility, restraint and generosity – this year, you should spiritualize the concrete and concretize the spiritual.
