The Sacred Exchange: Creating a Jewish Money Ethic

Abstract

The Sacred Exchange is part of the “Challenge and Change” series offered by the Central Conference of American Rabbis Press. Each book in the series collects essays on a particular theme: The Sacred Table covers food, The Sacred Encounter sexuality, The Sacred Calling women in the rabbinate, etc. The Sacred Exchange gathers essays on the theme of money, broadly defined. As such, it is a kind of Reform movement equivalent to the Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, which (despite its academic haskama) does the same from a Modern Orthodox perspective.This is not an academic book, although it includes PhDs among its authors. Nor is it only for Jewish professionals, although there is much here that concerns them directly. It is aimed at a wide lay audience seeking constructive guidance from Jewish tradition on the theme in question. Its three-dozen chapters are each quite short, running an average of ten pages. It does not appear intended for cover-to-cover reading by individuals, but would be well suited to group study of individual chapters in synagogue adult education classes, Hebrew schools, summer camps, etc. It is important to emphasize the format and audience, because things that might be flaws in academic monographs may be excused here, e.g., repetition. Reading the book front to back, one might get a little weary at the fourth or fifth encounter with Maimonides’ hierarchy of tzedakah or Rabban Gamliel’s funerary reforms. If one takes each chapter to stand on its own, however, it is pedagogically justifiable for many authors to invoke what are, after all, central texts in Jewish ethics.The Sacred Exchange is divided into six parts, following an introduction and a fifteen-page collection of paragraph-length blurbs, entitled “Small Change.” Each part comprises five or six essays on a theme, plus two shorter (one- or two-page) pieces applying the broad theme to a particular situation (“Ethics in Focus”) or offering a few thoughts in a more narrative style (“Talking about Money”). The six major themes include a focus on textual sources, tzedakah giving, the State of Israel, employment relationships, the economic costs of Jewish religious life, and “uncomfortable conversations” about money issues. There are a few instances in which the placement of an essay in a specific section is surprising (e.g., does Rabbi Edward Elkin’s excellent piece on debt and bankruptcy belong in the Israel section?), although rationales are offered.In any volume that gathers so many essays together, some pieces will be more compelling than others, and different ones will interest different readers. There are certainly some standouts here. I particularly enjoyed the essays in part 1 on wealth in the traditional sources. Alyssa Gray’s “Blessing and Challenge: A Further Look at the Sources” will hopefully direct some readers to her other work in this area. I also learned from Rabbi Daniel R. Allen’s “Tzedakah and Aliyah: How American Jews Helped Build Israel,” which follows the fortunes (literally) of the United Jewish Appeal and other organizations as they fundraised to contribute huge percentages of the budget of the early State of Israel, and from Patty Gerstenblith and Rabbi Samuel N. Gordon’s piece on the subtleties and difficulties of returning lost or stolen art (as in the cases of Nazi looting and archaeological fraud).In a recent issue of this journal, I surveyed a new genre of book-length works that I called “Jewish economic ethics in the neoliberal era.” For the purposes of that essay, I restricted myself to monographs rather than edited volumes. However, The Sacred Exchange would have fit right in. Many of the works considered there are cited in it, and it is characterized by all the formal and ideological features, for better or worse, of its moment in political-economic history.What I mean by this is that there is a certain implicit political-economic coherence or ideological direction to the book, despite its anthological form. A similar book published half a century ago might have been challenged by its Cold War context to speak explicitly to general ideological questions in a way that this book does not. Here, the appearances of words like “capitalism” and “socialism” can be counted on one hand. Many of the essays imagine a middle-class or even affluent reader in a position to confront questions about where to give tzedakah or even philanthropy at a high level (two of the pieces are by current and former Federation chiefs). Part 4 is entitled “We Are All Employers”; there is no “We Are All Workers.” Working-class, leftist Jewish identity is figured as part of a nostalgic past, as in Judith Rosenbaum’s essay “Bread and Roses: Jewish Women Transform the American Labor Movement,” which also contains the book’s only mention of communism, notably disappearing again as soon as it appears: “the Red Scare and McCarthyism purged unions of those Jews who had been communists or communist sympathizers decades earlier” (264). Today’s American Jews “are, in fact, wealthy” (326), as Rabbi Douglas B. Sagal puts it in his apologia for extravagant life-cycle parties; “it is not for us to judge” the “individual choice” (328) of those who conspicuously consume. Chapter after chapter reminds us that Judaism does not treat money as inherently evil or corrupt, and yet there is a strange lack of attention to Shabbat, which is mentioned by some of the authors as relevant to employment contracts, but never in connection to the prohibition on using money itself—a striking omission for a book whose subtitle specifically intends a “money ethic.”In the absence of live ideological alternatives, the parts of the book that look beyond the individual and toward policy are restricted to limited and voluntaristic reforms, like calling on public purchasers of firearms to press manufacturers to employ safer technology in their guns. Even gender pay equity within Reform congregations starts to look like something for olam haba. Readers are called upon to individually embody best practices, as this is perhaps the most we can hope for. Occasionally there are insights into the power of ideology and ideology critique, as when Rabbi Zamore in her essay on domestic workers rightly points out that referring to employees as family “creates a dangerous fiction” (234). And in the most radical essay in the book, Rabbi Andy Kahn goes so far as to dream “a new economic structure” (285), although here too we find that ideas like Universal Basic Income or Douglas Rushkoff’s “digital distributism” are configured as “economics for the messianic era” rather than our own. It may be true that, as Rabbi Seth M. Limmer puts it, “economic justice is the foundation of all justice” (75), but the authors are far from united on what aspects of such justice we can expect to realize in olam hazeh.And then there is the other side of the coin. Those familiar with the Reform movement’s positions on Zionism since the Six-Day War will not be surprised to learn that The Sacred Exchange’s chapter on socially responsible investing recommends divesting from Sudan and investing in Israel in the same breath. The author congratulates past Reform efforts to divest from South Africa while warning against contemporary Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts against Israel as dangerous and not at all in the same line. An attempt to engage BDS on the merits would have been interesting, but its absence is predictable. Far more shocking to this reviewer is the presence of an essay arguing for Jewish congregations to take up the money-management philosophy of the evangelical Christian investment advisor Dave Ramsey. Rabbis Alan Freedman and Amy B. Cohen, in their call for Jews to “allow Dave Ramsey…to remind us of our responsibility to turn to the Torah and Jewish teachings to help our community find financial shalom” (404), begin with the unobjectionable point that financial management is important and challenging. Like the authors of many of the other essays in The Sacred Exchange, they argue that the shame and fear that often attend conversations about money inhibit people from making sound decisions. But however positive their own experience teaching Ramsey’s “7 Baby Steps” to a group at their synagogue might have been, and however warm and helpful the staff at Ramsey’s Financial Peace University were when they called, it is irresponsible to offer a completely uncritical embrace.Freedman and Cohen write as if the only obstacle to Jewish appreciation of Ramsey is his Christian faith, which can be overcome once we see that “we are all sending the same messages about how to handle money” (400). They make no mention of the fact that Ramsey opposes (as “socialism”) the even minimal government intervention into the economy that would be required to establish the “economic justice” so many of the book’s other essays endorse as Jewishly mandated. Worse, Ramsey is often patronizing, hostile, and borderline abusive to callers into his radio show, telling those burdened by student debt that they are “freaking babies who can’t step up and take care of their business.”1 But the biggest problem with Ramsey is a moral one at the heart of his economic theology: he equates financial success with virtue, and failure with sin. This has led many—perhaps millions—of Americans to blame the poor for their own poverty, even when that entails the psychological trauma of blaming themselves.2For Ramsey, who has $55 million, “If you are broke or poor in the U.S. or a first-world economy, the only variable in the discussion you can personally control is you.”3 For the rabbinic sage Rava, invoked elsewhere in The Sacred Exchange as a guide to contemporary life, “Lifespan, children, and sustenance are not a matter of merit, but of luck” (BT Mo’ed Katan 28a). These positions cannot be reconciled without explicitly explaining just what it is about “the U.S. or a first-world economy”—in other words, capitalism—that makes success equate to virtue, when it would not have in Rava’s time. Nor can one side with Rava against Ramsey without explaining exactly how and why the capitalist system, like other economic systems before it, in fact fails to achieve distributive justice. But this is just what The Sacred Exchange does not want to do. In this reluctance, it joins its peers in Jewish economic ethics in the neoliberal era.