How many pairs of shoes do you own?
In 1940 women had an average of four pairs. During World War Two Americans were rationed two pairs per person, the British could buy up to three pairs. In 2010 women owned an average of 20 pairs. The Daily Mail estimates that today’s average is 30-35 pairs of shoes. That’s average, across the entire population. It is a telling measure of our economic well being. We live quite well.
We live so well that over the past year one of the most trending concepts has been quiet quitting – which has been variously described as doing the minimum at work necessary to not get fired, or a workers’ rights movement to not go the extra mile or even work the extra hour for one’s employer. Regardless of how you define it, being able to quietly quit is a luxury. Tevya the milkman could not quietly quit if he intended to feed his family. We live quite well.
Last week there was literally a river of wine flowing through the streets in Portugal, because there is now too much wine in Europe. The Indian immigrant comic Zarna Garg hit a nerve when she said the following.
I mean, in India you get water in a bucket. There are buckets in America too but they are filled with fried chicken! A shower doesn’t stop here until you stop it. People fill gallons of drinkable water in a bathtub and just sit in it. Because they’re sad.
We live well.
There is no question that a free and open society and free markets and open trade borders have contributed to our high standard of living. Much of that high standard of living is supported by mountains of debt, personal and national. Canada’s national debt has nearly doubled since 2019. Credit card debt in Canada hit a record in the first quarter of 2023 at 91.5 billion dollars. The trends are no different in the United States and the European Union.
In the long run the amount of debt may be the single greatest threat to the Western way of life. This observation is not the rabbi using the pulpit for politics. It is more about where things stand today in the historical record of empires – the countries that dominated the world economically. The most prominent ones include the Dutch trading empire, the British Empire, the Chinese and American.
The economist and investor Ray Dalio published a New-York-Times-Bestselling book last year, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Dalio’s analysis reflected the fact that historically, all empires collapsed when their GDP – the total value of the goods and services of the economy – could no longer produce enough value to service the debt.
The foundation of Ray Dalio’s claim is not just wonky economic analysis, it’s social and psychological reasoning as well. Societies that can amass debt on the scale of the modern West are yoked together by certain behaviors.
As people become wealthier, they tend not to work as hard. They enjoy more leisure, pursue the finer things in life, and at the extreme become decadent.
According to Dalio, the early generations, the builders of the empire are hungry, ambitious and hardened by tough life. The Dutch reclaimed the land from the sea. The British adapted to strange (at least to them) climates, the Americans tamed vast expanses of wilderness. On the other hand, “the new generation is less battle-hardened, steeped in luxuries and [is] accustomed to the easy life, which makes them more vulnerable to challenges.”
The assumption that we are all entitled to the good life is built into everyone’s wallet. I don’t know any adults who operate in today’s economy without a credit card. Some use credit responsibly; many use it to ensure the good times keep coming. I remember seeing an episode of Leave It to Beaver; for you kids out there, that was like the Friends or Riverdale of the early 60’s. Ward Cleaver [the dad] thought Eddie Haskell [Ward’s son’s sketchy friend] was reckless and crazy for buying gasoline with a credit card.
People used to save and then pay in cash; now we buy on credit and pay later when we have the cash. The grandchildren of those who pinched every penny after the Second World War treat their twice-yearly vacations as a given. Homework and deadlines are negotiable. Showing up for work at 9:00 is a suggestion and leaving early is entirely forgivable. Using your parents’ credit card until late adulthood is entirely normal. If you grow up in the good times, you are unlikely to want to work very hard for them. There is a new economic baseline, and you didn’t have to sweat to earn it.
Dalio is convinced this was true of all the societies of wealth. The Romans, the British, the Dutch all suffered from the same problem. When times got good, the workforce was not hungry enough to work hard. The societies declined and so did the empires. Dalio writes for investors; he suggests that it might be time to bet against the prosperity of the United States, Canada, and the EU.
Even before the Roman Empire, Moshe in the closing chapters of the Torah warns of exactly this phenomenon. Moshe is terrified of the success that will come to the Children of Israel in the land of Israel. He says bluntly, “וישמן ישורון ויבעט and the Jewish people grew fatted and kicked.” We tasted luxury and left Gd.
In the rabbinic text the Sifre, the rabbis wonder how Moshe knew success would be so corrosive. In an uncanny fashion they use an analysis much like Dalio’s. Moshe examines the first societies that rebel against Gd. All fell from power specifically because of their prosperity. The generation of the flood had it too good. Babel was a hyper-efficient society that built giant towers and felt secure enough to rebel against Gd. The people of Sdom, who were extremely wealthy, rejected Gd and the idea of charity. The generation of the golden calf was the first generation that had Skip the Dishes with Manna falling from heaven at everyone’s doorstep every morning; they also rebelled due to their position of luxury.
Up to this point, this sermon is as relevant in our synagogue as it would be in the halls of Parliament or in St John’s church, or at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The West is facing a cultural crisis twinned with an economic one. Some of you may be more convinced by Ray Dalio, some more convinced by Moses, but it is the same lesson: וישמן ישורון ויבעט the straight have grown fat and rebelled. Our culture is becoming poisoned by its own success.
Dalio offers no remedies, only ways to make money off the crisis. However, Moshe envisions a unique formula for the Jewish people to survive the challenges of success. The formula is a counterintuitive framing of our Jewish identity. Moshe asks the Jew to forever consider ourselves as strangers. Ultimately the Jewish people and its character are born in Egypt – even reborn in Egypt – every year at the Seder. Yet, there is one place that the Torah tells us that we can never return to – that is Egypt itself. We are Hebrews, from the word עברי, literally the other side of the river. In other words, Hebrews are always from somewhere else.
The Israeli writer and philosopher Micah Goodman points out that the ceremonies that celebrate the blessing and gift of the land of Israel declare us to be strangers to it. This is most striking in the Mitzvah of Bikurim, the first fruits that the farmers bring to Jerusalem to celebrate the gift of the land. He notes that we declare, “ אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי, וַיֵּרֶד מִצְרַיְמָה וַיָּגָר שָׁם בִּמְתֵי מְעָט, וַיְהִי שָׁם לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל עָצוּם וָרָב “my father was a wandering Aramean.” Goodman emphasizes that “when the Jew celebrates the land of Israel he declares he is not of the land of Israel, his roots are elsewhere, in wandering.”
Moshe’s greatest fear about the future of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is what will come of their success. He is not afraid of the future struggles but of the times of plenty.
“פֶּן תֹּאכַל וְשָׂבָעְתָּ וּבָתִּים טוֹבִים תִּבְנֶה וְיָשָׁבְתָּ ..…רָ֖ם לְבָבֶ֑ךָ וְשָֽׁכַחְתָּ֙ אֶת־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ
Beware lest when you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, …..your heart grow haughty and you forget your God יהוה who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of slavery.“
He is afraid of what economic success will mean for a nation whose character and ethos were forged and founded in the suffering of Egypt.
Goodman points out that the Torah establishes a holiday celebrating the liberation from Egypt, and a holiday remembering traveling and living in huts in the desert for 40 years. However, there is no biblical holiday for national independence. We never celebrate conquering Israel or founding Jerusalem. All of the holidays recall foreign or unsettled geography, Egypt, the wilderness. Interestingly, there is no holiday in the Torah for our success, only for our suffering and perseverance.
I always thought Jews never felt like citizens because we were expelled from every country in Europe: 1276 from Bavaria, 1290 from England, 1492 from Spain etc, etc. We were expelled from most of Europe and every country in Arab Africa and Asia in 1948.
This [being outsiders] is not a bug, it’s a feature or our identity. Being the stranger is part of the design. We are meant to always feel like outsiders, this is the secret to not letting prosperity and success spoil us. We Jews are always meant to feel like vagrants, even in Israel. This is not because we are not entitled to stay on the land, and not in the way that the anti-Zionists delegitimize Israel. It is because we are not meant to feel entitled.
Viscerally, we need to feel like strangers and identify as strangers so that we will always remember to extend comfort and support and caring to others. The Torah tells us because we were strangers in the land of Egypt and we still feel so today,
“וְגֵ֖ר לֹ֣א תִלְחָ֑ץ וְאַתֶּ֗ם יְדַעְתֶּם֙ אֶת־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַגֵּ֔ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃
you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.“
I think this is the first practical lesson for us in the cultural war against the perils of success. We need to occupy a very special mindset, a place in the story where we tell ourselves that we are permanently immigrants.
We are not the Establishment. We are the children of the malnourished and at the same time we need to feed the hungry.
We have been oppressed because we are meant to help the oppressed.
Our story is that of Abraham the wanderer and of Moses – who was prevented from entering the land. We are Esther – who was both queen and a marginalized Jew at the same time. We are Isaac Abarbanel – who was expelled from three countries even as he was the finance minister of two kings and a queen. We are Dreyfus who was both a war hero and branded a traitor. We are Irwin Cotler who Mclean’s Magazine called “Counsel for the Oppressed.”
How do we create consciousness of the sacred stranger? We immerse ourselves in the story. We study the narratives of those individuals in the Torah who met the challenges of being outsiders. We become familiar with them as they emerge in weekly Torah readings and in the cycle of the holidays. We make them our heroes.
I cannot tell you at which one of my family’s Sedarim or at which moment in synagogue or in the activities of the shul I came to know this concept. However, I know that these two messages were clear: we were Jews and we did things differently. We ate different food. Sandy Koufax could not pitch on Yom Kippur. We were supposed to speak up for the oppressed and feed the needy. We are the sacred strangers. If we want to inoculate ourselves from the poison of property and the ills of ‘affluenza’, we need to occupy this identity of the sacred stranger that emerges so naturally from 929 chapters of the Tanach.
There is a second discipline that Moshe gave us to avoid the corrosive nature of success. You might call it givitude.
Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg, from mid-19th century Königsberg, noted that in Judaism our first obligation is to give back. Before you enjoy any of the harvest, before the first grain can be made into food for the table, you have to give back. You have to bring the Omer offering. Why?
ואמרו המחברים לפי שאין דבר מרים לב בני אדם ומחטיאם כשפע רב טוב, כמאמר וישמן ישורון ויבעט לאמר כחי ועוצם ידי עשה לי את החיל הזה, ולמען דעת כי לה’ הארץ ומלואה פירות ופירי פירות, וכח האדם בם אין כי הכל הבל
The great codifiers of the law said that there is nothing that embitters the heart of man and tempts a person to sin as much as abundance and good times as Moshe said, the Jews grew fat and kicked. They said to themselves it is because of my genius and the work of my hands that I have achieved this strength. We give back to remind ourselves that what we have is a gift from Gd.
If you recognize this, as Rabbi Mecklenburg does, [i.e.,] that there is nothing that poisons the heart of a person more than abundance, then it follows naturally that one should not reward oneself first. It follows that self-care is not the first priority. One might even reach the conclusion that one’s own children must be second in the pecking order behind the mission of giving.
The key to avoiding the trap of success is to feed other people first. If you handle all the money as treif until the fruits of success are shared, then you understand that wealth is a blessing. If Gd gave it to you it has a sacred purpose.
What is the most radical form of charity in the Torah? It’s the Shmitta. Let’s imagine that you were a vintner in the Torah. You spent years finding the right patch of land, developing the right variety of grape. You set up the right row orientation, made sure that the drainage channels were properly excavated. You had pride in all you invested in this land. On the seventh year the Torah demands that the fruit of the vineyard belongs to whomever can pick it. The vintner has no more right than the vagrant to that fruit.
Rabbi Ari Bergmann is a Talmud professor at Yeshiva University and CIO of a hedge fund specializing in derivatives structuring and negative correlated alpha portfolios. (I have no idea what that means, other than to say he spends half his day talking economics and the other half talking Talmud.) He said the following about Shemitta.
I think the giving and charity, although is very noble, but in some ways it’s a form of violence. It is a form of control. You realize that by giving you are the giver and somebody else is the taker. We all see that this idea of giving charity, you feel good about yourself that you give, it’s yours. At some point in time, you realize that we own nothing. In essence, sharing is much greater than giving. You realize that giving is a form of control, is a form of power, because by nature, when you give is a form of control and form of ownership. Shmitta is relinquishing. The word shmitta in Hebrew means le’hashmit, means to relinquish. It’s amazing to relinquish.
Yes, we are meant to become strangers to our wealth too. It’s radical, maybe even very radical. There may be no other way to avoid the trap of being poisoned by our own success.
Let me be blunt here in the last minute. There is nothing that threatens our happiness, our wellbeing, and our character as much as the success that we have been blessed with. I know many of you, maybe most of you, share my concern that there is nothing that threatens the West and this community in particular as much as our material success. Short of taking vows of poverty, there is only one formula for avoiding the corrosive features of success; become a Sacred Stranger, a Hebrew, an Ivri. The Torah does not preach poverty, it preaches perspective and performance.
How do we occupy the mindset of the Sacred Stranger? We do it through Torah perspective and performance of mitzvot. The only way you get perspective is by immersing in the story of the Jewish people, immersing in the Torah narrative, and taking its instruction.
Start with a minimum of one hour a week of actual Torah class participation in the shul. If you don’t embrace the story, you can’t occupy the mindset. You can’t embrace the time-tested formula Moshe gave us for surviving success.
Second comes performance – the small mitzvot. Do you thank Gd before you eat your grass-fed Wagyu kosher steak? Do you make sure that you take off 10% for tzedakah before you deposit your paycheck? Do you come to shul and engage in the book that asks you to be thankful for everything from higher cognition to unremarkable trips to the washroom? Yes, there is a blessing after peeing, and it is profound. I know that praying is hard, but can we really afford to not be appreciative? Have we become so callous to the blessings that they mean nothing to us?
Our grandparents prayed for salvation from fascists and famines. We pray to save ourselves from fast times and financial success. We need to pray to save us from ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rosenblatt
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