Finding the Soul of Money Rabbi Ron Stern

I firmly believe that one of the primary functions of the synagogue is to engage people in deep conversations about ethical behavior and moral attitudes. You come to be comforted when you are in pain, uplifted when you are despairing, inspired when you are forlorn and I hope, to be challenged because we all need challenging. But true challenge requires dialogue, debate and discussion. It has often been said: two Jews, three opinions well, thats a good thing and I want to celebrate that today by inviting you to express your opinions in response to me expressing mine. This year, Im going to try an experiment. This sermon is presented to you in its current form so that youll be able to respond in the space provide on the WiseLA Social Justice Blog (access it here) . Youll be able to see what others write and we can listen to each other. The only limitation is that I will moderate the posts to make sure that our dialogue remains civil and respectful. Now, I know that this is not necessarily new for the many other venues on the internet, but to the best of my knowledge, few rabbis have done this with High Holy Day Sermons. Now, to the topic: Im going to begin a conversation about our relationship with money. Its time to have this conversation because Americas relationship with money has become quite unhealthyand its not just because our economy is in shambles. America has become a money culturea society where all things dollars and cents have become our obsession. It begins, but doesnt end with Wall Street. Fortunes rise and fall through the stock market which has been described as having all the stability of a 12 year old adolescent. We are barraged by all the emotional ups and downs of our volatile adolescent through the financial news networks on cable, financial papers and the internet, which delivers financial news to our computers in real time. Then it moves uptown to Madison Avenue where advertisers, merchants and other media seek to entice us with their provocative, alluring images and compel us and our children to spend more and more and more. None of us can resist the intoxication. Regardless of our
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actual financial situation we are enticed to crave the latest technology, the newest car, the larger house, the vacation, the trendiest clothing all of it. Finally, it moves out west to Hollywood where the latest product placements, reality TV shows about sweet 16s, fancy life-styles, and exotic vacations build our desire to consume, consume, and consume. It seems the more ostentatious the characters are in a TV show, the more popular it is! So we buy and buy while the financial industry obliges our obsession by making it all too easy for us to get in to debt and reap the proceeds from our interest payments. They start teaching us young: My son is a senior in college and our mailbox is filled with credit card applications addressed to him. None of this should be construed that there is anything about money that is inherently evil. Money is neutral and vital for the world as we know it. However, the way we use our money, whether we have a lot of it or a little is what makes all the difference. And what keeps me up an night is the place that money has taken in the lives of most Americans. We have created an American Money Culture. Ive shared this concern with many of you throughout the year (yes, this sermon has been brewing that long!). Ive discovered that you feel just as frustrated, concerned, overwhelmed and appalled about what is going on in our world as I do. Ive heard your stories, and, when I told you that I want to talk about this during the High Holy Days, youve said: Its about time! Actually, its way past time. . . . Its way past time because recently, I was speaking to someone about our retirement plans. With despair, he told me he would never be able to retire. I looked around at his beautiful home, the top tier electronics, new re-construction, and beautiful decorating. It was filled with pictures from all the places he and his family had traveled. I was in shock and asked why retirement was inconceivable. He said that it cost him so much to live in this style that he would not be able to save enough to retire. I was shocked to hear that someone like him was trapped in a situation that made him so unhappy. He has been sucked into the swirling vortex of the money culture that says consume, consume, consume to the point that his lifes goals were distorted.

Its way past time for this conversation because, more than any generation, weve been swept up into this money culture vortex like never before. American personal debt has never been higher even while middle class salaries are stagnant. At the same time, spending on luxury goods continues to spiral upward while donations to charities spiral in the opposite direction. These trends are the results of skewed personal financial decisions. We have lost our financial moral compass. It is way past time for this issue to be raised before the largest gatherings of our community. Now, even more than when these lyrics were first written in the musical Cabaret: Money (really) makes the world go round. Theres even been a word coined to describe whats happened to us: its called financialization. Author and former Republican strategist, Kevin Philips coined the word and defines it as a process whereby financial services, broadly construed, take over the dominant economic, cultural and political role in a national economy. In other words, money has taken over at the expense of our values, our perspectives and our level-headed priorities. We no longer control money, money controls us! The sweeping vortex pulls us in when we can least afford it and it often forces us to do things we dont want to do. I was sitting with a mother talking about her sons Bar Mitzvah. With tears in her eyes she said, I cant afford private school and the party Im expected to have by my family and community. She and her husband were caught amidst their financial abilities, their values and the pressure she felt from her family, her community and her society to go big! Lets be clear, its way past time to tell the Jewish community that spending on Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties has gotten out of control. I have a drawer in my office of $50 invitations that cost $10 to mail. How does it reflect on the Jewish community when our parties for 13 year olds go through the roof while our synagogues and other communal institutions starve? While Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties are troubling, weve also seen weddings where the celebrations rival British royal weddings. Theres enough food for a small army (and it seems a small army has been invited), the sea has been emptied for the sushi bar and the decorations rival Versailles!

The great American Money Culture has hijacked our priorities and warped our values. When does a celebration become a violation of principles, values and ethical standards? I face calls weekly from people who are caught in the money culturea long time member called me in desperation. He was about to lose the beautiful home where his family has lived for five years. He asked me if I knew of any lawyers, bankers or even politicians who can help him get out from under his loan. We talked some more and he told me that when times were good he and his wife decided to buy the most expensive house they could possibly afford. Banks were all too happy to offer him a no money down mortgage. Now hes upside down on his mortgage, his income has decreased significantly and the combination of all of his expenses (including private schooling) plus the mortgage is more than he can bear. Hes not alone. Millions of Americans are in the same boat. During the heady days of the 1990s and first decade of this century banks and mortgage brokers aided by politicians were like drug pushersmaking it possible for Americans to enter into mortgages that were disasters waiting to happen. Eventually they did lose their house and change their lifestyles dramatically. They are another victim of the American Money Culture. For them and millions of other Americans, whose flimsy mortgages were disasters waiting to happen; the great American dream has become the greater American nightmare. The question of whether we can afford the things we buy is only one aspect of destructive embrace of the money culture. For the wealthy, most of whom have only been marginally impacted by the recession the question is not can we buy, but should we? Someone might be able to afford an expensive car, an immense home, a lavish vacation, or designer clothes does that mean that he or she should? Whats the impact of that gas guzzling car, that energy and water sucking house on the price of gas, the environment and the availability of water for the rest of the city? When making those decisions to expend exorbitant amounts of money on such luxuries, what is the cost to society if the charities they might otherwise support are not sustained? As your rabbi I am asking you: Have we lost control? Has the value of money assumed such a place in our eyes that our view of other more critical values is clouded? Can we re-align ourselves in a way where our actions and beliefs about how we use money consistently reflect
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a set of values that reflects some of the noblest ideals in the Jewish tradition? Can we find the soul of money? The phrase: Soul of Money was taught to me by a powerful book Lynne Twist. As she explores societys relationship with money, Twist (who is affluent herself) makes bold comments such as the following: Rarely in our life is money a place of genuine freedom, joy, or clarity, yet we routinely allow it to dictate the terms of our lives and often to be the single most important factor in the decisions we make about work, love, family, and friendship. There is little that we accept so completely as the power and authority of money, and assumptions about how we should feel about it. We challenge assumptions about every other facet of life: race, religion, politics, education, sex, family, and society. But when it comes to money, we accept it not only as a measure of economic value but also as a way of assigning importance and worth to everyone and everything else in the world. When we talk about success in life, money is almost always the first, and sometimes the only, measure we use for it. There is nothing wrong with money. There is nothing wrong with wealth. In fact, our tradition has always looked favorably on wealth and financial security is usually a sign of discipline, resourcefulness and success. As an employee of a non-profit, I know how important our donors are. Because of our collective wealth, Jewish philanthropy has made a tremendous impact throughout or city and world. The accumulation of money is neither a vice nor a virtue. However, what we do with our dollars and cents once we obtain them truly reflects our character. When we commit ourselves to find the soul of money we challenge ourselves to think dramatically differently about the place that money holds in our lives. Consider this updated perspective on law from the Torah: What if congress were to pass a law that would allow us to make all the money that we could throughout our lives, but every 50 years from the date the law was passed wed have to take all our money and redistribute it equally throughout our nation. Then from the 51st year moving forward, wed
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start all over again, only to know that 50 years later wed have to level the playing field all over again. Crazy right? Well that principle actually was proposed by our ancestors thousands of years ago when the Torah was written. It is called the Jubilee year. This idea has aggravated Jewish capitalists and inspired Jewish socialists ever since the two have existed. In fact, it aggravated Jewish capitalists even before there were such things as capitalists. According to this Torah law, every fifty years all the land that has been sold or lost due to debts by its original family owners must return equally to those owners. It sounds crazy until we recognize that some people have actually taken this principle seriously in an effort to untie the snare of the money culture. Though congress has passed no law requiring such a sunsetting of their wealth they have decided to do so. It is called the Giving Pledge. Warren Buffet along with more than 70 extraordinarily wealthy people like Bill and Melinda Gates, Ely and Edythe Broad, Larry Ellison and Michael and Lori Milken have taken the giving pledge. They have promised to give the vast majority of their wealth to charity, some of them have vowed to do this before they die. Buffet promises to give away 99%. Once they have reflected on their relationship with their money theyve come to realize that their money is not any type of monument to their characters, theyve endeavored to explore the soul of their money and realized that the greatest purpose of their money is to leave it to the world not for it to be hoarded by their families. The realization that we cant take it with us reflects a long standing Jewish value. I am often struck profoundly by the fleeting nature of our material possessions when I officiate at a funerals that observe traditional Jewish burial practices. I stand before a plain pine box and know that the person inside is wrapped in the customary simple burial shrouds, I am reminded that no matter how much we accumulate in life, when we die, we take nothing with us into the ground. We are part of a tradition that is obsessed with our responsibilities to others and from that place of responsibility has much to say about how we use our money. Charity is seen as being among the greatest virtues of a Jew. Maimonides, one of the keenest rabbinic minds of all times conceived of a ladder of tzedakah that provides a ten rung guide for supporting those
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who cant support themselves. Yes, our tradition maintains that accumulating money is a sign of individual success, but it also teaches that giving it away in meaningful ways is a virtue that makes one right with God. Remember what we read during these High Holy Days: Tefillah, Tzedekah uteshuvah maavrin it roah ha-gzeira. Prayer, charity and repentance lesson the severity of Gods decree. I do not take those words literally, but I do take them seriously. Your life may not be longer if youre a more charitable person, but it certainly will be more worthwhile. Pursuing and finding the soul of money doesnt demand the lifestyle of Mother Teresa. It does require that we examine how money flows into and out of our hands and the way it influences our attitudes about critical issues facing our society. I am asking you, upon hearing this sermon, to make a resolution in 5772 to find the soul of money. Here are three steps which I believe will help you find the soul of the money that passes through your life. First and foremost: Examine how money flows out of your hands. What are the values that you exhibit in your spending practices? Is your consumption destructive to this world or the wellbeing of others? There are corporations with admirable environmental practices and employee conditions and then there are those that are exploitative. Can you shift your spending and investing towards those that are more responsible? To what extent is money the source of your self-pride when you have more, you feel better about yourself, when you have less, you feel worse? Thats an indicator of the influence the money culture has in your life. Charitable giving is another way that money flows from us. Does your charitable giving reflect your true ability? Decisions about giving cant come last on our list of priorities, they have be near the top and giving merely for certainly tax avoidance is not a sign of true generosity. Next: Examine how money flows into your hands. Are your business practices responsible and fair? Do you believe that money buys you happiness and more money buys you more happiness? Countless studies have proven the lie to that belief. How does the way that you make and accumulate money reflect on your character? Is your pride in yourself connected to how much you make or is it related to the virtues you display every day?
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Finally, Examine how money influences your beliefs about what is right for our society. There is no doubt that the conversation in Washington and Sacramento is often a money culture conversation. It pulls us in and deflects our priorities as well. When the predominant conversations focus on debt, taxes and spending rather than the health, education, and wellbeing of our state and country the money culture is evident. We must elevate the real stories of suffering families and poorly educated children and the neglected handicapped to a place of equal focus in our conversations about our future. Then we will be addressing the soul of money in our nation as well as our lives. As you can see, these are very complicated issues with complex solutions. I am not telling you that I have the absolute answer to the decisions we make about our personal lifestyles and public policies we support. I also know that many of you are constantly asking yourselves the question Ive raised here. You are acting on your values and the community and even the world is better because of it. More of us must join the conversation, and all of us will reach different conclusions. However, if we all agree that we must ask the questions and challenge ourselves to act upon our noblest values through our actions then we will show ourselves and the world around us that the vision of the Jewish people and the values that we embrace are alive and well in our lives and can be an inspiration for this great country to embrace the soul of money.