Constructing a Life of Meaning, Part Three: Money
Yom Kippur: October 6, 2003/5764
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

Throughout most of my adult years, I decided that I was not going to put a lot of money into the car I drove. Now, I do care about safety, and the funk factor, style, is of some concern to me so I came up with a solution. For years, I drove old, very funky Volvos and I was proud to say my Volvo station wagon had 250,000 miles on the car, before the odometer broke. Besides keeping the car running, I never thought about it a lot. I never worried about the car. If friends needed a station wagon, they were free to borrow mine. Then I got to a place (maybe I was tired of jump starting the car late at night) when I said, "OK, I'm ready to drive a new car." So I bought a brand new fancy Volvo, very cool, and all of a sudden, certain things started to change. I was nervous about where I parked the car. Before that, I had always parked my car all over town and never gave it a second thought. When friends asked, I didn't want to lend it to them. If we were going downtown, I asked other people to drive. And the question began to dawn on me: Just how much better did I make my life by buying this new car? I was certainly worrying a lot more. Did I own the car or did the car own me?

This morning, I want to share perspectives from the Jewish tradition on the role of money in our lives. Some truths about money are somewhat evident; Having money does not guarantee that you will be happy. Not having enough money to live in some basic dignity guarantees that your life will be difficult. How do we come to some balance in our lives where we are realistic enough to understand the value of money and yet not so obsessed with money that we lose perspective on the things that really bring value and meaning to our lives?

So first, let's get historical. I want to credit Rabbi Arthur Waskow for opening my eyes to a numbers of these concepts. When the Torah, and then the rabbis' commentaries, first deal with the issue of wealth in society, they do it in the context of our relationship with land, which in an agricultural society, is the basis of all wealth. I've always been taken with native American concepts about the ownership of land. Perhaps you know that the Navaho people believe that people can't own land: in fact, it is the land that owns the people. Three thousand years ago, the Torah addressed the ownership of land, and through that, our relationship to wealth, in a similar manner. In Leviticus, the Torah teaches that the land belonged to God. It was distributed fairly to the tribes of Israel for their use, but a person couldn't "own" the land. You could acquire, actually rent, land but what you owned was what the land produced, not the land itself. Then every seventh year, the land deserved to rest on a Sabbatical year, just like people deserved to rest on Shabbat every seven days. During that year, you store-housed food in advance and ate what grew without cultivation. You let the land lie fallow; an early system of crop rotation. Furthermore, every seven cycles of seven, on the fiftieth year, called the jubilee, something amazing happened: land reverted back to its original owners. It was impossible to play monopoly and acquire Park Place, and all the other cards on the board, forever. Every fifty years, the cards were all redistributed. So too, all indentured servants were freed and debts were forgiven on the seventh year. If people needed help, you loaned them money, but you couldn't charge interest. In Arthur Waskow's important book "Down to Earth Judaism" he examines how the community acted like a family. Giving help didn't turn the giver into permanent overlord and it didn't turn the recipient into permanent supplicant; because in seven years at the latest, the debt would dissolve.

Now, while this system was not always followed in exactly this way, this concept had tremendous implications for how the rabbis thought about ownership, wealth and it's distribution in society. Our importance and worth and power couldn't be determined by what we "own." It's not really ours anyway and it's important for us to remember that. In fact, this concept, that even if you are a "landowner" you don't fully own the land, is reinforced by another law as well. This is the law of "peah" the injunction that you were not allowed to harvest the corners of you field. In addition, if you missed anything when you were harvesting your land, that produce belonged to the gleaners as well. The poor didn't need special permission to access the land and its produce, they didn't have to ask for a handout, there were always sections left for them to work and gather food. It was their right to have access to them. The wealthy person couldn't say, "This is mine. No trespassing." At the corners, what you "owned" blended into what the community as a whole owned. There could be no "gated communities" and this had a profound effect on the concept of owning wealth in society.

To go even deeper, the rabbis raise the possibility that perhaps our entire concept of what we own, what we possess, needs to be reexamined. There's a wonderful midrash, a story in which Rabbi Akiba poses a math problem to his students: He said, "If you have a thousand dinars and you give away three hundred, how many do you possess?" "Seven hundred, his students answered." No. You truly possess only the three hundred you gave away. Anything could happen to the seven hundred you "have." You could be robbed or lose them in a business deal. But no one can take from you the all the good you've done, all the people you've helped, the pleasure and fulfillment and meaning of the money you've given away." The rabbis understood that while money was powerful, in itself, it meant very little. Money is only meaningful to the extent that it can be used to have a positive effect on the world.

Over the years, this concept had tremendous implications for how people in the Jewish community thought about the impact of wealth on their lives. There is a tendency to think that because we are privileged to live in a nice house, or have enough money to go to an expensive university, this might be some proof of our self worth and importance in society. The rabbis clearly teach a very different lesson. A person's self worth was established more by how they acted than by what they owned. People were respected for their acts of charity and loving kindness, for the level of learning they had acquired, for those things really belonged to them. This is illustrated by the following story.

Once there was a famous rabbi who rode a train to visit his many followers. The rabbi was renown for his learning and revered for his kindness. He was unassuming and modest and insisted on being inconspicuous and dressing simply. So he sat in the train compartment and it turned out that his fellow passengers were two very wealthy couples, dressed very fancy, who totally ignored the rabbi during the ride, turning up their noses, making comments about him as if he wasn't there and simply treating him rudely. When the train arrived at the station, there was a huge crowd of the rabbi's followers waiting to meet the train and give him an appropriate welcome to town. When the two fancy couples saw how important the rabbi was, they were mortified that they had treated him so badly. One of the men approached and said, "We are so sorry. We had no idea who you were." The rabbi replied, "Don't apologize to me; you can't even apologize to me. You weren't wronging me. You had no idea who I was. Apologize to all of those people who you thought I was, the "little people" who you thought didn't merit your sensitivity, kindness, respect or attention. Those are the people you need to find and to whom you need to apologize." Having money doesn't make us any better than people who don't. While we might know that intellectually, it's important to put it into practice in our lives. There are a lot of people here at school who have a great deal to teach and I'm not only talking about our talented professors on campus. I learn a great deal when I talk with the people on staff who work in buildings and grounds, and in dining services. It drives me crazy when occasionally I see people be rude to them or speak down to them. It's important to never confuse the nature of a person's work, or the amount of money they earn with their worth or importance in life.

Another truth about money that people sometimes miss is that money can be very expensive. I often think of this when some of our students get those fancy jobs right out of law school where they are making a really nice salary but they are literally working eighty hours a week. Now, I don't have anything against lawyers, (I was almost one myself) and if that kind of job fits into your larger career goals, that's fine. But life is short and I think it's important to think carefully about what we sometimes give up to make money. I recently heard a friend redefine the notion of avodah zarah, and apply it to work we do that doesn't fit who we truly are in life. Traditionally, the term avodah zarah means idol worship. Yet recently, I've been thinking about this term in relation to the lifework that we dedicate ourselves to. In this way, avodah zarah can be translated as strange work, work that makes you feel estranged from who you are. Occasionally I will meet someone who is "successful" but so unhappy with their job that I wonder if the price of success is worth the money. It feels great to be making an impressive salary for when you first accept a job but very soon, you realize that you spend a tremendous amount of your waking hours dedicated to your work. If you aren't passionate about your work, if you don't think it makes a difference, if you don't derive satisfaction from it, then maybe you are practicing some form of modern day idolatry. Certainly, the money you are making is very expensive, taking its price out of your time, your energy and your soul.

I am in no way saying that having money is bad. In the Jewish tradition, there is nothing wrong with money. We weren't the ones to say "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person entering heaven." That is in the Christian Bible. It was the other guys who said that. The question is what do you do with that money and what does the money do for you? Many people get confused thinking that have to have money to fulfill the dreams of their life when the answers might be much simpler and closer to home.

A number of years back, I gave a sermon basically addressing the question "What would you do if you won the lottery?" I actually asked a lot of people about this. One friend said, "I'm so busy, I rarely see my friends. I'd charter a plane and bring all my friends to Tuscany so we could all be together." Another said, "I'm having such trouble getting in shape. I'd build a great gym in my home so that I could work out and finally do that." A third (very altruistically) said, "I feel bad because I'm not giving enough back to society. I'd set up a fund and donate lots of money to charity." Now the interesting thing was that each of these people could absolutely fulfill their larger goals-spending more time with friends, getting in shape, contributing more to society-totally without winning the lottery. The money was actually quite irrelevant to their deeper goals. But the money-having it, not having it-clouded their vision when it came to how to achieve those things which they thought were really important in their lives.

If you choose to view money competitively, there is always someone who has more of it than you do. Or as my friend who owns a nice little sailboat says, "There's always someone with a bigger boat." The problem is that our culture has made money into such a cult that however much you have, there's a feeling of not having enough. This will bother some people so much that they can't see or enjoy anything without wanting to own it themselves. It's easy to get off track and the desire to possess something can cloud the larger goals we are trying to achieve.

Let me share a personal example: I love music and am always listening to music and occasionally, I'm enthralled with fancy stereo systems. But I've found a fool-proof way to know when my values go afoul. When I find myself listening more attentively to the stereo system than to the music, I know I'm off track. The key is to enjoy, appreciate, and hear the music, not focus on the fancy toy that it's playing on.

I want to finish by going back to the car, just in case people think I went back to driving a 1985 Volvo station wagon. I didn't. But when I park my nice car in downtown Boston or when it gets scratched or dented, as cars invariably do, I think a lot about the words of my wife's grandmother, Dora who would say, "It's just a thing. It doesn't really matter. People matter; things don't."

Much of developing a healthy understanding of money in the Jewish tradition is about putting money in a larger perspective. One rabbi in the Talmud said, "I am truly a wealthy man: I never wanted anything until I already had it." To have things isn't bad, it's the baggage that often goes along with acquiring them that is dangerous. It's dangerous when we think that money itself will make us happy or loved, or provide us with self worth or solve our problems. It's dangerous when we want money so much that the envy becomes all-consuming, or when we'll go to such extent to acquire money that we'll give up our dreams for its sake. In Pirkei Avot, the rabbis pose the question: "Who is wealthy?" They answered it by saying "The person who is satisfied with what he/she has." That is, the person who works to find satisfaction in the blessings they have and who can understand that money plays only one part in a larger whole.

I hope that this year we'll be able to develop clear enough vision to see what is really important to us and what we truly value in life. I hope that we won't get off track from pursuing our passions and our dreams. I hope that our generosity and kindness will seal us for blessings in the book of life.