Tag Archives: economics

On the Economy and on Sustenance: Judaism, Society, and Economics [Hebrew]

Posted on January 9, 2010 by | 3 comments

Al haKalkalah ve-al haMihyah eds Itamar Brenner and Aharon Ariel Lavi 2008

I just got around to reading another volume in the “Jewish Thought and Cultural Criticism” series, they reflect the thinking going around Religious Zionist circles Below are short summaries of the articles  without the details to give you a sense of the volume. I will focus more on the ones that deal with Jewish thought.

Section One
The opening essay by Rav Shagar Z”l presents two understandings of the Sabbatical Year Shmita- a functional one and a spiritual return to harmony with nature and the Divine. He presents an ambivalence of inner and outer views of society. Hazal were ambivalent on carrying on Sabbath- it is one of the 39 prime categories but also a melakhah gerua but one can make eruv. He says that Hazal were more concerned with outer bounderies with the natural order than internal ones with the camp. He applies that back to the Sabbatical year. But along the ride, he discusses Midrash, Zohar, Heschel, and Mordechai Breuer, He concludes “Shimita is a catharsis, a disengagement and a purification from acquisition and civilization.

Dov Berkovits offers a nice analysis of the agricultural laws as showing wealth as the blessing of God and we partake of God’s blessing. He compares this to John Locke where wealth is human initiative. For Locke, God mandates government and human are left free, while for Hazal there is an interaction of the Divine and the human.

Roni Bar-Lev, who is working for a PHD under Avi Sagi discussed wealth in the writings of Rav Nahman of Breslov.He shows how for Rav Nahman, a kosher Jews should be far away from money or acquisition. Money is vile. In the story “master of prayer” the wealthy are so delusional that they organize themselves into angelic ranks based on their wealth. Yet, it is needed in the world. Greed is the only vice that cannot be transmuted to good, but desire itself can be transmuted.

Motti bar-Or of Kolot also offers the distinction in zedakah between the functional and the getting closer to the Divine.

Aharon Lavi, an editor of the volume doing a PHD in economic gives us a long article that is a gold mine of playing Jewish thought off of economic concerns. He major thesis is that Jewish thought offers a model of giving and receiving (mashbia, mekabel) , a connected societal model which he contrasts with Utilitarianism. He cites Chabad, early Hasidut, Zohar, Rav Nahman to create his model, more Chabad than others. For him, the Torah is pro Keynes and against Milton Freidman He also explores other images of tikkun, from above and from below. He concludes by rejecting Naomi Klein’s ideas of NO LOGO because she does not get the cultural elements.

Section two
Israel Auman, the noble prize winner offers a Hebrew translation of his English articles on Risk Aversion. Yaakov Rosenberg offers a Richard Posner analysis of hilkhot nezikin.Julian Sinclair offers a translation of his English article on climate change and Judaism. The political Kabbalist Yitzhak Ginzburgh creates a kabbblah of management. And Yossi Zuriah (I am not sure if this is how he spells his name) ponders applying ideas of Shimitah to the high tech industry- “shareware” “open source” and why this would still keep the company afloat.

Section three

Articles from a current Israeli halakhic debate on not relying on heter iska today. Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach was against using it today. Some say we should use Arab banks. So this volume has Rabbis Yaakov Ariel and Yoel Bin Nun on the topic on minimizing the use of heter iska as much as possible. This is a VBM shiur by Daniel Wolf that gives the background. Some of these arguments could use a review of Money Supply before writing
The same section has an out of place article by Yael Wilfed presenting part of her Duke PHd comparing Roman and rabbinic concepts in philanthropy. Conclusion – Romans were concerned with the collective state and gave out bread, the sages were concerned on a personal level.
There is an article by Yosef Yitzahak Lifshitz presenting his libertarian anti-socialist views, seems a translation from Azure. (It should have been in part II). And an article of Meir Tamari and an article by Edo Rechnitz, from the Beth Din for money, on targeting Zedakah

Little prepared me for the afterword by Rabbi Menachem Froman Of Tekoa
He start off by discussing how people found Religious Zionism from decades ago as all socialism and secular at its core but observant only on top of that. He turns to hasidut to discuss how we have to do things leshem yehud, to unify God, to sanctify the everyday. Then he moves to Rav Nahman to discuss how everyday life and money is the evil side and that God wants us to enter the evil side to redeem it. We then get a homily on the Zohar in which there is a disjunctive inserted between Lo (DO NOT) and KILL (Tirzah) meaning that sometimes you have to do what is normally forbidden. We then move to the importance of making an offering to the evil side as shown by the scapegoat offered to the evil side, but Froman’s question is why the second goat? Answer- we need to return to the non-spiritual, the mundane. We need to bring the spiritual work into the mundane into the evil side of dealing with money.
Then he discusses Camus’s myth of Sisyphus and the Plague and concludes that Torah teaches us not to ask about the outcome; we need to do things lishmah. He concludes with a discussion weaving together the Zohar, that the world is the evil side and Doug Adams – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I read the Rav Froman piece last Shabbat and right after Shabbat I read a great article on Rav Froman in the religious section of MAARIV/NRG.

If you do comment, please comment on ideas, not people. And please  do not arrive to offer scatter shot citations of articles on economics and Judaism from the RJJ and TUM journal and the like.

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Posted in israel, jewish thought, religious zionism

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Walmart, Love and Universal Ethics

Posted on September 30, 2009 by | 1 comment

Pope Benedict of the Week

David Nirenberg a Jewish professor of (Jewish) history and social thought at the University of Chicago offers a review in the TNR of Benedict’s recent encyclical “Caritas in Veritate: On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth.” He likes the message of love over market values, but asks: Why does it have to be framed as Catholic and not universal?

Benedict’s teaching differs from that of his predecessors in at least two important ways. The first is evident in the key term in his analysis: “love,” rather than “justice,” “natural law,” or “human reason,” the terms that were favored by some of his predecessors

As Wal-Mart shoppers, for example, we must divide our attention between 1) a self-interest in the lowest possible price for whatever object we desire; and 2) the needs of that object’s producers, of the environment in and from which it was made, and of the moral and fiscal balance of global trade (hence “consumers should be continually educated regarding their daily role, which can be exercised with respect for moral principles without diminishing the intrinsic economic rationality of the act of purchasing”); and 3) an openness to the loving “spirit of the gift.” Benedict is not simply suggesting a moral yardstick for the marketplace. He is claiming that every commercial exchange needs to become a loving act modeled on the gratuitous gift of Jesus Christ.

And only Catholicism, Benedict tells us, can achieve the universal fraternity necessary for authentic community: “Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.

The problem is that Benedict is claiming to offer general answers to global questions that affect people of every faith (and sometimes of no faith), while at the same time insisting that the only possible answer to those questions is Catholicism. Such a suggestion might be a plausible prescription for global peace and development in a Catholic world, but the world is not Catholic.

In a de-secularizing age, and with our faith in self-interest shaken by economic crisis, we should want to draw on the wisdom in that ocean of thought. But if those teachings are to contribute to global “unity and peace,” they will have to be taught in a way that seeks to transcend the boundaries of the traditions that produced them. This does not mean, as Benedict fears, that Christianity (or any other religion) must become “more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance,” or that “there would no longer be any real place for God in the world.” Values are not a zero-sum game. God’s place in the world is not lost when one religion tries to translate some of its truths into helpful good sentiments for those of other or no faith

Full review

To which Michael Sean Winters replies at NCR and at his blog at America that he likes the perspective of the historian but disagrees with the need for universalism

his article is so refreshing and so frustrating. On the one hand, he understands that the advent of capitalism and its values represented a “reversal of a millennial moral consensus”

If Nirenberg truly believes that Benedict’s vision is narrowed by his insistence on truth to the point of preventing dialogue, why write a review of the encyclical? Nirenberg’s effort disproves his own claim.

Who is correct?

I think A Jewish Call For Social Justice by Shmuly Yanklowitz is closer to David Nirenberg in that he discusses social justice without any claims of truth or higher values. But is Jewish pragmatism enough? Is Winters correct that David Nirenberg, and most Jews, are more utilitarian than principled?

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Posted in social theory, theology

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