Friday, March 13, 2009

Strategies for Hope #3: JTS's "False Profits"

With the economic collapse has come new opportunities to reassess the relationship between money and morality. The Jewish Theological Seminary has embarked on an ambitious series of White Papers on various aspects of the crisis, called "False Profits." In his introduction to this ongoing effort, Chancellor Arnold Eisen writes:

“False Profits” is The Jewish Theological Seminary’s response to this set of challenges, and especially to the one about losing hope. We aim to assist in the preservation and generation of hope by bringing Jewish tradition to bear on the crisis that threatens to engulf us. JTS cannot right the banking system or save the auto industry, but we can—and will—offer thoughtful perspectives that help us all to think through the multiple challenges we face and so, perhaps, to help us overcome those challenges and turn them to best advantage. Understanding the moral/spiritual/religious dimension of what ails us may provide clarity about the direction in which our society—and we ourselves—should be moving.

Read Eisen's complete introduction:

Read False Profits: A Jewish Response to our Financial Crisis, including the first two essays of the series:

"An Era of Responsibility" by Rabbi David Hoffman: If we are to take our Judaism seriously, we must expect and demand that our tradition responds to some of the greatest challenges in generations. In response to these economic and social crises, what might Judaism have to say to us?

"How Much Is Enough?" By Dr. Alan Mittleman
We must decide, again in both a personal way and as a nation, what degree of gain or growth is sustainable. We need to rescale our values and liberate ourselves from pegging our worth to our wealth. Above all, we must discover sources of moral wisdom in our tradition that reconcile us to hardship, financial and otherwise.

Mittleman writes:

Without the ability to learn to say enough we are lost, both as individuals and as a society. We must decide, again in both a personal way and as a nation, what degree of gain or growth is sustainable. We need to rescale our values and liberate ourselves from pegging our worth to our wealth. Above all, we must discover sources of moral wisdom in our tradition that reconcile us to hardship, financial and otherwise....

Creating an “ethics of enough” is an important desideratum for contemporary Jewish religious and moral thought. God, a midrash tells us, probing the meaning of the divine name Shaddai, created the world through saying to the watery chaos, ”Enough! (Dai!).” Creation, which we are charged to protect, is about limits. So too is human moral and spiritual well-being.

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