Pete Tobias, the rabbi at the Liberal Synagogue Elstree, has an essay on spiritual implications of the economic meltdown:
There’s a rabbinic quote about wealth and possessions that I’ve never really understood. It reads: “There are four types of person: one who says ‘what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours’ – this is the average type. One who says ‘what is mine is yours and what is yours is mine’ – that is an ignoramus. One who says ‘what is mine is yours and what is yours is yours’ – this is a righteous person. One who says ‘what is yours is mine and what is mine is mine’ – that person is wicked.”
I also don’t understand very much about global finances, but it seems to me that our economic wellbeing has been governed by a system – and people – who largely fall into the second category: ignoramuses who say what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours. They pass around large and often imaginary sums of money that don’t belong to them and lend it to other people, who then find themselves unable to give it back. Quite what the consequences of this are going to be for our world remains to be seen, but it is already clear that something very dramatic – alarming even – is taking place all around us that could yet have drastic effects on our society and on each of us as individuals.
. . .
And we are seeing also the manifestation of another of nature’s cruel aspects: the greed and folly of human nature. A society built on the acquisition of material possessions, constructed around the beliefs of those who tell us that it is possible to buy now and pay later; that what’s theirs is ours and what’s ours is theirs – but please can they have what’s theirs back now. But we can’t give it back because it was never ours in the first place.
What we do have, and what we need to rediscover, are the values of community – social capital – that have underpinned human development throughout the ages, even as our greedy economic system has run away with itself and carried us along with it in more recent times. As our human nature has driven us to seek the acquisition of ever-greater quantities of riches and possessions, so it has blinded us to the more profound qualities that are available to us. “Who is wealthy?” ask those same rabbis who might now be shaking their heads at the folly of an economic system run by ignoramuses. “Someone who is satisfied with what they have,” is their reply.
Read it all here.