Tuesday, March 17, 2009

BiblEconomy.com Featured Interview with Rabbi Shmuley

Bestselling author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach speaks to BiblEconomy.com about the Bible and the state of the economy. He tells us about the connection between the economic crisis and childhood obesity. He talks about the Torah’s economic philosophy: is it more Capitalistic or Socialistic? Most importantly, Rabbi Shmuley tells us the economic crisis isn’t so much about money, but about values.

Describe your Jewish Values Network and why it’s so important to you?
My passion is to heal America and heal a fractured planet. By healing I mean that for the most part the Western world succeeds macrocosmically. We provide a standard of living. Most of the time our economy works — we’re going through very difficult times now — but by and large we have built societies with roads and hospitals. What doesn’t work, what is failing utterly is the microcosm. It’s the personal lives of those who inhabit the Western world. We have skyrocketing divorce rates, … we have a lot of women with low self-esteem, one in three American wives is on an antidepressant. The collapse of our economy was caused not by an economic crisis but a spiritual crisis called greed, where you become voracious and insatiable. I believe that the Jewish community, and the Jewish religion has unique values that need to be shared with the rest of the world that can address that crisis. And here’s why: because Christianity and Islam are global, enormous religions with about a billion followers each. What they focused on [historically] is how to create empires, how to govern with Christian law or Islamic law, these are very big macrocosmic questions. The Jews had no homeland, so what we focused on were the microcosmic questions. How do I learn not to be jealous of a friends’ success? How do I curb my tongue from gossip? How do we sustain marriages — passion — as an institution? How to we inspire children and get them to make good choices? Those are vehicles at which the Jewish community really excels and now is the time we need to hear those values.

I’ve devoted my life to spreading those values. Be it in the form of my books, all of which are based on Jewish values but are written for a mainstream universal audience or the Jewish Values Network which is a means of doing so directly through live events in major American cities and through a giant television advertising campaign for our Friday night initiative called “Turn Friday Night Into Family Night,” which features celebrities, politicians, well-known personalities advocating the need for a national family night, everyone getting together on a Friday night.

To what do you attribute the present economic crisis?
No question, it stems from greed. Here’s the problem in the United States: it’s very straight forward. What we’ve done is make people into commodities. Everyone’s a price tag: there’s the “Forbes 400 list,” there’s the “100 most influential people in Hollywood,” there’s the “100 most influential people in the world.” Even those people who don’t reach those lists, they still judge themselves based on how much money they make and which university they went to. Our dignity is all dependent not on our being but on our doing, and we all feel a need to do more and more and more to get more dignity. You become more special by possessing more, earning more, having more. We don’t know how to be anymore, we just know how to have and in the process of having we have become increasingly insatiable. Enough is never enough.

And we see this problem not just in economic lives, we see it in childhood obesity. Who would have ever thought that we would raise a generation of kids who eat but are still always hungry, no matter how much they eat they’re always hungry. Isn’t that really a metaphor for rest of us as well? No matter how much we have, we always want more. Where did these kids learn this from? I believe their voraciousness came from our voraciousness. The story to our economy is when no matter what the economy gave us — even when it gave us the highest standard of living in the history of the world, in the world’s largest economy, the world’s mightiest nation – it still wasn’t enough to satisfy us, and the net result is that the system began to give, and it began to collapse.

Bankers who were making 10, 20 million dollars a year felt still it wasn’t enough … if you’re making 20 million dollars a year and it’s not enough there’s something very wrong in your life and now we’re seeing much as the collapse of the economy, we’re seeing a widespread collapse of male self esteem, because so many men especially were tying their value as human beings to their earning power. And now that they’re being unemployed these stories are erupting all over the United States. Without sounding prophetic, it was all pretty straight forward.

I predicted all of this in my book (The Broken American Male) that was published a year and a half ago. I said then that we are in danger of a total collapse of male self esteem because it’s being too closely tied to earning power, and should there be some terrible downturn we’re going to see a greater collapse of marriages.

There are so many stories coming out now, men come home, and they don’t talk to their wives, they don’t want to make love to their wives. That’s subject of my new book The Kosher Sutra, how sexual desire has been lost in the American marriage.

How do we teach our children to avoid the irresponsible behavior we engaged in as a society?
By correcting it, by recognizing it was toxic and destructive, while pledging to steer away from it and by making real changes. By talking to our kids about why some of the problems are are happening today and how they dare not repeat those mistakes. Although at end of day we all know that kids: they listen to parents a little bit but mostly they emulate then. So it’s never enough to teach our children, we have to change ourselves.

On the ethics of the bailout, there’s a lot of debate about bailing out homeowners who made bad decisions: are we our brothers’ keeper or is tough love more in order?
There were two different kinds of homeowners. There were reckless homeowners who really bit off way more than they could chew (speaking to the kind of rat race that I just discussed where one’s dignity is often dependent on ones possessions. More and more meant “I’m a more important person,” in other words, we were buying things we didn’t need because money was becoming the currency by which we purchase self esteem, property was becoming a currency by which we purchase self esteem.)

Then there were the everyday homeowners who wanted to put a roof over their children’s head. I think it’s important to distinguish between the two. Not everybody was reckless, not everybody was greedy, some just wanted the very legitimate desire to own their own home. The Talmud says if you don’t have a home you’re not a person. What it means by that is not pro-property, it’s rather saying that: We all need a place to just park ourselves to feel comfortable with ourselves, we need a place to retreat from the public sphere to the private sphere. Having a home is a very important thing. We have to be a compassionate society, and we have to help those people but those who just speculated endlessly – there were so many people who got into speculation — and having the American taxpayer foot that bill is a stretch.

What I certainly agree with is President Obama’s insistence that corporations that are receiving government aid right now in the form of billions of dollars cannot have a chief executive making more than half a million dollars a year. At the end of the day these [companies] are on welfare. The whole idea is the reason you got your banks into this mess is that you were paying outrageous bonuses. You needed to create ever more inventive financial vehicles to generate more and more cash just to support 10 million dollar bonuses. Now if you can’t make do for a couple of years with half a million bucks — which a heckuva lot of Americans would give their left arm to earn half a million bucks a year — then you haven’t learned anything. If you want to spend private money,  if you want to earn 5, 10 million dollars a year, no problem, God bless you, America is a capitalist society, but not when you’re on public welfare.

Is the Torah fundamentally Capitalistic or Socialistic?
There’s no question the Torah is Capitalist. The Torah recognizes there has be an engine of human events, people need incentives. The Torah is not anti-ego … There’s no question that the ego presents a lot of problems, but the Torah gives the ego its due. We don’t want to be ruled by our ego, less so do we want to be limited by our ego. But to obliterate the ego is to obliterate the human desire: to achieve, to dream, to reach, to accomplish. We are a Capitalist structure that allows people to develop their potential, both spiritually and materially.

Having said that, the Torah has great safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t become a soulless Capitalism as it’s becoming here in the United States which we need to avert. A healthy Capitalism is where you understand that money is a means to an end. You want to earn money for good purposes. You want to provide wealth to your family which is a Mitzvah, you want to give Tzedaka [Charity] which is an even bigger Mitzvah. You want to glorify a Mitzvah like buying a nice Etrog.

Soulless Capitalism is when money becomes the end in and of itself. You want to acquire money just in order to possess, you want to hoard, you are a hunter gatherer, you’re a consumer, you’re born to devour, you’re voracious. Having said that, Isaac Abarbanel said that when Mashiach [The Messiah] comes, society will be much more Socialist as it were, because there will be such an abundance of plenty we won’t be motivated by profit, but that’s in the end of days. For right now, we’re definitely a Capitalist religion, [as long as it] doesn’t become soulless.

What will it take for our society to heal itself and to pull out of this economic crisis?
A renewal of our values. We can no longer have values that judge a woman by the size of her breasts, by her age, by her thinness. We can’t make women into objects. We have to come back to that great vision of a woman being equal to man with a mind and heart, we have to celebrate real female achievement and not degrade our women.

We need to make our men into human beings, with a unique dignity, we’re not just born as oxen to the plough. We have to learn to be satisfied with what we have.

In the words of the Lubuvitcher Rebbe, as the Rebbe explained: We need to learn to be materially satiated and spiritually hungry. In other words, each and every one of us has a cavity at our center, each one of us has a hole that opens up. The question is what can are you going to fill it with? We all want to fill ourselves with something, we know we can be empty vessels.

Right now, the model is fill it with stuff, with things. Our model has to be fill it with Mitzvahs… with righteous action, fill it with good deeds… We need to go back to what John F. Kennedy said: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. We need to hear it from our politicians especially. Barack Obama is a man who’s immensely gifted oratorically. He needs to now get up there and say, “everything is going to be OK, but not if we don’t make fundamental changes.” Just to promise people it’s going to be OK with the government doing everything for them, that’s not enough. We need to make fundamental changes.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international best-selling author of 20 books, including his most recent work, The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life (Harper One). His book Kosher Sex was an international blockbuster, published in 20 languages. Previous books on the American family include: Parenting With Fire and Ten Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children. Rabbi Shmuley is married to his Australian wife, Debbie, and they have nine children. His website is: http://www.shmuley.com