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xi Introduction: Money Rava said: When a person is led in for judgment [in the next world], God asks: “Did you transact your business honestly? Did you fix times for the study of the Torah? Did you fulfill your duty to establish a family?” —Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a THE VERY first question that God asks each one of us after death, according to this passage in the Talmud, is whether we handled our monetary affairs honestly. The Talmud does not ask the expected questions —Did you murder anyone or injure anyone?—presumably because it assumes that most Jews do not do those things. What we are tempted to do, though, is to cheat in monetary affairs. Thus the way one handles one’s money is a sensitive barometer of the moral mettle of a person and hence the very first question we are asked. This book is about money—not how to get it but how to handle it morally . It describes how the Jewish tradition conceives of money, and it explores a number of moral issues that arise when the most scrupulous of us deal with money. The presumption of this book—and, indeed, of the Jewish tradition—is that most of us want to be moral. Even so, there are many times when we are not sure what the right thing to do is. This book does not always give firm answers to such questions—life is too complex for such certainty—but it certainly suggests guidelines. These guidelines come directly from Jewish sources themselves and from a number of modern Jews who have wrestled with such problems and have been asked to reflect on the best way to respond to them. There clearly is a strong connection between money and work, for most of us make the money that sustains us through our work. Money, though, raises moral issues on its own, apart from the work that often produces it. This volume, the second in our series, will explore some of the problems and challenges inherent in how we perceive and handle money. Volume 3 will focus on some additional issues that we face in our work environments. Fundamental Jewish Perspectives on Money “Money is the root of all evil.” Although often said, this does not bespeak a Jewish view—not unless we balance it with the equally exaggerated xii proposition that “money is the root of all good.” Instead, like most things in life (food, sex, technology), money is morally neutral; it gains its moral valence on the basis of how it is used. As with the body, the topic of Volume 1 in this series, though, American Jews are confronted by two very different perspectives about money in the American and Jewish traditions that they inherit. The Protestant ethic, which is at the core of much of America’s attitude toward money, values not only work but the resources it produces, including money. Taken to its extreme, as it is all too often in modern America, money becomes the measure of a man—and now, increasingly, of a woman too. We speak of a person’s “net worth,” referring to how much money or other financial resources he or she has, as if that really defined the worth of a person. Another source of American perspectives on money is the Enlightenment . In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said that it is a “self-evident truth” that all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He borrowed that language from the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke; however, Locke had used the phrase “life, liberty, and property.” According to Locke, we give up some of our rights in the state of nature in order to gain the benefits of civil society . Among these are our rights to all the monetary resources we have produced, and for every government to tax some portion of its citizens’ income or assets. The burden of proof, however, rests with the government because it must prove not only that it requires this money but that it is using it fairly and wisely. Indeed, “no taxation without representation” was one of the primary battle cries that motivated Americans to revolt against England, and “taxation without representation” still appears on the license plates in Washington, D.C. as a protest against the inability of residents of the District to elect members to Congress. All monies and properties that...

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