The festival of Sukkot
this year has an added feature. It’s part of the once-every-seven-years
cycle of biblically designated sabbatical years known as shmitta. And both of them share a fascinating Torah insight about money that has tremendous contemporary relevance.
Unlike Christianity which
taught that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” Judaism
considers wealth a divine blessing. As reward for Abraham’s faith, the
Bible records that he was granted financial success. The priestly
benediction that begins with the words, “And may the Lord bless you” is
taken by the Talmud to refer to economic gain. Gold and silver are what
made it possible for us to build a temple to God as well as to achieve
countless noble goals.
But Judaism was also
painfully aware of a problem that all too often accompanies the
accumulation of great riches. The supposed wise saying of our day is
“You can’t be too thin or too rich.” I’ve seen all too many examples
that prove both these statements are false. “Anorexia” is the medical
term for the sickness of people who refuse to acknowledge that too
little, in terms of weight, may prove fatal. “Affluenza” is a newly
coined description for the ailment that allows too much wealth to
destroy the lives of its owners.
Now part of the title of a best-selling book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic,
by John DeGraaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, affluenza is
described by the authors as “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted
condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the
dogged pursuit of more. It’s a powerful virus running rampant in our
society, infecting our souls, affecting our wallets and financial
well-being, and threatening to destroy not only the environment but also
our families and communities.”
Affluenza means knowing
how to make money, but not how to live. Affluenza can turn you into an
egomaniac. Money can make fools of important persons just as much as it
can make important persons out of fools. Affluenza proves that wealth
costs some people everything they are. In the words of twentieth-century
philosopher Bertrand Russell, “It is preoccupation with possessions,
more than anything else that prevents men from living freely and nobly.”
Too bad that one of the
wealthiest men in the world didn’t learn this lesson until it was too
late. Sam Walton was the multibillionaire CEO of Wal-Mart, the fourth
largest U.S. corporation. As he was lying on his deathbed, he struggled
to get out his last three words on earth. He had given his life for his
business. In that area, he succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Yet, it was at a price. He hardly spent any time with his wife, his
children, and his grandchildren. He didn’t allow himself the moments of
loving interaction, of cuddling a grandchild on his lap, of playing and
laughing and rejoicing with his loved ones. His final three words? “I
blew it!” He had the billions, but by his own admission he had failed.
Dennis Pearne is a
clinical psychologist and a pioneer in the emerging field of wealth
counseling. His specialty is treating clients with “sudden wealth
syndrome.” Those are people who inherited large sums of money, won the
lottery, or sold their Internet businesses for billions of dollars.
Now they were faced with
the dilemma of, “What do I do next?” How many cars can you buy? How many
homes can you own? As the Yiddish saying goes, even the wealthiest man
can’t eat more than one dinner.
According to Pearne:
Sudden wealth creates
issues that go way beyond money. The money can cause traumatic responses
and lead to shame, anger, confusion, isolation and guilt, among other
things. With inherited money, you hear stories of what goes on in
families – the control game, blackmail, gender discrimination,
resentment children have at being raised by nannies, and a whole host of
psychological issues.
The way Pearne has helped
people the most is by working with them on a value-based exploration in
order to focus on proper priorities. Together, the “wealth counselor”
and the “sudden wealth victim” explore basic questions of life: What is
the relative importance of living a wealthy lifestyle versus
accumulating more wealth versus helping friends and family versus
philanthropy? What do you do with the money you will never need for
yourself? How would you want the world to improve – and what can you do
now personally to turn your ideal into reality?
One of the most striking
things Pearne has found is that when his clients seriously reconsider
their options in life, they invariably choose to devote themselves to
social change, to philanthropic endeavors, to helping to create a better
world - all those very things that Judaism has been stressing in order
to make our lives meaningful and filled with true happiness.
“Money is a neutral
object, a tool that can be used positively or negatively,” he said. “The
power of receiving a lot of money is so great it can destroy someone’s
life or empower someone to have a much better life. It all depends on
how you deal with it.”
And that is precisely why we celebrate both Sukkot and the sabbatical year.
Source of Blessing
Sukkot was the time when,
in the agricultural society of old, farmers found themselves the
wealthiest they would be all year. It was the time of the harvest. The
granaries were full. They were blessed with far more than their
immediate needs. It was their moment of affluenza. So the Torah
commanded them to leave their homes and to sit in simple frail huts
through whose coverings they could look up at the heavens and remind
themselves of the source of their blessings. They needed to recall, in a
festival appropriately named “the season of our joy,” that true
happiness comes not from our possessions but from our priorities, not
from what we own but from who we are, not from our mansions that offer
physical comforts but from our families with whom we create everlasting
bonds of love and affection.
The sabbatical year, just
as the Sabbath of days every week, served as a powerful reminder that we
are not meant to be slaves to our work but that our work is to be a
means to allow us to fulfill our higher spiritual calling. Six years
farmers worked the fields. On the seventh the Jews were the first and
the only people in the world, under divine mandate, to proclaim a
national sabbatical – a year when tilling the land was replaced by
toiling in the vineyards of Torah. Study was an entire people’s
occupation. They could not yet have known the concept of fallowing, the
now recognized truth that letting the land rest would enable it to
replenish its minerals and allow it to become even more productive, but
they trusted God’s promise that they would survive in even more
bountiful measure.
The message of Sukkot
and the sabbatical year speaks to our technological society with
perhaps even more urgency than it did in biblical times. It restores the
proper balance that our lives require between wealth and self-worth. It
teaches us the difference between success measured by the marketplace
and the lasting achievements that create a spiritual legacy. In a time
of great wealth, we need to embrace the biblical wisdom that came to
liberate us from the most insidious and seductive kind of slavery – the
slavery of addiction to wealth without linking it to its spiritual
value. | 
