Rabbi Shmuley Boteach spoke with BiblEconomy about the roots of the financial crisis and how we transcend it.

“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,” including lessons such as restraining jealousy and gossip; how to sustain marriages, and inspire our children to make good choices. 

Rabbi Shmuley says one key problem to how we are living our lives is that “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… 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.”

On bailing out homeowners, Rabbi Shmuley distinguishes between two types of homeowners: the reckless speculators and those who wanted a roof over their families. He says supporting the latter is compassionate. At the same time, he says he agrees with President Obama’s insistence that “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… 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.”

Asked if the Torah is in essence Capitalistic or Socialistic in its economic outlook, Rabbi Shmuley says “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 … 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.” But he also warns of a soulless Capitalism left without any checks and balances.

Rabbi Shmuley shared his thoughts about what it would take to get us out of the financial mess. And the answer is not exactly money-related. We need to treat our women equally, not degrade them, “we have to celebrate real female achievement.” “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.”

“As The [Lubuvitcher] 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? … Right now, the model is fill it with stuff, with things. Our model has to be fill it with…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… 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.”

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