‘Turn it and turn it again, for everything is contained therein” — so says the Talmudic compendium of wisdom known as the “Ethics of the Fathers,” in trying to describe the value of the Torah. It’s got everything you need right inside, tradition teaches. It’s the all-in-one roadmap for living in this world. After all, people have been turning to it for thousands of years for guidance in times of crisis and doubt. There’s a reason they call it the Good Book.
You would think, then, that at moments of really big crisis — say, a global economic meltdown — we could look in the book and find some big idea that helps us make sense of it all. Alas, most of us gave up trying a long time ago. Some have turned it and turned it upside-down and shaken it, but what came out, it seemed, were mostly lists of who begat whom and how many cows to sacrifice on weekends and holidays. Even those who do believe usually find that we go there for the personal, small-bore things like practicing kindness and coping with loss, not redeeming society or saving the planet. For the big stuff we look to the politicians and scientists.
On July 7, however, a very, very big idea was drawn out of Scripture, offering a framework for fixing and humanizing the global economy so that it feeds and houses people instead of fattening offshore banks. The author is Pope Benedict XVI, formerly known as the very conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. What he has to say about the economy reads like a left-wing social-democratic tract, albeit overlaid with a lot of camp meeting-style calls to faith.
The document, titled “Charity in Truth,” was published as a papal encyclical. That means it is a letter to the church, spelling out a doctrine with all the authority of the papacy — and, according to an earlier pope, it “ends theological debate” on the topic at hand.
Here’s what has just been put beyond debate:
All people have a fundamental human right to food, clean water and a job.
Economic decisions are not neutral. “Every economic decision has a moral consequence,” and economic activity must be regulated by “just laws” enacted through the political process.
The current state of economic inequality is a “cultural and moral crisis of man,” and demands “distributive justice” through a redistribution of wealth.
Profit should not be the goal of a business, but a means by which it achieves the goal of providing human needs.
Investment and incentives should be structured to encourage long-term business development rather than short-term profit.
Managers should be accountable not just to investors and shareholders but “to all stakeholders,” including workers, consumers and surrounding communities.
Society must protect the right of workers to form unions “that can defend their rights.”
The globalized economy requires a global economic authority that can prevent companies from escaping national regulation by moving offshore, and can negotiate a fair distribution of capital and resources among rich and poor countries.
There’s much more, of course, in the 130-page document. It speaks several times of what Catholicism calls protection of life — partly to say that economic justice must flow from a value system that respects human life, and partly to say that protecting life is incomplete unless it includes human dignity and economic justice.
The encyclical also says that moral values underpinning this doctrine can be found in many religions, not just Christianity — and that believers and non-believers should work together in alliances based on shared human values.
Commentators have been falling over themselves to insist it isn’t left or right wing, since it mentions abortion along with unions and redistribution. But nobody seems to be fooled. One leading Catholic neoconservative philosopher, George Weigel, wrote in National Review Online that the encyclical reads like a “duckbilled platypus,” meaning an incoherent mishmash. It’s not clear how much longer a defender of church authority can get away with that. After all, it is a papal encyclical, not a Twitter tweet.
As for other religions that don’t have a papal authority, they can only look on in wonder and envy, and perhaps seek ways to link hands. Judaism has a long tradition, older than Christianity, of reading the Bible in very much the same way, as Rabbi Jill Jacobs argues elegantly in a new book called “There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice Through Jewish Law and Tradition” (Jewish Lights).
But Jacobs’s views are all too rare in Judaism these days. For a long time now, those Jews who seek the sort of structural justice that Benedict is talking about haven’t been very interested in Jewish law, and those most attached to Jewish law aren’t jumping into the sorts of coalitions Benedict proposes.
It used to be different. In the Middle Ages, communities were governed by their rabbis as mutual aid societies, following the sort of biblical principles the pope writes about. But rabbis don’t govern the community anymore, now that the ghetto walls have come down.
A century ago the voice of the community was its working class, the unions and populist community organizations that answered to their public. Nowadays the organizations answer to their donors, and rabbis are afraid to preach unionism when the synagogue president is around.
Reading the papal encyclical is a reminder that we’re quickly losing a big part of our tradition. It’s part of what made the Jews a light unto the nations. Look, even the pope is copying us.
I confess that when I read news of the papal encyclical I dismissed it without reading it. I was mistaken. No matter how Jews might feel about the Church, this document is significant for the way it demands a reversal of trends in capitalism at work over the last three centuries. When Goldberg notes that pre-modern communities functioned as mutual aid societies, he comes close to the change. As Karl Polanyi wrote in the 1940s, economy was embedded in society. Now society is embedded in economy, an appendage of material goals that have attained a self-justification radically new in human history. This in spite of the fact that defenders of capitalism believe that the market exists "by nature" and not by political order and that capitalist behavior of the kind the Pope condemns is an expression of "human nature." The Pope has fired a shot against this nonsense and Jews should pay attention, talk about it on Shabbat, argue about it. The Pope has singled out the one thread of Christianity that has not done violence to Jews--its last-shall-be-first social thinking.
The Pope has identified what steps must be taken for the promotion of the Common Good and the development of a society that trandscends traditional left and right declensions.
God Bless the work of Pope Benedict XVI
1960s hippy theorizing comes back, from the 60s hippy JJ Goldberg. Hey, let's make food, sheleter, education, med care, and everything else a "right" and then no one will have any motivation to work and then the government can pay for all these rightss we all are entitled to by printing money since no one will be working and no taxes will be collectible from anyone!
Hey JJ, Easy Rider was a movie not an economic plan!
The pope can give up some of that treasure in the vatican taken from poor uneducated christians.This guy looked the other way for how many years as sex crimes were committed. We can learn something alright.
JJ, turn down your Joan Baez records on the phonograph and go take a look at the real world. Take Econ 101 for example! Stop showing us your ignorance!
I don't understand what human dignity there is in holding a job. If it is only Providence that allows us to sustain ourselves, then why not spare us the trouble?
All the above comments are interesting, but none of them deal with Goldberg's point. The point of the article is that the Pope spoke out in the name of his religious teaching, based at its core on the Bible; the Jewish community seems to be floundering and badly paradoxical in its efforts at moral pronouncement -- even while we are the originators of the Bible and of the dictum that everything is contained in it.
That is the burden of the article, as I read it. If I'm correct, I ask whether it takes a rabbi to see what Goldberg is saying -- or, can't we all see, in proportion as we are each able, that the Jewish religion stands accused of being morally mute in our day?
Well said Rabbi!
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