Word: jewishness
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TIME talked to Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim clerics about the kind of prayer that is appropriate in a time of possible economic peril and found strong agreement on some basic advice...
...surprising that scholars like Levine have begun to bring Jewish religious teaching to bear on the current crisis - which, if not completely about ethics, certainly has a large ethical component. Says Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, a body of the Conservative arm of Judaism, puts it, "What any religious tradition calls on us to ask is, 'how can I make money and simultaneously be a responsible member of the society in which I live, protecting the interests of both the buyer and the seller?' Clearly that consideration was absent from...
Neither Levine nor Diamond claims that Jewish participants in, say, the sub-prime mortgage crisis have been more virtuous than non-Jews. But both are inclined to analyse it through the lens of Jewish law, especially regarding proper financial disclosure, on which so much of the current fiasco has hinged. Here are some of the ancient principles they feel are applicable to today's bad news...
...Bamboozling the "Blind" Much Jewish ethical thought flows out of Leviticus 19:14, which reads "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind." From an early date, rabbis expanded this into a general prohibition on bad advice. In time, it became part of the language specifically regarding loans, mostly regarding the need for witnesses. But Diamond says it now applies to the whole loan debacle and "any expert who tells someone who probably shouldn't take out a mortgage 'you'll be able to do it, no problem.'" There are a lot of financially...
...this last bit sounds too ethical to be true, that's because, these days, it is. "To be honest," Diamond explains, "In the medieval and the modern periods, Jewish law caved to the marketplace on this." The financial markets that Jews found themselves in routinely assumed profits of over 6%, and they followed suit. "It became more an aspiration than a duty," he says. "Let's say that the more pious among us would take this seriously in establishing prices that are responsible, based on the marketplace." Indeed, with the exception of those involved in specifically Jewish markets like...