Sukkot and the Great Meltdown - MUST READ

ChossidMom

Sun, Oct 12 2008, 8:29 am

Sukkot and the Great Meltdown

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
October 17, 2008

All the Jewish holidays are times of rejoicing, but only Sukkos is specifically known as "the time of our rejoicing." The special joy of Sukkos is connected to the extra measure of closeness to God we feel as we leave our fixed, permanent dwellings to spend a week in an impermanent structure, with no fixed roof over our heads.

That miniature exile, explains Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, leads to a negation of the material world (bitul hayesh) and paves the way for a greater closeness to God. The sukkah is a reminder of the Clouds of Glory that protected our ancestors in a howling wilderness, and helps us feel God's enveloping love.

THE ENTIRE WORLD is currently experiencing its own form of negation of the material, though few have been heard expressing much rejoicing . World stock exchanges are crashing, and the retirement nests that millions had squirreled away in "safe" pension plans are disappearing. The only question according to many economists is whether we are on the cusp of a worldwide recession or depression.

Already the meltdown in financial markets has had major consequences. Two of the world's leading investment banks have bit the dust, and the rest are being reorganized on a completely new footing. The American presidential election, which was a dead heat three weeks ago, increasingly looks like it will end in a Obama rout, though he has given no indication of any economic understanding and even though one of the causes of the crisis was the pressure placed on banks by Democratic legislators to offer mortgages to non-creditworthy home purchasers. (By speaking more frequently and impulsively, McCain has removed any doubts about his own grasp of economics.)

Whatever slim chance remained that President Bush might act to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions prior to leaving office have been reduced to zero. The global economy could not bear another such shock at present.

In my own community, the social safety net based on private philanthropy from abroad has been removed from under thousands of families, as much of the massive wealth which supported thousands of chesed organizations has disappeared.

ECONOMISTS WILL STUDY and debate the causes of the meltdown for years. But one thing is clear: part of the crisis has a moral component - in particular a severing of the relationship between productive activity and wealth. Decades ago, I read that the economic future of a society could be judged by the ratio of engineers to lawyers (and, we might add, financiers.) For the last fifteen years, too many of Americas brightest have been drawn not just to the big law firms but to Wall Street and affiliated hedge funds. Rather than to inventing better widgets or finding a cure for cancer, they opted for the quickest way to earn millions.

Financial institutions play an indispensable part of the grease that makes a global economy possible and play an indispensible role in wealth production. But the only thing that the twenty somethings in big Wall Street firms could take pride in was the size of their annual bonuses, which were often in the millions and based almost entirely on short-term profits. Money became the measure of all things.

No wonder the young hotshots ended up, in the prescient words of a 2007 British comedy skit, amalgmating thousands of mortgages pushed upon "unemployed . . . men in string vests" sitting on the porches of tumbledown shanties, into investment packages sold to other investment firms around the world, in which neither buyer or seller had any idea of the value of the mortgages comprising the package. If the underlying real estate turned out to be worthless, well, the bonuses would have already been paid and someone else left holding the bag.

As long as these young men and women were pulling down million dollar bonuses, they were sure that their success owed directly to their superior brains and talents. "They were infused," writes David Brooks in the New York Times, "with a sense that they had it all figured out." But the complex risk-allocation instruments and swaps they developed, failed to take into account the markets' heard psychology, and their risk-sharing swaps only served only to link financial institutions around the world in one death grip, like a drowning swimmer pulling down his would be rescuer.

Hundreds of thousands who viewed their million dollar bonuses as the just measure of their talents are now out of jobs. And the fingers of blame are pointed elsewhere – at dim-witted politicians, failed bosses, and all manner of forces beyond their control.

Not only on Wall Street and other world financial centers was the relationship between productive activity and the enjoyment of the fruits of such activity severed. Americans have been living well beyond their means, unwilling to postpone enjoyment of those things money can buy until that money was earned. Credit card debt swelled to 100% of GNP in 2006 from 50% in 1980.

In the midst of the worldwide depression beginning in 1929, Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman, who would be martyred in the Kovno ghetto, wrote a piece that applies no less to today's crisis. The problem, he wrote, was not that there was no more money, but that all trust had broken down. The credit upon which any modern economy is based had dried up. Those with money refuse to lend it (check the current interbank overnight lending rates), suppliers will not sell on credit.

Reb Elchonon saw a Divine lesson in that loss of trust. He attributed the loss of trust between people to a loss of emunah (belief) in God.

The sukkah beckons us to leave behind our false sense of security in the physical world and to enter into a different realm, a realm described in the Shemoneh Esrai of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, filled with awareness of God. The move from our fixed abode to the sukkah allows us to contemplate the world of Spirit, a world without limitation, in which men are not set against one another in competition over a limited pie.

The Talmud interprets the verse, "I caused the Children of Israel to dwell in booths (sukkot) when I took them out of Egypt," to mean that only by throwing off our bondage to the physical world do we escape the spiritual depravity of Egypt.

Sukkos will not return to all the trillions that have been lost. But it can help us recognize that true joy does not come from the things money can buy and that our ultimate security does not rest in the size of our retirement fund.

Chag Sameach.

ChossidMom

Sun, Oct 12 2008, 8:44 am

Here's another excellent Rosenblum article:

Hanging in the Balance

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Mishpacha
October 7, 2008
Hashem prepared us for Rosh Hashanah this year with a vengeance.

The Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 8:5) on the words, "Na'aseh adam -- " Let us make Man," describes a debate that took place in the Heavenly Court prior to Man's creation. Truth argued against Man's creation on the grounds that he would be a constant liar. Tzedek, however, argued that Man should be created, for he would also perform righteous deeds. While the debate was raging, Hashem created man. The Midrash relates that Hashem told those with whom He had been ostensibly consulting, "While you were deliberating, na'asah adam, Man was created."

The deeper meaning of the Midrash is that Man's very creation was contingent. No decision was ever reached that he was worthy of creation. It is left to Man to demonstrate that he is worthy of creation through the exercise of his free will, to literally justify his existence. And every Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of Man's creation, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation -- our very claim to existence is hanging in the balance.

The financial meltdown on Wall Street -- a meltdown almost sure to spread to all the world's financial capitals -- in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah emphasized how uncertain is every aspect of the reality that we take for granted. The description of America as the "world's only superpower" suddenly rings hollow. Talk of a worldwide depression is in the air.

There were no visual images from last week's financial crisis to match that of 9/11, which took place in the week before the conclusion of the last shmittah cycle. Then every school child in America watched repeatedly as the Twin Towers, the world's tallest buildings, crumbled like a child's pile of blocks, with 3,000 men and women crushed inside.

The image of men and women deliberately jumping to their certain deaths from 100 floors above ground, preferring that death to the blazing inferno behind them, reached every corner of the globe. Who could fail to recite the words, "And who by fire," with increased feeling that Rosh Hashanah?

Last week's events produced no such iconic images. But the consequences have already affected each of us in profound ways. Much of the great wealth that has supported yeshivos around the world and hundreds of chessed organizations and mosdos haTorah was directly based on the financial services industry.

Rabbi Meir Tzvi Zilberberg pointed out recently that the shmittah year has two aspects: one the renunciation of our dominion over the Land (shmittas karkaos) and the other the renunciation of all monetary claims in the form of loans (shmittas kesafim). Both demonstrate that ultimately all real estate and money belongs to Hashem and our ownership is only provisional.

At the end of the last shmittah cycle, the best known real estate in the world disappeared in a matter of minutes; at the end of this shmittah cycle, several of the largest and ostensibly wealthiest financial institutions in the world crashed almost as quickly. The lesson of the two aspects of shmittah could hardly have been clearer.

The recognition of how illusory is human control over even those aspects of reality that seem most solid is one Hashem must teach us prior to fully revealing Himself. As Rabbi Zilberberg noted, the Gemara (Megillah 17b; Sandhedrin 96a) identifies Motzaei Sheviis as a propitious time for ben David to come.

In a similar vein, Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetsky explained a difficult Gemara (Sanhedrin 97a), which states that Mashiach will not come until the Jewish people have despaired of redemption. All the commentators ask: How can the loss of belief in one of the cardinal principles of faith hasten Mashiach's arrival? Reb Yaakov answered that the Gemara is referring to redemption through natural historical processes. Only when we cease to place our faith in any human agency, in any power other than Hashem, will the Redemption come. Loss of our sense of control is part of that process.

WORLD EVENTS focused my Rosh Hashanah davening by emphasizing the contingent nature of our existence. And those two days of davening, two days disconnected from all news of the outside world, left me much better prepared to handle that news after Rosh Hashanah.

The last two weeks' financial meltdown has dramatically altered the American presidential race. Prior to the crisis, the race was even. Now, Obama is comfortably ahead, for reasons not immediately evident. True, McCain, as his wont, spoke too quickly as the crisis broke. But Obama had nothing more substantive to offer.

Obama advocates greater redistribution of wealth through taxation than any previous major party candidate, and has been closely associated with radical Leftists since he was in college. (His father Barack Obama Sr., once remarked as a senior Kenyan economic figure, that there is no problem with a government taxing 100% of the income, as long as takes care of the citizenry.)

Though I harbor no great enthusiasm for McCain, an Obama presidency terrifies me. Obama, whose base is the pacifist wing of the Democratic Party, would be far less likely to do anything about the Iranian threat to the world. He has said repeatedly that he is pro-Israel, but not pro-Likud. Those are code words for saying that he would press Israel for major territorial concessions to the Palestinians, no matter how incapable the Palestinians show themselves of running a stable state or how likely that the West Bank would become a third Iranian front against an Israel reduced to what Abba Eban once described as its "Auschwitz borders."

Evangelical Christians, Israel's strongest defenders in the United States, would have no influence with Obama in the White House and a Democratic Congress. Forget about American Jews. Those that still profess to care about Israel have convinced themselves that the less defensible Israel is the better off she will be. Certainly advocating such a neutered Israel makes life easier for them in relations with their well-heeled gentile neighbors and on elite campuses.

Over the two days of Rosh Hashanah, there was a dramatic shift in the polls towards Obama. Yet I was able to absorb that news after Rosh Hashanah with equanimity. Whether the coming year is a painful one or not for the Jewish people will not be determined by McCain or Obama, but by Hashem's judgment as to whether we succeeded on Rosh Hashanah in justifying our continued existence.