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Our Rabbi's Message
October 31st 2008
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelThis new crash of the stock market is just a new way of presenting an old story. People live in a precarious position. We can never be sure where our next meal is coming from. We can never be assured of constant happiness. Dangers that we may never think about always lurk in hidden corners. Allow me to share some of the Biblical, pre-economic crashes, which destroyed the happiness, comforts and hopes of mankind.
The most notable was the flood. People were living on this earth for generations. They never thought that civilization could crash and destroy all vestiges of human culture, but they started and did not stop and like the people of Bangladesh today, civilizations of the ancient earth were washed away and drowned.
Then there was the Tower of Babel. People had joined together in one confederation, believing that together they could build a tower to God. Something happened to destroy that goal and civilization was exiled. The idea of one world disappeared almost forever. It is true that kings and queens since that time tried to take over the world, but all failed rather miserably.
At the time of Jacob a famine destroyed a good part of Egypt and of the Levant. Until that time people never thought that they would have to sell their properties to the Pharaoh, but to survive they had to give up all that they had. It was that unexpected event that ultimately caused the enslavement of the Jewish people and our long exile from the Promised Land.
Before the crash of Lehman Brothers, we believed that we were an indestructible power. We didn't pay attention to biblical events or to events that have happened so often in the histories of so many people. The greedy believed that there would be no consequences to their greed, and therefore believed that humankind with utopian, but immoral, dreams could create a time of prosperity for Americans at the expense of the Third World countries.
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