The Jewish Mutual Fund

Every financial advisor and mutual fund manager delivers the exact same message to their clients. When the market goes haywire, don’t panic. Don’t rush to sell when it goes up and don’t dash to the exit when it goes down. If you have a long-term investment strategy, it is designed to take account of market swings. You are in it for the long haul, and you don’t throw the strategy overboard just because market turmoil one day or one week sends the Dow Jones suddenly spiking up or down.

If that is the best investment strategy for money, which comes and goes no matter what, how much more is it the right approach when we are talking about the qualities of our very souls!

It’s my impression that the world has recently taken a sharp turn toward being a harder, colder, less rational place. Virtues and strengths of character that the Jewish tradition has held out as ideals for millennia are under attack in the public square. Lies, hatred, arrogance and self-interest are running roughshod over truth, compassion, humility, lovingkindness and generosity.

From my perspective, there is only one thing to do, and that is to stay the course. The Torah shows us people who struggled to be virtuous, and in every generation since then, we have sought to be pursuers of virtue. There is a “mutual fund” of virtues that Jews have showed allegiance to in all eras of history, through all kinds of turbulence and challenge, and the message we get from our Fund Advisor On High is: Stay the course.

When leaders and their minions tell blatant lies, we owe it to ourselves to be the standard-bearers of truth. When ego is flaunted, our own spiritual lives require that we be champions of humility. When hatred is normalized and whole nationalities demonized, then if for no other reason than for the sake of our own souls, we must step up in their defense.

The great temptation of the moment is to let our emotions rule, which is the equivalent of dumping our stocks in a moment of panic. In this case, that would mean allowing ourselves to get provoked into mimicking the debased thought, words and deeds that are currently polluting public discourse. As Jews, we have paid a high price for the virtues that are so central to our identity, our tradition, our mission and ourselves. We find ourselves in an unexpected moment of test when we need to be strong and vigilant, to ensure that we don’t look back and realize that we bought high and sold low.

No matter what is going on in the world and how we find ourselves engaged with situations and events, we are meant to be conscious of not just outer events but the dynamic interplay between our personal spiritual curriculum and those events. To put it another way, at the same time as we may find ourselves called upon to take political action or help other people, or contribute to a cause, we must have in sight that we are simultaneously working on ourselves to fulfill our Torah-given mission to become holy people.

In that way, while we are actively engaging in the community and our particular historical moment, we are being true to our long-term strategy of investing in the Jewish mutual fund of inner traits and their ultimate expression, holiness. This is a characteristically Jewish approach to spiritual growth, which is meant to happen not in seclusion or isolation from the real world but in direct engagement with it.

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the revered Mussar supervisor of the Mir yeshiva in pre-war Belarus, whom we have met before, gives us a sharp image for this process of working on inner growth while engaged in worldly activities.

He says (p. 112 Daat Chochma uMussar) that if you see a baker who is baking matza and you ask that person “What is your work?” and the baker answers, “I’m baking matza,” that’s the wrong answer. It reveals that the person is conscious of worldliness but not to the corresponding internal reality and impact. The correct answer, says Rav Yerucham, would be, “I am working on caution and alacrity.”

Baking matza, obviously, but in the process working on a personal spiritual curriculum by cultivating certain inner traits that can be developed and enhanced through that engagement.

This lesson applies to a baker, a driver, a doctor, a parent, and, in fact, to you and me in every context of our lives in which we are active. And right now, in our time and place, where discourse in the public sphere has descended to loud hee-hawing that resembles braying more than speech, and where hatred and self-interest have become civic operating principles, we are called to retain awareness of and loyalty to the basket of virtues which have endured through the centuries – not through lip service but by aspiring to develop them in ourselves.

Our strength and our salvation lies in loyalty to our mutual fund of virtues because everything else, expedient and tempting as it might be, has not earned the stamp of durability that Jewish values bear.

You might think that I am being awfully conservative here as I look back to draw lessons and models from the past rather than innovating new solutions to our contemporary issues and problems. But from my perspective, while the context of our present situation and all its challenges will certainly have changed from what our grandparents and grandparents knew, the human nature we invoke as we grapple with those issues has not changed an iota.

The world may have changed enormously over the centuries, but human nature is no different from what we read about in Mussar texts from the 11^th or 15^th or 19^th centuries. The lessons they have handed down to us about being a human being – the good and the ugly – apply to our world without the slightest alteration or update.

In support for what I am saying, I want to mention the book of the oral Torah called Pirkei Avot. Because it is part of the Mishnah, we know that this book would have been written down about 1700 years ago, and its contents would have been around for centuries before that. Pirkei Avot is probably the most popular and most quoted book of Jewish wisdom.

Almost universally, the title Pirkei Avot is translated as Chapters of the Fathers, or Ethics of the Fathers, and yet neither of these is correct nor accurate.

The first translation gets the word pirkei right, accurately translating it as “chapters.” The second translation gets nothing right, because the word “ethics” does not show up anywhere in the title. And what both get wrong is how they translate the word avot.

Yes, avot can be the plural form of “father,” but that is not its only meaning. The Mishnah is primarily a work of law, and elsewhere in its text the word av (singular for “father”) is used to name a first principle or a first cause.

So, each of the 39 primary forms of labour (melacha) that are prohibited on Shabbat is called an av melacha.

The primary source of any impurity (tumah) is called av ha’tumah.

Binyan av is a legal term that establishes a general rule based on specific cases.

And so on through other legal terms that invoke the idea of av as “first principle” or “first cause.” Given that Pirkei Avot focuses on primary ideas about human life, the title is more accurately translated as Chapters of First Principles.

This is not just linguistic pickiness. If the title gives you the impression that this is just a book of musty old material collated by previous generations, that feels very different from looking on it as a collection of timeless first principles our ancestors extracted from life experience that they have compassionately passed down to guide us in our own living.

To my mind, the lessons our ancestors passed down to us about life and living is precious guidance for our own lives. What they have to say about anger and humility and envy and kindness are as applicable in our era as much as it was in theirs.

These first principles for living identified in previous generations are especially valuable for helping us deal with the enormous challenges that are pressing in on us from all sides these days. They are the basket of investments that make up our Jewish spiritual mutual fund and just as they have paid dividends in the past, so will our loyalty to these first principles of human life yield rewards in our time as well.

Being kind in an unkind world, being generous amid selfishness, staying calm when surrounded by panic, aligning with humility when leaders trumpet their own greatness … these are the investments Jews have made generation after generation that we need to endorse and embrace in our lives and in our times. Our mutual fund has proven itself to be a very good investment.

Something new: A poll! I’m really curious to know what you think of the proposition that we need to stay true to the “Jewish mutual fund.” Please submit your response to the poll below and I’ll share the results next week!