Finance and the golden calf

(December 10, 2011) Jonathan Sacks, chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew congregations of the Commonwealth, will hold a public conference at the Gregorian University on Sunday, on Rediscovering religious values in market economy under the title “Finance and the golden calf. Rabbi Sacks has come to Rome to share his concerns with religious leaders, even as the political leaders of Europe meet to save the Euro and European Union. This was relevant because the market economy has religious roots. It emerged in a Europe saturated with Judeo-Christian values. He pointed out that the first financial instruments of modern capitalism were developed by fourteenth century banks in Christian Florence, Pisa, Genoa and Venice. The birth of the modern economy is inseparable from its Judeo-Christian roots. But he warned that the market undermines the very values that gave rise to it in the first place. The consumer culture is profoundly antithetical to human dignity. It inflames desire, undermines happiness, weakens the capacity to defer instinctual gratification, and blinds us to the vital distinction between the price of things and their value. These are symptoms of a wider failure: to see the market as an end not a means. The Bible paints a graphic picture of what happens when people cease to see gold as a medium of exchange and start seeing it as an object of worship. It calls it the Golden Calf. Its antidote is the Sabbath: one day in seven in which we neither work nor employ, shop or spend. It is time dedicated to things that have a value not a price: family, community, and thanksgiving to God for what we have, instead of worrying about what we lack. The time has come, says rabbi Sacks , for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God. Humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind. Rabbi Sacks is due to meet Pope Benedict XVI.