On Bernie who Madoff with the Loot -- Fifty Billion

It was said of Lev Bronstein, a revolutionary in post-Czarist Russia, who -- to dissociate himself from his Jewish roots -- changed his name to Leon Trotsky: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the bill.”

We are 5 million Jews in America, and ten percent of us are Orthodox. So: 500,000 Orthodox Jews . . . 5 million American Jews. There are one or two of these crook situations each and every year. One or two out of 500,000 . . . one or two out of 5,000,000. The large-yarmulka’d rabbi of the 1970s nursing home scandal. The Brooklyn yeshiva condemned by United States Senator Sam Nunn for drawing federal Pell Grant funds for students who do not exist in a yeshiva that does not exist to eat meals that do not exist. The junk bond dealer. The Washington lobbyist. The fellow who fled America for Switzerland, then got pardoned by a departing President who said the pardon was requested by Israel’s Prime Minister. The New Square Chassidic community that bullet-voted for Hillary for U.S. Senate after Bill did not pardon but commuted sentences of three of their chassidim. The East Coast Chassidim, West Coast Orthodox Union lay leader, and Israeli bankers involved in a federally indicted money-laundering scheme. And of course Postville. Some are “Orthodox.” Some are otherwise denominated.

We Jews are such a profoundly ethical and honest community. How many prisoners in the federal prisons really ask for kosher meals? Five? Eight? Nine?

Yet, there comes a point where it no longer seems or feels like only three out of 500,000 -- because this is the area of stereotype. It plays and feeds into stereotype. And therein lies the profound sensitivity.

Stereotypes are foolish, built on apocryphal presumptions. Do Jews really know more about money than do others? Clearly, anti-Semites throughout history have thought so, always keeping a Jew around to head the Treasury or the Exchequer. Even Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, when they expelled all Jews from Spain, asked one individual Jew, Don Isaac Abravanel, to stay behind to do the books. Insane! If Jews know so much about managing money and turning a profit, why is Israel unable to manage without American largesse? How did Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke help preside over the American fiscal fiasco? And was it Mayor Abe Beame who took New York City into bankruptcy? And Robert Citron in Orange County?

Who got the idea that Jews know so much more than anyone else about how to manage money? Yet several Presidents seem to have brought in some Jewish monetary advisors. FDR had Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. Nixon had Herbert Stein as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors. Carter had W. Michael Blumenthal. (Shhhhh! He was not really Jewish despite being named Blumenthal.) Clinton had Robert Rubin. Certainly, to employ a double negative, there is no reason that a Jew should not be welcomed as an economic advisor if she is best for the job. And certainly Jewish deep thinkers populate the entire spectrum of economic thought from a range of liberals including Paul Samuelson to conservatives like Milton Friedman and even objectivist-libertarians like Ayn Rand (Shhhhh! She was Jewish despite changing her name to Rand . . . from Alice Rosenbaum.)

It is impossible to avoid noting that this latest crook, Bernard Madoff, was prominently positioned in the Yeshiva University lay hierarchy. (He personally is not Orthodox, nor is he nominally so or thus quasi-denominated.) He also invested hundreds of millions of charitable dollars in his Ponzi schemes. We need to do something as a community akin to what Jews in America did 100 years ago to separate ourselves in the popular imagination from the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Bugsy Siegel and Legs Diamond and Meyer Lansky. And we did.

Whether it means refusing to count these characters in minyans, to give them aliyas, to permit them to attend banquet dinners, taking their names off synagogue walls and out of siddur/chumash inside-covers, or the like, it seems necessary to do something to separate our community from them.

There should always be a chance for teshuvah -- sincere, heartfelt repentance. Absolutely -- that is a core Jewish value and belief. And someday in the future, maybe after therapy, after restitution, after complete repentance (teshuvah g’murah), new books can be dedicated, and new minyanim can be formed with their inclusion. They can be given new honors. But there needs to be a separation, a havdalah g’murah, pending teshuvah.

Similarly, we must give real thought to changing the way we do business as an organized theological and spiritual community. Are we too material-focused? Do we respect money more than good deeds? To paraphrase Rav Michael Broyde's quote of Rav Emanuel Rackman's observation: Do we teach that it is more important to do good in this world -- or that it is more important to do well? Do we honor people who are monied more than people who exude righteousness? (Yes, a monied person simultaneously can exude righteousness. I have known some such people, like Jack Nagel of Los Angeles, and they have touched my life by their example without really donating my way.)

What a moment of opportunity we have before us to teach our community and our young people real Jewish values! Or to capture some of these thoughts in a public statement promoting reconsidered public policy. We have before us -- right now -- an opportunity to propose or suggest standards that limit or regulate the vulgar excesses of Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah parties. (How many meals can a Jew eat in three hours? Does every thirteen-year-old merit a life-sized ice sculpture of his luminescence and deserve to have 300 adults compelled to watch a fifteen minute retrospective of his life-and-times as though compiled by Ken Burns?)

What a moment of opportunity to reinforce condemnations that rabbinic organizations repeatedly have published against those who conduct synagogue-centered poker games and casino-like gambling. To teach people that the great names that have lived in Jewish history are those of rabbis who taught Torah, scholars and teachers, pioneers who built Israel, other pioneers who built and defended Jewish communities throughout the world -- and monied people who distributed their wealth generously. The greatness of Baron Rothschild, Moses Montefiore, Baron de Hirsch, Haym Salomon, Jacob Schiff, and others was not their riches but their philanthropy. They did not sit on their money and hoard it. They worked hard for it, took real risks in the world of industry, and then shared generously with those less fortunate.

What an opportunity we have! To require that every public event/banquet include at least one major award to be conferred on a humble less-prominent person purely for his or her profound leadership in Torah and ethics, regardless of money. To teach about honesty. To invite to schools the person who returns a lost bag of cash that he finds left behind in a taxi. This is the moment to turn this shame into a moment of pride.

And, even as we truly have a remarkably proud record throughout the world as a law-abiding community – can you think of a safer place to walk alone in the middle of the night than in a frum neighborhood that is not plagued by midnight interlopers from outside? -- we need to teach our yeshiva kids again and again, nukh a-mol un takeh nukh a-mol, that financial crimes are cardinal sins because they implicate the name and honor of HaKadosh Barukh Hu.

And now a final exposition: “Why is the religion of these isolated perpetrators relevant?”

In Torah terms, the problem is Chilul Hashem. Their actions desecrate the Holy Name of the G-d of Israel Who took us out of Egypt and brought us to Mount Sinai to receive His Word and to transmit its glory to the Nations around us.

And in secular terms, the problem is in the stereotype. If David Berkowitz, the non-Jewish “Son of Sam,” went around murdering blonde women in their cars with his .44-caliber gun, it still did not feed a stereotype. Jews are not stereotyped as killers/murderers.

But this Madoff thing fits a stereotype. For some prejudiced non-observant Jews, it fits one intra-Jewish stereotype: “Oh, those Orthodox! They are so strict about their supposedly high standards. They think they are so much better than we are. Why, one of their rabbis would not even drink wine that I poured for him! They won’t eat my food – even though they will eat the food of people who hire illegal aliens and employ child labor. So they are oh-so-holy, but when it comes to being honest, they take a back seat, those Orthodox. I’m a better Jew than they are, any day of the week. We may eat pork on Yom Kippur, but we are better Jews than they are. Because we have Jewish hearts.”

Cardiac Jews.

That is why Madoff -- who is not Orthodox in the first place -- is a problem of Chilul Hashem of one sort, when dealing with one sub-group of non-observant Jews. And it is not an answer to respond that the Reform Community Day school in Los Angeles is named for a junk-bond dealer who perpetrated crimes of financial shame. How can that be an answer? What kind of response is that? Rather, that is the road of falling into the same silly trap when, in fact, we all should be working together as Jews of all stripes and spots, denominations, genders, and politics, to eradicate financial malfeasance and defalcations.

Again the question, then: Why is the religion of the perpetrator relevant? I would say, because the real concern is the way that we -- all Jews -- appear in the eyes of those bigots among the non-Jewish world who may bear prejudices and stereotypes that feed off these aberrations.

There are plenty of non-Jewish crooks, frauds, and defalcators. The present Illinois Governor (still in office as of this second) was elected to shake up Springfield but instead shook down Illinois. How Jewish is a guy whose name is pronounced Bla-goy-avich? And Martha Stewart is not Jewish. And, during my high-stakes litigation career, I represented and defended powerful clients, including a solid cross-section of non-Jews who were accused of financial malfeasance.

Yet it is not a sufficient answer to say that Enron were non-Jews and that Global Crossing were non-Jews and that Charles Keating was a non-Jew who used his fraudulent gains to support Mother Theresa – indeed, she even wrote a letter to the judge in his support during the legal proceedings against him. Because, at day’s end, there are stereotypes. Stereotypes are so hard to squelch and so easy to reinforce. People truly believe that Polish people are stupid, even though they have produced a Pope of the Catholic Church, a brilliant (if disastrous) foreign policy advisor to a past American president, my favorite / sharpest / most brilliant morning talk show hostess, and at least two Prime Ministers of Israel. If an Irish person gets involved in something arising from inebriation, well, it is as though the only alcoholic beverages ever concocted were Jameson's, Powell's, and Bailey's. When an Italian person is associated even obliquely with something arising from organized crime, it feeds stereotypes, even though Italians like Rudy Giulliani led vigorous struggles against organized crime.

People of color particularly are subjects of stereotypes.

The stuff of Madoff feeds our stereotype. The vulgar use of the word “Jew” as a verb is shamefully tied with financial vulgarism. We may fight the Oxford Dictionary, but this is what it is. The stereotype is Shylock the Moneylender. It is hook-nosed Fagin who corrupts and sends urchins to steal for him. Both were fictional creations of literary minds and pens that could have designated them Anglicans, but didn't. During the Civil War, the stereotype prompted Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to issue General Order No. 11. When William Jennings Bryant railed at the 1896 Chicago Democrat National Convention against Wall Street financiers, saying “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor a crown of thorns; [y]ou shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” everyone understood what he was saying. He was not stereotyping the Romans on Wall Street.

This is the viciously unfair stereotype of us. In the streets of the rustic Midwest, even where no Jews live, arson-for-insurance (as contrasted from pyromaniacally setting wildfires in California) is called “Jewish lightning.” The term is so defined on Wikipedia's Wiktionary website: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jewish_lightning I heard it for the first time while traveling in the Bible Belt. The person was a non-Jewish colleague of mine, a friend, who did not even realize that the term was offensive. (It is like absent-mindedly criticizing a Native American as an “Indian giver.”) It is Marc Rich getting pardoned by an American President who pens dishonestly in the New York Times that he did so at the urgent behest of the Prime Minister of Israel. And every single time that an outlier, isolated Jew emerges in one of these things, it builds, and it builds on itself. It builds on stereotypes. It poses the single greatest calumny against Jewish people.

That’s why the religion of the perpetrator matters to me. I wish we could figure out a way to separate ourselves in the public mind from these guys, but it is easier said than done. As long as we allow such defalcators and crooks to be honorees at our events, to have their names on our institutions' buildings and in the inside covers of our holy books, to hold positions of lay leadership in temple and synagogue boards of directors or trustees, we inadvertently become ignorant accessories, teaching children for the next generation that we accord our highest honors based not only on how deeply within his denomination he bears his bond and trust in G-d . . . but on how consummately he is deeply pocketed in bearer bonds denominated “In Gd We Trust.”

We have to aim higher. We absolutely must.

Agriprocessors Now Doing What They Need to Do

A prominent public-relations personality in the national marketing of kosher foods recently published an article lambasting students, mostly in the New York area, who urged a boycott of the Postville company at the center of the recent Postville scandal. He called them a bunch of "leftists" reflecting a "lynch mob mentality."

Although that initiative a few weeks ago by those students at a rabbinical seminary in New York to boycott Agriprocessors was misplaced and premature at its time, those students who circulated the boycott call were motivated by their ethical sense of right and wrong. Theirs was not a call motivated by their being “leftists.” Rather, students act more quickly and intensely than do people who are older and who need to balance various personal and institutional considerations and interests. A centrist also could have joined their boycott call. I am a Centrist, a RIETS musmakh – and I came pretty close to going their route. Nor is the students’ institutional affiliation central to their boycott call, and I was deeply offended that the author of the article chose to level ad hominem attacks against the boycotters – instead of pointing a shining light to help the Postville slaughterhouse see how better to rebuild public trust.

The “road back” for Agriprocessors to win public support and to persuade consumers not to boycott them is by assuring the public that the company has taken and continues taking important steps to prevent recurrences of the things that have happened. Don't attack the boycotters. Rather, bolster public trust in corporate compliance. Indeed, since the scandal, Agriprocessors has been doing lots of right stuff, even if long overdue. For example, it was compelling that the company terminated its in-family CEO and has launched a significant search for a new CEO outside the family. It is particularly compelling that the company recently has retained a significant former federal prosecutor, Jim Martin, former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to deal with compliance issues. Martin was a federal prosecutor for 21 years, apparently was top of his class at University of Michigan Law School, and was a tough-as-nails USA investigating and prosecuting corporate white-collar crime in the Midwest. He went after Chrysler, prosecuted a CEO at Blue Cross Blue Shield, and basically is as solid a person as you could find to be chief compliance officer for a corporation. Now that is impressive. That builds public trust.

The Postville issues are complex, and I summarize many of them in my blog on the matter. http://ravfischer.blogspot.com/2008/05/post-about-postville.html But don’t sneer at the boycotters as “leftists” and a “lynch mob.” Such ad hominem name-calling in that context is shameful.

Postville, Kosher Meat, Rubashkin, Ethics Scandal

Clearly, the allegations against the slaughterhouse may be false. It may be that undocumented workers were working at Postville, but that they deceived Postville management, inducing them to believe that their working papers were in order. Employers in Iowa cannot be expected to suspect every Latino and Latina who arrives in Postville, seeking employment. It would be understandable that legal immigrants from depressed societies would flock to a large plant that offers labor opportuntities, albeit at lower pay than skilled professional work.

Similarly, it may well be that the undocumented workers, and other low-paid workers, now are fabricating stories of workplace abuse and even sexual harassment for any of a number of reasons: (i) thinking that such claims will shift the focus of law enforcement away from them and onto Postville's management and rabbis; (ii) thinking that, if they are going under, they may as well take their employers with them; and (iii) perhaps even being motivated by union activists, immigration groups, and others -- including activists within the legal community --to fabricate accounts that could lay a foundation for class-action lawsuits.

So I am not yet prepared to believe unequivocally anything being said, dissseminated, or otherwise spread and published within the media, including the JTA daily news reports.

But there is no question that this thing is a massive Chilul Hashem. By this weekend, Jewish weekly newspapers will be having a field day, lambasting "the Orthodox," using the news to revisit the issue of the filmed slaughter that troubled those who viewed it previously. Already, there are those using this scandal to imply that it is they who are the more noble guardians of kashrut and Judaism by suggesting that, unlike "the Orthodox," they would deem Jewish ethics an essential part of any certification.

Like we don't?

Even as the Gerut Crisis emerged unexpectedly in Israel and compelled an organized response, so does the Postville matter call us to address the matters being disseminated and to set forth that, although the early reports and press conferences may prove absolutely and utterly unfounded, there is an halakhic imperative to be ethical in all business matters.

Now, let us be fair and understand the dilemma faced by kosher certifiers at any meat plant, whether at Rubashkin or anywhere else. In a way, it goes back to the politics of the 1970s when people asked how anyone could certify the kashrut of Pepsi products when the company was doing business with the Arabs and the Soviets but not with Israel. Kashrut certification should almost-always be separate from politics. And, just as the USDA has a limited mandate -- to inspect food and not to adjudge working conditions and workplace issues -- it would be quite a thing to have kashrut certifiers take on themselves the responsibilities of OSHA, the EPA, the EEOC, the INS, and all those other acronyms.

A rabbinically trained mashgiach is trained particularly in the laws of Yoreh De'ah, one of the four compendia of the Shulkhan Arukh, the Code of Jewish Law. Those laws are complex and esoteric. I know because, as a Rav with Orthodox s'mikha, I had to pass a whole series of exams on aspects of Yoreh De'ah. We learned Yoreh De'ah intensely for a year, and we still did not learn everything that a trained mashgiach certifier at a slaughterhouse must know.

It would be profoundly unfair to expect such a person to be expert also in determining whether immigration documentation is authetic or forged, to adjudge whether workplace conditions comply with OSHA rules, etc. Certainly, no one expects such broad knowledge among USDA inspectors. Moreover, if the rabbinate ever were to assume the duty to inspect worker documentation, that assumption of responsibility would open the floodgates of litigation liability. So let's be fair.

That said, this scandal looms as such a mammoth Chilul Hashem – just wait till this weekend’s secular Jewish weeklies arrive – we have to ask, good and hard – when there looms a Chilul Hashem on so mammoth a proportion as looms at Postville – whether we ought to have a mechanism in place to affirm and explain the Torah community’s position on business ethics.

On the one hand, we know our balabatim (laity) are, for the most part, as honest or more honest than the norm. As a purely impressionistic observation, the paucity of kosher meals ordered by Jewish prisoners in the federal incarceration system reflects that we make up far fewer crooks than our numbers in the population might otherwise anticipate. Few of us know any real crooks among our balabatim, and those who are crooks are profoundly outlier.

Yet, the stereotypes pervade. The image of a Chasidic community in upstate New York that bullet-voted for a particular United States Senate candidate after her husband, who did not pardon Pollard, extended quasi-pardons to crooked members of that Chasidic community. The gentleman who was photographed wearing his black fedora as he alighted the federal courthouse steps in Washington, D.C., in the center of the lobbying scandal two years ago. The recent money-laundering, tax-evasion scandal involving certain Chasidim on the East Coast and certain members of the Orthodox Union leadership on the West Coast. And now Postville.

Our position on ethics – a position we all intuitively know like “aleph-beis” – should be made clear to a Jewish public that whispers. For example, my role model on this issue (as on so many other issues) is Rav Steven Weil of Beverly Hills. When a financial-ethics scandal hit in Southern California, including a prominent member of his shul, Rav Weil spoke so strongly and firmly from his pulpit that the waves reverberated down to Orange County. (Well, at least I heard about it in Irvine.)

It is important to do hasbarah on the issue of Jewish ethics. And rabbonim (Orthodox rabbis) must be fearless to lead the way. We should speak out on the ethics issues arising from Postville, fully cognizant that for all we know the Rubashkins may have done absolutely nothing wrong. I re-emphasize: it may well emerge that the Rubashkins did absolutely nothing wrong. They may have been deceived by people who traffic in undocumented workers, forging papers to present to unsuspecting employers. I absolutely scoff at the notion that there was a methamphetamine lab on the premises with their scienter. That is so bogus.

Yet we must speak out on the imperative of Jewish ethics. We should seek a mechanism for explaining to the public why mashgichim cannot check immigration documentation the way they check lungs. And we should explain that “Orthodox” Jewish behavior assumes, as a foundational principle, ethical business behavior.

These scandals raise questions in the minds of non-Jews because, as history has unfolded, that is the stereotype that we Jews have the "merit" to shoulder unfairly. Just as Italians unfairly are associated in the public mind with stereotypers of organized crime, just as Irish people unfairly are stereotyped with imbibing, and just as Polish people unfairly are stereotyped with jokes about being less smart. These are terribly unfair stereotypes. Not only unfair -- but ridiculously wrong-headed. Rudy Giuliani is Italian and rose as a crime fighter. Justice Antonin Scalia is tough-headed on crime. Similarly, Poles include world leading thinkers and just regular intelligent and even brilliant people, ranging from a former pope to Zbigniew Brzezinski to my morning radio fix, Laura Ingraham. Menachem Begin grew up in Poland. So did two of my four grandparents.

Stereotypes are tough. As for the stereotype that we bear, we are perceived as being very smart but also very cheap and so unethical that we will do anything, no matter how unethical, to make an extra penny. (And what a false stereotype it is! Only Jews want to save money? Like they never have a department store sale in Montana or Idaho?) And, as far as Wall Street crimes go, our boys did not run Enron.

Yet, this is life. If the immigration raid takes place at a shoe manufacturing plant owned by Jews, it is a shame, but it is not as stereotypically horrible as watching the federal government set up special holding cells for people being dragged from a kosher slaughter plant overseen by Chassidim. On the one hand, there is a glorious reward for wearing a yarmulka and tzitzit. On the other hand, the federal raid makes quite a story on page one of the New York Times (for those who still buy the paper).

Even for a guy like me who does not care a whit about what non-Jews think about me as a Jew -- c'mon, do non-Jews worry every day about what "the Jews" will think of their bad apples? -- it is a shonda. Clearly something has been terribly wrong in Postville. For goodness sakes, the owner just fired his son, who was the CEO, and now is seeking a new CEO.

So let us not remain silent. Let us explain that a mashgiach, like the USDA, certifies the meat, not the documentation of workers. Let us explain that Americans go to supermarkets and Home Depot stores, and we receive help from workers whose accents suggest they were not born here. Yes, theoretically, they may be undocumented. But we do not ask questions. No one checks. We assume that the people in Human Resources ("HR") have checked the papers. Similarly, we assume that the Postville slaughterhouse has someone in HR who checks the documents. Let us explain that a mashgiach who certifies kosher slaughter has no right and no business encroaching on HR.

This is what we must explain to the public. In the federal government, one agency checks workplace safety – OSHA. Another checks compliance with discrimination – EEOC. Another checks compliance with environmental concerns – EPA. It is not fair to mashgichim, who have their hands full protecting our access to kosher-slaughtered and -checked meat, to expect them to do so much else. Even among the secular government agencies, the officials who check the meat – USDA – do not have to check compliance with building codes, documentation of workers, etc.

We must explain that a large corporation typically has a Human Resources department. “H.R.” is a common reference in corporate parlance. HR assigns workers, checks documentation, gathers W2 forms, oversees whatever benefits, if any, are paid, assures compliance with minimum wage laws, settles disputes among workers, makes sure that all those annoying posters that no one ever reads are posted in the proper font and typeface, advises on terminations, etc. Therefore, when a federal INS raid reveals that 300-plus employees apparently have gotten jobs despite false, forged documentation, there is something scandalously wrong at HR. First and foremost, the HR director has much to answer.

When a markedly Jewish business is conducted as a model of decency, we all stand prouder, as we did when Aaron Feuerstein, the employer in New England, took care of and continued paying his idled employees while he was rebuilding his burned down factory. Yeshiva University proudly advertised his story. We were so proud. We were a light unto the nations.

And an important lesson may be derived for the future: It may be worthwhile for kashrut-certifying agencies in the future to modify their business contracts with food producers, instituting a policy that, while rabbonim and mashgichim do not and will not check businesses for their adherence to ethics, such businesses will need to know – as part of their respective kashrut contracts – that any convictions for ethical violations that transcend a certain rubicon will result in immediate withdrawal of the kashrut certification. Just as a business that is open on Shabbat scares away the vast majority of kashrut certifiers, so a business that is exposed as run unethically should be denied kashrut certification.