Sin and Shame in 2002

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Yom Kippur 5763 -- September 16, 2002

There's a certain irony when in a recent New York Times op ed piece JP Morgan, the late 19th century early 20th century financier, is held up as a paragon of moral virtue. He may not have cared about the farmers or the workers, it's admitted in the article, or paid heed to the social costs of his economic successes, but he was at least an honest broker, someone who took moral responsibility for insuring that investors in the railroad industry would not be cheated.

The particulars of the various recent scandals are probably better known to you than to me, but what I would like to talk about this morning is sin, and shame, two concepts that were once rejected by my generation but which I think may be due for a comeback.

To me, sin conveys the sense that something is wrong, not just in that particular situation, but in and of itself. It conveys a value judgment. To say that cheating is sinful, that falsifying documents on which other people depend to make important decisions, is sinful, is to set out a framework of judgment.

In recent years, there have been many situations in which it is hard to get a consensus on moral judgment. American society is divided on the question of abortion, on the appropriate remedies for past racial discrimination. People of good faith differ on the means of improving the lot of the poorest members of our communities. We are also sensitive to the cultural biases of many of our judgments and are therefore reluctant to judge others, even under fairly extreme circumstances.

But I have yet to find someone who has justified the abuses that have taken place in the world of business lately. Perhaps that is because each of us knows some innocent victim of the dishonesty of others. I know I received a call from a retired teacher whose pension, managed by responsible financial experts, has now almost disappeared because of the false reporting that became the acceptable norm in many companies. I think most of you would join me in my outrage that her hard earned nest egg, through no fault of her own, or even of those who were managing her pension, has been significantly depleted -not because of some natural disaster, or even as a consequence of a terrorist attack, but directly because another individual put their own self- interest above the requirements of accepted business ethics. In this case I find people able to say," it was sinful" to lie, to cheat, to cover-up.

Related to sin is the question of shame.

The other day in the car, I heard a news story on NPR contrasting Japanese and American business styles. First I heard a Japanese businessman, whose company had done some wrong. He was apologizing to his customers for betraying their trust. He was filled with shame and asking their forgiveness. He was crying as he took responsibility for what had gone wrong. Michael told me that a similar thing had happened when the failure of a phototube nearly destroyed a multimillion dollar particle detector in Japan. The director took full responsibility and resigned in disgrace, even though one could easily argue that the responsibility was shared.

Contrast that to what has been happening in the United States this summer and fall. The NPR clip I heard showcased an American businessman recently caught up in one of the scandals. He was full of excuses and alibis. He was taking no responsibility; looking out for number 1, he was being very careful not to say anything that might implicate him in any way. He did not seem to experience any personal shame. In fact he did not even seem particularly unhappy.

That's not so surprising. Michael's college alumni magazine- which is not published in Berkeley-- notes that it is unlikely that CEO's accused of malfeasance will ever be sent to jail. This is not because of a current conspiracy but because of the nature of the their role in the companies they run and the nature of American business law. If there have been signs of contrition on the part of these CEO's and others implicated in the scandals, they have not been obvious to the public. I have not heard of a single generous offer of compensation to those hurt by market manipulations by those who have personally profited greatly and who continue to live in great wealth. It's a long way from my grandmother's advice to stay away from even the appearance of impropriety.

After years of encouraging people to feel better about themselves, recent discoveries in the social sciences suggest that perhaps, in some cases it would be better if people felt worse. People who respond positively to statements like:" On the whole I am satisfied with myself", or "I take a positive attitude toward myself", may not be model citizens, because of their high self-esteem, but rather may be dangerous to others. Some studies done on university campuses find these people more likely, not less likely, to hurt another person. This is not because they don't think highly enough about themselves, but because they think so highly of themselves. Nicholas Emler of the London School of Economics writes: "People who believe themselves to be among the top ten percent on any dimension may be insulted and threatened whenever anyone asserts that they are in the 80th or 50th or 25th percentile. " Those with low self-esteem are no more likely to do poorly in school or in life, in fact they may do better, because they often try harder.

Instead of building self-esteem, Emler suggests we work on self-awareness which he sees as a necessary prelude to self-assessment and taking responsibility. We may need to hold back on building self-esteem until we have encouraged realistic self- appraisal, and self-judgment so that our self-esteem is grounded on our real accomplishments. Maybe he suggests, we do all need to go to a shrink, not to boost our self-esteem but to shrink our egos so that we evaluate our own actions honestly and treat others with empathy and respect.

The first stage of repentance is admitting to ourselves that we have done something wrong. It's a necessary step and sometimes the most difficult. Failure to own our wrongdoing, rather than excusing it, seems to be a particular weakness of American society. It isn't just in the business community. We see it in schools where parents are often more intent on finding fault with teachers and administration than in encouraging their child to acknowledge a wrongdoing. We know it in ourselves, when we excuse our own unacceptable behavior because of stress or other hardship, as if we had no role in choosing how we would act. Newsweek magazine reported this summer on the most extreme case. Of the 1,200 families serviced by a grief-assistance program, in Philadelphia, only 10, less than one percent, had seen some kind of remorse from the person who killed their loved one."

While some put the blame on moral relativism, I wonder if the problem today is that we have grown accustomed to looking for a chain of causality for everything that happens. We identify those factors which contributed to an event taking place, and then use them as excuses. In figuring out why something happened, we often loose sight of the individual moments of decision that took place along the way. We don't focus on the individual's choice, instead we allow a sense of inevitability to develop.

Yes it is true that a large part of the problem in business recently has resulted from the way CEO compensation through stock options promoted corrupt behavior. CEO's were structurally motivated to push up stock market prices and when they couldn't do that with profits, they did it instead by hiding expenses or overstating revenues. Yes it is true that much of the scandal resulted from accounting firms acting as consultants and advisors to the same firms that they audit, and thus being pressured in a variety of ways to disregard existing accounting norms. And these structural issues need to be addressed, but my concern is that in focusing on these issues, we are minimizing the responsibility of the individual actors. Instead of encouraging them to acknowledge guilt for wrongdoing and feel ashamed of their own behavior, we are feeding into the already existing tendency towards rationalization and blaming others. We are letting them off the hook, saying by implication, anyone in that situation would have done the same. Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, professor of theology and ethics at the Hebrew Union College, stated recently: We will have no significant effective business ethics until we once again learn to feel shame for our business immoralities.

There was a time when many people felt shame inappropriately and it prevented them from being able to enjoy their lives. Now it would seem we have come to the other end of the pendulum, where people don't feel shame even in cases where they should. If we don't feel the discomfort of shame when we commit a wrongdoing, we are more likely to repeat the action and eventually to forget its offensiveness and consider it acceptable.

Traditional Jewish writings on sin, speak specifically to the problem of our becoming accustomed to practicesto which we initially objected. They say that the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, comes in like a houseguest, very polite and obeying all the house rules, but eventually takes over the place. Using an example the rabbis would be less familiar with, it is like the lobster who doesn't jump out of the pot, because the water gets warmer gradually. When we have acclimated ourselves to the new lower standards, traditional constraint no longer works, for we no longer say "I am ashamed of my actions". That is what has happened over the last several years in the business community and in American society as a whole.

In Judaism we don't have saints, but we do look to ordinary people to become role models by doing that which is right and good. These role models set the community standard by which other people can judge themselves and if appropriate find themselves wanting. It is up to our current business community to cast out those practicing lowest common denominator ethics, and insist on a new code of business behavior. How much better to be reading Jewish names in the newspaper in this regard, as models of behavior we can applaud.

If we have not become inured to wrongdoing as commonplace behavior, if we still have a sense of standards of right and wrong, then it may not be as complicated as some suggest to figure out whether a particular practice is acceptable. In some cases, Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer, a past speaker at Shir Hadash on the topic of ethics, suggests, it may be easier than one thinks. Rabbi Schaefer suggests the following very simple decision model. Act, he said, such that if your decision were made public on television, and your parents and all your friends and even your rabbi were watching, you would still feel proud.

On Yom Kippur we are reminded that our lives are the result of all the individual choices we have made. We accept responsibility for our behavior. And we commit ourselves to striving not to miss the mark as we move forward.

CEO's compensation has risen dramatically over the past twenty years, from 42 times the average worker's hourly pay in 1980 to 531 times the average worker's pay in 2000. Some say this is because of the CEO's contribution to the economic boom, yet in 2001 when corporate profits declined 35% the average CEO's pay still rose 7% . Many analysts feel that salary and compensation have been delinked from corporate performance in many companies across the board and that high corporate compensation relates to other factors.

When Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel began teaching business ethics at the Jewish Theological seminary some questioned its authenticity as a course of study. He responded , you have become skilled at spotting blood in an egg. But there are four times as many commandments in the Torah that address economics than address keeping kosher. I hope you will be just as able to spot blood in money as well.