How Much Money Do You Deserve?
Feb 21st, 2011 | By admin | Category: 2010-2011, Archives, E-geress 3rd Article
An Answer for the Guilty Rich of Silicon Valley
by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman
A New York Times article about the nuveau riche of Silicon Valley highlights a wealth-related phenomenon not often commented on: guilt. Here’s an excerpt:
“Many of the more modest millionaires here feel sheepish, even guilty at times, about their piles of cash. Talent played a role in their financial success, but so did being at the right place at the right time.
“They recognize that if they happened to walk into a different office,” said Marilyn Holland, a Menlo Park, California psychologist who has been counseling the Valley’s elite for 25 years, “things would have turned out very differently.”
“A lot of the money here is accidental money,” said Bruce Karsh, 51, an engineer who puts his net worth at $2 million to $4 million. “People weren’t setting out to become gazillionaires.”
Celeste Baranski is one of them. The lucky moment in Baranski’s career came when she took a job as the head engineer at Handspring, the hand-held device maker, in September 1999. By the end of 2000, Baranski’s stock holdings briefly made her one of the wealthier women in Silicon Valley.”
“I always ask myself, ‘Do I deserve it?’ ” she said. “It never feels like you do, because that’s a lot of money.”
Baranski is hardly the only working-class millionaire asking herself this question. Holland said she regularly works with multimillionaires who wonder why they are so well compensated when others, like teachers, who contribute so much to the world, are not.
I don’t know what advice psychologist Holland had for the guilty rich. But there’s a Jewish perspective here that might help.
Presumably, the guilty rich of Silicon Valley wouldn’t feel this way if they were earning a more modest salary of, say, six figures. Why? Because they figure they’re smart enough to deserve that much. But what did they do to deserve those smarts? Nothing. All the psychological research done over the past few decades confirms that intelligence is a product of heredity and nurture. Psychologists differ as to what the proportions are; how much is the result of inheritance from brainy parents, how much of a role early childhood stimulus plays (Mozart in the crib), how much weight to give education and social milieu. But all agree that some combination of these factors must account for the talent and intelligence of a person.
And these are things over which one has no control. You have no more control over which genes you get from which parents than which neighborhood they will reside in and which school they’ll send you to. Even they may have little choice over these things, except (maybe) for the initial decision to marry each other.
So if you don’t feel guilty about being smart—which you did nothing to deserve—why feel guilty about getting rich because you were in the right place at the right time? Or, for that matter, any other reason?
Of course, native ability is no guarantee of success, either. Hard work is needed to attain success. The self-made man has no guilt feelings. Only the Silicon Valley types, who walked into their riches, have reason to feel uneasy.
Yet, we all know people who seem to meet all the criteria for material success, including hard work, and yet never seem to attain it; as well as others who do attain it but then lose it. The self-made man will insist that his success was his own doing. Indeed, that’s his credo. But it does often seem that if it’s not in the cards, it’s not in the cards.
The Sages of the Talmud say that before a person is born it is decreed in Heaven whether that person shall be strong or weak, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor.* Whether one is born into affluence, or comes by it later in life, it comes by Divine decree. Talent and hard work alone are no guarantee of success. Accordingly, there is no reason to feel guilty for stumbling into a great job or a great deal, any more than one should feel guilty for being smart, or having an intelligent and loving set of parents.
However, there is another part of that Divine decree: That you should be good. In the language of the Sages, it says that an angel informs the soon-to-be-born that he has the choice in life of being righteous or wicked, but, he says, “Be righteous!” **
When it comes to money, the moral issue is not only how it is acquired, but how it is used once acquired. Judaism deplores ill-gotten gain. Theft, bribery, and fraud in all their forms (including, for example, the common practice of falsely claiming academic degrees on a resume) should give rise to feelings of guilt. These are behaviors over which we have control, and for which we have to take the blame.
How we spend our money is also in our control. While there is no crime in spending it on material possessions and personal pleasures, a certain moral discomfort might be appropriate if little or nothing is given to those less fortunate. Philosophers ponder where to draw the line. How much for me, how much to save the world from hunger and malaria? How much for that long-awaited luxury vacation? How much to save the coral reefs of Belize, or the wild bison of Montana?
On this, Judaism provides a standard: that at least one-tenth of earnings (after one’s own essential needs have been met) should go to tzedakkah (charity).
As for the other 90 percent, even if it’s a gazillion, don’t feel guilty, you deserve it.
* It is also decreed who will marry whom (although that doesn’t preclude free will in the choice of a life partner, it does indicate that our field of choice is somewhat narrower than we might think, and that the chance encounter which leads to love at first sight is not the random event it appears to be).
** Perhaps this accounts for moral conscience, and the need people have for rationalizing their bad deeds. For they have been told from the beginning, at a highly impressionable age, that they must be good.
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