Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann Stanford University
University Public Worship August 3, 2008/2 Av 5768
Sex, Death and Taxes: What Does Religion Say?
Taxes
A few years ago, at the height of the Enron scandal, when we were bombarded with almost daily revelations of seemingly unending corporate fraud, Lee Lorenz published a memorable cartoon in the New Yorker. In the drawing, three portly executives clad in suits are sitting and smoking cigars in a posh corporate conference room. The man at the head of the table leans forward in war room mode and he declares, “Well, we’ve licked taxes—that just leaves death.”[1]
We’ve licked taxes. What an amazing victory! This caption hits home because we recognize the perspective of the executives pictured: taxes are like an illness that diminishes one’s faculties. The illness must be fought. Health must be restored. Or taxes are like an enemy that strikes in the night. The barricades must be manned. The castle must be protected. In a different time and most certainly a different social class, Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye might have paraphrased, “May God bless and keep the czar—and his incessant demands upon our pocketbook—far away from us.” But in contrast to Tevye’s powerlessness, these corporate champions are filled with hubris. As the proverb teaches, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” And having beaten back the scourge of taxes, they are emboldened to tackle the next great challenge—death. Wealth, and the creativity that made it possible, our cartoon executives imagine, confers so much unrestrained power that even the inevitables—death and taxes, can be defeated. Having risen to the exalted heights of licking taxes, they feel entitled to impersonate even God.
When it comes to either death or taxes, most of us don’t feel that same kind of privilege (and it should be noted-- despite their illusions, some high flying corporate executives are now in prison!) But, even those of us who wouldn’t presume to defeat death and haven’t licked taxes, even those of us who are grousing as we pay them, are not so different from our cartoon executives in one sense. For us, like them, our primary perspective on taxes is formed from inside our own pocketbooks. What does it cost us? How can we minimize the bite out of our own assets? What loopholes can we take advantage of? What tricks can a crackerjack accountant appropriate to get us right up to the line, without quite going over it? We have forgotten what taxes, or their predecessor, tithes, once said about our relationship with God and about our relationship with other human beings. How different our relationship to God once was when it came to parting with some of our assets.
Most religious traditions uphold the notion that taxes are indispensable for the maintenance of religious institutions and their personnel. The biblical injunction in Deuteronomy to “set aside every year a tenth part of all the yield of your sowing that is brought from the field.”(14:22) is still invoked in many religious circles. Giving 10% of one’s income is encouraged, if not required in Jewish, Catholic and Protestant communities. Mormons regard the obligation to tithe as a sacred duty and a test of faithfulness. The tithe pays for the operating costs of the church and the funding of new temples and missionary programs. In Islam, tithing is one of the five pillars of faith, and religious authorities teach that the fulfillment of this monetary obligation is itself, an act of worship. Buddhists, Bahá’ís and Hindus are not provided with a specific percentage, but in each faith, contributing to others is both expected and meritorious.[2]
Clearly, the question these religious traditions ask is not, “How can I give the least possible amount and still fulfill my obligation?” Rather, the questions they ask are, “How can my assets be used to deepen my relationship with God, or to take care of the needs of those who serve God or those who are dependent upon the generosity and goodwill of others? How might my resources help me to gain forgiveness for my transgressions? How can my means convey my commitments?
There are multiple descriptions of taxes or tithes in the Bible. The first is an income tax commanded in Deuteronomy: “You shall set aside every year a tenth part of all the yield of your sowing that is brought from the field.”(Deuteronomy 14:22)
Furthermore, in Malachi, in exchange for that ten percent, the giver is promised handsome benefits. “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse and let there be food in My House and thus put Me to the test, said the Lord of Hosts. I will surely open the floodgates of the sky for you and pour down blessings on you.” (Malachi 3:10)
In Exodus, a tax is sought that is not dependent upon wealth. Everyone over the age of twenty pays the same amount. “This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight—twenty gerahs to the shekel—a half shekel as an offering to the Eternal…The rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel…” So far, this is straightforward-- the contribution is the same for every adult. And since the context is a census, each head can literally “be counted” by counting the amount of shekels collected. But the text continues in a surprising way, “The rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel when giving the Eternal One’s offering as expiation for your persons. (Exodus 30:13-15) What does it mean that the half-shekel expiates? What role is this tax playing here? The rabbis, note that this half-shekel text precedes the story of the sin of the golden calf. Turning biblical chronology upside down, they assert that the possibility for atonement is offered prior to the sin. They understand that the contribution of this half-shekel is to be reparation for the Israelites having committed the sin of the golden calf. And since the sin of the golden calf implicates the entire community, it must also be atoned for democratically[3].
This interpretation addresses one understanding of why God imposed what is probably the first “flat tax” in history. But the rabbis offer another explanation. Why, they ask, should the wealthy not contribute more if they are willing and able? While that may sometimes be a sensible way to proceed, the Torah suggests an alternative principle—in a religious democracy, every person is of equal value. The responsibilities of the society rest upon each and every member. How better to portray that than for every person to contribute a small amount rather than to ask a few generous people to carry the whole community? Furthermore, the amount to be paid was a half-shekel, rather than a whole shekel, reminding the givers that no one person is complete without a counterpart. There can be no illusions about being whole without others.
As Rabbi Leon Morris writes: “These two issues -- the specific amount of a half-shekel, and the “flat tax” manner in which it was implemented -- are very much interrelated. Individually, we are each incomplete. We have an inherent need to join our lives in bonds of relationship and responsibility with others…The half-shekel is a reminder of our inherent lack of wholeness for which we need another, and a community, to feel complete. The flat tax nature of the Torah’s injunction reinforces the idea that [that] other who contributes along with us is our equal, is as valuable as I am, and as necessary to my own sense of wholeness and holiness.[4]
The story of Ruth furthers another of the multiple biblical understandings of taxes—that of an implicit social contract. Boaz is a man of means, a landowner with employees who work in his field. Like all other landowners, he understands and accepts his obligation to take care of those less fortunate. When his workers harvest the crops, they have been instructed to do two things—they are to leave unharvested the produce which grew in the corners of the field, and they are to leave on the ground any produce that dropped while they were harvesting. Ruth, a stranger in need, followed behind the workers, and picked up what they left behind to feed herself and her mother-in-law Naomi. The wealthy Boaz is a hero, not because he was especially benevolent in leaving the harvest for the poor—he was obligated to do that. His generosity was in taking care of Ruth, in insuring that Ruth could fulfill her prerogative to glean in the field with dignity, untroubled by the teasing or unwanted attentions of the workers. Being a property owner in the community, he knew that he was required to use his own assets to take care of those with less.
This “tax that Boaz paid ”—the gleanings of the field-- was more direct than our own taxes. He could, and did, develop a connection to the one in need. Our obligations are often not as graphic or as obvious to us. When we pay our taxes, we can see the check being written and our bank balance diminish, but we cannot clearly see the gleaner in the field. Yet, our taxes, too, are part of a social contract. They not only pay for the poor, the hungry and the stranger, but they also pay for the roads, the levees and the bridges, the schools, the courts and the firefighters. Our cartoon executives, and sometimes, many of us, forget those social benefits. In a 2003 New York Times opinion piece, Thomas Friedman argued vociferously against tax cuts and for that social contract.
“May I make a suggestion?” he asks. “When you shrink government, what you do, over time, is shrink the services provided by federal, state and local governments to the vast American middle class. I would suggest that henceforth …substitute the word ''services'' for the word ''taxes'' …
Say it with me now: ''Read my lips, no new services -- or old ones.''
Whenever [you hear], ''It's not the government's money, it's your money,'' [it means], ''It's not the government's services, it's your services'' -- and thanks to the…tax cuts, soon you'll be paying for many of them yourself.”
Friedman continues, “Everyone wants taxes to be cut, but no one wants services to be cut, which is why Democrats have to reframe the debate -- and show President Bush for what he really is: a man who is not putting money into your pocket, but who is removing government services and safety nets from your life.”[5]
A year ago this week, the absence of funds for infrastructure and services was on horrifying display as we watched the eight lane interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. And, if we had forgotten as the images receded from our view, far too many people are still suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, where the power of Mother Nature was made exponentially more destructive by the cumulative effects of government and infrastructure neglect.
If taxes can convey our interconnections, if they help us to take care of those in need, if the purpose of taxes is to maintain our infrastructure and services, then why are they so reviled? Why do they need to be licked or vanquished or diminished? In our contemporary culture, torn between individual acquisition and communal responsibility, between being self-directed and other-directed, the pendulum has swung too far toward the individual.
In 1985, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues published a classic study of American culture entitled, Habits of the Heart. In the book, they identify the first language of American life as the language of individualism. This familiar language taps into the values of freedom, self-determination, personal responsibility and limited government. But the book also describes a second language—a language of interconnectedness, of egalitarian and humanitarian values, of interdependence and community[6].
Ten years ago, Robert Bellah revisited this theme. He identifies how little fluency we now have in our second language-- and he places the blame squarely on our economic assumptions. He writes, “But there is… a very big problem, and its solution is hard to envision. Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that … religious individualism … is linked to an economic individualism which, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money. What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore, is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves aren't going to make it all alone. That is a tradition singularly weak in our country ... And we also lack a tradition of Social Democracy such as most European nations possess, not unrelated to the established church tradition, in which there is some notion of a government that bears responsibility for its people.”[7]
If we are to rethink our own understanding of taxes based on shared responsibility to one another and to the Divine, if we are to revive and relearn the second language of connectedness, it we are to atone for our misguided selfishness, we must do so with a sense of reciprocity. We need to ask, not only more from ourselves, but also more from our government. We must insist that our elected leaders keep civic needs and interests front and center, rather than their own needs and reputations—and we must hold them accountable if they do not. We need to pair our willingness to pay for one another and our society with an equally strong commitment to become engaged and educated citizens. We need to find in our leaders and ourselves, willing hearts.
When the Israelites built the tabernacle, Moses asked them for their precious possessions to decorate the place for God to dwell. “Everyone whose heart so moves him shall bring them...gold, silver and copper; blue, purple and crimson yarns, fine linen and goats’ hair…lapis lazuli and other stones.” (Exodus 35:4-9) The people were so eager to offer their belongings, there were so many whose heart moved them to contribute that, in essence, Moses had to put up a stop sign saying “Enough”. They needed to be restrained from giving.