Let me put it this way: If you didn’t mug a little old lady and steal her pocketbook, if you didn’t hold up a convenience store, and if you didn’t persuade the government to take money from someone else and give it to you, then the only way you got that dollar in your pocket is that you pleased another human being. I don’t know if it was a customer, your boss, a client, or whomever, but you must have pleased someone who gave you that dollar willingly because he valued whatever you gave him or did for him as more than a dollar. In other words, your dollars are symbols of the acts of kindness you did for other people.
Without this spiritual vision, we’d never realize the importance of private ownership of property. Without the Bible to teach us the idea of charity and how there is little virtue required to give away other people’s money, we would never have learned that wealth is only created by means of a system that allows people to own that which is theirs. Without the Bible, we would all be living in equality – equal poverty, that is.
After Marriage and Money, Manners is the third “M” area in which the Bible anchors us to our roots. You see, everything we consider to be good manners comes from the first chapter of Genesis. What did our mothers say when we noisily slurped our soup? That’s right – “Don’t eat like an animal.” Behaving like an animal is to violate that gift and erode the separateness that God gave us from the animal kingdom. For this reason we don’t make noises like animals, we don’t scratch ourselves in public like baboons, and we don’t eat like animals.
Our lives are immeasurably improved by living in a society where marriage is the crucible of the next generation, where money is created and wealth possible, and where human interaction is lubricated by manners and civility. Severed from our Judeo-Christian roots we risk losing all that and everything that flows from it.
Now more than ever, we must reconnect the severed flower so that our civilization can be saved.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin is a best-selling author, popular lecturer and the host of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin Show on San Francisco’s KSFO. This essay is adapted from Rabbi Lapin’s address last month at Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny Event at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
