This is Shabbat Shekalim – a special Shabbat that falls just before the month of Adar, the month in which we celebrate the holiday of Purim. The word shekalim is the plural of the posssibly familiar word shekel – a weight of silver, and since 1980 the official name of Israel’s currency.
We call this Shabbat “Shabbat Shekalim” because of an extra bit of Torah that we read (Exodus 30:11-16), setting out the law of how one takes a census. According to the instructions, you carry out the census by enrolling every adult (or maybe just the battle-ready adult men, it’s not completely clear) and then by each of those adults contributing a half-shekel of silver. This flat half-shekel-per-person tax goes for the upkeep of the mishkan, the holy tent. It is a tax to support the people’s communal spiritual endeavor.
Torah calls this money a “ransom.” Why? Rashi says it is because of the age-old taboo against counting human beings. Counting people is thought to invite the Evil Eye. As soon as you crow about how many people you’ve got, bad luck will arrive to take some of them away, tfu tfu tfu. So according to Torah, the coin is given to ransom back our souls from whatever peril awaits.
A half a shekel. So what is a shekel? A shekel is, at its core, a weight. A particular weight of a precious metal, in this case silver. Naming it as a weight is in line with many modern currencies, when you think about it. Think of the peso, meaning in Spanish simply “weight.” Or the British pound or the old Italian lira from the Latin libra, meaning “a pound on the scale.”
Money was, historically, a particular weight of silver or gold or something precious. It was literally worth its weight. Exactly its weight. Its value was not an abstraction like our paper money, or our online bank accounts, or, heaven help us, cryptocurrency.
Money, as we have come to experience it, is an abstraction. We count it, receive it, give it, without ever holding it. Money also has metaphoric meaning. We understand it to have something to do with value and something to do with power. Making money decisions is a way of clarifying values. Visit any Ner Shalom Board meeting and see the decisions the Board makes about what to do with a finite budget. Every budgetary decision is a decision about value, about our values, about the relative importance of different things we offer. And each of us in this room can look at our own checkbook or credit card bill and we will discover the same. Money, our shekels, show up as proxy for value, for our values.
Money is also proxy for power. Since the beginning of the agricultural revolution thousands of years ago, resources has been unevenly distributed. Our histories of feudalism, colonialism, capitalism, slavery, have made wealth disparities all the more extreme. The more localized wealth is on one side of the scale, the more widespread the poverty on the other. So that we can live here in Sonoma County with some of the richest people in the US, while 3000 people are still sleeping in tents or cars.
For those of us who work for our money, that money represents labor. Units of work-effort, of personal energy. I have put my energy into work and exchanged it for dollars. Some communities have experimented with alternative local currencies that try to level economic disparities by making a unit of currency that is equivalent to one hour of labor. Labor in whatever field you are in, whether you are a lawyer or a seamstress or a farmworker or a financier. Turning time into currency serves, in theory, as a kind of equalizer. An hour is an hour, no matter what pay scale you’re used to.
But in our conventional economic system, money, when amassed, represents power. We all know about the ability of big money to buy and mine irreplaceable resources. The power to extract value through the labor of others. The power to buy political favors or even elections. Which is more valuable, your vote or your campaign donation? And would your answer be the same if you were Elon Musk or one of the Koch Brothers?
Money is power. And the more money you have, the greater your power to do good and the greater your power to do evil. And some suggest that this is the reason we read this bit of Torah now, just before Purim.
It has to do with the Purim story, the Queen Esther story. In it there is a plot point that we usually skip over. But it is worth noticing, and it is this: in order to persuade the king to issue an edict to kill the Jews, Haman uses arguments about Jewish disloyalty. But to clinch the deal, he offers to fund the operation himself. Or, more precisely, Haman offers 10,000 talents of silver for the king’s treasury if the king will issue the edict. (Esther 3:9)
Haman doesn’t just dream up the destruction of the Jews, Haman buys the destruction of the Jews. And the king has a moment of values clarification, determining that the lives of the Jews are not equal in worth to the fortune that Haman is offering.
In light of Haman’s money, how could the story of Purim end in anything other than our destruction?
Talmud offers a very interesting response, from the rabbi called Resh Lakish, who knew the value of money, having been a bandit in his youth. Resh Lakish asks how we could prevail against this mega-rich villain. He declares a principle: that there is no harm that God can impose on the People of Israel for which a cure had not already been invented. He goes on to say that even at the time of Creation, it was foreseen that Haman would weigh out his shekels against the Jewish people.
As medicine, God devises the census that we read about in Torah. A census in which every member of the Jewish people contributed a half-shekel to the collective. (BT Megillah 13b)
It is that money, collected by the Children of Israel in the desert, that is gathered for the mishkan, for the sake of Heaven, that is weighed on the heavenly scales against Haman’s 10,000 talents of silver. Money from a different time and a different text. But still, there it is, on the scales, unforeseen by any but God. In essence, Haman was outbid by us, using the shekels collected by our ancestors, generations earlier.
So we might ask the question for ourselves now, when we feel discouragement at the state of the world and we wonder how we – any of us – can overcome the powers stacked against us. How do we counteract the money that pours into campaigns to do away with people’s rights over their bodies and over their lives? How do we counteract the money amassed by corporations that profit from stripping the earth and dismantling the climate? How can we ever hope to balance the scales or to weight the future on the side of justice and love and life?
Resh Lakish seems to suggest that we look back at the value that we have already amassed. We are not paupers. We are not starting this struggle with nothing. We are starting with an accumulation of our energy and our labor and our willingness to fight and our love for each other and our vision of a world imbued with holiness. We have paid and continue to pay into the collective. There is value already on the scales.
And we stand ready to ante up even more. Not just in love and devotion and determination and other seeming intangibles, but in money too. Through how we spend and how we donate and how we are willing to rethink the wisdom of our whole system if necessary, so that value might flow back into the black and indigenous communities from which it was extracted through colonialism and enslavement.
It is a moment of unexpected reckoning. It is Shabbat Shekalim, the sabbath of shekels, of weights. What are all our weighty acts of the past, present, and future that can still turn the scales toward justice and toward life? What assets do we have in us that we haven’t even begun to tap yet?
It is Shabbat Shekalim. Let us not undercount our resources or underestimate the currency we hold.