Labor and Judaism

Sermon Shabbat Shoftim, Labor Day Weekend 5782

One of my favorite jokes is about labor.  It goes like this:

Hard work fascinates me.  I could sit and watch other people do it for hours. 

My friends, it’s Labor Day weekend, which in many parts of the country means the last hurrah of summer.  But here in the Sonoran Desert, Labor Day is just a brief interruption during an already busy fall schedule. We started public school a month ago, Religious School is going full speed, and Rosh HaShanah is just over three weeks away. In fact, here in Tucson, Labor Day weekend is typically just a quick breath before plunging into the deep end of the swimming pool of a hectic fall—or an excuse to drive to San Diego for a final beach vacation of the year.

But long before this holiday became another American excuse for a three-day weekend, Labor Day was a significant statement about the value of a human being’s hard work.  When it started, the very concept that labor had value, morally and economically, was controversial—as it remains in some quarters today.

Labor Day was created in the 1880’s to celebrate and support the workingman and woman, and as         an expression of the importance of organized labor in America.  It was a way of saying that labor mattered, that capital wasn’t the only positive value in the US economy and society.

We Jews have always believed labor has moral quality.  One of the great sentences in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Ancestors, says “Al shlosha devarim ha’olam omeid: al hatorah, v’al ha’avodah, v’al gemilut chasadim: the world is based on three things: on Torah, on work, and on acts of selfless kindness.”  The Hebrew word Avodah, labor, can mean religious service—but typically it means practical and prosaic work, and the connection of labor to Divine service is intentional.  In other words, honest work is a form of prayer.  This exaltation of basic labor as a foundation of society—and a way to serve God—is consistent throughout Jewish tradition. 

You might not know that until fairly recently being a rabbi wasn’t a paying profession.  Most of the great rabbis and scholars in Jewish history had day jobs, from Rabbi Yossi Hasandlar, a shoemaker in the days of the Talmud, to Maimonides, a physician in 12th century Spain, to the rabbis of Eastern Europe who made a living in the lumber trade or as butchers.  For Jews, there has never been any shame in hard work. 

In fact, a movement based on exalting work, the Labor Zionists, created the State of Israel.  They are celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the first Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland this very weekend, by the way.

The first immigration of Jews coming back to Israel in the 19th century was made up of idealistically motivated Labor Zionists—what we call socialists today.  They created the institutions of the modern state of Israel, including the Histadrut, the labor union-based organization that still has enormous influence in Israeli life, and internationally as the Jewish Agency.  Until the 1970’s every Prime Minister of Israel came from the Labor Party; its influence in the Knesset has eroded steadily since, but the mythos of Israel is deeply imbued with exaltations of labor and work.  Early Zionist songs include lines like “heChaluts l’ma’an Avodah, Avodah l’ma’an heChaluts”—the pioneer lives for the sake of work, and work is there for the sake of the pioneer.

And of course, one of the great old institutions of Israeli life, the Kibbutz, which did more to shape the character and reputation of Israel than virtually anything, was based on labor and shared ownership and responsibility.

Here in America many important labor organizers, from Samuel Gompers to Emma Goldman, were Jewish. 

Samuel Gompers was one of the first great labor organizers in American history, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor, the AFL part of the AFL-CIO.  Gompers said about this weekend’s special holiday, "Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country.  All other holidays are … connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."

As Abraham Lincoln, said, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

The Jewish appreciation of the value of labor goes way back.  There are many injunctions in the Torah concerning the rights of workers and laborers: one must not keep the wags of a worker overnight, but instead is legally required to pay her or him everything they have earned on that same day.  One must provide a living wage, that is, enough for a worker to be able to afford food, clothing, and housing.  In the economic agenda established in Deuteronomy, the book we are reading now establishes extensive rules to protect workers and allow them to support themselves in the society that is being created in the Land of Israel.  No one is to be too rich, and no one is to be left behind, or rendered too poor.

I’m not sure exactly when “labor” became a dirty word in American politics, or when the very concept of unions became problematic.  Today in America, and certainly here in Arizona, Labor Day has lost its sense of purpose, as has our understanding of the value of labor.  We celebrate the great tycoons of the new Gilded Age, the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gates and the Mark Zuckerbergs; of course, in our Twitter-driven society that means we also excoriate them from time to time, but in general they occupy a good deal of the attention of the public sphere.  There are currently well over 700 billionaires in the United States now, I am informed—sadly not enough of them donating to Beit Simcha, but still—that’s a lot of super-wealthy people.

The average CEO today makes 355 times as much as the average worker; back in 1965 that ratio was just 25 times as much as the average worker.  That means since the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” satirized the inequities of corporate America the gap between the top executive and the worker who makes his or her job possible has been enlarged by a multiple of about 15.

Deuteronomy would not approve of that gap between the richest leaders and the ordinary workers in our current American society.  In fact, our Torah portion of Shoftim very specifically commands that even kings must not accrue too much wealth, but instead remain wealthy only in proportion to their subjects’ prosperity, and never in some gigantic multiple of the laborers own success.

For fifty years now the labor movement has declined, in many cases precipitously and so has protection for workers in our American society.  The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the U. S. peaked in 1954 at 35% of the working population, while the total number of union members peaked in 1979 at 21 million. Union membership has declined ever since, with private sector union membership now just 7% of private sector employees. Public sector unions have grown, but generally speaking unions have faded badly.  And that means that workers have not fared well in society, have seen their purchasing power and access to the benefits of our society, from housing to medical care to education, reduced, while the very wealthy have become, well, the incredibly wealthy.

One Labor Day won’t fix that, of course, not even at a time when the US is experiencing full employment, statistically, and when it is nearly impossible to fully staff most companies.  The truth is that until we return to the concept of the centrality of labor in producing the benefits of society, we will not see these matters improve.  And the Torah could well be our guide in this.

A personal note on the subject of labor: my late mother Claire’s parents, my Zaide Lou and Bubbie Dora, were members of a group called the Workmen’s Circle—the arbitering, Jewish Socialists who didn’t much believe in God but certainly believed in Jewish life and the value of labor and workers.  I used to do a Passover Seder for the Arbitering that managed to make no mention of God, but was otherwise about as traditional as you can imagine—except that Moses came off as a union organizer.

So even as we will all enjoy a day off from work, perhaps with barbecues or swim parties, we should remember that labor, and work, are central to Judaism and critical in our world.

Lo  alecha hamlacha ligmor, v’lo ata ben chorin l’hibateil mimena, Rabbi Tarfon informs us in Pirkei Avot, the great Ethics of our Ancestors in the Mishnah—it is not up to us to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from doing the labor.  Which includes helping our society to recognize the intrinsic value of work, and workers.

May we remember the importance of labor, ourselves work always for the good, and seek to remind our society of its central importance.