Until last week, I had never heard of the Silicon Valley Bank and even the term Bank Run was never something that I had ever contemplated the meaning of.
All this changed over the course of the week as the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, another was seized by the Feds and another one is being propped up by other banks, and similar happenings are occurring across the pond in Europe.
I have heard many seasoned financial analysts offer their take on this and I really don't understand enough of the investment world to be able to fully understand all of the dynamics myself. Yet certainly, public trust in the Bank that collapsed began to plummet very quickly and similar things began occurring to the trust in the financial system in many other places.
This will surely be analyzed and researched and the question of risk strategy versus investment strategy will all be explored. Lessons will be learned in how banks move forward, while doing their job of safeguarding the money that is invested in them, while also trying to earn a profit for them in a measured way.
How far is what happened in Silicon Valley this week from Moses in the Desert and are there any ideas and lessons that can provide us with meaning or guidance in the wake of this?
Tomorrow in synagogues around the world, we will read how Moshe, the leader of the Jewish people, completes a massive construction project of the Divine Tabernacle in the desert. It was one of the biggest crowd funding construction projects in history and literally everyone had given fixed amounts and additional donations to help make this happen.
Yet now the work was done, the hammers were silent, the knitting had stopped, the sawing had stopped, and the tabernacle stood there shining in the desert in front of all the Jewish people. Indeed the moment they had all been waiting for was now at its climax.
Yet before things move forward, Moshe had one more thing to do, a public audit. This was despite the fact that G-d described Moshe as being a trusted person and he was a respected Jewish leader of epic proportions. Yet Moshe had begun to hear the grumblings of the masses, wondering how he was using the funds and that perhaps he was using the funds for alternative uses than their intended purpose.
Moshe begins listing all the donations of every material and lists their quantities and begins to break down how they were used in the construction. At one point the Midrash explains, Moshe forgot what he had used 1,775 shekel coins for, until it was suddenly clarified that he had used them for the hooks of the Tabernacle.
The Sages taught from this story and its description, that when handling public money and especially charity money, we always needs to go the extra mile to ensure transparency, have other eyes on the numbers and the transactions, and avoid doing things that could arouse suspicion or concern.
The caution that the trusted leader of the Jewish people showed when handling public funds, is a powerful lesson about the responsibilities we have when dealing with the money and resources of others, and is perhaps a timely reminder as we read it tomorrow in regards to the modern day corporate world and the values and morals that we must be mindful of.
Lastly, when Moshe does an audit of all the things that he has been entrusted with to fashion this Divine Tabernacle, it is also a metaphor and a lesson for our own lives. It is a calling of sorts to evaluate our talents, resources and abilities that we have been endowed with to be G-d's partners in building a better world and a better self, and from time to time make an honest evaluation about how we are doing with using our various facets, skills and resources, to be the person that G-d would want us to be.
We may not be perfect, but we can and should know our skill set and understand where we can make our own unique difference to building a better world. Every so often a little tweak or calibration to who we are as well as an assessment of how we are doing, is probably a very healthy moral and spiritual process.
With the audit in the desert, it all ended well, everything was accounted for and everything was used for it's right purpose. Let us hope that here too, this jolt to the Banking system will end well for everyone involved and for the system as a whole.
Shabbat Shalom
Yisroel