The Next Phase of Business Ethics

Celebrating 20 Years of REIO

Michael Schwartz, Howard Harris, Michael Schwartz, Howard Harris

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781838670054
• eBook ISBN: 9781838671624
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

The role of organizations in society, the international and multidisciplinary scope of business ethics, and the importance of narrative were concerns that were raised in early volumes of Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations (REIO). That these topics remain of interest is perhaps sobering, and a cause for reflection in the business ethics community. What has the discipline of business ethics achieved over the last 20 years? Where is at in 2019? Where is it headed?  

Written to celebrate the founding of the series 20 years ago, the volume tackles the tendency to see business as something spawned in recent times. REIO's founders, even in 2001, were contemplating the next phase of business ethics, and saw it linked to both good corporate practice and a multidisciplinary heritage stretching back in time. This volume considers whether scholars, practitioners, and business professionals have been slow to act, or whether the problems are intractable. The role of film and narrative in the development of ethical standards and in business ethics education is addressed. Individual submissions also consider corporate responsibility, redemption, and the nature of boundaries in organizations and personal life. 

The volume will appeal to academics in the business ethics field and related disciplines.

ARTICLES

EVERYDAY REDEMPTION: PERFORMANCES OF HOPE

Moses L. Pava

ABSTRACT

“In every generation, each person must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” This prescription of the Haggadah promises that there is a way of reading and speaking about Exodus that allows one to embellish old stories and to make them new in order to re-energize the ideal of biblical redemption, making it relevant to our everyday lives.

Redemption in the Exodus narrative can be read not only as a historical record of ancient events, but can also be understood as creating a counter-culture of hope when all that has been experienced until now is one of pure necessity. Redemption, in this view, is an ongoing, everyday activity. It is creating islands of stability in a seemingly meaningless and unresponsive universe.

In this article, I identify and explores several rabbinic conceptions of everyday redemption including 1-mirror play, 2-deep dialogue, and 3-and the institutionalization of Torah study. The article also briefly discusses the inherent and dangerous temptation of overreaching and demanding an otherworldly redemption (Redemption with a capital R) in the here and now. The article concludes with a description of some practical contemporary examples of everyday redemption in business.

Keywords: Exodus; redemption; hope; dialogue; Judaism; business

“In every generation, each person must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” This prescription of the Haggadah promises that there is a way of reading and speaking about Exodus that allows one to embellish old stories and to make them new in order to re-energize the ideal of biblical redemption, making it relevant to our everyday lives.¹

Redemption in the Exodus narrative can be read not only as a historical record of ancient events, but can also be understood as creating a counter-culture of hope when all that has been experienced until now is one of pure necessity. Redemption, in this view, is an ongoing, everyday activity. It is creating islands of stability in a seemingly meaningless and unresponsive universe. Or, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1955) put it, more memorably and poetically,

The meaning of redemption is to reveal the holy that is concealed, to disclose the divine that is suppressed. Every person is called upon to be a redeemer, and redemption takes place every moment, every day …. (p. 313)

In the remainder of this article, I identify several rabbinic conceptions of everyday redemption including 1-mirror play, 2-deep dialogue, and 3-and the institutionalization of Torah study. The article also briefly discusses the inherent and dangerous temptation of overreaching and demanding an otherworldly redemption (Redemption with a capital R) in the here and now. The article concludes with a description of some practical contemporary examples of everyday redemption in business.

FIT FOR REDEMPTION I: MIRROR PLAY

He made the laver of copper, and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who thronged, who came in throngs to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.

(Exodus 38:8)

Where does the process of redemption begin? Or, as Aviva Zornberg (2001) puts it in her book The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, what makes one “fit for redemption” (p. 25)? Zornberg’s evocative answer amplifies a unique and playful rabbinic midrash² explaining what happened after Pharaoh decreed to the Israelites that from now on husbands could no longer go home to sleep:

Said Rabbi Shimeon bar Chalalfta, What did the daughters of Israel do? They would go down to draw water from the river and God would prepare for them little fish in their buckets, and they would sell some of them, and cook some of them, and buy wine with the proceeds, and go to the field and feed their husbands …. And when they had eaten and drunk, the women would take the mirrors and look into them with their husbands, and she would say, “I am more comely than you,” and he would say, “I am more comely than you.” And as a result they would accustom themselves to desire, and they were fruitful and multiplied, and God took note of them …. In the merit of those mirrors which they showed their husbands to accustom them to desire, from the midst of the harsh labor, they raised up all the hosts … and it is said, “God brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt in their hosts.”

Redemption begins, according to the central motif of this midrash, in the mirror play between wives and their husbands. What makes one fit for redemption is the ability to gaze into the mirror and to perceive a hidden potential, more than the literal reflection immediately reveals. What makes one fit for redemption is playing together with the idea that one is already fit for redemption. And, most fundamentally, what makes one fit for redemption is the engendering of a mutual desire through the strange loop of love.

The women challenge their husbands,

grimy with clay and mud, to see the beauty within that blackness. What she [the wife] initiates is a dynamic, loving game. What she says is not a statement of fact, but a performance of transformation. Against the gezera [decree] of Pharaoh she sets up the mirror of desire. The hosts of Israel, the secret of redemption is all done with mirrors. (Zornberg, 2001, p. 61, emphasis added)

The power of this midrash and Zornberg’s contemporary interpretation of it, is that it takes seriously the potential for meaningful action, a performance of transformation, or what I prefer to call here “a performance of hope,” even amidst the chaos of Egypt. So it is that even in the face of Pharaoh’s stern decree, there still exists a flicker of hope represented by these “little fish” of the rabbinic imagination. As Zornberg (2001) summarizes the women “defy the gezera [decree]: instead of that which must be, there are multiple possibilities, jubilant, polymorphous, anticipatory” (p. 66).

Redemption must start somewhere. It requires not just God preparing the theatrical set (“God would prepare for them little fish”), but it requires human initiative. “What did the daughters of Israel do? They would go down to draw water from the river …” And, it is with these first tentative steps down toward the river that the would-be nation awakens to the possibility of the birth of an altogether new reality.

From an establishment perspective, speaking solely in the name of realism, mirror play is silly, at best, and subversive, at worst. The idea that redemptive fitness can be described in the mundane terms of everyday intimate life seems implausible and even dangerous from the perspective of institutional authority.

The rabbis who authored this hopeful but destabilizing tale understood its especially transgressive power well and its challenge to the status quo. As the above quoted midrash continues, the rabbis have Moses himself object to the sanctification of these very same mirrors. As the Tabernacle and its holy instruments are in the planning stage, Moses is outraged when the women proudly and perhaps naively show up to donate their mirrors as their contribution to the national project.

When Moses saw those mirrors, he was furious with them. He said to the [male] Israelites, “Take sticks and break their thighs! What do they need mirrors for?”

In this surprising continuation of the midrash, Moses is the one speaking up on behalf of the status quo. From his position of authority, the mirrors represent vanity, and a regressive and dangerous unmooring from the way the world really works. But, despite Moses’s misgivings about the appropriateness of the women’s gift, God, as it were, steps in.

Then God said to Moses,

Moses, these you despise! These mirrors raised up all those hosts in Egypt! Take them, and make of them the copper ewer with a copper stand for the priests to sanctify themselves.

The Rabbis’ Moses is not wrong. As he begins the hard work of institutionalizing the new religion, the mirrors are vain and regressive. Moses’s voice is included here – not as a straw man to be easily knocked down – but as a permanent warning. There are dangers in romanticizing the Israelite history, as the first part of the midrash certainly does. His exaggerated anger, though – “break their thighs” – I suggest, is a cover for his own ambivalences about mirror play.

Despite the fact that the midrash has God siding ultimately with the women, the answer to the question of what makes one fit for redemption remains open to us. It is true that what makes one fit for redemption is, in part, the everyday engendering of a mutual desire through the strange loop of love, as the midrash would have it. But, keep in mind, this is just a made up story, and as Zornberg emphasizes repeatedly, it is all done with mirrors.

At the end of the day, the act of creating midrash, the act of embellishing old stories and making them new, creates a hopeful island of stability in a seemingly meaningless universe. Midrash is not a mere statement of fact, but like the daughters of Israel’s playful boast – “I am more comely than you” – the midrash is itself a performance of hope, a playful attempt at hinting that instead of what must be, there are always multiple possibilities from which to choose, jubilant, polymorphous, and anticipatory.

FIT FOR REDEMPTION II: DEEP DIALOGUE

The story of redemption, like any good story, can be told from many different perspectives. The narrative voice of the Bible speaks with the singular majesty of a God’s-eye perspective: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …” (Genesis: 1:1). Rabbinic midrash tells the same story, but does so from a human point of view. Midrash is not an attempt by the Rabbis to impersonate God, or to merely re-tell His story in their own words, but it is an attempt to engage with the sacred text in deep dialogue.

Here is how Aviva Zornberg (2001) describes midrash:

I suggest that the peshat, or plain meaning of the text, functions as the conscious layer of meaning; While midrashic stories and exegeses intimate unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning. The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic text into multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious, undercut, destabilize the public narrative. (p. 3)

The official view of redemption in the original Biblical telling describes redemption as a one-way gift that God bestows upon Israel. “I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). Or, “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto Myself” (Exodus 19:4).

This grand narrative of the Exodus continues to inspire, but like all grand narratives, through its repetitions, gaps, flashbacks, contradictions, odd formulations, the official text elicits: curiosity, inquiry, and, ultimately a human response.

[…] the biblical text itself seems to give warrant for such retellings. Several times, the Torah itself emphasizes the importance of telling the story to one’s children and grandchildren. At certain moments, the imperative to narrate the Exodus becomes the very purpose of the historical event: it happened so you may tell it. (Zornberg, 2001, p. 5)

The public and overt view of redemption is that it is God’s unilateral gift to his people. “And God brought us out from Egypt – not through an angel, not through a seraph, and not through a messenger …” (Passover Haggadah). It is sometimes seen as an example of God’s pure grace (i.e., the free and unmerited favor of God). But this fantasy of grand redemption eventually collapses under its own weight. Redemption is not something that can be imposed from above, but redemption, by its very nature, requires an active human partner. Freedom cannot be forced; “Whoever must play, cannot play” (Carse, 1986, p. 4). And, one always returns to Zornberg’s generative and human question: What is it that makes one “fit for redemption”?

An open culture, jubilant and anticipatory, an imagined culture of hope – that is, everyday redemption – ultimately hinges upon dialogue, some form of a meeting of minds. Dialogue can mean many different things to many different people, but, at minimum, engaging in dialogue requires a belief that minds are the kinds of things that can be changed.

A great leap forward toward real redemptive movement in the Exodus story, from a human perspective, occurs only after the Exodus from Egypt, after receiving the Ten Commandments, and after the sin of the Golden Calf. We read:

And the LORD spoke unto Moses: “Go, get thee down; for thy people, that thou broughtest up out of the land of Egypt, have dealt corruptly; they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them; they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed unto it, and said: This is thy god, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” And the LORD said unto Moses: “I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people. Now therefore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introductory Essay: The Next Phase of Business Ethics
• Special Section: 20 Years of REIO
• Articles
• Reviews