By Rabbi Gidon Rothstein

Soon, men at Passover Sedarim all over the world will lean to their left as they drink their wine, the Seder story with those around the table, and eat their matsah and their meal. This ancient requirement, perhaps quaint today, hearkens back to a time when the wealthy leaned as they ate, while the poor did not.

Knowing that acting affluently is a sign of freedom suggests another item for our Pesah-preparation list. If we are to lean, we need to do so as people who use our money in a way that pleases the One Who granted it to us. A few moments’ consideration will show that it is not as easy as it sounds.

Our first instinct may be to limit the question to wondering whether we donate enough to charity. As the Mishnah in Avot reminds us, we are not supposed to think of charity as giving away our own money, but that we are returning to God some of the bounty bestowed upon us. (There are significant questions about how to prioritize even that giving, but that is a topic for a different time.)

Defining how much to give, though, is equally challenging and one of the central questions of wealth. Halachah requires that all Jews give something, tradition has instituted a custom of giving a tenth of our incomes, and a statement in the gemara prohibits giving more than a fifth (of assets and beyond that of any new income). These categories apply to people at all ranges of the income scale, so that someone struggling with a family of four and making $30,000 a year might legitimately give only a token amount, someone making significantly more than that should give at least a tenth, and nobody should give more than a fifth.

Left unclear by those statements is what we define as charity. For those struggling to live up to the standard of a tenth, authorities have articulated several leniencies, such as including yeshiva tuition as part of that tenth. As our wealth grows, then, as we own homes valued in the high-six or even seven figures, take multiple vacations, send our children to expensive camps, we might want to question whether relying on leniencies is still the best use of our money we might make.

What is even less clear is how and when a person needs to begin giving more than a tenth. The Shulhan Aruch defines the obligation of charity as being to support all the poor in one’s area, with the limitation of a fifth, suggesting that anyone who economically can do so should be striving to go beyond the standard tenth.

Defining the words “economically can” is, of course, the kicker. I remember years ago having someone point out to me that he did not understand how an Orthodox family of four, earning $100,000, could be expected to give $10,000 to charity. Tuition for two children is at least $20,000; rent on an apartment would be another $24-36,000 (depending on neighborhood); childcare (if both parents are working) can easily be another $20,000; which leaves somewhere around $40K for taxes, food, clothing, heat and electric, and so on. Prices have only risen since then.

A well-taken point, but how far up does it extend? What are we to make of a family that takes vacations, owns a large home, is putting away tens of thousands of dollars for college and retirement (as they should) and buys better clothing than just the minimum necessary to look presentable? Is there a point at which such a family needs to feel that a tenth is too low a standard to be aiming for?

Perhaps the road to answering such a question runs through another vexing issue, defining objectively inappropriate forms of luxury. Take, for example, a man who makes $10 million a year and who gives charity to the highest standard possible (for the sake of the argument, assume he gives $2 million a year to the poor, and another $2 million to other causes, such as Torah institutions, hospitals, medical research, and so on).

For such a person, other than the prohibitions of specific halachot, is all monetary spending acceptable? Suppose this person is marrying off a child, is there any reason not to spend a million dollars on the wedding? Or, to take an example from Martha Stewart, not to spend $6000 on a handbag?

We can defend an affirmative answer in several ways, but the members of the Kollel where I work recently gave me a particularly effective one. They argued that spending wildly violates the prohibition (or at least the ethos) of bal tashhit. Spending money on nonsense, in this view, is another example of needlessly destroying items in this world. In the case of a wedding, the comedian Modi has noted that it’s like driving a new BMW to the wedding hall and leaving it there.

Granting that certain spending is wasteful and therefore not within the ethics of Judaism, we still need to draw the line between necessary, acceptable, and problematic. The secular philosopher Peter Singer once argued that people only need $30,000 a year to live and should give everything else to charity. We seek a standard that is less austere, but does not allow for distastefully extravagant expenditures. No Tyco-style parties for us, I would hope.

As a first step, I would offer lines that seem so out of the pale as to be obviously wasteful and to work back from there. In any expense, there would seem to be three central questions that can guide our decisions about the propriety of that expense: What is the need? What are the community standards for how to handle that need, and how far is the person straying from those standards? What will be the impact of this person’s spending on the definition of community standards?

We can and should define need liberally. While people years ago did without television, air conditioning, vacation, home-ownership, and a host of other aspects of life we take for granted, we need not rethink our entire way of life to come to meaningful insight as to how to rein in the wildest spending. (Although we ought from time to time ask those more global questions as well; just how much do we need the toys we allow ourselves?).

Air conditioning, I remember once reading, was seen by many as the twentieth-century invention that most improved quality of life, even though people made do without it for thousands of years. As long as an expense can be defended as making ordinary life easier or better in some way, there seems room to allow it. A laptop computer is in one sense an extravagance but has made my work life significantly easier and more productive. If a businessperson feels the need to fly in business class so as to be more prepared for the meetings on his or her arrival, it is not perhaps a necessity of life, but an acceptable way to ease one’s success in this world.

Even defined liberally, the mindset of considering need would still already significantly retrain our sense of appropriate spending. I doubt that people assume they need many of the extravagances they allow themselves, they simply don’t think in those terms. The fifteenth pair of shoes a woman owns aren’t for need, they are because she thinks they look nice. Some people do need a new car every year, or a new dress or suit for every large affair they attend, such as people whose livelihood depends on their image and impression they make on others. Most people, however, do not, and thinking in terms of need would already rein in some unnecessary spending.

The question of need has even more impact when we start questioning how much is acceptable to spend on a particular need. Clothing is necessary, and there is no requirement to shop at Cheap Charlie’s, but there are clearly clothing expenditures that cross the line into gross excess.

We can differentiate the two by using community standards as a benchmark. In a community where all homes sell for over a million dollars, buying a home for $1.2 million carries a different meaning than it would in a neighborhood where the average house sells for half that amount. Wearing a $3,000 sheitl or gown should be judged differently depending on the cultural milieu in which that person is operating (although, again, some expenditures fully accepted in a particular neighborhood might still be open to question).

Within each such subset of society, though, the multiplier rule seems appropriate. That means that it is universally wrong (and we mean morally and Jewishly) to spend a particular multiple of what an average person (not the poorest person) would spend on the item being purchased. For large items, a five-times rule seems at least appropriate. If the average person buys a watch for somewhere between $100-200 (or less), there seems little defense for spending more than $1000 on one.

The same standard can be applied to houses, cars, suits, and whatever else people buy. The multiplier changes for each item, incidentally: it is probably out of line to spend five times what the average person spends on a house, car, or wedding, but might be acceptable when it comes to clothing or food (although even there, if most people buy meat for $7 a pound, buying it for $35 a pound seems a bit much). For the vast majority of expenses, I suspect that five times the average is always too much.

The point of such a standard is not only for people to begin considering their own expenditures, although that itself would be a great advance over our current situation. In the same way our community exerts pressure to meet certain halachic standards, we need to exert pressure to meet standards around these issues as well, and that for two reasons. First, each person’s spending affects others, like secondhand smoke, and therefore deserves regulation. Especially if we allow community standards to set the standard for what is acceptable, we need to consider that each act of spending affects the benchmark as well.

The first person in a neighborhood who buys a Lexus (or whatever qualifies as luxurious in cars today) is often or almost always a paragon of giving appropriately to charity, a person with so much money that she is able to give out of all proportion to anyone else, and still to easily afford this extravagance. The next person to purchase this luxury may also qualify by the most rigorous standards of charitable giving. But the next fifty people who purchase it, and all those beyond that, are likely not giving nearly as much as they ought to be, but are defining their life-necessities by their only slightly wealthier peers.

Encouraging restraint in spending, in this perspective, is a way of shaping our society to a healthily balanced lifestyle. Needs, and even luxuries, are acceptable, but must always be balanced against competing issues.

The idea of competition for resources, so basic to economics generally, also offers the second reason to protest extravagant spending even by those who have apparently met all reasonable standards for charitable giving. Even the person who has given a fifth of his assets and yearly income has almost definitely included in that amount donations to medical research, Torah-study institutions, and perhaps libraries or museums.

Good causes all, but we would argue that when the gemara decried giving away more than a fifth of one’s money, it was worried about the person giving the impression of being so financially secure that nothing could affect him, so he could “waste” his money on giving it to the poor. The gemara never prohibited investing that money in the future of one’s world, in risky but worthwhile projects, not as a business investment, but as a way of attempting to produce a better world than we have now. Medical research beyond a fifth of one’s money, supporting a think-tank that will figure out how to fix Social Security, investing in a fund that buys only ecologically sound companies but does not yet turn a profit, are all ways to help better the world, fulfilling our human purpose, and helping preserve our lives and the lives of those we love.

We can use our money to pamper ourselves or we can use it as God wanted, to improve and beautify the Garden we were given to tend. No one has enough money, to perfect the world, not even Bill Gates, but any money given to the cause can provide quite a head start. He may have given $17 billion to charity, but that doesn’t mean the world wouldn’t be an even better place if he gave a few billion more.

It is easier to do that when you have multiple billions of dollars, but it is realistic for many Jews today to think in those terms as well. This needs to be applied individually to each case, but I think it behooves us a community to start pressuring ourselves to do so. As we do, and as we lean on Pesah, we will not only be truly wealthy—who is wealthy? she who is satisfied with what she has—we will be truly free.

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