JEWISH ECONOMIC ETHICS IN A PLURALIST SOCIETY A Response to Meir Tamari’s ’With All Your Possessions’: Jewish Ethics and Economic Life

This essays tries to show that Jewish economic ethics as presented by Meir Tamari in With All Your Possessions is ethics for a functioning religious and political community and that it is largely irrelevant to the transactions of modern commercial societies, which require much more abstract ethical rules to function successfully. The relevance of Jewish economic ethics to the formation of public policy in a pluralist and largely secular society will be found almost entirely in whatever witness it manages to provide through the characters of those who submit to its commands and the communities they create. III. Jewish Economic Ethics in a Pluralist Society Meir Tamari’s book ’With All Your Possessions’: Jewish Ethics and Econ-omic Life (1987) originated in his dissatisfaction with the way he was teaching courses in corporate finance at Bar Ilan University, an Orthodox Jewish institution in Israel. Tamari found himself teaching in the same wa