Faith Also Means Caring About Workers

We are all meant to be a source of blessing to those around us. When we stop caring about the wellbeing of others, we deny our own attachment to the true Source and, reluctantly, God reciprocates by withdrawing God’s grace from us. 

God’s identity is intimately bound with our quest for being kind. When Moses asks God how God wants to be introduced to the Israelites, God responds with “I Shall Be What I Shall Be.” The medieval commentator, Nachmanides, understands this cryptic answer to mean: “As you are with Me, so I am with you.” That is, when we open our hand to assist others, God also opens God’s hand. God’s nature is not independent of our actions towards each other but reflects our way of being.

We can’t clock in and out of this expansive, continuous kindness. Our intentions to help others must continue in our workplaces as much as in our homes, on the road, and in our houses of worship. Employers are also expected to be a source of blessing. To this end, the Rabbis of the Talmud explore a worker’s rights case that involves a manager who hired day laborers to work at a lower rate than the owner had requested. Even though the wages were within the fair market range and the workers had consented to the lower wage before they started working, the Rabbis conclude that the workers have a claim against the manager because they can say “Don’t you have respect for the verse (Proverbs 3:27) ‘Do not withhold good from one to whom it is due, when it is in the power of your hand to do it’?” In other words, part of the job is doing the work in a way that is good for all those involved. Being ethical isn’t just a theological argument, but a legally binding one as well.

We know that Noah escaped the flood in the ark, but we often forget that he merited being saved because of his desire to improve the working conditions of his generation. Genesis 5:29 states that Noah (literally “Relief”) gets his name because “This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.” Jewish tradition teaches that until Noah, people did not have agricultural instruments. So he constructed tools to help people in working the fields with much greater ease and efficiency. Noah’s technological breakthrough was to work from an internalized, heart-centered place, which consequently produced new tools to express his feelings of benevolence and care. God responded in kind by bringing him into the ark to protect him.

Historically, industrial advancements have often developed from military technology: nuclear power from the atomic bomb, canned food from rations, and even in Genesis 4:22 where Tubal-cain forged all implements of copper and iron as murder weapons before they found constructive uses in civil society as plows and shovels. To not repeat the violent cycles of the past we must approach new tools, like AI, with a focused purpose for communal benefit.

Often, we struggle with the space between our intentions and the actual impact of our actions. When it comes to being kind to others and feeling responsible to help all those who we can, it is our attitudes that determine how successful we will be in our pursuits of goodness. We are living in a time of both exceptional advancements in science and huge regressions in human decency. This vast separation can be explained by the greed and callousness that is motivating so much of these efforts.

These texts, from scripture and the rabbis, emphasize our agency: the potential and the obligation  we have to help others. Our ultimate success is in our hands; it isn’t determined by how hard or smartly we work, but how much we invest in being able to bring goodness with us wherever we go. It’s not the skillful labor that we produce that has the most value, but the altruistic aspirations that inspire the craftsmanship of kindness.

Noah and the other people of his generation all had equal access to the cutting-edge resources of their time. What set Noah apart was his willingness to teach others how to best use this technology and this in turn is what caused him to find favor in the eyes of God.

Each one of us in this world is part of a universal obligation to continue and expand our mutual blessings. Faith teaches us that our ambitions to help humanity should inform all our interactions, especially utilizing the workplace as a public display and implementation of our values.