Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

What’s in Your pocket?

During Machaneh Ayekah, our Year 10 Camp, students would play a good-natured game in which one would stealthily place an item in another’s pocket and the group would call out “What’s in your pocket?”

Our Jewish tradition teaches: “One is known by what’s in one’s pocket”.

This week’s parashah warns us: “You shall not have in your pocket/pouch alternate stones, larger and smaller”. A uniform weight was required to be utilised to maintain honest business dealings. The dishonest merchant, however, would use the smaller stone when weighing out the produce sold, and larger stone when weighing out what is to be received in payment. What ended up in his pocket belonged to another.

Recently, the University of Melbourne repaid millions of dollars to 1,500 academics in a “wage theft” case. The University was playing with differing stones. It allocated its staff a mere three minutes to mark student assessments and paid them a “piece rate” accordingly. Those staff who dedicated the proper time to marking this work ended up with less money in their pocket than owed  to them and those adhering to the three minute limit were joining the University in taking money not rightly theirs out of the pockets of its students and their families.

Similarly, staff was paid one third of the usual rate for tutorials by means of the University labelling them “practice classes”. Instead of receiving the three-hour payment for tutorials they received the one-hour payment of a practice class.

Our parashah says the stone/weight employed must be whole (sheleimah) and just (tsedek). The prophet Micah calls out to the people: “Can I be just/deserved of my gains when employing wicked balances and having a pocket/pouch of deceitful stones”.

The word shekel, the long-time Israeli currency, comes from the root word shakal to weigh. We just began blowing the shofar at the start of Elul in anticipation of Rosh HaShanah, also called Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement. Jewish tradition views each person as being weighed in judgement in accordance with his actions and deeds. The Talmud teaches that the first question one is asked at the final judgment is: “Were you honest in your business dealings?”

“What’s in our pocket?” How it got there and whose it is speaks to who we are.