The sec­ond in a series on ethics from the ven­er­a­ble Jew­ish Pub­li­ca­tion Soci­ety, this vol­ume approach­es the end­less­ly inter­est­ing top­ic of mon­ey — not how to get it, but how to act in the acquir­ing of it and what to do with it once acquired. The series is not so much a book with a sin­gle argu­ment and declared the­ses, but a series of source texts around which to build a con­ver­sa­tion, and a num­ber of essays by sev­er­al hands in which that dis­cus­sion is car­ried on.

The sources are cer­tain­ly use­ful to have col­lect­ed, and the argu­ments well-rea­soned. How­ev­er, the work as a whole would have ben­e­fit­ed from a broad­er per­spec­tive, and reads too much like the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty plat­form. Our tra­di­tion is noto­ri­ous­ly vast, and so must be our engage­ment with it. Encour­ag­ing the giv­ing of tzeda­ka and the moral imper­a­tive of treat­ing work­ers fair­ly is always valu­able. But to stage argu­ments on Exec­u­tive Com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages and the prop­er lev­el of the min­i­mum wage are essen­tial­ly polit­i­cal polemics, and do not require the Sages to bless them by a skill­ful selec­tion of prooftexts.