Religious Jews and Dishonesty: Tax Fraud, Zoning Violations, Downplaying Risk, and More, with Rabbi Jeremy Wieder (238)

The Torah is very clear that theft is forbidden; no one doubts that this is true. It is, accordingly, very disturbing that religious Jews as a community don't seem to be more ethical in these matters than people who don't see the Torah as their guide to life.

I am not suggesting that Orthodox Jews are worse than anyone else in these matters; I cannot possibly know if that's true. It does seem, however, that Orthodox Jews as a whole are not better than any other community when it comes to honesty in business and taxes. We have heard of too many religious people who find themselves in serious legal trouble to pretend that our community actually maintains a higher ethical standard.

The fact that people who learn Torah and daven with a minyan - people who are careful about Shabbat, kashrut, and taharat hamishpacha - are sometimes not nearly as careful when it comes to business law, is an embarrassment that we need to rectify.

As Torah Jews, we need to be better - and for that reason, I was honored to speak to Rabbi Jeremy Wieder about some commonly disregarded halachot, including tax evasion, paying a worker in cash so he can presumably avoid paying taxes, building in violation of zoning laws without getting permission from the city, the definition of "ona'ah" - overcharging - in a market economy, pyramid schemes, downplaying risk when trying to convince someone to invest money, not declaring merchandise bought outside of Israel when entering the country, and more. We also talked about why in these matters, integrity may require going further than the letter of the law, and a possible reason that people who study Torah may try to justify that which is obviously unacceptable. Finally, we talked about the problem of religious Jews ignoring the crimes of people who give extensively to charity, or even sometimes lionizing them for their faith in God when they were in prison - while conveniently ignoring the reasons that they went to prison in the first place, or pretending that they were victims, or committed "victimless" crimes, when, in fact, this is false.

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