Bernard Madoff took (by fraud), and made $50 billion evaporate. The line of victims immediately formed, then quickly ran around the block and down the street. When Enron, Worldcom and Lehman Brothers went belly up, fat cats and regular people were both burned. This time, though, it’s a plain and simple Ponzi scheme, a straightforward, unconscionable swindle. Swindles happen a lot, in fact all the time. Old ladies get swindled. Nigerian email spam, phishing, they’re all variants on the same theme.
Here’s what makes the Madoff case orders of magnitude worse: this gonnif (Yiddish for thief) has been busted at a particularly bad time, since we’re in the midst of a profound and crippling recession that’s a few shuttered Wal-Marts short of the first Depression in 70 years. We’re already taking on water, and now there’s another torpedo in the side of the American economic psyche, the week of a particularly frightening Christmas season.
Then there is the list of the aggrieved parties.
All of the above elements have something in common: Other than Mr. Villehuchet, a disproportionate number of Madoff’s victims were Jewish-based philanthropies, charities and foundations. For everyone who’s just lost their shirt, their pension, their retirement, their house, their life savings and want someone to blame it on, Bernard Madoff has just become their newest whipping boy. If this person who’s lost everything is also an ignorant bigot, Madoff is the answer to their prayers, because he’s Jewish.
The fact that the vast majority of unwitting victims also had deep ties to the Jewish community doesn’t matter. Everyone, but especially the Jewish community has been betrayed. In the Yom Kippur liturgy, Jews recite a prayer called “Al Cheyt”, where we confess to sins we may have committed over the course of the year. The Al Cheyt includes “for the sin which we have committed before You in business dealings…forgive us, pardon us”. Did Bernard Madoff attend Yom Kippur services and recite the Al Cheyt? Did he even attempt to ask for atonement for the sins he committed? Did he care who he stole from? Did he care about the fallout? Did he care about the organizations and the lives he ruined?
I suspect not. I believe that murder and treason are dreadful crimes, but the betrayal of your clients and your community, your own mishpoche (family in Yiddish), is particularly grievous in its own way. What Madoff did cannot be forgiven. He set out with selfish and malicious intent to defraud and reduce to ashes his victims’ finances.
Tonight is the fourth night of Chanukah, and also Christmas Eve. This is the season of lights, festivity and hope for the return of warmth and good cheer, For thousands of people in countless communities across the country, Bernard Madoff stole that hope. He burned their dreams to a charred crisp. The good and decent works of the charitable foundations he defrauded are dead. Perhaps someone will take their place eventually, but in the meantime there will be a void, and that much less hope for good in the world. This one man destroyed all of that, and for that, I hope God can forgive him, because many on earth never will.
