Is hatred of money in fact even a Torah value? Put differently can’t everything in this world be put to use appropriately in service of Hashem?

People often speak of worship of money as being the contemporary form of idolatry. The script goes like this: Silly modern man ridicules the notion that long ago people actually ascribed divine powers to idols of wood and stone and hungered to do their perceived bidding yet he fails to realize that he places wealth in the very stead of those icons of antiquity.

So far so good; there’s much truth to that narrative. But in reality there’s yet another dimension to the truism that regards pursuit of money as a form of idolatry.

This dimension is a much more prevalent one and is relevant even to those of us who don’t count ourselves among those who dream of great wealth and put all their efforts into amassing it. I refer to the belief so many of us have that money is every man’s bottom line that one only needs to dig deep enough into any given human interaction and underneath it all he will find the profit motive the ultimate consideration underlying every decision.

Flowing ineluctably from this belief is yet another deeply cynical one: That every man bar none has his price. It is this jaded view of human nature that is expressed in the admittedly delicious bon mot of a famous Jewish comedian: “I have my principles – and if you don’t like them well I have others.”

Why do I refer to these latter beliefs as idolatry even though they don’t seem to promote a worship of money? Well how else would you characterize a view that ascribes both omnipotence and omnipresence to an inanimate object like money? Omnipotence because this belief holds that regardless of what they profess to believe and practice everyone bows before money which controls everything people think say and do in this world.

And omnipresent because in this view it is money not G-d that is here there and truly everywhere as the ultimate meaning the subtext (albeit often unspoken) of everything humans do. A cynical Yiddish saying captures this idea perfectly: “Der gantze velt iz a mashal — und der nimshol iz gelt ” meaning “the whole world is a mashal — and the nimshal is money.”

These notions are all about us in society Jewish and gentile alike and deeply woven even into everyday conversation. When some wise man utters lines like “Follow the money ” “Money talks ” or “Time is money ” all nod knowingly at what they consider to be unassailable existential truths.

But Yisro — and the Torah — dissent. And who better than Yisro — who the Mechilta teaches had engaged in every form of idolatry known to man and then rejected them all — to insist that there exist actual sonei batza in this world who reject the idolatrous cult of the almighty dollar in all its manifestations. These are people who not only don’t nurse a love of money but aren’t even subtly moved by it who don’t feel even the almost imperceptible frisson that so many feel when money or moneyed folk are being discussed.

A kollel man once shared with me his experience observing for the first time the scene at a charity fundraiser in the home of an extremely wealthy man. The room he said was packed with attendees waiting for the program to begin. And then the Big Man himself the host made his entrance which caused every single person in that room to make some slight albeit subconscious bodily movement as if all felt forced to physically relate to his sudden presence among them. Fascinating isn’t it?

But these sonei batza of whom Yisro speaks not only do they relate to money in emotionless almost antiseptic terms but they are haters of batza. That is to say they don’t abhor pecuniary profit in and of itself because money is nothing more than a value-neutral vehicle for good or evil. What they abhor is what money tries to do to them and succeeds in doing to other people. They hate it for the way in which it subtly corrupts good people into banishing even the possibility of altruism and seeing the world through a smudged mercenary lens.

And all those venerable insights into life that one hears in society extolling the “bottom line” as the be-all and end-all? The Torah and its sages dissent from those as well.

“Time is money”? The Chofetz Chaim’s retort was that au contraire “money is life.” In other words rather than allowing the opportunity for profit to control how we spend our time the fact that we’ve been allotted only a fleeting bit of time in this world must determine how much of it we’re willing to expend in accumulating money instead of drawing nearer to G-d and gaining entry into the World to Come.

As for “money talks” we might say that David Hamelech b’ruach kodsho foresaw that millennia ago when he said in Tehillim (115:4) “Atzabeihem kesef v’zahav ma’aseh y’dei adam peh lahem v’lo yedabeiru — Their idols are silver and gold the handiwork of man. They have a mouth but cannot speak….”