Devar Torah Parshas Noach
“…ותמלא הארץ חמס“ …and the world was filled with wrongdoing.
The sages define חמס (Chamas) as legalized stealing.
Rav Shimshon Rafael Hirsch writes:
“חמס is גזל (robbery) that cannot be recovered through legal proceedings. One who perpetrates חמס is not penalized by any human court: but if committed over and over again, חמס gradually leads to the ruin of one’s fellow man.” Rav Hirsch brings from Iyov (Job) 15:33) “If a vine sheds unripe grapes, it commits חמס against the fruit. The חמס is not committed at all once; rather, the fruit’s drawing of substance from the vine is slowly stopped, until the fruit drops off”.
Rav Hirsch continues, “But חמס – wrongdoing facilitated by cunning – destroys a society.
חמס is rampant in our society today. It is pervasive in a wide variety of our normal daily transactions – financial and non-financial. But when trusted pillars of society commit חמס as a regular and mundane matter of their business and actions, it catalyzes societal breakdown. Two such pillars of society are banks and the police. We trust them out of necessity. These two pillars, sadly, are at the forefront of חמס today.
It is well known that before the economic crash of 2007 – 2008 banks were engaging in predatory lending, getting people to commit to bigger mortgages than they could reasonably afford. My bank engaged in a practice where the due date for their credit card changed each month by a couple of days. For one month the payment was due on the 11th, the next month the 9th, the next month the 12th. This caused people with limited cash flow and reserves, who pay on the due date, to frequently miss the payment date by a day or two. The bank – and many banks – used an algorithm that became stated policy (in the fine print of their credit card agreement) that would generate millions of dollars in fees. One bank was fined for earning $500 million dollars in fees from this legal scheme. The U.S. Congress put a stop to this and other such bank practices.
Banks continue, though, to earn enormous profits through another scheme. Their algorithms tell them that if they offer consumers 0% to 3% credit card loans for terms of 9 to 18 months they will get the financially weaker consumers to utilize these loans liberally to add to their current credit card balances. Of course, there is a 3% to 5% upfront transaction fee. At the end of the low-interest period, the loan reverts to a high-interest loan. This practice literally traps weaker consumers into a situation where they are forever paying a high interest while barely able to lower the principal amount owed.
Now let’s turn to the police, another necessarily trusted pillar of our communities and society. In most municipalities, there is an arrangement whereby a civil servant’s monthly pension is determined by their income from the last several years of service. This leads to a legal scheme where civil servants, including police officers – especially the police leadership – give themselves liberal overtime hours to greatly increase their income during their last several years in order to maximize their pension. There is an unwritten tacit policy to allow civil servants to take nearly as many extra hours as they want.
For the police, we are not talking about extra hours working the street where their lives are in constant peril. These hours are spent at their offices or engaged in meetings or lots of training – putting aside the question of whether a soon-to-retire police commander is the best candidate for training resources. In this manner, civil servants, especially the police, are able to drain hundreds of millions to many billions of dollars from municipal budgets, far beyond the total of pension payments if they were to maintain their usual hours. This fits squarely into the category of legalized stealing, of חמס.
When the banks and the police misbehave, society breaks down, with all its attendant trauma and pain. Then the cycle begins anew, with a newly formed society and a new hope, until it, too, falls to legalized corruption and moral bankruptcy, as history testifies….
May G-D spare us.