On expenses

Here is my article for the June issue of Sussex Jewish News.

My contract with BHPS says that I’m entitled to claim on expenses: “Books and journals and other materials required for your continuing development as a rabbi.”

This is my first rabbinic post, so it’s kind of difficult for me to know how far to take such a tempting invitation. Giving me an expense account for Jewish books is rather like letting my 2-year-old loose in a zoo’s gift shop. I only have to see the title of a book in a footnote before I feel an urge to buy a copy immediately. And I could justify almost any purchase as relevant to my “continuing development as a rabbi”: anything can inspire a sermon, be quoted in a shiur, help me to keep on learning now that I’m no longer attending a seminary every day.

In any case, claiming obscure Torah commentaries on expenses hardly seems like the sort of extravagant expense fraud we read about taking place in Parliament: it’s no duck-house, after all.

This month, we read from Parashat Korach, where Moses faced a rebellion from his cousin, who accused him of getting carried away with his power, and ruling dictatorially over the Israelites. A 10th-century midrash imagines Moses’s response. One of his lines of defence – and I think this is particularly wonderful – is that, when he travelled from Midian to Egypt to begin the ‘let my people go’ portion of the Exodus story, he didn’t claim a mileage allowance from the Israelites. “I only made that journey on account of their needs,” he tells Korach, “but even so I did not ask you to cover the cost of my donkey.”

Restrained use of an expense account is, of course, an attribute of a responsible leader. It would certainly have been unbecoming if Moses, a prince of Midian, had seen the task to liberating a group of slaves primarily as a free jolly to a sun-drenched culture hotspot like Egypt. (Sadly, BHPS doesn’t let me travel anywhere more exciting than the Liberal Judaism biennial conference in Daventry.)

Yet at the same time, ostentatiously covering all of one’s own expenses out of one’s own pocket is rather unappealing as well. Rishi Sunak was obviously right not to expect the taxpayer to pick up the bill for his new heated swimming pool – but it’s also a terrible look, during a cost-of-living crisis, for him to pay for it himself. What message does that send to the public? Probably the same message that Moses sent when he effectively told the Israelites that they should be grateful he covered the costs of liberating them himself. In doing so, he breached a cardinal rule for any leader: don’t demand gratitude for doing things people are entitled to.

The story of Korach (and the story of my conscience wrestling with the question of just how many books to buy) is about the need for balance in public life. Leadership is a tightrope. Even the most experienced acrobats sometimes slip, and even the most worthy leaders sometimes err. But acknowledging the difficulty is the first step to moving forward safely and responsibly.

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Shabbat shalom!