How is Our Worth Measured?

Read the passage below:

For three decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty – defined as those who live on less than $2.15 per person per day – was declining. But the trend was interrupted in 2020, when poverty rose due the COVID-19 crisis. The number of people in extreme poverty rose by 70 million to more than 700 million people worldwide. The world’s poorest people bore the steepest costs of the pandemic, as their income losses were twice as high as the world’s richest. The poorest also faced large setbacks in health and education which have lasting consequences for their lifetime income prospects. The recovery since then has been uneven, as a result of war, climate shock, and conflict. By the end of 2022, 685 million were living in extreme poverty

Read the passage below:

On one level, global poverty surfaces deep inequalities. We live in a world where privilege lands in both arbitrary and deliberate ways, and residual feelings of guilt are strong. Why am I afforded opportunities while others are not? How does the accident of my birthplace determine my lot in life? How do I navigate systemic forces that are designed to keep others down while I can flourish? How can I contend with such deep differences and not be held back by the guilt I may feel? One path towards reckoning with such feelings is not by a rejection of one’s privilege, but rather accepting privilege as a fact, but not as something that is existentially significant. Leaning into our engagement with the value of universality – that individuals in the world may have vastly different realities – economic, social, educational – but are at their core radically the same, can help guide our feelings and actions, and help us set aside feelings of guilt that may be holding us back.

• Facilitator prompts the group:
  Have you felt/do you feel guilt in the service work that you do?
• Articulate 1-2 sentences that capture your feelings. What is the hardest part about engaging in the service you are about to do today?

Read the following and reflect on the questions below:

Jewish principles guide the way we value one’s worth and how we are meant to see others in the world. According to Jewish wisdom, all humans come from the same source, and therefore each has infinite, and not relative value. Humans are not allotted a sense of worth vis a vis one another, as each human life is of infinite value.

The Mishna (the first major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah, edited 200CE) outlines the rules and regulations concerning examinations and cross-examinations of witnesses in civil and criminal cases in Beit Din (the Jewish court system). [Sanhedrin 4:5] In that context it also tells us the reasons why Adam the first man was created alone.

Mishna 5 says:

“The court tells the witnesses: Therefore, Adam the first man was created alone… And this was done due to the importance of maintaining peace among people, so that one person will not say to another: My parent i.e., progenitor, is greater than your parent.”