Sunday, December 4

AM  Psalm 148, 149, 150     PM  Psalm 114, 115
 Amos 6:1-14
2 Thess. 1:5-12
Luke 1:57-68  

Credit cards.  Mortgages.  Car loans.   Student loans.  What is the role of charging interest?  What is the role of borrowing money? How might justice be served?  

How do we change a culture that has become addicted to borrowed money?  (Average credit card debt per household with credit card debt: $15,799.) 

One of the issues facing those who are struggling to make ends meet is the high cost of borrowed money (particularly that borrowed through credit cards).  Interest rates can skyrocket if you're late on just one payment, making it almost impossible to then make headway on paying off the principle. 

Here's some food for thought, from the NY Times:

December 2, 2011

Loans Without Profit Help Relieve Economic Pain

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

When Hirshy Minkowicz was growing up in a Hasidic enclave of Brooklyn 30 years ago, he often noticed visitors arriving after dinner to meet with his father. They would withdraw into the study, speak for a time, then part with some confidential agreement having been sealed.
As he grew into his teens, Hirshy came to learn that his father operated a traditional Jewish free-loan program called a gemach. The visitors, many of them teachers in local religious schools, struggling to raise their families on small and irregular salaries, had been coming to borrow money at no interest and with no public exposure.
Now 39 years old and serving as the rabbi of a Chabad center near Atlanta, Rabbi Minkowicz has done something he never expected: open a gemach that deals primarily with non-Orthodox Jews in a prosperous stretch of suburbia. The reason, quite simply, is the prolonged downturn in the American economy, which has driven up the number of Jews identified by one poverty expert as the “middle-class needy.”
The same phenomenon has appeared in Jewish communities across the country, albeit most often in those with existing Orthodox populations already familiar with the gemach system. This institution, rooted in biblical and Talmudic teachings and whose name is a contraction of the Hebrew words for “bestowal of kindness” (“gemilut chasadim”), is now meeting needs created by such resolutely modern causes as subprime mortgages, outsourcing and credit default swaps.
“I honestly never thought, in my realm here, to start a gemach,” Rabbi Minkowicz said in a recent interview. “I thought people wouldn’t understand it. It’d be a foreign concept. They hadn’t grown up that way. But definitely, definitely, definitely the economy now is the worst. The 13 years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen people go from a regular life to rags. I’ve seen that up-front and personal.”

Read the rest here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/us/a-traditional-jewish-loan-program-helps-ease-pain-of-tough-economic-times.html?_r=1