By "Chaim" Victor Schramm, CFS®, CAS®, CDFS®, AIF®
It’s Better To Attend A Funeral Than A Party
A relative once told me “opening the Bible always makes me feel creeped out, sad, and bossed around.” Ecclesiastes is a great book of the Bible because it will do that for you more efficiently and self-consciously than the rest, and it is my favorite by far.
I’ve said a lot over the years about Ecclesiastes. In my opinion, it’s the greatest work of existential philosophy alongside The Stranger by Camus, The Castle by Kafka (my 2nd favorite), The Flies by Sartre, and Lonely Man of Faith by The Rav Soloveitchik. As a staunch Jewish Existentialist, I am its target audience.
Ecclesiastes is distinct because it’s also the codex of what we can term Existential Finance- the recognition that Markets become systems people psychologically inhabit, and the reflection on how people act within that arrangement. Very few texts go directly into that space.
We usually read Ecclesiastes during the season of joy and the festival of the summer harvest, Sukkot. I’m reading it leading up to the Spring harvest pilgrimage festival which kicks off this week, Shavuot. I’m actually writing this as a kind of decentralized, distributed contribution on my part to the tradition of studying and teaching on Shavuot known as Tikkun L’Eil Shavuot, where we stay up late at night studying the first night of the holiday. I traditionally teach about charity and finance when I get a chance to participate in person, and this is the version that’s happening this year for a host of reasons.
It is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting; for that is the end of every mortal, and the living should take it to heart… The wise are drawn to a house of mourning, and the foolish to a house of merrymaking. - Ecclesiastes, 7:2.
Why are we like this? Why do we do this- read a text with words like this, a text that famously begins with “Utter futility! All is futile!” during what is supposed to be a harvest festival of relaxation and gratitude?
The storied tradition of Jewish moroseness aside for a moment, and also setting our greater tradition of darkly ironic humor, I think that Ecclesiastes has an excellent point for us: we learn more about what we need to do to heal the world from the mourning than from the glad.
I write this on the morning of a new All Time High for the US stock market (hopefully this blog does not jinx markets and glibly mark some high we never again attain- that would be too Kafka-esque even for myself). Yesterday was also the All Time High for Emerging Markets & International Developed Markets. A house of feasting, if you will.
This week I had meetings with young people in love, getting married; buying a house for the first time; another having their first baby. As a planner, you love to see it. I take undue pride in their joys, given that markets and they themselves together did all of the financial merry making and I simply pushed some margins around.
I also had a meeting of a very different kind. I will change the details so as to make the situation unrecognizable for confidentiality’s sake, but this is the reality of the work of a Financial Planner. A widow in her seventies first buried her only son — a casualty of economic despair — and then, shortly afterward, her husband. All on the heels of narrowly escaping cancer. Renting an apartment in an expensive city that isn’t truly home, on very light Social Security income and the last $60,000 in a bank account. Fearing what happens to that last $60,000 should the cancer return. The “good news” is that there are no siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, or really anyone to leave that $60,000 to; the good part of that being there is no one downstream hoping to receive some part of what is left.
Sitting in the grief and the horror of that is more valuable in some sense than the long string of merrymaking a Financial Planner implicitly handles day in, day out. The truth of the matter is that there is no financial instrument that can “solve” the angst and the misery embedded in the survivorship of the widow. Markets are simply very efficient means of maximizing Capital and its returns, say what else you may say of them. One Corporation goes, and another ones comes, but the earth remains the same forever- to misquote Ecclesiastes slightly.
The Limits of Finance
There is not a way to fix the situation of the widow in question with $60,000. There’s no other way to slice it. Linking that person to community and the generous people of the Pacific Northwest is the actual financial answer to the above scenario.
The shadows of the morning’s All Time Highs (I’m going to sometimes abbreviate to ATH hereafter) are indeed quite deep. While the ATH was happening, 5% of the Russell 3000 index of stocks hit a 52 week low. That’s to speak of the uneven distribution of ATH-ness narrowly within Wall St. Outside of Wall St., I’m sure that you don’t actually need me to pepper you with grim tidings of American inequality in 2026. You can look at your local mom’s Facebook group, Buy Nothing Group, Nextdoor feed, or just talk to anyone you know. Maybe don’t look at instagram (we’re joining Ecclesiastes in avoiding the party, remember).
So, what do you do, investing public that reads the Chaim Investment Advisors website?
If we learn more about what to fix in the world from mourners than revelers, you can look at your investment account as not only an all time high resource for yourself. There are people and places that would greatly benefit from your applying the lens of generosity and abundance to your investment accounts.
You don’t need to find a non-profit that accepts gifts of ETF, stock, or Mutual Fund shares to make a donation of some of your resources. You can gift your shares to your own Donor Advised Fund or DAF that can then be distributed as cash gifts to a huge range of qualified institutions.
You don’t even need to sell your shares and realize a Capital Gain to give away a small piece of your portfolio today. Again, you can gift those shares directly to a DAF or 501(c)(3) that is willing to accept them as is and these are deductible charitable gifts with no tax cost to you.
There are even great tools these days like Daffodil that let you track the impact of your one-off and ongoing giving through your DAF on a number of metrics. You can use such tools to track opportunities for the future and past giving you’ve done over time.
Conclusion
Underlying Ecclesiastes’ observation about futility, the dispassionate march of days and years, and a preference for funerals is a quintessential core of spiritual thought: the world was not created perfectly by its creator. In my tradition, it is believed that it was created imperfectly on purpose, that every living being that lives within it may be a true partner in its emerging and eventual perfection. That is, it is on us to complete the work of creation.
I’ve been fortunate enough to live the euphoria of being married to the absolutely right person for a long time. And to have lived in the awe of two beautiful spirits come into the world through us, my daughters Amirah & Sofia. Those two experiences alone give me the belief that there is no need to perfect many moments and occasions in life- they are imperfectible and infallible in themselves. It’s why Ecclesiastes says the wise spend less time with these moments, in joyful spaces- they don’t give us anything to do. As partners in creation, that is important to recognize.
The widow gives us something to do. Some sages have said of this admittedly challenging piece of Ecclesiastes that “He who raises his voice in lamentation, they will raise their voices in lamentation for him.” That is, there’s self-interest even in potentially selfless acts, so you should do them even if they bum you out. And I get that. It’s possibly true.
Personally, I think that spending time in that space- in the shadow of the ATH, in the house of the mourner so to speak- is a reward of its own.
It wouldn’t be a proper Jewish celebration if we didn’t inject a bit of existentialism. And it wouldn’t be a proper ATH if we didn’t feel a bit nervous about it. We don’t need global conflicts or looming resource crises to do that for us. And my advice is that you don’t spend time looking in those spaces (a note to self to spend less time doom-scrolling Bloomberg.com) to sit in the discomfort of what is a very bad-vibes-bearing ATH this time around: Every neighborhood in every city in this country has work that can actually be done to partner in the world’s creation.
Happy Shavuot.
About Chaim Investment Advisors:
Chaim Investment Advisors is a Registered Investment Advisor firm in Oregon & California. It’s led by Investment Advisor “Chaim” Victor Schramm, CFS®, CAS®, CDFS®, AIF®. While we’re not a strictly “religious” based firm compared to certain other national firms, we are a firm that takes traditional & Talmudic Judaism seriously as well as the diverse faiths of our clients.
Disclaimer:
This information is solely the opinions of “Chaim” Victor Schramm, CFS®, CAS®, CDFS®, AIF®. This is not a solicitation to buy or sell any public or private Security. Socially Responsible Investing is a complicated and diverse field of investing that requires a high degree of specialization and due diligence.