Rabbi Moshe ben Makhir is one of the renowned 16th century Sephardic Kabbalists from Safed, Israel. Descended from a Spanish family expelled from Spain in 1492, Rabbi ben-Makhir was the presiding Hakham over a prestigious Talmudic Yeshiva that was first located in Ein Zeitim (north of Safed). After the Yeshiva was unfortunately robbed and looted, they eventually moved to Safed, where they studied Talmud amongst the great mystical circle of Sephardic Kabbalists.
Rabbi ben-Makhir authored Seder Ha-Yom (The Order of the Day), one of the most important works blending Talmud, Kabbalah, Halakha and Ethics. In his introduction to Seder Ha-Yom, he defines the purpose of the book: "To lay out the order one should follow in his days and nights, on Shabbat and holidays, the order of the entire year when sitting at home and walking on the way, when retiring and rising."
The book encompasses teachings that include synagogue rituals, but in the complete spirit of the Torah, it also discusses Jewish law and practice away from synagogue life.
One of the elements covered in Seder Ha-Yom is how we treat employees.
In this week's Torah portion, Vayetze, we are told of the tenuous employer-employee relationship between Jacob and his uncle Laban. Jacob expressed to Laban his disapproval and disdain of the type of employer his uncle was:
"These twenty years I have spent in your service...often, scorching heat ravaged me by day and frost by night, and sleep fled from my eyes. Of the twenty years that I spent in your household, I served you fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your flocks. You changed my wages time and again. Had not the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, been with me, you would have sent me away empty handed." (Genesis 31:38-42)
Jacob's open indictment of his uncle's abusive style as an employer is countered by the Torah's ethical laws on how to properly treat an employee:
"The wages of an employee shall not remain with you until morning" (Leviticus 19:13) and "You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger in one of the communities of your land. You must pay him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets, for he is needy and urgently depends on it..." (Deuteronomy 24:14-15).
In this very spirit, Rabbi Moshe ben Makhir comments on the Torah's philosophy of how we treat employees:
An employer who has a heart and loves people pays the wages owed to his employees immediately without delay. Furthermore, as an employer, he should not stand over their heads and critique every detail of what they are doing, rather even if they make a mistake at work, he should treat them with love and forgiveness. When he pays them, he should do so with love and with a positive spirit and good attitude. If the employee is impoverished despite the wages paid to them, the employer should display empathy for them and seek to help them. Such ethical behavior makes the employer a partner with God.
Rabbi ben Makhir outlines the Torah's beautiful philosophy of how a Jew is meant to behave outside the synagogue. Spirituality and Godliness are not exclusively within the domain of the "House of God," because the entire world is the "House of God." When we wake up in the morning, we should be thinking about how we treat others as much as how we pray to God.
Perhaps that's what Rabbi ben Makhir had in mind when - in the same book Seder Ha-Yom - he composed one of Judaism's most beloved prayers, the one we all recite when we wake up in the morning:
Modeh ani lefanekha Melekh hai vekayam shehehezarta bi nishmati b'hemla, rabah emunatekha
I give thanks before You, living and eternal King, for returning within me my soul in compassion; great is Your faithfullness.
More than just a statement of thanks to God for giving us another day of life, Rabbi ben Makhir's Modeh Ani statement points out that God granting us another day of life is an act of compassion and a sign of faith in us.
God is compassionate towards us by granting us life, so we should be compassionate towards our fellow human beings - especially those in need - by helping to improve their quality of life. God has faith in us to treat our employees with fairness, honesty and compassion. God grants us another day, not merely to live our lives in the endless toil towards wealth and fortune, but to live meaningful lives where we can live ethically and seek to help others.
For those reasons, when we are blessed to wake up in the morning, the first thing we say is Modeh Ani, reminding us - as Rabbi Moshe ben Makhir did so poetically - that God grants us another day to fill the world with compassion and love.
Shabbat Shalom