Because money and religion are generally considered off-the-table dinner conversation fare, Tom Levinson, a clever and fastidiously courteous Chicagoan with an abiding interest in the taboo topics, found a successful workaround: develop a podcast devoted to them.
Levinson, a longtime Hyde Park resident and modern-day Renaissance Man-he has worked as a writer, interfaith justice worker, attorney, and financial consultant-approached Eboo Patel, founder and president of the Chicago-based Interfaith America, about co-sponsoring the podcast with Levinson's investment advisory firms. Patel not only gave the go-ahead, but he also provided Levinson, a strongly identified Jew, with a partner for the new venture: Amber Hacker, Interfaith America's chief of external affairs and chief financial officer, and a devout Christian.
Together, Levinson and Hacker launched their
Money, Meet Meaning
podcast this past spring with a series of conversations featuring religious scholars and spiritual leaders across the ecumenical spectrum, including Patel, Reza Aslan, Dr. James Hollis, and Reverand Winnie Varghese, as well as Rabbi Jay Moses, Vice President of The Wexner Foundation, who married Levinson and his wife, psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Kieff, more than 20 years ago.
During Meaning, nothing concerning money is off the table: savings, spending, debt, charity, wealth, poverty, and many people's ambivalence toward, if not fear of, the almighty dollar. Levinson and Hacker also talk freely about their and their guests' faith traditions about money-and how their own spirituality has been shaped by the value placed on currency.
As a 13-year-old, Levinson recounted in the maiden podcast, he became acutely aware of "the significant amounts of money" certain of his peers and their families expended on bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, an impression that has remained resonant with him for more than 35 years hence.
Growing up Southern Baptist in North Carolina, Hacker said her family early on taught her about savings, spending, and tithing. She added, in a play on words, that she is often referred to as "Budget Hacker," because paying off her and her husband's college and graduate school debt assumed a high priority in her family.
The podcast co-hosts point out that Jewish and Christian texts have much to say about "behavioral economics"-that is, the importance of "behaving honestly in one's commercial transactions" and "being deliberately transparent with your customers," Levinson explained. Parsing the 10th Commandment-"Thou shalt not covet"-provides Judeo-Christian teachings, for instance, on creating appropriate values for leading a good life, he and Hacker concurred.
For Levinson, the path to the intersection of money and religion was smooth, but certainly not predictable. Growing up in what he described as an "areligious" New York Jewish family, he said that one of his first exposures to "Jewish expression" was the annual seder hosted by a great-aunt and -uncle. When his peers began attending Hebrew school in preparation for their b'nai mitzvahs, he asked his indifferent parents to send him to his grandparent's synagogue for
bar mitzvah
instruction. It was "not an especially positive" experience, Levinson recalled, and post-bar mitzvah, he went through an "antagonistic" and "religiously rebellious" adolescent phase.
But religion was back on the table by this time he was an undergraduate. He majored in it at Princeton, and by the time he was 30, already a Harvard Divinity School alum and second-year law student at University of Chicago, he wrote
All That's Holy: A Young Guy, and Old Car, and the Search for God in America
(Jossey-Bass, 2003), his account of driving cross-country interviewing ordinary Americans of all backgrounds about their faiths and religious practices. The book was widely praised, and
Publisher's Weekly
called it "[w]ry, insightful, and balanced."
Today, Levinson remains active in the Jewish community. He and his family are longstanding members of KAM Isaiah Israel, where he has served on the Board, and he continues to engage deeply in Jewish study.
"Tom is one of the most brilliant, thoughtful, and deeply curious individuals I've ever met," said Hacker.
Money, Meet Meaning
can be accessed through Interfaith America's website:
interfaithamerica.org
.
Robert Nagler Miller is a journalist and editor who writes frequently about arts- and Jewish-related topics from his home in New York.
