Emotional Accounting Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley November 30, 2025

Thank you so much for having me these uh

three Sundays over the course of the

fall, over the course of Reverend

Marcus' time with his new baby.

It's been a real pleasure.

In the novel The Dispossessed

by Ursula Kawwen,

Chevik is a brilliant physicist who has

made a breakthrough that will change the

world. Change the worlds, I should say,

because this is a science fiction novel

and there are many worlds that know

about one another's existence.

On Chevvik's world,

there are no possessions. There's no

money. Everyone takes what they need and

gives what they can of their labor.

It's a society that was born of a

revolution on the neighboring world and

has sustained for generations this form

of anarchistic socialism.

He goes off to offer his breakthrough to

the neighboring planet which is called

Urus. And the place that he goes there,

the country he goes is a lot like our

own country. Um everything's

transactional. It's a it's a wealthy

country. Um and poverty is not very

desperate there. Um, but he he has to

get used to the fact that, for example,

what he hears on the radio is mostly

advertisements of things for sale

and that everything around him has been

bought and sold. It belongs to somebody

and doesn't belong to someone else.

Now, they know about uh his discovery.

They find it valuable and um they want

to talk to him about it, but he doesn't

he doesn't want to sell it.

He wants to share it,

but he finds himself caught in this web

of transactions.

And in a plea at the very end of the

book, he says, "Is there no alternative

to selling?

Is there not such a thing as the gift?"

Of course there is. on Urus and in our

own land that is so obsessed with buying

and selling. But the gift

can get hidden under all of that, you

know, all this transactionality,

even in our most intimate relationships.

Maybe you've found that there are some

relationships

in which you'd like to give and receive

gifts, but it's difficult. It always

seems that there are strings attached or

someone is fearing that there are

strings attached is looking for them is

treating it as a transaction when

another party intends just a gift

and so it's very difficult to give one.

There's a story from my own life that's

remained with me for many years. I was

16 years old. I was working in an ice

cream store. Uh, it was my first job

outside of babysitting, earning minimum

wage, which seemed pretty amazing to me,

getting $4.55 an hour for scooping ice

cream.

I remember what everything cost more or

less. Um, most people came in and got a

single scoop, $120.

Some people got a double that was 220 or

240.

Once in a while, somebody would just get

an 80 cent kids scoop.

This was in New Haven, Connecticut,

which was and is a very poor city. Lots

of people there were very poor.

One day, a man came into the ice cream

shop looking pretty ragged.

And asked how much the cheapest cone

was. I said 80 cents. And I scooped it

up for him. And I stood there as he

began to pull money from his pockets.

this sort of greasy coat, holes in it,

a nickel, a bunch of pennies,

a dime, more pennies, a quarter. I

thought, "Oh, thank God. We're moving

along." I stood there very awkwardly

watching him pull apparently every bit

of money he had

until he got to 64 cents.

He dug in his pocket some more

and then he kind of shrugged at me

and I shrugged at him and I handed him

the ice cream

and I took the 64 cents off the counter

feeling bad

all around.

Feeling that I wasn't supposed to accept

only 64 cents. I was cheating my

employers of 16 cents plus tax.

Feeling that surely I could be more

generous than I was being. That maybe I

was humiliating him by watching him pull

out

penny a nickel to reach this small

amount of money that was so much for

him.

Now, of course,

if I had it to do over, I would just

say, "Oh, please. Can I buy you an ice

cream?" and I would scoop him up a

double and I would give my employer the

240 plus tax.

But I didn't have that wherewithal at

16. And not financially, I don't mean,

but just in my mind, in my heart,

I was steeped in this sense of scarcity,

in these rules about transactions. He's

supposed to come in and give me the

right amount of money, and then I'm

supposed to give him the ice cream, and

that's that. This isn't mine to give

away. I don't have money. I can't just

give things to people who come in. I I

don't know.

It was painful because I felt like I was

insulting his dignity.

And even now, I realize that a lot of

the feelings that I'm assuming were

there in that room might not have been

at all.

Maybe what I was doing was granting him

a lot more dignity than it would have

been for a 16-year-old girl to offer him

the gift of an ice cream cone. I don't

know. Of course, I didn't ask him what

he felt.

I stuck with the transaction

and it has stuck with me this lesson in

a fact that I had been steeped in in my

religious upbringing

which is that how we give and receive

matters.

I felt like there was something grudging

about my end of that interaction,

lacking in generosity.

And I realized over time that I'd

learned about that.

There is a 12th century Spanish Jewish

philosopher named Moses Benmont. So from

several centuries before the origin of

the story that Katherine shared with us

um he's known as mymonities

and that's

how I had been brought up to think about

these things. The how of giving and

receiving that mymonities articulated he

said there there is a ladder of charity.

It has eight rungs. And the very top of

the ladder

is the best way to give to somebody in

need is to make them no longer dependent

by a gift or a loan by going into

partnership with them or giving them a

job, some way that you can launch them.

Much like the man in the story, he said,

"I got a job. Now I can I can take care

of myself and others."

the sort of teach somebody to fish idea

that according to my monities that's the

highest level of of giving.

The second best way is to give in a way

that's anonymous all around. the giver

who doesn't know who's receiving. The

recipient does not know from where comes

their gift, their charity.

And thus we see that for mymonities

that that sense of people's dignity,

the shame, whether there should be shame

or not, the shame of receiving

is an issue. And that little tinge of of

pride, that pat on the back,

even sometimes that arrogance of giving,

that's something that he counsels us to

avoid. They're on the seventh step. That

if we could take those out of the

equation, that would be the best. And

then about the third and fourth, we used

to debate in Sunday school, in my Jewish

Sunday school, which one was better. He

said the third best is when the giver

knows who's receiving but the recipient

doesn't know who their benefactor is.

And number four is the other way around.

Oh, we were great philosophers. We used

to talk about why is that one better?

Which one's better than the other?

The fifth best is is to give directly

into somebody's hand without being

asked.

You just see somebody in need.

So translating there, I could have just

said I could see, not to assume from his

clothes, but this man seemed to be

pretty down and out. And then of course

once he started digging for pennies and

nickels, I knew

80 cents was a lot of money for him. I

could have just said at that moment, let

me let me just make a present of this to

you if you don't mind, sir. Anonymity is

not possible, but just giving without

even being asked, that was still

possible.

The sixth best according to my monities

is to give after being asked.

And the seventh is giving less than one

ought to

but with gladness and good grace. And

the eighth, the minimum way to give is

grudgingly.

Notice he doesn't say how much.

Maybe you're giving more than the person

who gives with the good grace, but

you're giving grudgingly. That's the

worst.

What my monities doesn't go into in a

lot of detail

is when is giving actually

transactional, but it seems to me that

he's helped get us thinking about that.

What does giving feel like? You know,

half of a sale.

This gift for return of gratitude

or another gift at the next holiday.

The irony of course is that true

gratitude, a desire really to give to

others tends to blossom only when there

has been a true gift.

I mean, of course, we all like to thank

and be thanked even in the freest

situations of gift giving. You know,

when we just we give the way we give to

a friend. I saw something. It made me

think of you. I thought it would make

you happy. So, here I I got it for you.

No occasion, no obligation, just I love

you and I wanted to give you something.

And of course then we say thank you with

no sense of obligation, right? Just

we're just glad to be appreciated, to be

known and loved.

And even there reciprocity of course is

a part of things. We wouldn't long stay

friends with somebody if the giftgiving

was always one-sided. But that sense of

just spontaneously giving, that's when

true gratitude seems to emerge.

But my monities, he laid the groundwork

for thinking about giving as a spiritual

and emotional matter by spelling out how

it matters very much how one gives.

Otherwise, the latter of charity would

simply be a list of amounts. The lowest

is the lowest, the highest is the best.

The more you give, the better. He wanted

to make it perfectly clear not. So

now I keep using the word charity but

that is not the word that my monities

used. He was speaking of saddaka the

Hebrew word which uh is used to mean

charity

as in if you're Jewish you probably keep

a saddaka box in your house for putting

money in. Put sort of all your extra

change in there and you give it away

when it fills up. But the word saddaka

really means what is right, justice.

Saddaka.

And of course, the word charity, you

probably know comes from kadas. It means

love.

So why do we have such negative

connotations

with the word charity?

The way it carries a sense of insult to

the dignity of the recipient, a little

unwarranted pride on the part of the

giver.

If one receives charity,

what happens to all those icky

connotations if we replace the word

charity with love?

like in the sentence, I don't want to

have to depend upon

love.

Maybe we wouldn't feel that way,

that shame about charity if we felt we

were receiving the love of our

neighbors.

Or what if we replaced it with justice?

The word charity replaced by justice. I

try to give to justice every week.

Very different.

Our n our nation has been weathering a

crisis of charity

like when our national program ground to

a halt that ensures that everybody has

enough to eat or more to eat. Anyway,

it gave rise that crisis and snap

benefits to some interesting expressions

in that dangerous dangerous place, the

internet.

Somebody was reflecting I saw during

that time

I learned that 42 million Americans get

SNAP benefits. He said, "Doesn't anyone

want to work anymore?" That is a direct

quote.

Others pointed out,

of course, in response that the vast

majority of people receiving SNAP do

work. Half of the total recipients work

full-time.

And these as others then asked different

questions

like

why have we created an economic system

in which a person can work 40 hours a

week and be unable to afford enough

food?

And an even more important question,

how shall we change it?

Because as Chevvex says elsewhere in

that marvelous novel, The Dispossessed,

he says, "You talk about economic laws.

They're not laws. They're not like the

laws of physics.

They're not like gravity.

We made them.

like justice, saddaka, or the lack

thereof. How do we want to bring our

system that we have created and that we

can remake into alignment

with justice,

with love?

As for most of the rest of the people

who receive SNAP, of course, it's

because of their age. they're too young,

many, many millions of children, or too

old to work, or they have a disability

that's keeping them from bringing in a

full-time income.

So, here too, we could ask,

what is the just way,

the loving way

to ensure that people who otherwise

would have trouble earning a living have

enough to eat?

What is the way to do it that is in

keeping with karas and saddaka

emotional accounting

is a term for applying financial

principles to our relationships. our

friendships, our marriages, the

relationship between parents and

children, cousin and cousin, among

members of a congregation.

Now there are financial realities in all

those relationships of course. But when

we reduce emotional

spiritual connections

to financial transactions

or things that act like them, even if

it's not actually money changing hands,

we lose something very important.

Like when we have that expectation that

a gift will be repaid with one of equal

value or that a recipient will express

thanks effusively and many times over.

That one way another or another our

gifts are not gifts but payments,

transactions,

a matter of accounting.

So what if we turn that around?

What if instead of viewing the give and

take of relationships through financial

lenses, using financial metaphors,

as we so often do,

to our cost to use another financial

word?

What if we viewed our financial

relationships through an emotional and

spiritual lens,

which is what we are gathered to do, of

course.

After all, an econ economy is made up of

people.

It's a bunch of networks. It's a network

of relationships.

And we have feelings about these

relationships, about the people we

employ and are employed by, about the

people whose taxes fund things for other

people. We care about the people

affected by our own taxes. When we bring

emotional accounting into these

conversations, we're doing what

mymonities did, saying not only the

dollar amounts matter,

but the how of giving and receiving.

These are questions

of tadaka and karas, justice and love.

Well, this gets scary. It gets scary

for some people because, you know,

things get difficult when we look at at

the how how money came our way or

didn't.

So, here's an incident. You might have

heard this too from a few weeks ago when

we were in this crisis of the the new

month is coming. Are people going to get

their SNAP benefits and so many other

things that were falling apart when the

government was shut down?

Billy Isish, very young, very talented

singer and songwriter. She's 23 or 24, I

believe.

I learned at that time that uh she's in

possession of $44 million.

And I learned this because she gave a

quarter of her wealth, not her income, a

quarter of her wealth away to

environmental causes, I believe.

And she announced this when she was

getting some kind of community award.

and she challenged the billionaires in

the audience, there were some to do the

same.

Reportedly, this annoyed some of them.

I don't know if that's a fair

interpretation of their facial

expressions or the amount of applause

they gave. I didn't see the video.

What we do know is that there is a myth

underlying wealth in this country and is

bless her

challenged it.

The myth is

those of us with wealth earned it.

The wealthy deserve it.

Now, it's interesting. These are terms

of justice, right? Earning, deserving.

That's some common ground.

Both those who believe this myth and

those who challenge it probably care

about justice. When someone says it's

unjust to ask billionaires for any of

their money or much less require much of

it in taxes, they're speaking about

what's fair,

common ground. Okay. So, let's talk

about that.

Obviously,

if they think that the proper feeling

for those who receive anything from

people as rich as is and much much

richer, like the billionaires in the

room is gratitude.

Well, that's one way they feel grat

they're supposed to feel gratitude,

indebtedness, maybe not just financial,

but emotional.

That's yours and you gave it to me, so I

have to feel a certain way.

Now, I want to be clear. By giving away

one quarter of her wealth, Billy Isish

left herself with over $33 million,

more than anyone would ever need. She

didn't impoverish herself, nor did she

claim to, and nor does she have to. She

did the decent thing. She acted out of

love for her community at a moment when

her country has abandoned its already

meager promises

to improve the environment.

A time when our government was going to

leave people literally starving.

She said, "I can do something about

that." And she did it.

Now, if Mark Zuckerberg, who was in

attendance, gave away one quarter of his

wealth,

>> no,

let's do a different math problem.

If he gave away 99.5%

of his wealth,

he would still be a billionaire,

a millionaire a thousand times over.

Now,

do these folks with these unimaginable

riches, do they deserve their money?

Is Zuckerberg have both created things

that people want. That's how they made

money. They sold things that people were

willing to pay for. I like her music and

I like using Facebook, so I'm not saying

that they shouldn't be getting money for

those things.

But when we apply real emotional

accounting, when we say

what are the emotional, the spiritual

issues involved,

no by no measure are they more deserving

of their riches than for example the

best kindergarten teacher I have ever

seen. Yeah,

>> I you can whoop. I was fortunate enough

I'm talking about a specific person. I

was fortunate enough for him to be my

daughter's kindergarten teacher.

I mean, if we want to talk about what

people deserve, right? Terms of

deserving, he does good work. He works

hard. He does something that's important

that just about everybody agrees is

important and valuable in our society.

And he makes I mean, you know, nobody

goes into kindergarten teaching to be

rich. I'm sure he would be embarrassed

um if he thought I was suggesting that

he ought to be or wants to be.

But can we all agree

he shouldn't have to worry about money?

Nobody should. Who's doing that work? He

should have enough.

>> Amen.

>> Enough for everything he and his family

need. And a little sprinkling of luxury

is just what we all want to get through

this life.

And the reason he probably doesn't is

that the market doesn't reward what he

does. That's all.

It isn't based on saddaka or k car

karas.

So the first thing we could do if we

want to change this is stop pretending

that it is because that's an insult.

Let's just say

Billy Isish is rich because she produces

beautiful music that a lot of people

want to listen to and so they give her

money for it. That's all. Let's not

pretend that that's more worthwhile.

$44 million more worthwhile than what

other people do.

And then the next thing we could do is

we could fix it.

We could actually

change our system because it's not like

gravity.

People made it. People can make it

differently.

You know, there's always mixed motives

to our giving.

Emotions are complicated things.

We may give freely and still also kind

of be hoping that that person will give

us a nice gift next time. I you know

but if we clear away the unpleasant

feelings and unworthy motives that are

always a little mixed into our giving

then we can discover that under them are

other richer reasons. Ones that will

give us joy. Ones that will make the

gift more meaningful.

Make it a true gift for the one who

receives it and release a sense of

abundance and generosity in the one who

gives it.

There are always joyful, loving reasons

to give. They lurk under the guilt and

duty and resentment and social pressure

and social appearances and all the

things that also worm their way into our

giving and receiving. And once we've

acknowledged all of those,

then these beautiful reasons

of love and justice

emerge and they shine and they show us

the way to a life that overflows with

gifts.

So may it be