Leap of faith: taking unfair advantage is a no-no

The latter half of Leviticus 19:14 reads: “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind. You shall fear your God, I am the Eternal One.”

For the rabbis of the Talmud, this Torah law had to mean more than stopping people doing something they saw as childish at best and obviously cruel at worst. They also pondered why this phrase about fearing God was included in the verse. That led them to look at where else it was used and they found only four examples, all in the book of Leviticus.

In each case, the phrase accompanied the sort of law that could be broken without anyone else realising at the time, or maybe ever. When you might be tempted to deceive someone else to your own advantage, the Torah clearly warned that God would know! So, they concluded that what the Torah was really prohibiting is that you should never use your knowledge about something to gain advantage over someone else.

If, as alleged, people who knew the election date placed a bet on it, they sought to profit from their knowledge and someone else’s ignorance. Such taking of an unfair advantage should offend our sense of fairness and we would always hope that the law would match our sense of natural justice.

In the world of business and finance, a term we use for such advantage taking is insider trading. I find it remarkable that the rabbis prohibited this around 1600 years ago, while UK law only legislated against insider dealing in 1980.

Elsewhere in the same chapter, we read that the wages of a hired day labourer must not be held “overnight until morning” (verse 13), as you might prevent them affording food and lodging for the night. In the wake of the awarding of contracts for personal protective equipment during the Covid pandemic, there seems to have been advantage-taking that the Talmudic prohibition would address. The sort of lengthy and abusive late payment of supplier invoices that, for example, were practised by Carillion Plc before it collapsed should never have passed audit, and the aftershocks of that collapse are still playing out. Small businesses suffered badly and people’s lives were profoundly affected.

Later are rules that prohibit false measures of length, weight or capacity (verses 35 – 36). Integrity in business dealings was and is seen as consistent with the concept of holiness.

In Leviticus, and later, there is something that goes beyond compliance with the law of the land. There is a higher standard of ethics applicable to all aspects of business, which is about sanctifying God’s name through going beyond the latter of the law and acting to be above suspicion.

Such ethics and principles are relevant to contemporary life and the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence – just think about deep fakes. It seems that today there are more stumbling blocks being placed than ever.