December 3, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Vayetzei
The Bankman-Frieds and Us
December 3, 2022 — 9 Kislev 5783
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
In Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Lucy By the Sea, the central protagonist, Lucy Barton, goes through life with an essential question: what is it like to be you?
Two people make me think about that question. The first is Joseph Bankman, who is the Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School. His academic expertise is tax law. He is the author of widely used casebooks with exciting names like Federal Income Taxation. But he is not just a tax nerd. He is a deeply caring and empathetic professor. He got an additional degree in clinical psychology so that he could be more helpful in counseling anxious law students. He also hosted a podcast called WellnessCast for Stanford Law School to discuss “wellness and mental health within the legal profession.” A tax scholar with heart.
The other person I have been thinking about is Barbara Fried. She is the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Her academic expertise is distributive justice, namely, how are the goods and services in our society distributed, and are they distributed fairly? She is a three-time winner of an award that recognizes excellence in teaching at Stanford Law. Barbara Fried is married to Joseph Bankman.
Both professors were known at Stanford for being not only superb scholars and teachers, but also for being mensches who genuinely care about their students. In an article published in late November in The San Francisco Standard, Anna Tong writes:
Former students said both cared deeply about students, more so
than other professors. Fried invited students to her home and spent
time outside class talking with them about dealing with law school
pressure. A student of Bankman’s said he was…a “big-softie.”
Joe and Barbara raised two sons named Sam and Gabe. Over the dinner table, they would talk about utilitarianism, which is the doctrine that the most ethical principle is to maximize happiness for the greatest number of people. Every human being is entitled to happiness. Our job is to figure out what we can do to bring happiness to as many people as possible.
In 2020, Barbara Fried published a book called Facing Up to Scarcity. In the dedication, she pays a loving tribute to her sons:
Both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their
father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but
in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively,…
they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart
of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting
each person—alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door,
known or unknown to us—as one.
In other words, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried are both brilliant, idealistic, and nobly intentioned, and they raised their sons to share in their idealism.
Roll the film forward. Their son Sam Bankman-Fried enjoyed a meteoric rise as a titan of cryptocurrency. He was the founder and president of a cryptocurrency company called FTX. At one point his personal wealth was valued at 16 billion dollars. He cultivated this whole persona as a disheveled nerd genius with a heart of gold. His hair is a deliberately uncombed mop. He would wear deliberately schleppy t-shirts and shorts, deliberately uncool tube sox. He would wear this attire when meeting with captains of industry who were going to invest millions of dollars—like the Ontario Teachers Union—in FTX. There was a well-rehearsed and frequently repeated choreography when courting investors. Dressed in his shorts and t-shirt, he would be asleep, or fake sleep, on a bean bag in his office. When the potential investors walked in, he would wake up, or appear to wake up, and spring into brilliant action. It worked. He charmed countless investors who invested billions of dollars. He charmed political leaders of both parties. He charmed A List personalities, like Tom Brady and David Ortiz, to talk favorably about cryptocurrency. He charmed Bill Clinton into saying that Congress should pass laws that are favorable to his cryptocurrency business.
All of that unraveled quickly and spectacularly. FTX declared bankruptcy. Sam Bankman-Fried’s personal fortune went from 16 billion dollars to nothing overnight. Officials who were brought in to run the company, including the guy who supervised the end of Enron, said that in his entire career he had never seen such a hot mess as FTX: lack of discipline, lack of book-keeping and basic accounting principles, lack of ethics, lack of accountability. The money of investors who believed in Sam Bankman-Fried is gone. He sent untold amounts of money to a company run by his then girlfriend, a clear conflict of interest, unethical, possibly criminal. People who bet their pensions, or the pensions of their clients, on FTX now have to await the resolution of the bankruptcy proceedings. Who knows how much, if anything, will be recovered.
And to top it off, when launching FTX, he would speak about the effective altruism movement, the notion that he was making all this money to give it away to worthy causes, and to bring happiness to as many people as possible. And since it all came crumbling down, he is on record as ridiculing the very idealism his parents taught him and embodied. A Vox reporter named Kelsey Piper writes Fried in a tweet: “You were really good at talking about ethics…” And he writes back:
I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of to some extent. I feel bad for those who
get [hurt] by it (he uses a different word I can’t say on the bimah) by this dumb game we
woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths so everyone likes us.
Deep cynicism of a son who came from deeply idealistic parents. Which leads back to the framing question of Lucy Barton in Lucy by the Sea. What is it like to be Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried? They enjoy keter shem tov, the crown of a good name. But their son has disgraced himself and has made himself vulnerable to criminal prosecution. They are disciplined, principled, idealistic. But their son is undisciplined, unprincipled, and cynical. They do their best to help people. But their son has courted and then squandered the life savings of innocent people who trusted him. How do these two caring professors understand and make peace with their own cynical and careless son?
Most of us who are parents can relate at some level to the pathos of what Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried must be going through, because while the facts here are especially florid, public, scary, and humiliating, in our own less public and painful ways, most parents experience a more benign form of this same challenge: our adult children have minds and lives of their own, and while we care infinitely, we control so very little. As Andrew Solomon writes in the first line of his classic book Far From the Tree about parents and their very different children: “There is no such thing as reproduction…only production.”
How should parents understand and respond to this reality? The Torah observes that Isaac loves Esau. What does that mean, Isaac loves Esau? The late great rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes as follows:
“…why did Isaac love Esau, despite everything; his wildness, his mutability, and his outmarriages?… Isaac loved Esau because Esau was his son, and that is what parents do. They love their children unconditionally. That does not mean that Isaac could not see the faults in Esau’s character. It does not imply that he thought Esau the right person to continue the covenant. Nor does it mean he was not pained when Esau married Hittite women. The text explicitly says he was. But it does mean that Isaac knew that a father must love his son because he is his son. That is not incompatible with being critical of what he does. But a parent does not disown their child, even when the child disappoints their expectations. Isaac was teaching us a fundamental lesson in parenthood.”
Isaac says: My son, my son, I love my son. He makes choices I would not have made. But nothing can keep me from loving my son. My heart will always belong Esau. If he loves hunting, I will learn to love steak.
Rabbi Sacks’s Torah on Isaac loving Esau applies to these crestfallen parents. What must it be like to be Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried? They must be in the throes of asking themselves painful questions. What did we do wrong? What could we have done differently? What did we not see? What did we miss? And yet, even as they ask these hard questions, they must know that the answer is that their adult son is an adult. He is his own person. He made his own choices. He is living his own life. There is no such thing as reproduction. Only production.
And what it must be like to be Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried is also to be resolute in their love for their son, no matter what. That is what a parent’s unconditional love means. We never give up on our children, not ever. Not Isaac when Esau does his Esau thing. Not Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried when Sam Bankman-Fried explodes his life and their lives. Not us, when our adult children make choices we would never have made but which we can do absolutely nothing to control.
And what it must be like to be Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried–and to be any parent of adult child–who is not thriving at the moment, is to hold out hope, legitimate hope, that the story is not over, that the end has not yet been written, that our children will still figure it out, and that they will thrive again. Isaac loves Esau, despite Esau’s challenges, because Esau is his son. But in the end, Esau becomes a mensch. Younger Esau resolved to kill Jacob. But in next week’s portion, older Esau, more evolved Esau, an Esau that grew, hugged Jacob, kissed Jacob, was genuinely delighted to reconnect with Jacob, and invited his brother to his home, to renew and deepen their relationship after all they had been through.
What is true of Esau is true of all of us. True of our children. True of Sam Bankman-Fried once he pays the price for his misdeeds. We are all entitled to grow, change, deepen, get better. Every life can become a redemption story. And that means we parents have legitimate reason not only always to love and support our children, but also to never give up hope, for their redemption story is just waiting to be written. Shabbat shalom.