Musing on…Bread and Promises

I just finished baking a couple of loaves of challah for a friend of mine because it’s her birthday and I promised. On the whole, this isn’t very remarkable. I cook a fair amount for family and friends. Given the migraine I’m having (still), let me tell ya…cooking was the last thing I wanted to be doing. While I could easily have postponed or gotten out of doing this, the fact of the matter is that I promised months before that I would bake these loaves.

To me, a promise is something that should be golden and rare. It’s more than agreeing, it’s more than giving your word…it’s a pledge that you will do whatever you must before allowing the promise to be broken. Only the most extraordinary of circumstances (death counts) are valid for even serious consideration of setting aside something that was promised.

Many people think that I’m rather quaint with this point of view. I prefer of thinking of it as being mindful of the responsibilities and obligations I agree to undertake, and treat them with the solemnity they deserve. This doesn’t seem to be the contemporary interpretation, however. People seem to be rather casual with making promises. Even something as serious as marriage isn’t given the effort that it was in days past; short of taking vows to join a religious order, this is about as serious as it’s supposed to get.

No. We live in an age where if you haven’t given more than 100% (which, buy strict definition is impossible if your scale is honest) you have underachieved, where anybody who isn’t simply sitting in front of a TV is called a hero, where moral character is often thought of as being weak–not by everyone, but by enough so that acts of integrity actually make the evening news.

I don’t think there’s a solution. History is replete with scoundrels both noble and common–so much so that it seems the norm for our species. Hard work is for suckers. Honesty is for saps. Integrity is only useful if you profit by it. Ah…there’s the rub. People with integrity _do_ profit from it. Yeah, it’s that touchy-feely knowing-you’ve-done-the-right-thing stuff that is often frowned on by those whose definition of cool actually means being a schmuck.

A family member (let’s call him "Dave") told us of his participation in a management-training course (mind you, this is before Gordon Gecko’s "Greed…is good" speech in the movie Wall Street). In an exercise, he’s in one of seven groups. They are told that if they work together, each group would make somewhere around 15% net profits, but they weren’t bound by that. So, the groups all get together and agree on a cooperative strategy to ensure steady growth for all. Then Dave’s group decides that instead of keeping their word, they would seek maximum profit. They made close to 50% while the rest never got out of the low single digits. Then the groups met again for the next cycle, the profitable group apologized profusely about having "misunderstood" the agreement, and agreed to play by the rules. Needless to say, they made it through another round with 50% profits. The next round two more groups broke ranks, and after that, they all did. It was too late. By the time the "suckers" realized they’d been had, they were in a sufficiently poor market position that they couldn’t recover. Only one group was healthy enough to stay in business at the end.

A lot of readers might be wondering why this is a problem. It’s market forces at work. The trouble is, it’s an example of lack of integrity breeding chaos. It’s systemic, societal, and global. It’s "Look after only yourself"-ism. Instead of seven healthy (virtual) business providing jobs, a tax base, and consumerism; you are left with a small group of fat cats laughing at the naive goodie-goodies for taking them at their word, and who now have to scramble for the scraps. For a small group it was a wise tactic, but for the larger whole it was being a bad corporate citizen. Ethics classes and seminars clearly have little effect as the situation never seems to improve.

All that’s left for us as individuals to do is to keep burning the light of integrity when we can. Baking a couple of loaves of bread for a friend when I didn’t feel healthy, after giving my word that I would, is but a drop compared to the oceans of broken words surrounding us, but it meant a lot to me. And to her…she really enjoyed the bread. The heartfelt smile and the hug of thanks made it all worth it. One of those charge-card "priceless" moments. And I got it all just because I kept my word.