In of itself, this is no big deal for most Manhattanites. Living on the Upper West Side, I sometimes find myself darting past piles of young actors playing corpses for the various Law & Order installments that have made the neighborhood their perpetual playground, and a star appearance on my block by George Clooney a few years back did more to acquaint me with my neighbors than had eight years of living under one roof. But that day downtown, things were different. The little yellow signs posted everywhere detailed the production’s title: Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

I am a child of the 1980s, and so the original Oliver Stone drama had a deep impact on my developing psyche. It taught me that it’s cool to be a greedy, self-obsessed moron with little or no regard for anything but his immediate material needs. This being the quintessential message 11-year-old boys everywhere yearn to hear, I spent considerable chunks of time in the sixth grade channeling my inner Gordon Gekko, the evil tycoon portrayed with much gusto by Michael Douglas. I borrowed one of my father’s tattered blazers, badgered my parents for a subscription to Globes, Israel’s premiere financial paper, and did my best to always sound as if I was on the cusp of launching a hostile takeover of a competing conglomerate. It didn’t do much for my social standing in elementary school; thankfully, a year later Big came out and provided me with a much more child-friendly model of a business executive.

Gekko’s famous catchphrase from the first film was “greed is good.” It’s a sentiment that echoes far more feebly in today’s America, ravaged as it is by the financial implosion of the last two years. Greed, we’ve all learned the hard way, may be many things, but good is never one of them. Stone knows that: According to reports, the new film recasts Gekko as a repentant capitalist working to warn the rest of the world of the coming economic disaster. If it’s not too late, the director may want to send his screenwriter a copy of this week’s haftorah. It’s a famous one: after asking the Lord for wisdom in a dream, King Solomon is approached by two women, each claiming that a certain baby is hers. Solomon famously orders the baby cut in half, and watches as the real mother surrenders her claim so as not to harm the child.

While we celebrate the king’s nimble mind, we too often ignore the story’s true, gritty meaning, namely that one woman was willing to let an infant be halved rather than admit defeat and let another woman triumph.

Little, it seems, has changed since biblical times. In it annual roundup of the year’s most notable ideas, The New York Times Magazine wrote about a phenomenon called Drunken Ultimatums, observed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Duke. The scientists recruited two participants, and introduced them to a simple game: one participant would be given a sum of money, and would then have to offer a portion of that sum to his partner. If the partner agrees, both participants keep the cash; if he or she refuses, however, both walk away empty-handed. To make the experiment a bit more interesting, a bit of booze was introduced into the equation.

“The scholars were interested in drunkenness because intoxication, as other social-science experiments have shown, doesn’t fuzz up judgment so much as cause the drinker to overly focus on the most prominent cue in his environment,” wrote Christopher Shea. “The most prominent cue, in this case, being money, the hypothesis was simple: if people truly care more about their long-term goals, they’d take the money, no matter how much or how little was being offered. If, however, they cared more about revenge—similar experiments had shown that most participants tended to reject the monetary offer, finding it to fall short of their expectations—they’d reject the pay and take satisfaction instead in seeing their partner lose cash as well.

The results should come as little surprise. “In both setups,” writes Shea, “drunken players were less likely than their sober peers to accept offers of less than 50 percent of the total. The finding suggests, the authors said, that the principal impulse driving subjects was a wish for revenge.”

The evil mother, then, the one willing to see the baby cut in half, is not evil at all. She is human, acting like humans always have and always will. It is Solomon who is otherworldly and foreign. After he passes his judgment, the haftorah tells us, “all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king; for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him to do judgment.”

Humbling words. Impartiality, which we might assume to be governing official human environments such as the courthouse, the state house, and the marketplace, is presented instead as something foreign, fearful, and divine. Like the social scientists with their boozy ultimatums, the Israelites, too, know that to be human is to be petty and vengeful, to sacrifice one’s own good for the pleasure of witnessing another’s misfortune.

Which, frankly, makes me miss Gordon Gekko. He, at least, was only greedy. And while greed may not be good, it is often be rational, even innocuous, as its sole interest is the continuous acquisition of more assets; put no major moral obstacles in its way, and it’s nothing but a never-ending treasure hunt. But revenge is mad, and maddening, and mercurial, delivering nothing but misery and horrors. Let us consider that the next time some offers us a stiff drink and cold, hard cash.

Attached were a few short letters. I read them once or twice and felt a warm rush of empathy towards their author. I could tell he was young, as he possessed that special sort of certainty that is only ours to keep until we become settled, mature, and reasonable adults.

He needed every bit of the brashness of youth to pull off his central argument: poverty, wrote the juvenile correspondent, was the one true path, the best way of life, a state of glistening bliss to which we must all aspire. If powers corrupts, he thundered, the lack of it must redeem.

It would be unkind to quote the eager young man’s work verbatim, but there he was, in letter after letter, arguing passionately that if one is to remain morally upright and politically just, one had to commit to a life of obstinate abjection. His greatest aspiration, the writer added, was to amble through life a cheerful pauper, sustained by bread and flowers and the occasional poem.

The letters filled my heart with hope. An itinerant college professor, I’ve spent much time in the company of young men and women on the cusp of adulthood, and was too often dismayed to learn that their ambitions had more to do with IPOs than poetry. This kid, whoever he was, may have been naïve, but he at least seemed to have soul to spare. I liked him.

As I put down the letters, however, a question crept into my mind—why was my friend sending me the epistles of some random dude? I was perplexed. I leaned back in my comfortable chair, sipped on the espresso I had made in my fine Italian machine from fresh-roasted beans I had imported from Costa Rica, launched a new window on my silvery new MacBook Pro, and intended to get to the bottom of the mystery.

A second later, a bolt struck hard. I knew who had written these letters. It was me.

It was 10 years ago. I had just graduated college and arrived in New York on a one-way ticket and with just enough cash to buy a few cups of coffee and the occasional hot dog. I was writing to my friend from the main hall of the public library on 42nd Street. And my enthusiasm was genuine: despite being impoverished, I felt freer than I had ever been, a man without duty living a life of no consequence. I sneered at the drones I saw passing me on their way from Grand Central Terminal to midtown Manhattan’s corporate castles. All they’ll ever have is money, I told myself then, whereas me, I’d always have the spirit.

I’ve since abandoned the follies of my youth, as you surely realize, and while I am still faithful to many of the same core ideals, I’ve rid myself of the foolish notion that poverty is in some way poetic, romantic or righteous in its own right. I still prefer the riches of Wordsworth to those of Wall Street, but if I can discuss the The Prelude while sipping on a lovely 2005 St. Emilion and sitting on a comfortable leather sofa, hallelujah. Wealth and poverty in of themselves don’t define us in any way; the values we assign to them do.

Just ask Hosea. The prophet, delivering this week’s haftorah, knew all there is to know about keepin’ it real. On God’s command, he married a harlot and named his daughter Unloved and his son Not Mine. He preached during tempestuous times in Jewish history, with the Northern Kingdom of Israel spinning downward toward ruin. And he realized that the problem was not so much having or not having earthly possessions but the way these possessions, or the lack thereof, make us see the world.

As Exhibit A he offered Ephraim, another name for the northern kingdom founded by the sinful king Jeroboam after the virtuous Solomon’s death. “And Ephraim said: Surely I have become rich; I have found power for myself,” Hosea booms, adding, “all my toils shall not suffice for my iniquity which is sin.”

Prosperous at the time of Hosea’s prophesying, the folks at the northern kingdom must have looked upon the ranting madman and his oddly named offspring as a collection of kooky outcasts. After all, isn’t material wealth proof of divine love? Wouldn’t God bless with riches only those of his creations he saw as deserving and just?

Unlike Calvinism, Judaism, quite radically, contends that the answer is no. Trying to assign spiritual values to material circumstances requires, by necessity, a belief that Man could somehow divine the mindset of God. Instead, our theology offers us a more complicated, and, ultimately, far more liberating assertion. Since we cannot ever know the Lord’s will, it tells us, all we have to go by is the laws he had given us. And these laws, being laws, are subject to endless debate, discussion, argument without end. We are therefore advised to seek the answers not in signs from above but in ourselves. We are urged, to paraphrase a seasonal favorite, to be good for goodness’s sake. We are meant to do the right thing without any expectation of compensation.

But this isn’t some altruistic fantasy. With righteous behavior come rewards, not heavenly prizes but earthly ones—if we obey those laws, prophet after prophet tells us, what we’ll get is a society that’s just and progressive and allows each man, rich or poor, to live with dignity and grace.

The captains of the northern kingdom saw things differently. For them, just like for my youthful self, there was merit in might and purity in power. They found proof of God’s love in every shekel and every sword, and they were so busy with inventory that they didn’t see the catastrophe coming right at them. We all know how their journey ended. May it not be that way for us.

It’s a question anyone who has ever applied to anything has pretended to contemplate at some point or other before changing the topic and embarking on yet another thinly veiled paean to the self. But I was a savvier interviewee. I had an answer to that nagging, perennial question. I had S.

I met her in the Israel Defense Forces. I was a young and cynical Non-Commissioned Officer who had audaciously dreamt up a brand new department as a means to avoid doing actual work, and S. was one of the soldiers assigned to my command. She was nothing like the others: whereas her colleagues were happy to follow my lead, produce hefty reports and other misleading signs of productivity, and bolt back home in the early afternoon, S. was always spoiling for a fight. She was the daughter of privilege and was stationed with our small and desirable unit through the efforts of her influential mother. A few weeks after her arrival, it became clear to her commanding officers that S. was not to the mess hall born and viewed authority the way bulls view the matador’s red flag. Placing her in my care, then, was a stroke of genius. It relieved the higher-ups from having to contend with the feisty young woman, and it assured them that if, for whatever reason, I, too, failed to tame her, I could easily be sacrificed to her powerful mum.

It took S. four days to unleash her fury on my small and peaceable kingdom. It began with a roll of an eye, crescendoed into a symphony of sighs, and soon arrived on the brink of insubordination. One day, S. arrived sans uniform, wearing fashionable jeans and a torn t-shirt. Another, she didn’t arrive at all, telling me, when I called her cell phone, that she was too tired to report for duty.

Despite being as of yet unaware of the all-important question regarding leadership skills looming in my professional future, I instinctively knew what I had to do. I summoned all my soldiers, S. included, to a meeting, and unceremoniously removed the rank insignia from my shoulders and slid them across the table toward a silent S.

“Here you go,” I said. “You seem to have many ideas about how this place should be run. You’re in charge now. Tell us what to do.”

It took her a moment or two to realize I wasn’t kidding. She tried to act indignant, but I wouldn’t budge. If she thought she knew better, I told S., now was her chance to prove it. Sensing her colleagues’ hungry looks, S. understood she had stumbled into a showdown and had no choice but to draw. She placed the ranks on her own shoulders and announced she was now in charge. Then she smiled and instructed all of us to get the hell out of her office.

Her triumph, however, was short-lived. For all of my leniency and good humor, I ran my department efficiently and knew how to motivate my soldiers. S. didn’t. She treated her former peers like servants, abused her power whenever she could, made mistakes, got in trouble, tried to cover up, panicked. Three days passed, then five, then a week. Soon, S. asked me out for a drink.

While shakily holding a cigarette, she apologized. She had no idea, she said, how tough it was to be in charge. She gave me back my rank insignia, shook my hand, and promised to be a perfect soldier. And, for the remainder of my time in the office, she was.

I thought about S. as I read this week’s haftorah, which details the efforts of King David’s son Adoniahu to elbow aside his brother Solomon, the heir apparent. The story depicts the court as a cluster of conspiracies, a byzantine institution where power-starved parties are forever at each other’s throats. Throw in the virgin who appears at the story’s outset to help keep the ancient monarch warm, and you get a story that makes Showtime’s raunchy Henry VIII series, The Tudors, look tame.

The main function of the tale, however, only becomes evident when compared to the week’s parasha, which tells the story of Isaac and Rebecca and the death, at age 175, of Abraham. Unlike the redheaded king, Judaism’s Founding Father has no court but a tent, no kingdom but a divine promise of a great nation that will one day spring forth from his loins. More importantly, Abraham faces no succession war but passes the mantle peacefully to his son. And unlike Adoniahu, Isaac understands that authority, in its truest sense, can never be usurped, but must be bestowed on its proper owner at just the right moment in time.

This sentiment is anathema to modern minds. We, a generation bent on empowerment, have come to believe fervently in Gloria Steinem’s famous edict, that power can be taken but never given, and listen to the Beastie Boys when they opine that one must fight for one’s right to party. Adoniahu sure did, colluding with the commander of the army, keeping his father’s loyalists at bay, and conducting all the rituals of coronation to cement his ill-gotten stature. And yet, by the time the story ends, he is denounced and the crown promised to his wiser sibling.

But the biblical system is anything but retrograde. It is, in fact, astonishingly meritocratic, dulling the edge of ambition and impeding its ability to woo and wound the powers that be. It places at the helm only those most deserving of privilege; it may deprive people of a modicum of agency, but it also blissfully robs them of their shining ounces of unsubstantiated pride.

In an age when challenges to power have become the stuff of popular t-shirts, such absolutist talk of preordained appointments can make many of us squeamish. But before we roll our eyes at the heavens or take a shot at the crown, let us remember that there’s another way, and that power is pointless unless it is deserved and well-used. It’s a rule I’ve put forth a thousand times in a thousand different job interviews: sometimes, the best way to see if you’re fit to lead is to take off your ranks and see if they ever make it back to you.