What Bernie Madoff Can Teach Us About Trusting in God

What a public scandal reveals about human nature's deepest craving.

The Bernie Madoff scandal is (thankfully) old news. Yet, I think the story can teach us something important about ourselves.

The day it hit, my Jewish philosophy professor came into class in a state of amused irritation toward Yeshiva University, who had issued a notice to all the staff.

“Fortunately, we only had 18% of the university’s endowment compromised,” it said. My teacher was incredulous.

“Only 18%??”

The truth was, only 18% was not so bad. Many people had invested their entire life savings with Madoff. Others had given over to him generations’ worth of wealth—not only their own, but their family’s, friends’, and clients’ money. They had trusted him with everything in the biggest Ponzi scheme the world has ever known. And when he was exposed, it first appeared that they had lost it all.

When I first heard about the Madoff scandal, I assumed that greed had somehow driven it. Jumping to conclusions, I thought people must have blindly sought the highest returns they could get, and got hit. Uncovering a kind of hidden sin in Madoff’s investors made the turnaround seem less senseless.

But as I learned more, I realized that the motive that led so many people to entrust everything they had to someone who was, in retrospect, quite obviously operating a fraudulent business, was perhaps far deeper.

Madoff guaranteed growth for his clients. The charts that showed his returns did not have the normal up-and-down distribution that investment returns necessarily have. Rather, they were linear. They went straight up. His returns were good, yes, but more than being good, they were consistent, and they were certain.

The Madoff scandal, was, therefore, less an exposer of greed than an exposer of fear—the fear of risk and the wish for security.

Why is this relevant?

The starting place for trust, and the risk-taking necessary in life and in business, is recognizing this fear…this desire to know that everything will be okay. I will have a roof over my head, I will have food to eat, I will not wallow in shame and failure for not meeting the needs of my family.

Yet if you think about seeking security through the means we often seek them, their futility is quickly apparent. The wealthiest person can still die of starvation, the healthiest person can still drop dead from a sudden heart attack, assets can lose value, governments can collapse.

As Madoff’s clients (who trusted both Madoff and the institutions who approved him) learned so painfully, there is no safety, no certainty, in the manmade world.

Is our search for safety then doomed to fail? Must we live with fear festering under the surface at all times?

Fortunately, we have an alternative when it comes to seeking a sense of safety. “Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust and I will not fear.”

Trust in God, is indeed, the antidote to the latent drive for security and our constant underlying fear. How, and in what ways? Let us continue to explore.

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