Shalom Brothers: When Money Becomes Manhood (Behar-Behukotai)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International

Men are often taught to treat money as proof of manhood.

Not just as a practical necessity. As evidence. Evidence that you are competent, desirable, serious, protective, respectable. Evidence that you can provide, recover, endure. Evidence that your life is moving forward. And if that evidence starts to thin out—if debt grows, work falters, a divorce drains your savings, child support rearranges your budget, or the life you thought you’d have at forty-five looks more like survival than success—many men do not experience that merely as financial strain. They experience it as humiliation.

That is one of the quieter brutalities of masculine culture: it trains men to confuse economic hardship with personal failure.

Leviticus 25 offers a striking alternative. In the sabbatical and Jubilee laws, debt and loss are treated as real, serious, socially consequential—but never as final verdicts on a person’s worth. Land returns. Slavery ends. Economic misfortune is not supposed to become a permanent identity. The Torah seems to understand something that modern men are often denied: financial hardship may change your circumstances, but it must not be allowed to become a lasting assault on your dignity. Unfortunately, that is not how many men live.

For a lot of men, money is never just money. It is self-image. It is social standing. It is erotic credibility. It is the difference between feeling like the adult in the room and feeling secretly exposed. That is why men so often lie about it—not always directly, but atmospherically. They project confidence. They downplay fear. They keep spending to preserve an image. They avoid conversations with spouses. They postpone asking for help. They carry debt like a moral stain and call the whole performance “holding it together.” However, being quietly terrified is not the same thing as being together.

And it is remarkable how little honest language many men have for this. Men will discuss the market, interest rates, business news, crypto, side hustles, and whose career is “crushing it.” But ask what money pressure is doing to their sleep, their marriages, their parenting, their blood pressure, their sense of self, and the room often goes silent. That silence is not maturity. It is shame. And shame thrives when worth gets attached to winning.

A man who cannot maintain a certain lifestyle may begin to feel he has failed at masculinity itself. A man paying child support may feel not only financially strained but symbolically reduced. A man stuck in debt may stop seeing himself as a person navigating difficulty and start seeing himself as a cautionary tale. Even success can become its own trap, because once status defines you, any downward movement feels like annihilation.

This is one reason men compare so relentlessly. They compare jobs, houses, vacations, watches, schools, neighborhoods, retirement accounts, and the invisible but punishing category called “how I’m supposed to be doing by now.” The competition is often absurd, but the pain beneath it is real. Men are not only trying to get ahead. They are trying not to disappear.

Leviticus 25, parashat Behar-Behukotai, in introducing a Jubilee period in which all debts are forgiven, pushes against that panic with an almost radical insistence: no one should be crushed by the economic order. Not permanently. Not spiritually. Not socially. A person may be in difficulty, but he is not identical with his difficulty. That may sound obvious, but it is not how financial shame works. Shame collapses the distinction. It says: you are what you owe. You are what you failed to build. You are the promotion you did not get. You are the marriage settlement you can barely afford. You are the number in the account, and the number is not enough. The Torah, however, says otherwise. And men need spaces where that alternative can be said aloud.

Not only financial literacy workshops, though those can help. Not only advice about budgeting, debt consolidation, investing, or career transition, though that matters too. Men also need somewhere to speak honestly about the emotional and spiritual burden of money. They need language for provider anxiety. They need permission to admit fear without feeling unmanned. They need a community that can separate dignity from display.

Because debt is real. Financial stress is real. Economic loss can be devastating. None of this should be romanticized. But neither should it be allowed to become the measure of a man’s soul.

That may be Jubilee’s most countercultural wisdom. A just society does not merely manage debt. It refuses to let debt become destiny. And a healthier masculinity would do the same. It would teach men that while money matters, it is not the final ledger of human value. A man may need help, may need to downsize, may need to begin again, may need to tell the truth about what he can and cannot carry. And none of that makes him less of a man. It may, in fact, be the beginning of becoming one.