From Madoff to Enron to Long-Term Capital, the American people have been subjected to some pretty sophisticated scams over the years; but no hoax is more shameful, or potentially destructive, than the presiding myth of wealth's infinite virtuosity.

The myth provided an intoxicating rationale for easy money, lax regulations, and the sort of self-delusion required by the financiers who convinced each other and their clients that they could create brilliant financial mechanisms that would endlessly spin money out of thin air. This, as we now know, led to the unmooring of the financial sector - the driving force of the global economy - and sudden, collective realization that the whole thing was built on the sort of short-lived, rickety edifice we associate with scams.

In this way, Madoff is the perfect embodiment of all the ills and excesses that the myth perpetuated and inflicted on society. Unfortunately there's nothing metaphorical about the pain Madoff inflicted on the Jewish community. And we will be doing our community a massive disservice if we come to understand this story as the work of one, lone financial psychopath. We have done this to ourselves.

What seems from afar an incestuous miasma of machers, millionaires, billionaires and Jewish philanthropic "leaders" is really a very clear picture of the contemporary power structure of the pay-to-play Jewish establishment, where someone like the inspiring Ruth Messinger is a side-show annoyance without keys to the back room and Bernie Madoff is a marionette controlling the bureaucratic puppets who run many of our communal organizations. 

The myth of wealth's virtuosity, and the concomitant values it engendered, has had a disproportionate influence over our community. Partly, it's because we've disproportionately benefited from that myth and those values.

One problem is how we've come to define success. Our children can choose between a banker, lawyer or doctor as their role model. No surprise, then, that their bar mitzvahs are spiritually meaningless affairs whose primary effect is to introduce the children to an aggressively competitive class structure in which, approximating the popular ‘80s bumper sticker regarding toys and death: "He whose party is the most extravagant wins."

Madoff's brilliance is how well he understood this class structure and its evolution into adulthood; how he drew such emphatic lines between Us and Them, admitting the chosen to a circle of privilege, a "secret society" in the words of one of Madoff's victims; such admittance conferred on both gentile and the Jewish Mcmanor-born instant status.  They were "winners."

In a vacuum created by institutional decay, poor leadership, and powerless, uninspiring clergy, our Jewish "winners" (bankers et al) stepped in, often honorably, to fill the void. Even our outreach programs began to stress exclusivity, reaching out to only the most successful and influential among us.

And so ours has become a pay-to-play community where those with the most money have the most influence over the organizations, synagogues, charities, and country clubs that make up our communal infrastructure.

In effect, the myth itself became the central organizing conceit of this period - that ambition, financial wherewithal, and social status were the agents of communal progress.

Better to be a macher than a mensch these days.

We made goo-goo eyes over the megabucks high-financiers, with their turbo-capitalism and hyper-consumption, and now we're paying the price. And I'm not talking about the billions lost by the Jewish charities Madoff bilked. I'm talking about the perception created in all those people we've been crying so much about  -- all those unaffiliated Jews who just keep assimilating and intermarrying -who can now feel validated in turning their back on a community not worth turning towards. 

As we have made our bed, so we must lie in it. It's time to get up and change the sheets.

The fact that Jews are disproportionately successful in many fields of endeavor is undeniable. The statistics simply speak for themselves. Jews make up less than half of one percent of the world’s population but they consistently have made up more than twenty percent of the Forbes 400 list of the world richest people.

Jews excell at more than making money. Thirty percent of Nobel Prize winners in science are Jewish, and major Hollywood studios, like Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios, are also run or owned by Jews. In virtually every industry successful Jews are disproportionally represented.

All that success often makes us uneasy. We therefore try to downplay Jewish success and we often consider those who talk about it as borderline anti-Semites. But is this really fair? Facts are facts and the statistics don’t lie. When it comes to success and achievement we Jews do punch higher than our weight. There is no way to deny this reality.

In fact in my opinion this is something we must embrace, analyze and ultimately share with others. While some people think that Jewish success has to do with genetics, and others surmise that it is related to our intense persecution, it is my contention that Jewish success has to do with Judaism itself. Inherent within Jewish religious teachings and Torah stories are ideas that relate directly to behaviors and attitudes that lead directly to successful outcomes.

Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success: Lesson from the Torah and Other Ancient Texts is a book I have written together my friend and business expert Sam Jaffe. The book, published this month, relates stories and ideas that are found within the Torah and then demonstrates how they relate directly to successful business practices.

It's all in the book...Divine blueprint for success

But what I found most amazing was that after the book was completed, I found that many of the most successful business advice books came to similar conclusions as we did.

For example, one of the main points made by Jim Collins in his bestseller, From Good to Great, was that all leaders of the greatest companies in the world are what he describes as Level Five Leaders. Remarkably, our analysis of Moses’ leadership in the Torah reached the exact same conclusion.

Obviously all those who studied the Torah properly had learned how to be a Level Five Leader thousands of years before the concept was “discovered” and then coined by Jim Collins and his team of researchers.

Another example of this is Seth Godin’s bestselling book, The Dip, where he explains that early on in any endeavor or enterprise a person will experience a dip where things become difficult and seem insurmountable. It is in this dip phase that most people give up.

But winners, says Godin, love the dip and they lean into it because they know that success lays waiting for them at the other end of it. Anyone who has studied the story of the Splitting of the Sea in the Torah knows this lesson intuitively and I outline it in my book. The list goes on with areas such as negotiations, positive thinking, will power, the approach to failure and reactions to fear. –the Torah has wisdom for all of it.

It is therefore little wonder that Jews who have studied the greatest book of wisdom ever written—the Torah—are disproportionally successful in every arena of endeavor. And even those who do not actively study the Torah still benefit from its wisdom in the form of attitudes and teachings that Jewish parents and communities teach and pass down, albeit mostly without being aware that they originate from the Torah.

If this divine blueprint for success exists and it has helped us as Jews become successful it is about time we both recognize where the wisdom comes from and share it with others. With this in mind I wrote Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success: Lesson from the Torah and Other Ancient Texts.

Cross-posted from LeviBrackman.com, personal blog of Rabbi Levi Brackman, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success.  He's also guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.