GEN1156 The Torah relates that our patriarch Abraham “Was blessed by God with everything” Genesis 24:1. His great wealth thus allowed him to perform, without financial worry, what later became a time-honored Jewish act. He bought his first parcel of land in Canaan, not as a legal ploy or as a long-term investment, but to bury his wife Sarah. Bargaining with the landowner Ephron to purchase the cave of Machpelah, Abraham accepted the very first, very high price Ephron quoted. Because he had the money, Abraham knowingly overpaid and secured is not only a burial ground but good relations with his neighbors [this verse]. Abraham was the first to perform a classic Jewish mitzvah. A long line of wealthy Jewish donors connets Abraham to the contemporary industrialist, Aaron Feuerstein. Fire nearly destroyed Malden Mills, his complex of textile factory plants located not far from Boston. Rather than retiring on the insurance money, he immediately began to rebuild his factories. He also paid the salaries and health care premiums of his 3000-personal workforce for three months, until most of his employees where once again working full time. Feuerstein saved their families from great hardship; he also saved and actually strengthened the economies of the cities of Lawrence and Methuen, Massachusetts. Only a mean-spirited individual would argue that Feuerstein, an Orthodox Jew in his seventies, did these acts to benefit his corporate balance sheet. Having been raised in the tradition of gemilut hasadim, the duty of acting with lovingkindness, he could fulfill that mitzvah because he had the means. BOROJMV 112-3