Of course they disagree on certain points, such as the main characters. We’re all OK with Abraham as the father, but the Jews and Christians believe he was prepared to kill his son Isaac, while the Muslims believe it was Ismail. The Muslim interpretation seems more correct to me, for they say that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, and for that to have made sense it would mean Ismail, his first son, born years before Isaac.
I have a friend who studies the Bible through listening to a Texas preacher’s tapes every week. He’s not quite a fanatic, but he insists that the Ismail-Isaac difference is the main point of contention between Christianity and Islam. He once explained it to me in detail, but since I suffer the unfortunate tendency to shut down whenever anyone talks about religious dogma, I don’t know what he said. I thought the big difference was that the one side accepts Christ as the son of God, and the other only believes in him as a great prophet, accepting Muhammad as the last and final prophet.
The main point of the holiday is to be mindful of the importance of bowing to the divine will, so now let us consider the willingness to sacrifice in a business context. We’ve heard of business leaders of faith, whatever their religion, and when it comes to hard times a top executive or manager may consider economic forces as an act of God. The ideally good person would determine that whatever he or she has to do in order to survive should do credit to their faith. But what do you do when you feel you have to fire people or order layoffs? At least you could consult your human resources people for some advice.
Peter Cappelli, a Wharton professor of management and the director of the school’s Center of Human Resources, said in an interview published this week that there was a stunning statistic early in the recession that showed that in two-thirds of companies, the senior human resource people were not involved in the layoff decisions.
“That is amazing,” said Cappelli. “If you thought your human resource people are not good enough to give you answers to those questions, you should find some who are. But if you are not asking those questions, you are doing something wrong. You might as well just be flipping coins. It’s kind of amazing the extent to which companies are very sophisticated in supply chain analysis and thinking about how they buy parts and how they sell products, but when it comes to these people issues, they are just kind of going with their gut most of the time. You don’t need to do that. There are answers to all these questions. You can figure out what really makes sense among an array of options. It is not as simple as, do we lay off or not. There are lots of ways to think about the problem.”
As we tentatively enter a jobless recovery, and some sectors will still suffer contraction, it behooves managers to remember that willingness to do what has to be done is good, but that one may also let the better angel of their nature intervene, just as Gabriel did to Abraham. Some Jewish scholars believe that the episode with Abraham was meant to teach people God’s abhorrence of human sacrifice, as instructed in Leviticus, 18:21 -- “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.”
For the parentally minded manager, think twice before sacrificing your workers to the flames of unemployment. It’s not ethical to burn people alive, so do not trust your gut instinct -- like Abraham, accept advice.
