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The Rise of the Desert Diamond
In 1867, a fifteen-year-old South African boy named Erasmus Jacobs noticed an unusual stone lying near the Orange River as it made its way through his father’s farm. It was yellowish, transparent, and attractive enough that he gave it to the local children who collected nice stones to play jacks with. But a neighbor became curious about it and sent it off for some testing. It made its way to a prominent mineralogist, who certified it as a 21.25 carat diamond! It was the first diamond ever to be discovered in South Africa, and later became known as the Eureka Diamond.
A few years later, an even larger stone was discovered nearby. It weighed more than eighty-three carats and was given the modest name, Star of South Africa. The discovery triggered a stampede, quite similar to the California Gold Rush. Prospectors poured into the region, farms were torn apart, gaping holes were dug everywhere, fortunes were made, and fortunes were lost.
Along came a young Englishman named Cecil Rhodes. Like Levi and Strauss before him, he realized that he could profit more by servicing the miners than by competing with them. He began by renting water pumps to miners whose digs kept flooding. Rhodes used his profits to purchase mining claims. Then he purchased more. And more. He combined properties, absorbed competitors, secured a massive investment from Rothschild & Co, and continued buying. Finally, in 1888, he created De Beers Consolidated Mines.
Ironically, the company was named for the De Beer brothers, whose farm sat over part of the enormous diamond deposit found in South Africa. From their farm alone, miners would eventually pull about $10 Billion worth of rough-diamonds, or $25 Billion in cut and polished diamonds (in today’s dollars)! The De Beers brothers had sold the property early in the diamond rush for the equivalent of about $1.3 million in today’s dollars, and faded into obscurity, but their name became synonymous with diamonds to this day.
Cecil Rhodes was the true mastermind behind De Beers, not because he knew how to buy diamond rich properties, but because he figured out how to make diamonds valuable. Diamonds are beautiful, durable, and difficult to extract, but not nearly as rare as De Beers would like you to believe. Cecil knew that if diamonds were to flood the market, the value they hold would drop, so De Beers greatest achievement was controlling the release of diamonds, and keeping them rare.
De Beers first consolidated the mines in South Africa, so that 1900, they controlled over 90% of the diamonds coming out of South Africa. Later, under Ernest Oppenheimer, De Beers built an international system that bought diamonds from producers around the world, accumulated enormous stockpiles, and released stones gradually through its Central Selling Organisation. By the 1980’s, De Beers still controlled 80% of the global diamond trade!
They didn’t sell to consumers, and not even to any wholesaler who showed up with some dollars and a desire to buy diamonds. Selected buyers known as “sightholders” were invited to carefully managed sales called “sights.” They were shown boxes of stones selected by De Beers and told the price. This was no Middle Eastern shuk where the seller started the haggling at forty, the buyer offered twelve, the seller accused the buyer of starving his children, and eventually settled at twenty-seven. The price was the price.
A buyer who rejected a box risked losing access to future boxes. De Beers controlled the supply, the assortment, the distribution network, and, to a remarkable degree, the customer. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, and definitely don’t ask whether another wholesaler might have something cheaper. De Beers controlled the supply.
They also created the demand. During the Great Depression, diamond sales collapsed. Engagement rings existed, of course, but the diamond engagement ring had not yet become the universal marriage requirement people would later consider ancient tradition. In 1938, De Beers hired the Philadelphia advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Son to change that.
The campaign was spectacularly successful. Hollywood stars were photographed wearing diamonds. Newspapers carried stories connecting the size of a diamond to the depth of a man’s love. Lecturers visited schools and encouraged young women to associate diamonds with true commitment from a man. Advertisements steadily implanted a simple social rule: a serious man proposed with a diamond, and a sensible woman expected one.
Then, in 1947, advertising copywriter Frances Gerety reportedly sat down late at night to finish an advertisement. Exhausted and unable to find the perfect closing line, she wrote four words: “A diamond is forever.” Her colleagues were not particularly impressed, but the rest of civilization was.
The phrase linked diamonds with permanence. A diamond did not merely sparkle. It represented a love that could not decay, a commitment that could not be broken, and, rather conveniently, an object that should never be resold. De Beers had created both the product and the emotional universe in which the product became indispensable.
For more than a century, the system worked astonishingly well. But then mankind committed an unforgivable offense against the diamond industry. We figured out how to make diamonds in a lab.
Laboratory-grown diamonds are not pieces of glass or cubic zirconia. They are actual diamonds, made of carbon arranged in the same crystal structure as mined diamonds. They possess the same brilliance, hardness, and basic physical and chemical properties. Without specialized equipment, even an experienced jeweler may not be able to distinguish one from a natural diamond.
The difference is that the laboratory does in weeks what the earth does over an immense span of time—and does it without excavating a mine, controlling an international supply chain, or requiring a nervous young man to spend several months’ salary proving that he truly cared about his bride.
As laboratory-grown diamonds improved and production expanded, prices plunged. Consumers discovered that they could purchase a much larger lab-grown stone for a fraction of the cost of a comparable natural diamond. Laboratory-grown diamonds now account for a substantial portion of engagement-ring sales in the United States, while prices for both natural stones and De Beers itself have come under enormous pressure. The company that once arrogantly dictated prices to the world has been forced to reduce them.
At first, it tried not to make that reduction too obvious. De Beers reportedly offered select customers discounted stones through confidential sales while leaving its official prices higher. It adjusted assortments and packaging, making direct comparisons difficult. Some diamonds were being priced well above the open market, but because the De Beer boxes contained changing combinations of stones, determining the actual discount required the mathematical skills of an actuary, a jeweler, and possibly a prophet.
Recently, however, the pressure has become too great. In early July, reports indicated that De Beers had made deep official cuts across nearly every category of rough diamond it sells. The company that spent generations maintaining the price of diamonds had finally allowed those prices to crack. But De Beers still knows how to sell a story.
For decades, the diamond industry trained consumers to seek stones that were as white, clear, and flawless as possible. Diamonds were graded according to the famous “four Cs”: cut, color, clarity, and carat weight. The ideal diamond was brilliant, colorless, and clean. Brownish color was generally a disadvantage. Visible imperfections reduced a stone’s value. Off-color diamonds were for industrial needs, not for the pure of heart looking to show their love and affection to a potential bride.
Today, De Beers is promoting what it calls “Desert Diamonds.” These are natural diamonds in warm shades of sand, amber, honey, cream, mocha, and brown. They are now being advertised not as inferior versions of white diamonds, but as earthy, rare, individual, authentic, and impossible to duplicate precisely. Their unusual color is not a defect, G-d forbid, it is their character! Because labs can’t create them, their irregularity is not something to apologize for, it is something to covet! Yesterday’s undesirable brown diamond has been promoted to today’s exclusive treasure.
We are watching in real time one of the most impressive maneuvers in the history of marketing. First, persuade the world that only clear, colorless diamonds represent true luxury. Then, when laboratory manufacturers become exceptionally good at producing them, preach to the world that the real luxury was the brown ones all along. Apparently, if you rename garbage poetically enough, photograph it against a desert sunset, and place it inside an expensive velvet box, it becomes authenticity.
And perhaps that is precisely what our galus, our exile has done to us, the Jewish People.
On Tisha B’Av, the Jewish people mourn the destruction of the first and second Batei Mikdash, the Holy Temples in Jerusalem. We sit on the floor and read Eichah, the Book of Lamentations. We remember the siege, starvation, flames, slaughter, captivity, and centuries of persecution that followed. We recount crusades, expulsions, massacres, pogroms, and destruction. But the deepest tragedy of this exile is not merely what the nations have done to us, it is what the exile has persuaded us to value.
There was a time when the Jewish people lived in Eretz Yisrael, with the Beis HaMikdash standing in Jerusalem. The Shechinah, Hashem’s revealed presence, rested among us. A Jew could bring a korban, an offering, and experience closeness to Hashem in a way we can barely comprehend. Torah was not an isolated religious activity squeezed into the corners of life. It was the structure of our national existence. Agriculture, commerce, courts, leadership, family, celebration, grief, and time itself were all lived openly in a deep relationship with Hashem. Jerusalem was not merely the capital of a Jewish state. It was the point at which heaven and earth touched.
Then we lost it. And after nearly two thousand years, we became accustomed to the loss.
We learned how to build beautiful lives in exile. We established communities, yeshivas, shuls, charities, businesses, schools, and homes. This is a magnificent achievement and one of the great miracles of Jewish history. Hashem has sustained us in every country to which we have been scattered, and even allowed us to thrive and become fabulously successful. But survival in exile can create its own danger, we can begin to mistake a successful exile as a goal into itself. We can begin to want the brown diamonds instead of the flawless ones.
We become deeply attached to the nations in which we reside. We admire their culture, seek their approval, adopt their values, and measure ourselves by their definitions of success. We become more passionate about sports, politics, finance and fashion, than we are about our relationship to the Divine. We can feel more emotionally rooted in New York, Miami, London, Paris, Lakewood, Johannesburg, or Los Angeles than in Jerusalem. We can spend most of our time focused on the latest restaurants, our university degrees, “our sports teams,” careers, entertainment, and even political activism, while regarding the Beis HaMikdash as a nice thing to have but necessary in our lives. We’re fighting for the brown diamonds, and leaving the greatest diamond of all abandoned on the street.
When the prophet Jeremiah describes the tragedy of the destruction of the First Temple in the Book of Lamentations, he says (1:7) “Jerusalem remembered, in the days of her affliction and wandering, all the precious things she possessed in earlier days.” But that exile only lasted seventy years. How much more of a tragedy is it that after almost 2,000 years of this second exile, we don’t even remember or recognize the precious things we possessed in earlier days!
That is the peculiar cruelty of this exile. Not only did it take our greatest treasure, but it gradually erased our ability to recognize that it was a treasure. It gave us brown diamonds and said, “Celebrate this! Look at the warmth and the authenticity! The unique character of these earthy one of kind stones!” And we said, “Wow, that’s amazing! I’ll work three times as hard to get one of these! They are so real!”
Tisha B’Av asks us to do more than grieve over the people who were killed when the Temple burned. It asks us to grieve over the relationship with Hashem that we lost, the Jewish unity that we shattered, and the all the Jewish goals and aspirations that we exchanged for the comforts of exile.
The question is not whether our lives in exile contain beauty and comfort. They certainly do. The question is whether we have allowed that comfort to convince us that exile is home. A 6,000 square foot waiting room is still a waiting room. A beautifully decorated hotel is still not your house. And a custom-built dream home is still not the treasure you surrendered to receive it.
This Tisha B’Av, we need to spend less time asking how many hours remain in the fast and more time asking what we are fasting for. What would it mean to live in a world in which Hashem’s presence was no longer hidden? How much human suffering would disappear if (Isaiah 11:9) “the knowledge of Hashem would fill the world like the waters cover the sea?” What would it mean for the Jewish people to understand our shared purpose more deeply than our disagreements? What would it mean to return home—not just geographically, but spiritually—to a life in which holiness is not an accessory but reality itself?
And then we have to ask the more uncomfortable question: What am I prepared to do to help bring that world back? Who am I prepared to forgive? Whose dignity can I protect? Which argument can I refuse to escalate? Which Jew have I reduced to a label, a political position, a level of observance, a community, or an inconvenience?
The Yerushalmi teaches that any generation in which the Beis HaMikdash is not rebuilt is considered as though it destroyed it. That is not a sentence of hopelessness. It is a declaration of responsibility.
The rebuilding is in our hands. We can be the generation that breaks the mold. We can be the people who build what was destroyed 2,000 years ago. We can be the ones to reject the Desert Diamonds, and demand the most pristine and rate gem of all, The Third and Final Beis Hamikdash, may we see it soon in our days!
Parsha Dvar torah
In this week’s portion, Devarim, we read about the final discourse that Moshe gave the Jewish people before he passed away. It was quite a long lecture, as it took over a month. However, it was a time that Moshe used to review with the Jews not only the laws he taught them, but also the lessons they needed to take from their experiences in the desert. That included reminding them of certain mistakes they had made. Moshe did this sensitively by only hinting to the experiences, instead of directly confronting the people with their shortcomings.
One of the events Moshe reminded the people of was the sending of spies to “check out” the land that G-d had already promised would be good. The spies came back and gave a degrading report of the Land of Israel, the people believed them, and wept all night (the first Tisha B’av ever). G-d then decreed that the Jewish people would wander in the desert for forty years, and that none of the people of that generation who slandered Israel would live to see the land.
When Moshe reminds the people of that event, and describes the people coming to him to request spies, he says the following: “You approached me, all of you, and said, ‘let us send men ahead of us to spy out the land for us.” (Deut. 1:22). Rashi comments on the apparently extraneous “all of you,” and explains that Moshe was hinting to a mistake they made. “You approached me, all of you in a hodgepodge- the young pushing aside the elders, and the elders pushing aside the leaders” (Rashi on loc.)
Rav Chaim Volozhin (1749-1821, Poland/Russia, known as the father of the yeshiva movement), asks why Moshe went out of his way to point out a seemingly small misdeed especially when the real topic, the sending of the spies, was such a severe one?
Rav Chaim answers that Moshe wanted to preclude any possible excuse the Jews could have given for sending the spies. The Jewish people might say that they sent out the spies with the best of intentions, and it was not their fault that the spies came back and persuaded them to believe the slander against the land of Israel! To counter this, Moshe showed the people that from the get go, they had the wrong intentions in mind. If they were truly noble in purpose when they sent the spies out, they would not have advanced the request in a way that would be disrespectful to others. By pointing out that they came as an irreverent, insolent, and impudent, group, Moshe was proving to the people that the problem was rooted not only in the persuasion of the spies, but also in the people who sent them.
We all get into arguments with others, whether at work, at home, or at the synagogue. Often we feel that we are in the argument only to champion the truth, and there is nothing personal about it. Even if things get a bit tense in the argument, that’s OK, because we are out there defending what is just and right. In this week’s parsha Moshe gives us a litmus test to determine our motives. If no one’s feelings get hurt through our argument, then it is an argument of principles, with each person solely trying to discover what is right. But the minute any person feels insulted, we know that we have crossed the divide and taken it into the personal attack arena. Hurt feelings, disrespect, or insensitivity are the smoking guns pointing to something less than noble. Let us use Moshe’s tool to help us disagree more effectively, which will lead us to live in harmony, and in that merit we will see the rebuilding of the Temple which was destroyed as a result of discord.
Parsha Summary
The Parsha of Devarim is a record of what Moshe told the people before he died. In the later Parshiot, Moshe reviews some of the key laws (mostly those that will empower the people to set up a stable, functioning society in Israel), but in this Parsha, he reviews the salient events that occurred in their forty year journey. The goal was to ensure that those entering the land wouldn't rest on their laurels and assume that if they were great enough to inherit the land, then obviously, they wouldn't fall to sin. To negate this idea, Moshe recounts how the generation that witnessed the greatest miracles of all time (the Ten Plagues and the splitting of the Reed Sea), and saw G-d at Sinai in the clearest revelation mankind ever experienced, still fell in the trap of sin.
The basis for this phenomenon is the principle that, "Whoever is greater than his friend, his Evil Inclination is greater." (Talmud Succah 52a) The higher one's ability to soar, the lower they are able to fall. (This applies for geographic locations as well. Yerushalayim comes from the merging of Yeru Shalom which means "will see peace," because it has the ability to bring the entire world peace. This could be accomplished by being the focal point of our prayers, and the city in which the whole world would come together to serve G-d in His temple. In that same way, it also has the ability to see the greatest negation of peace, as it has. I believe, and please email me if I am wrong, that Jerusalem has been the city that has seen the most violence in the world over the course of its 3,000+ years of history.) The generation of the desert had so much pushing them towards good but, to balance that, they also had so much pushing them toward evil. Therefore, Moshe felt it imperative to warn those going into Israel that, although they may be on a lofty spiritual plane, the danger of sin abounds.
Moshe first hints to the Jews' major sins, including the Golden Calf, their complaining that G-d took them into the desert to kill them, the sending of the spies, their sins with the Midianite women, Korach's rebellion, and their loss of faith in him at the sea before and after it split. After hinting to these sins, Moshe begins to detail certain events such as the appointment of judges and the failed mission of the spies. He also reminds them of how they had to circle around Israel and not enter from the south due to the Edomites and Moabites not allowing them through their lands, and G-d telling them not to fight with them.
Moshe then reminds the Jews of how, with the help of G-d, they were able to defeat giants like Og, and mighty kingdoms like Sichon, thus telling the Jews that if they put their faith in G-d, they need not fear the imminent conquest of Israel. Finally, the Parsha closes with Moshe describing the agreement he had made with the tribes of Gad, Reuven and half of Menashe regarding their settling land on the eastern side of the Jordan River. That's all Folks!
Quote of the Week: Any fool can know. The point is to understand. – Albert Einstein
Random Fact of the Week: In 1926 a new Ford Model T cost $360
Funny Line of the Week: I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
Have an Introspective Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham
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