If you do not do so I will die. The congregants turned to the Rabbi of Zans, and asked what should be done. It should not be imagined that the spiritual involvement with money and the moral issues posed thereby are something involving only marginal groups. Society does not become destroyed for incurring the displeasure of God because there are a few thieves or robbers. Judaism has always accepted that people often fail in their spiritual duties, that all people have desires no matter how exalted they may be.
Every man has a breaking point.
As the Baal Shem Tov put it, the only man who does not have desires is a dead one. This means that all are faced with this moral challenge of money. One Chassidic authority comments that this is why the injunction against stealing in the Torah is written in the plural, whereas the injunction in the Ten Commandments, understood to refer to the theft of men for sale, a marginal action, is referred to in the singular. Judaism views economic evils as the beginning of the destruction of both Jewish and non-Jewish societies. The commentators, discussing the sin of biblical S'dom, argue, inter alia, that the reason for the cities' destruction was their refusal to share their wealth with others, while the fate of the Generation of the Flood was sealed, according to the Sages, by the sin of theft.