בס׳ד

"Where does it say that you have a contract with G-d to have an easy life?"

the Lubavitcher Rebbe



"Failure is not the enemy of success; it is its prerequisite."

Rabbi Nosson Scherman



11 May 2015

Wealth, happiness and insecurity

The NYPost has an article about insecure millionaires which concludes with the following sentence.

“Enough never seems to be enough — even the wealthiest continue on the treadmill to achieve a better life,” added Paula Polito, client strategy officer at UBS WMA.
http://nypost.com/2015/05/10/study-shows-millionaires-are-insecure/
"One who has one hundred wants two hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34); "One who loves money will not be satisfied with money" (Koheles 5:9)

Walking Away from Wealth

The Torah tells us (Behar 25:8) to count the years, then to count each seven years for Shmita, then to multiply it get to forty nine for Yovel. Why all these calculations?

The Dubno Magid explains with a Mashal. There was a poor beggar who spent many years collecting money from door to door. Later in life he managed to escape his plight and become a regular Ba'al HaBayis in a small town. In this town he bragged to the other townspeople how wealthy he was despite being a man of meager means. "Fool!" said one his neighbors to him. "All the years you were a beggar you counted your money in pennies. Even now that you earn a meager living, you are still counting your wealth in pennies and are proud of your thousands upon thousands of pennies. However if you count your money in the larger denominations that normal people use, you have but a few gold coins which does not make you rich."

Our life in this world is fleeting, says the Dubno Magid. We are here today and gone tomorrow. However we mistakenly measure our life in years, days and hours, and we think we've been here forever and will continue to be here for a very long time. Not so says the Torah. Count Shmita and Yovel. You will see from seven years you have one shmitta. You'll only be here for a few shmittos, and probably not even two Yovlos. Think of it that way and you will be less concerned with your temporary dwelling and more concerned with your permanent one. Then, instead of collecting trivial events worth mere pennies, you will instead focus on collecting gold coins in the form mitzvos. Each one is worth not a Shmita or even a Yovel, but an eternity. 
http://revach.net/article.php?id=3734

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