Aug 27/05 - Shabbat Ekev

Commentary by Chazzan Aníbal Mass

There is a story about a man who was so busy working trying to be a millionaire that he stopped having contact with people, reading newspapers and even opening the mail.

He worked so hard and slept so little that he finally fell ill.

One of his old friends came to visit him and he immediately cleaned the poor man’s house and started opening the huge pile of letters.

The friend almost died when inside one of the old unopened envelopes he found a notification that the man had received an inheritance of $5,000,000 from a wealthy relative around four years earlier .

So this good man thought: "If my friend had stopped working so hard for a minute to read the mail he would known how rich he already was."

Judaism doesn't teach us that money is bad. In fact it is better to have money than to be poor. Money allows a family to live with comfortably. Money has saved the Jews countless times. Nations thought very carefully before expelling Jews from their land, because of the Jews' ability to produce wealth, create jobs, pay taxes, etc.

There is nothing wrong with having money, but there is a problem when we begin to want it so much that we start to forget what is good and correct: people lie for it, people steal for it, and some people even kill for it.

Now, I don't believe that any of us is close to those limits. At most we cheat a little bit from time to time and then we apologize saying, "It is what everybody does." And slowly, as a consequence of our desire to have more and more,  dishonesty starts to be part of our lives.

Sometimes we believe that we will be happier following this path.

But the Parashah of this week tells us: "Not by bread alone does man live, but by all that comes from the mouth of God does man live." (Deut. 8:3)

Judaism teaches us that we should not give up a productive life. In fact, the Talmud, based on the Book of Job 5:7 says, "the human being was created to work," not as a goal by itself, but as a tool to bring sanctity to the material world. And we can achieve that by pausing during our routines to read, not only letters from our relatives and the newspapers, but THE LETTER that HE wrote to us: THE TORAH, in which God gives us the recipe to be millionaires. Not millionaires in gold or silver, but millionaires in satisfaction and true happiness. We achieve this by listening to "all that comes from the mouth of God".

And as well as having no limits to increasing our bank accounts, neither do we have limits for our spiritual growth.

For example, the person that has one wants two, and the person who has 100 wants 200. Agreed?

Well ...

If you come to Shul for the High Holidays, then start coming for Shabbat.
If you come to Shul on Saturday morning, then come on Friday evening.
If you already come on Friday and Saturday, then come to study.
If you are studying, make your house a Kosher house.
If your house is Kosher, then add more MItzvot, etc.

My friends, it is not necessary to ignore money and material things to be a Jew. But it is good only if it helps us to serve God in a better way.

Shabbat Shalom.