Saturday 7thFebruary 2025 10th Shevat 5785
PARASHAT BESHALACH
Exodus 13:17-17:16; Judges 4:4-5:31; Matthew 14:22-33
A good friend relayed the following story to me: His son was playing basketball in their driveway with a couple of friends and took a blow to his mouth, causing his dental tooth crown to pop out. After a fruitless search, he went inside and told his mother.
My friend's wife went outside, took up the cause, and found the crown in no time. Their son said in astonishment, “Mom, I looked for 15 minutes and couldn’t find it – how did you find it so quickly?” She replied, “You were looking for a small piece of enamel; I was looking for $1,300!”
Understanding, the true value of things and appreciating what you have is one of the keys to lifelong happiness. Unfortunately, the human condition makes this difficult to achieve.
King Solomon writes in his magnum opus on philosophy, “It is a sorry task that God has given mankind with which to be concerned” (Ecclesiastics 1:13). The sages explain this to be referring to the all-encompassing and endless pursuit of money (Kohelet Rabbah 1:13).
Empirically, it would seem that it doesn’t make a difference what sums we are discussing. If a person has one hundred dollars, then he wants two hundred; if he has one hundred million dollars, then he wants two hundred million.
Honestly, is there a significant difference in one’s quality of life between having one hundred million dollars to having two hundred million? Why would someone spend their most valuable resource – time – in the pursuit of wealth that they could not possibly ever spend in their lifetime?
Yet there is clearly an insatiable desire to accumulate ever more. This would probably explain why, in 2024, the world had about 2,700 billionaires (unsurprisingly, New York City has the most billionaires of any city in the world with almost 150). Unless one has acquired wealth the old-fashioned way – by inheriting it – there seems to be a powerful force driving one to continue spending energy, effort, and time working to gain more.
I think the key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the cryptic statement of the sages, “A person who has one hundred wants two hundred and person with two hundred wants four hundred.” If the sages were trying to convey that a person will endlessly seek to have more money, why didn’t they just say, a person who has 100 will desire 200, and person who has 200 will desire 300? Instead, the sages said that a person who has 100 will desire 200, and a person with 200 will desire 400. Why does a person constantly desire to double what he has?
I believe that there is an extraordinary insight being taught here. The root of the Hebrew word for blessing is beirach, consisting of the letters ב-ר-כ. In the simplest form of gematria (the assignment of numerical values to Hebrew letters) these letters are the only ones in the Hebrew alphabet that are a doubling of the previous letter (2, 20, 200). This hints at the secret of a blessing.
Similarly, the Aramaic word for money is mamon. This is probably a derivative of the Torah’s example of sustenance known as monn, or manna, which is a cognate of the Hebrew word for a portion – maneh. Fascinatingly, all of these words are made up of the Hebrew letters that are a doubling of themselves. The Hebrew letter מ is pronounced mem (two מ’s), the Hebrew letter ו is pronounced vav (two ו’s), the Hebrew letter נ is pronounced nun (two נ’s), and ה which is pronounced heh (two ה’s). Thus the secret to resources lies in the doubling of oneself.
In the physical world we are constrained by many limitations; we can only be in one place at a time. Similarly, we are constrained by time itself; we can only accomplish so much in the time allotted to us. Likewise, we are constrained by resources as well; we can only accomplish what we desire to the extent that we have the resources to do so.
The message being taught is that the real blessing of having financial resources is that a person can endlessly double himself to accomplish ever more. Meaning a person may have a desire to distribute food to the poor but, due to limitations of time and space, one can only do so much. However, with endless financial resources a person can scale his distributions and achieve endlessly.
In our example, a person with financial resources can create a foundation, set it up to fund a food bank, and hire people to work there distributing food – a self-perpetuating system that can outlive the original founder. In this way he is able to mostly overcome the limitations placed on him by the physical world. This is why a person – whether consciously or not – always desires to have double what he has: so that he can endlessly duplicate himself. This is the secret of the Hebrew word bracha and what the sages are teaching us.
The issue, of course, is that a person must have a plan for what he wants to accomplish with his life in order for his financial resources to be meaningful. In other words, being blindly focused on the pursuit of wealth without an end goal is just plain foolish. Why waste what precious little time you have on this earth chasing resources that you can never use?
The only way a person can get off this endless “hamster wheel” pursuit of money is by knowing that he has enough and, as the sages teach us in Pirkei Avot – Ethics of our Fathers, “Who is a wealthy man? He that is satisfied with his lot.”
This week's Torah reading, which introduces the concept of the manna, also teaches us a powerful lesson regarding wealth and instructs us on how a person can know when he is satisfied with what he has. Clearly, the goal is to know when you have enough, but that can be quite difficult to achieve.
God decreed that Abraham’s descendants were to go to a land that was not their own and become slaves for four hundred years (Genesis 15:13). In the very next verse, God promises Abraham that, when his descendants leave the land of their bondage, they will do so bearing great wealth. How did God fulfill this promise?
God pleaded with Moses that the Jewish people should ask their Egyptian neighbors for fine jewelry and clothes so that when they left Egypt they would have wealth (see Exodus 11:2). They did so and managed to accumulate significant going away presents (ibid 12:35-36). Yet according to our sages, all that they managed to get from the Egyptians as they were leaving paled in comparison to the booty they seized from the Egyptian soldiers who came to slaughter them and were drowned by God in the Red Sea.
The Torah records that there was so much wealth on the banks of the Red Sea that Moses literally had to pull them away from the shore. This was because all the precious gold, silver, and fine jewelry that the Egyptian soldiers (and their horses!) were wearing had sunk to the bottom of the Red Sea when they drowned. However, God delivered a miracle and all that wealth was brought up by the sea and deposited onto the shore where the Jewish people were able to collect it.
Moses wanted the Jewish people to leave, but struggled to get them to comply because of all the riches still on the ground before them. Even after they had collected a large amount, there was still more to be had, and they didn’t want to go.
But this story begs the following question: Since the entire episode was a miracle, why didn’t God just bring forth the exact amount that He wanted the Jewish people to take? Once they had collected everything, they would have surely left on their own, without Moses having to admonish. So why was there more than they should take? Moreover, why would Moses even care if they stayed and collected additional riches?
There is a very deep message here. God promised our forefather Abraham that the Jewish people would leave Egypt wealthy. But at what point can you consider yourself wealthy? At what point are you satisfied with what you have?
The answer is when you see gold, silver, and precious jewels laying on the ground in front of you and you can just walk away. That is what Moses was teaching the Jewish people: You are wealthy now and you do not need any more. Once they realized that they had so much that they could simply walk away from more they truly understood that they were wealthy and left the shore behind. Thus, God fulfilled his promise to Abraham.
When a person can honestly look at everything he has and say, “I have enough,” then he can finally get off the “hamster wheel” and walk away from the pressures, the time, and the mind space required to stay in the “rat race.” More importantly, he can begin to focus on other life enriching endeavors (family, travel, acquiring knowledge, etc.) and can truly enjoy all the blessings that he has been given.
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