We live in a society that is obsessed with material success. We celebrate those who have amassed great wealth, built large companies, and created new innovations. Celebrities, entrepreneurs, entertainers and CEO’s hold forth on all the great questions of the day and influence the way many of us think.
This is not the Jewish way. Material success is important, but it is not the ultimate measure of human achievement.
In this week’s Torah portion we read, “He [God] subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the LORD decrees.” (Deuteronomy 8:3).
Commenting on this verse, Ib Ezra (14th Cent. Spain) writes, “The sense of the verse is that Man does not live from just bread, but rather, from the energy that it contains — and could live just as well from energy that comes to us from Heaven.” In other words, a spiritual connection is as essential to life as is bread.
Building on this idea we read in Pirkei Avot (3:17) “If there is no flour, there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour.”
In the Jewish ideal, success means a well balanced life, one that strives for material success so that one can cultivate one’s spiritual life. One without the other is an incomplete existence. Human beings must feed their bodies and their souls. That is true success.
Eikev – Deuteronomy 7:12 – 11:25, The Parashat Ha Shavua for Shabbat, Saturday, August 24, 2019
August 23, 2019 by Dean Kertesz •
We live in a society that is obsessed with material success. We celebrate those who have amassed great wealth, built large companies, and created new innovations. Celebrities, entrepreneurs, entertainers and CEO’s hold forth on all the great questions of the day and influence the way many of us think.
This is not the Jewish way. Material success is important, but it is not the ultimate measure of human achievement.
In this week’s Torah portion we read, “He [God] subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the LORD decrees.” (Deuteronomy 8:3).
Commenting on this verse, Ib Ezra (14th Cent. Spain) writes, “The sense of the verse is that Man does not live from just bread, but rather, from the energy that it contains — and could live just as well from energy that comes to us from Heaven.” In other words, a spiritual connection is as essential to life as is bread.
Building on this idea we read in Pirkei Avot (3:17) “If there is no flour, there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour.”
In the Jewish ideal, success means a well balanced life, one that strives for material success so that one can cultivate one’s spiritual life. One without the other is an incomplete existence. Human beings must feed their bodies and their souls. That is true success.