When we are inthe midst of our Bar and Bat Mitzvah season, our clergy team meets with the teen whose big day is coming up that Shabbat. We often ask some version of this question: As you are about to begin your Jewish adulthood, tell us some of your dreams. What do you want to do when you grow older? Who do you want to become?
Appropriately enough, most often the answer is: huh? What? What did you say?
They look attheir parents, who always say the same thing. "Don't look at us. Look at the rabbis. They're asking you the question."
At which point the most common answer is: "I don't know." Or: "I have no idea."
I plead guilty. I am usually the one asking that question. And I don't know why I keep asking it, given how fruitless it is and how dry the conversation goes.
But once, Hashem rewarded me for asking the question. I said to a Bar Mitzvah student:
"What do you want to do when you grow up?" With no hesitation, no looking at his parents, no helpless look, he declared: "I want to run a hedge fund.” Total clarity. I asked the obvious follow-up question: "Why? Why do you want to run a hedge fund?"
He was thirteen. Too young for pretense or affect. So he said: "I want to make a lot of money." At which point I asked the obvious follow-up question: "Why? What would you do with all that money?" His answer was clear. "I would want to have a really nice life. A big house. Nice vacations. Nice cars.”
I have been thinking about this inspiring conversation this week because I have been reading Jim Collins's new book, What to Make of a Life, and because of a famous teaching in our Torah portion this morning.
This teen's unvarnished answer points to what Collins calls “the arrow of money.” We work hard. We make money. We use that money to build the life we want. Our home. Ourvacations. Our children's education. Our tzedakah. Our retirement. That arrow is familiar to all of us. Our work leads to our money leads to our life, the arrow of money.
But Collins observes that many people who live deeply meaningful lives embody a different move. In his phrase, they “reverse the arrow of money.” They do not ask: "How can my work make me money?" Instead they ask: "How can I make enough money so that I can do the thing I most want to do?" One of the people he profiles, the historian Barbara Tuchman, did not write books in order to make money. She earned enough money so that she could write books.
Collins argues that the deepest question is not how to make money but what do we do once we have enough. Remarkably, that is exactly the point Moses makes in this week’s Torah portion: Lo al halechem levado yichyeh ha'adam. Man does not live by bread alone. We usually hear those words as a statement about spirituality. But in context, Moses is saying something quite specific.
