How to Make Money
What is the Torah approach to how wealth is increased?
What do you do if you want some extra money? Work longer hours? Make some savvy investments? Reduce expenses? Learn new skills so that you can get a better paid career?
In the charedi world, these things are ultimately meaningless. As discussed in the previous post, it’s Hashem Who decides how much money you make. Hishtadlus (worldly endeavor) has zero genuine significance, it’s just a charade. Most people have to engage in such a charade in order for Hashem to disguise His divine intervention. But since it’s a charade, there is no correlation between hishtadlus and parnasa, once the designated amount of charade is performed. And to the extent that one truly acknowledges that everything is from Hashem, less of this charade is required.
But is this traditional Jewish belief? Well, the Beis HaLevi, in chapter 22 of his work on Bitachon, presents it as being from the Gemara itself:
"וכמאמרם במסכת נדה, מה יעשה אדם ויתעשר יתפלל למי שהעושר והנכסים שלו"
“It is as they said in Masechet Niddah, What should a man do to become wealthy? Pray to the One who has all the wealth and resources.
All you have to do is pray. Provided that your prayer is sufficiently worthy, you’ll get the money that you want.
But is that what the Gemara actually says?
If you go and check, you’ll see that the Gemara (Niddah 70a) actually says something different:
מה יעשה אדם ויתעשר אמר להן ירבה בסחורה וישא ויתן באמונה אמרו לו הרבה עשו כן ולא הועילו אלא בקש רחמים ממי שהעושר שלו שנאמר (חגי ב, ח) לי הכסף ולי הזה במאי קמ"ל דהא בלא הא לא סגי
“[The Sages of Alexandria asked:] What should a person do to become wealthy? [Rabbi Yehoshua] said to them: Let him increase trade, and engage in trade with integrity. They said: Many did this, and it did not help! [Rabbi Yehoshua replied:] Rather, he should seek mercy from the One Who has the wealth… What does this teach us? That one without the other is insufficient.
The Gemara clearly states that the first thing to do in order to increase wealth is to grow one’s business!
Now, the Beis HaLevi did not delete this part of the Gemara himself. The Vilna Gaon erases that phrase from the Gemara. But I had a friend check earlier manuscripts, and all of them have the full text.
In other words, for Chazal, and the Rishonim, increasing the amount of money that you make requires you to make the ordinary efforts that people engage in to increase the amount of money that they make. This is, of course, consistent with the statements of Chazal and the Rishonim in numerous other places. But as the rationalist approach declined, it became unthinkable that this was a necessity, to the point that the Vilna Gaon believed that it must be an error!
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Meanwhile, I’m off to the US today. This weekend I’ll be in Miami Beach, and on Sunday morning I’ll be in Hollywood, Florida. Looking forward to connecting and reconnecting with friends!
My father has a nice related interpretation of this interplay from a pasuk from last week's parsha, Beshalach.
ה' יִלָּחֵם לָכֶם וְאַתֶּם תַּחֲרִישׁוּן
"Hashem will provide you with bread. All you have to do is plow."
>>>In other words, for Chazal, and the Rishonim, increasing the amount of money that you make requires you to make the ordinary efforts that people engage in to increase the amount of money that they make.>>>
I wonder what this means.
Many years ago, people used to think a whole bunch of crazy things about human health and well being, and it's somewhat unfair to characterize it that way, because it's only crazy from today's perspective, so I'm not judging them. Just like in 100 years from now the way to treat cancer will be with gene editing and they'll look back and say that we did crazy things like infusing people with nonspecific poisons that kill the cancer but also kill the patient, but we titrated it just enough so that we maximize cancer death and minimize person death.
But people used to think that, let's say, bloodletting was a good medical procedure to have done to cure yourself of various ills. Now we would say we know better.
If we can't observe the universe to see the relationships between causes and effects, then where do we look for this information? R' Slifkin says that "[halacha] requires you to make the ordinary efforts that people engage in to increase [their] amount of money" but why do things that make no sense? Maybe doing things to increase one's income are like bloodletting? I presume that halacha does not endorse bloodletting.
The problem with disjointing cause and effect as we observe it in the universe and supplanting the way we see things with a mystical perspective that has never been tested and cannot be tested is that we actually don't even know what it means to "do the things that make sense" or that "people ordinarily do."
Without admitting that anything we see is connected to anything else we see, how can we know what is a relic of bygone times and what is something that currently makes sense? And if it currently makes sense, then why the need for mysticism at all? Isn't that what "makes sense" means? That we don't need to look at mysticism? No one would suggest fixing the "car with low gas" problem with anything other than more gas. Why is that never called into question, but fixing the "bank account with low funds" problem is seen as different? These are not asked sarcastically.