Your Money or Your Life: Which Are You Choosing? - Rabbi Yitzchak Botton

old man coming home late one night in a very dangerous neighborhood a bunch of hoodlums confront him at gunpoint one of them screams out old man your money or your life so the only it stands there quiet silent lot of people and everyone's confused what's going on so they scream at it again do you hear you win your money on your life and finally government answers I'm thinking I'm thinking now that's just a joke but the reality is that we face this same question in our life not in such an overt away with at gunpoint but in each life choice we make especially business related reacted we have to make a decision what do we give priority to our life quality of our life or are we really giving priority to money because money is a very dangerous tool it can be very destructive or can be used for great things this brings us to a verse in crea Chima that we say every day agreed thereafter at national Okaka the whole navaja you should love the Lord your God with all your heart call now Shaka before your soul overhaul no devil and with all your might now the sages elaborate on a deeper message in this verse they explained that when the verse says that you should love God with all your soul it means even if you have to drop your life and that's the idea from Stuart nephesh I want to continues to say all your might well it also alludes to is with your money one would think that if I'm giving up my life that's it that's everything that's the biggest sacrifice I can make and money that comes later is really smaller either it should have just said your life and that's it or if you wanted to mention giving up money as well I should have mentioned money first and then ended with this climactic even giving up your life so that we would be going from a lower to a higher level of sacrifice so the Gemara answers the question by saying you know what so you're surprised there are people that value their money more than there this itself is very confusing how could it be that a person values his money more than his life so let's look at the storybook the joke this old man standing at gunpoint he says he was thinking about it because he might for the money over his life now that's a joke because at gunpoint no one no no sane human being would ever choose his money because once this life is gone we've got no money anyway so the rabbi's cannot mean this example that we used as a joke it doesn't mean that when someone points a gun to your head you're gonna say you know I want to keep my money kill me because that's senseless so what do they mean that a person valiums is money more than his life so let me ask you a question if you are successful in business and you're able to you know make money so what do you do with that money there are people that take the money they make and they put in a box and then they just run out to try to make more money and more money you ever heard the expression I'm building my business there's a person that spends his whole life building his business well what does it mean to build your business building your business can be misappropriated building a business is necessary but when your focus is on idolizing and just being completely devoted to your business to build it and build it and build it and you become a slave to that endeavor then you're putting your money above your life because you're taking your life the energy you have in the days you've been given which are numbered and you're using them to build the business that you will never benefit from because you're gonna build it to live a new life and then not giving you with the opportunity to benefit from that money it's also it's valuing that money more than life because it took your life and energy and time to make that money Lily Andy you become no better than a slave slave to money so how do you become a free person and use the money for your life putting your life is for your money well that's the healthy approach which the Torah prescribes for us to have fixed time for work and use that money the result of your work to service your life to give you a better quality of life and it's another way we can appreciate the idea of giving up one's life for his money let's look at business ethics for a moment if I'm going to compromise the law Jewish law prescribes exactly what's right and wrong in the interior dealings between people in business I'm going to compromise those laws do things that are forbidden essentially get my hands on on money that's not rightfully mine stolen money I'm gonna take from the person I'm dealing with in business what's not rightfully mine so then I'm also compromising my life on a very big level how so Kabbalah teaches us that our business dealings are very exacting when we're judged in heaven we'll be judged for those business dealings and if we took what's not ours even if we didn't pay back alone we have to come back into this world in a reincarnation to pay back that debt to give back that debt there are numerous stories brought by the Kabbalists about situations like this there is a famous story from the baal shem tov of a person that wrongfully took money from someone he was forced to come back in a reincarnation to give back that money and reincarnation is very difficult for the soul to have to go through this and even if we don't come on to the idea of having to come back again the simple simple result of stealing is it closed as a blemish on your soul so anytime we compromise our business ethics and truth and what's fair between our fellow person and ourselves and business we are also compromising our life and putting once again our money before we put our life with these lessons let's hopefully take the ultimate message money is a tool a tool that we can use to make our life better and to earn great reward by standing up to the challenge of money by being honest and through honesty and business one climbs up the spiritual ladder and earns a beautiful place in heaven and a great reward we see this universe speaking about angels ascending the ladder and Jacobs dream Jacob saw a dream with angels going up and then down the ladder dibala to one of the great sages displayed that the word suelen ladder can also equal the word money because they're the same camacho they have the same numeric value if we switch the translation of the words to on for the money we can appreciate the message the angels that are climbing the ladder are off when we use our money right we climb this spiritual ladder and when we use the money wrong we go down this spiritual ladder so ultimately it all depends on what we do with a platoon attention puts in front of us if we do the right thing then we bring ourselves and the world up with us and draw Hashem closer to us and if we do the wrong thing then we go away from the Shem and we make this world a worse place and ultimately the underlying root of all of this is greed or benevolence if we understand that God is kind and gives to us and we have to emulate that and give to others then we will be honest and faithful faithful to our Shem and our fellow in our business dealing [Music] [Applause]