There is a word that has become very common in our community – and which I hate. I am very troubled every time I hear it. And I hear it a lot.
The word is hadje.
It’s hard to define this word to those outside the community who aren’t accustomed to it. Narrowly, it means “enough,” but really, it means so much more than that. It means, “Whatever… I’m not going to bother... I don’t care.”
Why do I get so upset when I hear people say this word?
Because it is so, so sad to watch people just sleepwalking through life, who are okay just being average, who feel that once they have a decent income, their kids are generally okay, it’s enough, and so their attitude is “hadje” – there’s no need for anything more.
I want to wage an all-out war against the “hadje” mindset, and make sure we don’t ever use that word again!
In fact, I want to make sure that we’re not even tempted to ever use that word!!!
The World is Not an Easy Place!
Parashat Shemot tells of the dreadful period of bondage in Egypt. For the first time in the Humash, we find a group of people suffering without us knowing what they did to deserve it. Until now, every form of suffering was clearly the result of a sin:
· Adam and Havah were banished from Gan Eden for their sin.
· The generation of the flood was destroyed because of their lawlessness.
· The builders of the Tower of Bavel were punished for rebelling against Hashem.
· The city of Sedom was annihilated because of the cruelty of its inhabitants.
Here in Parashat Shemot, however, we find a large nation subjected to suffering for 210 years without any reason given for why they deserved it. How do we explain this?
A classic answer to this question is given by the Alshich. He writes that the Jewish People needed to go through this experience in order to become Hashem’s special nation. They needed to rid themselves of what the Alshich calls זוהמת הנחש – the “filth” injected within mankind by the snake at the time of Adam and Havah’s sin at Gan Eden. This was accomplished through the grueling, painful experience of slavery.
What does this mean?
Hashem initially created the world as a place where life is very easy. In Gan Eden, Adam and Havah had everything they needed readily accessible to them. They didn’t have to work, struggle or put in any effort.
That all changed after their sin. They were punished with זוהמת הנחש, the curse of the snake, which made the world a difficult place to live in. In the new reality, outside Gan Eden, the only way to succeed is by paying the price, by putting in the effort. In the world we live in, the only way to achieve excellence is to work for it. We have to pay for success, in every single area of life.
Excellence!!!
I once saw the following observation, which is so true:
If you’re poor at something, you’ll never get the opportunity to do it. If you’re okay at something, you’ll get an opportunity and get fired. If you’re good at something, you’ll keep your job. If you’re great at something, you’ll get a raise. If you’re excellent at something, you’ll get all kinds of great rewards.
There is an ENORMOUS difference between being okay and being excellent.
Just look at the world of professional sports. There are thousands of really good ballplayers out there, but nobody’s buying tickets to watch them play. A ballplayer can make lots of money only if he is excellent.
This is what it means to be Jewish.
Hashem did not make the Jewish Nation to be “okay.” Our job is to be excellent. And this is why we became a nation as slaves in Egypt – to teach us this basic lesson: in order to be excellent, we have to pay the price, and sometimes that price is high.
I tell my students at the beginning of the school year that they must keep the word EXCELLENT emblazoned upon their minds throughout their lives, every day. This has to be the goal. We should not feel content with being average. We need to strive for excellence. And in order to achieve excellence, we need to pay the price for it.
The Geniuses Who Started Out Dumb
A very important part of that price which we need to pay is failure.
Our Sages teach us, אין אדם עומד על דברי תורה אלא אם כן נכשל בה – one does not succeed in Torah learning unless he has made mistakes. There is no success that is not preceded by failure. If we want to succeed, we need to first try, fail, and then try again.
A speaker once came to the school where I teach to speak about his experience. He had gotten sick and needed to have a leg amputated. He received a prosthetic leg, and then went to therapy to learn how to walk with it.
At his first therapy session, the therapist told him to fall.
“What?” the man asked, in shock.
“The first thing you need to do is to fall!” the therapist instructed.
“But I’m here to learn how to walk, so I don’t fall!” the patient protested.
“Exactly,” the therapist said. “But you’re going to fall many times, and unless you learn how to fall, you’ll never learn how to walk.”
What a powerful message!
We cannot hope to succeed – at anything! – unless we first experience failure.
In order to achieve excellence, we need to go through failure and frustration.
I once saw some of my students looking very upset. I asked them what was wrong, and they explained that they were having a hard time in a certain subject, and they felt they could not be “excellent” as I always urged them to be. I brought them my copy of the book Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I showed them the chapter on failure. The book gives us a long list of some of the most successful and accomplished people of all time who at first failed miserably:
· Early in Vince Lombardi’s career, an expert said that he had limited football knowledge and lacked motivation.
· Beethoven was described as handling the violin awkwardly, refusing to use the proper technique, and “hopeless as a composer.”
· Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for…a lack of ideas.
· Thomas Edison’s teacher said he was “too dumb to learn anything.”
· Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four years old and didn’t read until he was seven years old. His teacher described him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.”
· Isaac Newton was a very poor student.
· Louis Pasteur ranked 15th out of his class of 22.
· Leo Tolstoy was a failing student in college, and was described as “unable and unwilling to learn.”
· Henry Ford went broke five times before finally being successful.
· Babe Ruth for many years held the all-time home run record…but also held the record for most strikeouts.
· Winston Churchill failed sixth grade.
What do all these people have in common? They all enjoyed great success, but only after paying the price – and that price was failure.
I once saw the following quote: “Success is like wrestling a guerilla – you don’t quit when you’re tired; you quit when the guerilla is tired.” The most successful people achieved what they did not because they were born a certain way, but because they didn’t give up, because they kept struggling and fighting. They were so determined that they didn’t let failure stop them.
Building on Failure
The Torah tells that when the Egyptians enslaved the Jews, they forced the slaves to build the cities of Pitom and Raamses. The Midrash tells us something fascinating about this building project. It says that when the Jews built the city, it crumbled, or just sank into the ground like in quicksand, and so they had to build it again. The city again collapsed, and so they had to build it again. And then again. And again.
Yet, the Torah tells us ויבן ערי מסכנות – that the slaves actually built the city. What this means is that eventually, the city was built. After building time and time again, only to watch to the city demolished each time, finally, the city was able to stand.
In order to be a nation of excellence, this is what we need to be able to do – to continue building even after failure. Even if we work hard and see no results, we continue working. This is the price we pay for greatness.
Once, on the fast of Asarah Be’Tevet, I sent my daughter to get a statement from the bank. It was a frigid day, and she was fasting, and she did not really want to do this errand for us. But she went, and the bank did not really know what we needed. She had to come home and then go back again. She finally came home, well after the fast ended – and without the statement.
“I am never doing this again!” she said. “What a waste of time!”
I turned to her and said, “I’m so glad you had this experience.”
She thought I was crazy.
I explained to her that she had learned a valuable life lesson – that we’re going to have days like that, when nothing we do seems to work, when everything we “build” seems to just come crashing down. And that’s okay.
Failure is part of the process. Part of building is watching what we build collapse, and then doing it again. It’s part of the price we pay for excellence.
“Hadje” is the precise opposite of this mindset. It’s the attitude of, “Well, it didn’t work, so whatever, it doesn’t matter. I did enough.”
This is not how people who strive for excellence talk. For them, it’s never “hadje.”
People sometimes come to me to lament that our community places too much emphasis on money, focusing too much on income, on earnings, and on materialism.
You know why this is? Because we aren’t striving for excellence in other areas of our lives, so this is all we have left.
If we decided to be excellent husbands and wives, to be excellent parents, to be excellent neighbors and community members, to be excellent in Torah study and observance, money would not matter that much to us.
Unfortunately, we do not talk enough about striving for excellence. We do just the opposite – saying “hadje,” that we’re comfortable being just “okay.” Every time we say this word, we reinforce this terrible message. We need to change our attitude – and our vocabulary!!! – to emphasize the need to reach for excellence, and to pay the price to get there!
Standards!!
When we speak of “paying the price,” we mean maintaining high standards, on three different levels:
1) Standards of conduct
This is the most obvious level – the standards of the way we act. We pray three times a day. We wear Shabbat clothes on Shabbat. Personally, I make a point never to pull out my phone, not even for a second, when I’m in shul. We should make sure not to talk during the tefilah. Even if other people around us don’t maintain these standards of conduct, we still need do – because this is part of the price we need to pay to be excellent.
2) Standards in results
When a devoted wife and mother prepares a Shabbat or holiday meal for her family and guests, she sets high standards for herself – in terms of the quantity and quality of the food, how the food is served, the way the table is set, and so on. She does not say “hadje” and serve some chicken and a dessert. She extends herself to achieve excellent results.
This is the way we should approach life, as well. We should set high standards. This does not mean we will always reach them – as I said, failure is part of the price we have to pay for excellence. But excellence is what we should demand of ourselves.
I want my children to study for tests with the aim of getting 100. Not to get a 70, or an 80, or even a 90 – but to get 100. If they don’t, then I don’t want them to feel discouraged; I want them to try harder next to time. The goal has to be excellence, and if we fall short – then we build on that failure to get better.
3) Standards of price
Most important of all, we need to be prepared to pay a high price.
If we want to have an excellent marriage, then we need to bite our tongues when we feel an urge to say something critical or negative. We need to tell ourselves “no” when there’s something we’re dying to buy.
If we want to be excellent in Torah, then we need to forego on things we enjoy doing for the sake of attending classes and applying ourselves to study.
If we want to be excellent parents, then we need to spend time with our kids, which means we cannot go on every vacation we want or attend every social function we want. We need to pay a price for excellence.
These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves:
· What is my standard of conduct?
· What kind of results am I aiming for?
· How high a price am I prepared to pay for those results?
If we live with this mindset, our lives will be so much more exciting and so much more fulfilling.
Wake Up Invigorated!
I was once talking to a youngster who told me that he felt lethargic and unmotivated.
I told him that the solution lies in this concept – of aiming for excellence, and paying the price for it.
When I wake up in the morning, I explained to him, I say to myself, “Hashem gave me another day. This means He thinks I’m important. He wants me to accomplish something today. So I am going to do an AWESOME job.”
If a person feels content being just average, waking up in the morning is difficult. There’s nothing to be excited about. But once we set our goals on being excellent, we wake up invigorated.
I want my marriage to be excellent. I want my kids to be excellent. I want my character to be excellent. I want to be an excellent teacher and speaker. I want to be excellent in caring for other people. I want to be excellent in Torah knowledge.
I might not achieve any of these, but these are my goals, this is what I am going to aim at.
And this is why it makes me sad whenever I hear somebody say “hadje.” Because when a person says this, it means that he or she doesn’t live with this ambition, with this drive, with this excitement. It means that person is perfectly content being average. And that’s really sad.
How important is this concept?
Important enough for Hashem to make a huge nation endure 210 years of slavery in a foreign land for them – and us – to learn this lesson. We started out as slaves precisely for this reason – so that we learn that we need to work and strive for excellence, and that the word “hadje” should never be part of our vocabulary!!!!
One Monday, I received a call from the young woman who arranges the Monday night class I give to recent high school graduates. She told me that due to the inclement weather, and the fact that many of the girls were away, it might be best to cancel that week’s class. I told her I’d think about it.
A short while I called her back and said that I decided not to cancel the class. I was afraid that some girls might not get the message, and they would go out into the bad weather, circle to try to find parking, and then come inside the shul and see there was no class. I did not want that to happen, not even to one girl!
I gave the class, and about ten girls showed up.
Because of the small turnout, I did not study Pirkeh Avot with them as I normally do, and instead did something completely different. I spoke about a certain chapter of Tehillim – one which is not widely known – in which David Ha’melech talks about the way he handled the scorn of his enemies.
I started reading a pasuk in this chapter, and one of the girls finished the pasuk. I was very impressed, as this is not a very common chapter.
Later, I quoted other pesukim from this chapter, and each time, this girl completed pasuk.
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “How do you know this??”
She answered that reads this chapter of Tehillim every day, so she was very familiar with it.
After the class, she came over to me and said, “This is amazing – just this week I was praying to Hashem to help me really understand what I’m saying when I read this chapter. And here I come to your class – which was about this chapter!”
It would have been very convenient for me to simply stay home instead of going out into the bitter cold to give a class. But that day I refused to be average. I wanted to be excellent. And Hashem made something excellent come out of it.
This is the way we should be living – like we’re on the road to excellence, each and every day. And if we live this way, and we pay the price in striving for this goal, then Hashem will do His part and help us get there.