Today we will share a story that illustrates a point that we mentioned in previous classes.
Not long ago, we spoke about the concept that you decide your own destiny, with the level of bitachon you have. If you believe that you need a certain amount of hishtadlut, then you need that amount of hishtadlut.
If you believe you need less, you’ll need less.
It’s what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy. But you can never be proven wrong because you'll always prove yourself right. You need the amount of hishtadlut that you think you need. There is a humorous story told, I believe, in the name of the Elder of Novardok, of a young man from a family that had a shoe business. A shoe business, in those days, meant you made shoes by hand.
He married a young woman from a family that had a diamond business, which was obviously a more lucrative business. How many shoes could you make in a day?
The wife advised her husband to join her family's business, which was far more profitable than his family's business, but the husband declined.
“This is the business that I know. This is the business I was raised on,” he said, and he continued building up his small shoe business. They lived a happy life, but the wife’s brothers enjoyed much more luxury than they did- more trips, nicer homes, and so on.
After many years, the husband turned to his wife and said, “It's really a good thing that I stuck to selling shoes. After all the 20 years I've been doing this, not one person has ever walked into my shop and asked for a diamond. Everyone who walked in wanted shoes. Could you imagine would've happened if I had sold diamonds? I wouldn't have made a cent!”
“You're so silly,” she replied. “You decided to sell shoes, so people come to you for shoes. If you had decided to sell diamonds, people would've come to you for diamonds!”
The same is true regarding our hishtadlut. If a person decides that to earn his living, he must work long, hard hours, he'll say, “Wow, it's a good thing I didn't rely on Bitachon, Look how successful I am, because I'm putting in all this work.”
He fails to realize that if he trusted in Hashem, he would've earned the same livelihood with less work.
Of course, it’s a hard thing to prove and it's a hard thing to fully conceptualize. But we all know, by and large, that to be successful, you need just a few things to happen-a few, what they call, lucky breaks, in order to make a business work.
And usually, those lucky breaks don't take so much effort. But it's hard to prove or disprove this theory.
Who gets the lucky breaks?
Of course, it’s not everyone with bitachon that gets the lucky breaks, because of it were, there'd be no freedom of choice. Obviously, there are people who work hard who also get lucky breaks. But the point is, hishtadlut is not a science.
You can't sit down and say exactly how many hours you need. If you're a lawyer who gets paid by the hour, you'll say, “Well, I have to put a certain amount of hours in.” But then again, certain lawyers get paid more per hour. And some lawyers have associates and get a portion of their business. So again, it's very hard to be finite with hishtadlut. There is definitely lots of room for the miracle of Hashem's hand to play its role.
· Everyone knows stories of success that were not something that you could have predicted or planned, those, for lack of a better term, lucky breaks. That's where bitachon comes in, in those areas where there is no exact defined yes or no.
And, it's not only in Parnassa, it's in all areas. You can have the lucky break of the right doctor, the right lawyer, the right shadchan, the right person to save you money or get you out of a problem. Someone told me once that he was supposed to pay pay X amount of taxes and then someone mentioned to him that he had a similar business venture and was paying much less taxes. He told him to use his accountant, and he saved him a lot of money.
Those are the kind of things that you can't plan. This man obviously merited to get that tip of the accountant who would save him more money, and that had nothing to do with effort or time and so on and so forth.
There's an even deeper concept, which we might have mentioned in the past, which says a person's food is decided from year to year.
It doesn't say his money is decided, but his food is decided. So, with all the money that you make and all the success that you have, how are you to measure your food intake, your relaxation and general serenity… the bottom line, so to say, the enjoyments of life, which can never be measured? You can never prove who's having more and who's having less. Who sleeps better at night and who sleeps worse? That's not something that's tangible or measurable.
Again, there is a lot of room for our bitachon to play a role, and nobody will ever know it’s effects.
Have a wonderful day.