Dayan (judge) Binstock said the most beautiful idea. He said that in Parashat Shemot, we find that Moshe Rabbeinu was coming back to save the Jewish people from slavery. People are dying, people are being killed, people are being beaten every day of the week. He has two kids, Gershon and Eliezer. He's coming back to the land of Egypt. As he's coming back, he checks into a hotel. A snake attacks him and is going to kill him. Why does a snake attack him? The snake attacks him because he hasn't yet done brit milah (circumcision) on his son. The reason he didn't do brit milah is that he was traveling, and it was dangerous. But now that you've gotten to where you're getting to, you should have done the brit milah first, then checked in, and then taken care of everything else. You had to delay it; you had a good reason, fine. But now that you're here, that should have been your first priority. Tzipora comes and does the brit milah on her son before the snake can kill Moshe Rabbeinu, saving her husband's life.
Ask Dayan Binstock. Amazing question. He says, “I don't understand. God, you have all the Jewish people dying. You have the leader. They're all suffering. So fine, Moshe Rabbeinu made a mistake. But you're going to deny the Jewish people their leader because of this little mistake that Moshe Rabbeinu made? All these people are going to die until you find somebody else? How long is that going to take?” Dayan Binstock answered with an amazing answer. He said, “If Moshe, or at least Moshe and his team, i.e., Tzipora—we know a husband and wife are like one body, like one soul—could tend to the needs of the people, and that came at the cost of not doing what he needed to do for his own son, then God didn't cost the Jewish people a leader. He was never the leader of the Jewish people. Because it can't be that the leader would lead at the expense of his own children. He's obviously not the guy. So the Jewish people would not have lost their leader. He never would have been the leader, because he didn't tend to his own children first.”
My friends, this is what I mean when I talk about non-negotiables. What is your non-negotiable at work? At what point do you look at the environment at work and say, “This is not for me”? Now, it's true that if I leave, I'll make less money. But the way that people speak, the way that they speak over here, the way that they think, the way that they act, the things that they make me do. There was a generation of people who gave up their jobs because of Shabbat, and they struggled with that. During the Great Depression, people were getting laid off every week. It's not just that they couldn't pay tuition or send their kids to camp. They didn't have food. They were struggling, suffering. But for them, that was a red line.
At work, there are red lines. In Shidduchim (matchmaking), there are red lines. Where your kid is at school—red lines. Now, if something happens at the school that you don't like, what do you do? You make sure that they correct it. The school tells you, “We're not correcting it.” So you have to decide you're going to live with it. Where are your red lines?