The Meaning of Making Money

"If life is full of meaning, why am I spending it hustling other people for their money?"

Don't think the question was invented by our bourgeois-bohemian, save-the-world-and-get-rich-too generation. It's been around since G-d handed Adam a hoe and kicked him out of the garden. Just that most of Adam's children worked that hoe with their hands. Today, we are all plowing the earth with our heads. And that can mean a pretty muddy head.

We plow the earth with our heads. And that can mean a pretty muddy head... Some of us like mud. Some think mud is disgusting and run away from it. A lot of us try to compromise--we'll just get a little bit dirty and try to wash up often. In which case we end up with a bifurcated life in which our principal occupation is making money and finding meaning is a pastime.

What we really want is a way to have it all. We want to discover that selling widgets is actually a path to higher consciousness and that true enlightenment doesn't have to be accessed in serene meditation remote from humanity--you can grab it from a corporate desk overlooking downtown Atlanta. Maybe even a law firm.

But if widget sales are all about getting hold of other people's money, then how can there be any nexus between this and your personal spirituality?

We have to re-examine what business is all about. Perhaps business, too, is about discovering meaning. About discovering jewels in that mud.

The master Kabbalist, the "Ari" (Rabbi Isaac Luria, 1534-1572), had our question five hundred years ago--but on a more basic level: If man is a spiritual being, why must he eat? Animals, it would seem, are less spiritual than people. Vegetables seem even lower--and the earth, air and sunshine would appear to be at the rock bottom. Yet vegetation is nurtured by those "inanimate" elements (indicating that they possess a vital force which it itself lacks), animals are nurtured by both those elements and the vegetation, and human beings rely on all three. Why, the Ari asked, is the pyramid turned upside down?

The real reason we eat is not for ourselves, but for the sake of our food Or maybe it's not upside down. Maybe, in some way, those animals hold within them a divine spark that is far beyond anything the human can attain on his own. Maybe the deeper you go into the earthiness of planet earth, the brighter the sparks become, so that the greatest sparks are found in the earthiest places. Which means that the real reason we eat is not for ourselves, but for the sake of our food. To uncover those sparks and connect them back to their source--and to one another.

Which is just what the Ari and his students taught: That all of human endeavor is meant to be a way to reconnect the world and reveal its G-dly power.

There is a caveat, however, to this process: In order to rescue a spark from its captivity within your food, you need to stay one step above it. If you're "grabbing a bite," the bite is grabbing you. Meaning that if it's the food that's demanding, "You need me. You must eat me. Eat me now!" and you stoop and obey--then it's not the spark that's being lifted up, but you that's being dragged down. Eating, the Ari explained, must be treated as any other spiritual activity, with composure, with mindfulness--as a human being.

Just like Adam with that hoe uncovered the power of the earth to produce bushels of food, so the widget seller has discovered a way to enhance human life with a simple array of wires and plastic. The systems analyst, too, is constantly in the process of digging value out of the abyss into which it has fallen. The orthodontist uncovers enhancement to human life so that no young lady need go without a pretty smile.

Turns out that business really is about finding meaning--about finding and exposing the secret power of the world around us. And not only the power to enhance human life, but also the power of miracles and wonders and beautiful deeds. The infinite light hidden in finite places.

...The deeper we enter the caverns of mundane life, the more brilliant are the jewels we find--as long as we stay above while we enter within... The widget guy found that infinite light hidden in an inner city high school, when he realized how his widgets could be used as a tool for teaching cooperation and literacy. The Atlanta executive revealed it in his own office when he arranged for a weekly lunch 'n learn session with a local rabbi who discusses Talmudic business ethics. As for the orthodontist, she finds it every day, in the wonderful smiles she brings to young people, especially the ones from underprivileged families, who she takes as clients pro bono.

The deeper we enter the caverns of mundane life, the more brilliant are the jewels we find--as long as we stay above while we enter within. Meaning: As long as we remember that the purpose of our occupation is not the obvious one of making money, but a deeper, higher purpose. Because we are all, in truth, spiritual beings navigating a material world.

As the Psalmist writes, "Those who go down in ships to the sea, who do their craft in the mighty waters; they are the ones to see the works of G-d, catching His wonders in their net."1