Here is how to make an honest living, with confidence and minimal worry:
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Determine how much you need to provide for your family’s needs.
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Get into a business that can make that sum of money.
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Put your best foot forward and do whatever needs to be done.
And stop there. Invest yourself, but don’t enslave yourself. Do your job, but don't become your job. No anxiety, no fretting, no sleepless nights. More will get you less.
That’s a job: You put out a bucket just the right size in the rain and trust that heaven will fill it to the brim.
Derech Mitzvosecha, Tiglachat Metzora; Hayom Yom, 16 Adar II and 5 Tammuz.
i have a question. we have the obligation to do a honest living, not cutting corners etc.
but when you work for an employer and he wants you to do things that is not in line with honest living, what then?
you see a lot of shop with targets that have to be held selling a specific product.
But if a customer lets you know what he/she needs, and that specific target product is not the right product for the customer but something else, in my opinion, i have to sell what is needed and not the target.
It can be that this will end up with a conflict with the employer and you loose your job.
How to work with this problem?
There is an entire section of halachah dealing with this. Specifically, what you are referring to is called גניבת דעת—deluding a person in a matter of valuable information. You need to sit with a qualified rabbi and determine the halachah in your case.
Or write to our Ask the Rabbi team.
to be honest, i belong to the goi, have no Rabbi to ask. all i know and think to understand is mostly the things i learn over more than 20/25 year reading the daily dose and reading some books about the Baal Shem Tov etc.
But this question haunts me because i can not imagine that a honest living, seen from the Great Creator, is only in personal life.
Be true, be reel, say what you do and do what you say are the guidelines i try to follow.