Whoever dies with the
most toys wins.
I have often seen this bumper sticker—and every time I do,
it saddens me. The notion that we can
achieve contentment by accruing a bunch of stuff is perhaps the most damning
and destructive lie at the heart of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism. As Ecclesiastes realized three thousand years
ago, amassing anything—wealth, fame, power and even knowledge—is, in the end,
pure vanity. The Rabbis put it
succinctly: “Who is happy? Those who
rejoice in their own portion.” Or in
Sheryl Crow’s insightful take on this wisdom: “It’s not getting what you want—it’s
wanting what you’ve got.”
In this week’s portion, Naso—the
longest in the Torah—we find another version of this lesson. Numbers 5:8-9 teaches: “Any gift among the
sacred donations that the Israelites offer shall be the priest’s. And each shall retain his sacred donations:
what a man gives to the priest shall be his.”
By the standard reading, “his”
is a reference to the priest, who receives the gift. But the Talmud (Brachot 63a) offers an
alternative interpretation, in which “his”
refers to the donor. In other words, as
the commentary in Etz Hayyim notes,
it is only when we give something away that the gift, and the good deed that it
represents, becomes permanently ours.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner captures the essence of this paradox
in his path-breaking book, Honey from the
Rock. He writes of our central human
challenge: “To learn that it is good for you when other people love other
people besides you. That I get more when
others give to others. That if I hoard
it, I lose it. That if I give it away, I
get it back.”
In other words, the things that matter most—love, kindness,
wisdom—do not follow the rules of the “dismal science” of economics. Paradoxically, it is only when we share what
we have that we can gain and grow.
Or, to amend that bumper sticker: Whoever dies with the fewest toys wins.
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