Parshas Behar 5782
They tell the story of an executive who, standing on the precipice of major professional burnout, decides to take an extended leave of absence and get away from it all. He books a small villa in Tijuana where he can recuperate and starts to get to know the lay of the land. One day he comes upon a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that serves up the freshest, most delicious grilled fish. He speaks with the proprietor and asks him his secret, but the reply is nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders.
“It’s just really fresh,” he answers. The exec is intrigued. “Well what’s your business model? What does your life look like?” The owner responds with his daily schedule. He gets up at dawn, takes out his fishing boat, and pulls in the day’s catch. He hauls it to his small store where we works from the late morning until the early afternoon, earning enough in those few hours to support his family’s modest lifestyle.
“What do you do the rest of the day?” the executive presses. “I go home,” he replies. “First a short siesta, then I play soccer out in the yard with my kids. I cook dinner with my wife and we sit down as a family. Afterwards, some friends or family come over and we have some wine out on the veranda. I strum my guitar and we tell stories, sing, and laugh together. We turn in early and the next morning I’m up again at dawn.”
The executive’s eyes widen. “My friend, you’re sitting on a gold mine with this restaurant of yours. You should consider franchising. In your free time after work you ought to be working on growing your business.” “What then?” he asks. “Then you’d have a whole fleet of restaurants paying you royalties.” “What then?” he asks further. “Then you could consider building further. Expanding into America.” “What then?” he presses. “Then the money would really come pouring in. You could have hundreds, maybe thousands of franchises and you could be collecting from all of them!” “And what then?” he insists. “Then you’d have the free time to do whatever you like. You could end your work day early, go home and play with your kids, cook with your wife, have dinner with the family, and spend the evenings sipping wine with your friends and playing your guitar.”
וְכִי תֹאמְרוּ מַה־נֹּאכַל בַּשָּׁנָה הַשְּׁבִיעִת הֵן לֹא נִזְרָע וְלֹא נֶאֱסֹף אֶת־תְּבוּאָתֵנוּ׃
ויקרא כה:כ
And if you shall say, “What shall we eat in the seventh year if we may not sow and may not gather our crops?
Vayikra 25:20
Rav Aharon Asher Volinetz, in his sefer Osher Aharon, notes that the concern voiced by the farmer in the above pasuk seems to be off base. If one cannot work in the land during the seventh year, then the problem is that there will be nothing to eat in the eighth year. It is the previous year’s crops that would be utilized in the coming year more so than the crops of that same year. Why is the farmer jumping the gun?
He answers with a salient insight. A person can become so preoccupied with what the future does or doesn’t have in store that it can be impossible to appreciate the blessing already present in his life. We can obsess over the expansion of a fish-restaurant franchise that lose sight of the fact that the goals we actually wish to attain may already be in hand.
Ambition is a generally positive quality. We are inspired by people who see beyond the present and can hold an image in their mind’s eye of a future time more impressive than the current circumstances. We want to be around such people and we want to be such people ourselves. We want to be bold and enterprising, not to sell ourselves short through underachievement and small thinking.
Indeed, ambition is a wonderful thing. But it can also be an unfortunate distraction. We can be so tomorrow-minded that we ignore the good fortune of today. We can become so nervous about retirement that we can’t bring ourselves to enjoy the present. We can become consumed with what can be built in the future that we are blinded by the fact that what we truly want to achieve already has been.
There may be plenty of food in the pantry in the seventh year. But the fact that there isn’t enough for the eighth year means I can’t even enjoy the meal I’m eating today. My disposition is characterized by worry and complaint rather than contentment and gratitude.
The fisherman continues to ask the executive who hounds him, “What then?” It’s critical that at times we ask ourselves the same.