Episode 19 - Beyond the Billionaire Mindset: Happiness Without the Bank Account

Trust in God transforms our relationship with wealth in ways that reach far beyond the material realm. Whether blessed with abundance or facing financial limitation, genuine trust brings clarity and contentment regardless of circumstance.

For those with wealth, trust reveals the true purpose behind their resources. Money becomes not merely a vehicle for personal comfort but a sacred responsibility. When properly understood, abundance creates opportunities to support community needs, fulfill Torah obligations, and transform lives. The spiritually mature recognize they are stewards rather than owners, keeping what they reasonably need while directing excess toward those struggling simply to maintain basic dignity. This perspective brings profound contentment—knowing exactly why wealth has been entrusted to them.

Meanwhile, those with limited means gain freedom from the burdens wealth often brings. Without constant solicitations, suspicious relationships, and weighty decisions about resource allocation, they experience peace unavailable to the wealthy. Though one might believe they would manage abundance virtuously if given the chance, divine wisdom sees far beyond our limited understanding, determining exactly what each person requires at each life stage.

Perhaps most transformative is breaking free from the endless pursuit of more. Those who "love money will never be satiated"—having 100 only increases desire for 200. True happiness requires recognizing what actually constitutes "enough" and finding joy independent of external circumstances. As Jews, our baseline should be happiness regardless of situation, adjusting upward during celebratory seasons and downward during somber times.

Equally important is the rejection of transactional relationships. When we help others conditionally—reminding them of past kindnesses or withholding future assistance because they didn't reciprocate—we violate fundamental spiritual principles. True giving emulates divine attributes: unconditional, without expectation, and never mentioned afterward to create indebtedness.

Ready to transform your relationship with wealth and find contentment regardless of your financial situation? Subscribe now and join our journey toward spiritual abundan

Transcript

Wrapping Up the Fourth Spiritual Benefit

Speaker 1 0:00

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another program. We are wrapping up the fourth spiritual benefit of trust in God, wrapping it up and moving on to the fifth. So the summary for the fourth spiritual benefit is that, no matter how much you have or don't have in terms of material wealth, in terms of money and finances, you constantly live with clarity. You constantly live with contentment, knowing that if you have a lot, that it's a benefit to you, because now you have an opportunity to change the world in a big way. That if God trusts you with lots of money that can change people's lives and support your community and do the things that the Torah requires of us to do, then you should do that and that's why he gave it to you. And if you're conducting yourself properly and you've got the mindset and you understand it, then you're content, you're happy, you know for what, why you have the money. You know that it's not for you, you know that it's not. So you can buy yourself another big house and another fancy car and get all the latest and all the trendy and all the brand names and you could be a walking billboard so you could look like I don't know, get into it and start saying things I don't want to say.

Speaker 1 1:06

But the reality is that people today, unfortunately, when they make their money, they think it's made specifically and exclusively for their own benefit. I'm talking in a general sense. I'm not talking about everybody. Obviously, we have a lot of very righteous people who God has entrusted with their money, and you could see how righteous they are. You see the way they live, you see the priorities that they have. I'm not saying that if God gives you money, you can't drive a nice car. I'm not saying if God gives you money, you can't have a nice house. Of course you can, but it's all relative. You have to understand what the priorities. If it's all going to you and the scraps are going to supporting your community and Torah objectives, then your priorities are upside down and you're living an incorrect life. If, on the contrary, the exact opposite is true, you keep what you need for yourself, you make sure you live by reasonable means, you make sure you have everything you need for your family right, you do all the things that you need to do, and then the vast majority of what you're earning and what you're gaining that you know is excess. You know it's excess. You know that the only way that you can spend it on yourself is to increase and continue to live by higher and higher and higher standards that nobody needs Certainly nobody needs but you want it because you've got it as opposed to seeing people who are poor and destitute and broken and don't have what to eat and could use that money just to sustain themselves, just to be able to live another day, just to be able to have an ounce of normalcy in their lives.

Speaker 1 2:32

So you have to figure out what's your and again, it's not a cookie cutter system. God didn't create a cookie cutter religion. It's not a pigeonhole that we need to fit into right. Everything is relative. Everything is personal to the individual. You know what your net worth is. You know what your expenses are. You know what's important and what's not important, or at least you should.

Speaker 1 2:52

If you don't have money, if you don't have means, the same thing is true. You don't kick yourself while you're down. You don't beat up on yourself, looking at everybody else who has means and think why not me? Why can't I have that? Why aren't I entrusted with those finances? Why can't I be the decision maker? You weren't chosen. It's not your job.

Speaker 1 3:13

Hashem chose somebody for that, you have to be content knowing that you don't have the headaches and the worries and the stress and the anxieties that come from having all this wealth. You don't want to know, or maybe you're not capable of knowing, maybe you think you are, but God knows otherwise of knowing what it feels like to have somebody come and put his hand in front of you and ask for a handout every single day and not being sure who your friends are, constantly suspecting the people who are around you. That's not a great way to live, and maybe, if Hashem gave you that wealth, maybe that might be you and you might jeopardize your relationships. You don't know that in your mind, no, no, no. I'm the best to safeguard Hashem's money. I'm the guy right, I can do all the right things with it. If only then I would do this and I would do that right, if only I had the wealth. But in reality he knows exactly what you would do with it. Then he knows not just what you would do with it, but what your life would look like with that wealth, and he's made it a determination that it's not for you, at least not right now. That can change. Money can come right, it can come and it can go. It's not guaranteed to be here and so maybe later on you get it. But at that point, and until then, when you have no means, you understand that the benefit to that is that you don't have the headache, right. You get to live a much more peaceful life.

Finding Contentment at Any Wealth Level

Speaker 1 4:36

Moving on to the fifth benefit of having trust in God and he says again very interesting concept over here. I've mentioned it before we're talking about spiritual benefits and it's kind of irking me a little bit that All we've talked about is wealth, right. So if we're talking about material benefits next, I would think that's where we talk about wealth, not now. I think now we'd be talking about our relationship with our creator. Obviously there are connections, right. I would just think on a surface level that if we're talking wealth, it's directly connected back to material, more than anything. Clearly, rabbeinu Bachi is telling us something different over here. There's clearly a message in it and it's our job to flush it out and hopefully, as we get through the next five benefits material benefits we'll be able to compare and contrast. But the fifth one doesn't disappoint that.

Speaker 1 5:32

Somebody who trusts in God completely knows that it's coming from Hashem, does not rely on his excess money as assurance for his future. In other words, I've got way more than I can ever use, way more than my children can ever use, way more than my great-grandchildren could ever use. Right, and that's all for me. So now I'm content because, as we've said in the beginning, there's no such thing as contentment. Ohav loves money, will never be satiated with the amount of money and never be content with the amount of money that he has. He has 100, he wants 200, right, we said it's double. You're never content. That's the way we're programmed. So you have to stop and recognize at one point go wait a second. I don't need all this. It's not for we're programmed. So you have to stop and recognize at one point go wait a second. I don't need all this, it's not for me.

Speaker 1 6:23

What does an individual need to be able to live a decent life? What does an individual need to be able to be the best version of him? You don't need to be Elon Musk. Not everybody needs to be a billionaire, right? And if that's your goal, if you're always aiming for that, then you got to get your head on straight, because life is passing you by. Life is passing you by If you're putting your contentment, if you're putting your happiness in an outside factor outside of you that you don't have any control of.

Baseline Happiness for Jews

Speaker 1 6:48

You may think you have control, but we've said very clearly we know where our money comes. We know it's determined in Rosh Hashanah and the new year. Every year, everybody's determined how much they're going to get. So if you're spending the rest of that year running after more money, as if somehow you can control how much you're going to make this year well, in the pursuit of that, you're going to miss out on the rest of your life. You're going to miss out on all the beautiful things. You're going to miss out on being happy for no reason. That's the baseline for a Jew. A baseline for a Jew is being happy for no reason. We always need to be happy because we have a billion reasons, as we discussed even in the last class. We discussed everyone. If you just take a simple accounting every day, you'll recognize that you have a billion reasons to be happy. But forget all those reasons. The baseline for a Jew is to be happy.

Speaker 1 7:41

How do we know that there's two times in the year, or two months in the year, where we are commanded, as Jews, to increase our happiness or to decrease our happiness. Right Misha nichnas, adar, marbin besimcha. When adar, the month of adarar, comes in the month of Purim, we're supposed to increase our happiness. Right In the month of Av, which is where we have Tisha B'Av, the worst day in history for Judaism, we're supposed to lower our happiness. We're supposed to decrease our happiness. What's the implication? The implication is that our standard is happy, your standard is happy. You increase during certain times of the year and you decrease during certain times of the year. That means that the status quo is happy. That's a Jew right.

Unconditional Giving and Avoiding Transactional Mindset

The Fifth Spiritual Benefit: Future Security

Speaker 1 8:28

So, continuing on, somebody. He says here and this is very, very interesting I want to touch on this because this is a very, very important concept, again, not something we're probably going to have to discuss tomorrow as well. He's talking about over here that somebody who has means and gives donations and helps people around him. He will not afterward mention his kindness to the one to whom he was commanded to give the money, ie to the poor person. This, my friends, you all know very well and I pray you're not this type of person and if you are, it's time to start working on this yesterday. If you're the type of person who does charity, who helps people conditionally, then you're doing it wrong. Not only is it a very negative character trait, but it's also a serious error, and I think we've touched on it in the past and Rabbeinu Bach is bringing it again. If you're the kind of person who lends your neighbor the lawnmower and the next time you go and ask him for his lawnmower, he gives you an excuse and you remind him very quickly about the time that you lent him your lawnmower, you've just sinned, 've just committed an Avera. You've just gone against Torah precepts. If he doesn't want to give you Islam or for whatever reason, you are not allowed to remind him that you lent him yours or that you gave him X, y or Z when he asked for it. That's not how it works. And more than that, more than that, if he comes back the next time and asks for your lawnmower again, if you're withholding your lawnmower because he didn't give you his lawnmower, same thing, you just transgressed another sin. Why? Because it's not tit for tat. That's not how we work. I do because you do. We are not transactional based. I mean, we are transactional based individuals, but we shouldn't be when it comes to Torah. You want to transact Transact in business, right. You have plenty of opportunities. Go to the grocery store, take whatever they're selling, give them your money, use a transaction right. That's not how Torah works. It's not transactional based. How do we know this? Because Hashem runs this world, and our job, our purpose, is to emulate God. That's our job. Our job is to be like Him. We've talked about this briefly in the past. Also, how do we emulate God? Obviously, we're not God. Obviously, we can never be God, we can never even come remotely close to it. But we can learn his Torah and through his art, through his creation, through his Torah, he exposes himself. He tells us who he is and how he operates, what's important to him and what's not important to him, right, and our job is to take what's important to him, what's not important to him, and more than that, he actually tells us and we say it in our prayer every day. He gives us the 13 attributes of Hashem. He tells us what his attributes are, and if you analyze those attributes now, you understand who your creator is. Guess what? Now your job is to emulate him. So it talks about having endless patience and it talks about not getting mad, and it talks about kindness and all these different attributes of Hashem. But Hashem, we've said God, is not a taker. He can't take Physically, by definition, cannot take. There's nothing we can do for him. So, by definition, his entire existence is just to do for us, unconditionally. So if we, my friends, are emulating God, guess what, when you're transacting with your neighbor or your friend or your family member, it's unconditionally. Of course there are situations where there is a business component to it. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about when you said to somebody you know I need this, and they say, well, I need that. You say, okay, well, here let's agree that you've made a discussion around swapping or trading, I get it. I'm talking about somebody comes over and asks for a kindness, asks for tzatka, asks for assistance, and you go and deliver. And when you see that individual the next day, maybe you don't even need anything from them. But, boy, are you sure to make them feel indebted to you? Boy, are you hell-bent on making sure that they will never forget the one time that you did something for them, never mind if you did it multiple times? But if you're that type of person, god forbid, you should have started to work on yourself a long time ago, and the next best time to start working on yourself is today. If you know people like that, well, now we know that they're operating in a very dark area and we should do everything we can to try and help them. That is the class for today, my friends. We'll continue with the fifth and final spiritual benefit and, god willing, we'll move on to the worldly benefits in the following class. Have an amazing day.