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October 3, 2008
Rosh Hashanah: What’s Your Legacy
Maayan Jaffe
Staff Reporter
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Get your priorities straight before it’s too late. That was the central message delivered Sept. 25 at a lecture at Beth Tfiloh’s Mercaz Dahan Center by Rabbi Yissocher Frand, a senior lecturer at Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Pikesville. He told a crowded sanctuary that the High Holiday season is a time to reflect and refocus on what is important.
In his lecture, Rabbi Frand spoke about a former Wall Street star named Andrew Neff who was employed at Bear Stearns for 20 years. Mr. Neff, who was there when it closed, wrote an essay titled “From Bear Stearns to Baba Metzia” in which he named five lessons he learned when the 86-year-old financial giant disappeared almost overnight.
Lesson four on Mr. Neff’s list, Rabbi Frand noted, is that every benefit has a cost and every cost has a benefit.
“Wall Street is a great place to have a career. It can bring great wealth, prestige and power. But there is also a cost. You lose track of priorities,” Rabbi Frand quoted Mr. Neff.
“A Talmudic passage says that in the world to come, we learn that the next world is inverted from this world,” the rabbi read from Mr. Neff’s essay. “It was a hard passage for me to understand until I left the high-powered world. The things I feared losing most were small things: a secretary, car services. The things I gave up most easily — time, especially with my family — had the most value. In retrospect, I see how inverted my priorities were on Wall Street.”
Rabbi Frand gave a 30-minute discussion about misplaced priorities. He said, according to Midrash, back in the time of the Torah, when Jacob and Esau were in their mother’s womb, Jacob offered Esau a deal. He explained to him the difference between the physical world and the spiritual world, and said to his brother, “If you take the physical, I’ll take the spiritual.”
The deal was sealed, Rabbi Frand said, when Esau came home from the field and sold his birthright to his brother for a bowl of lentils.
“What happens,” said Rabbi Frand, “is we become enthralled in the world of Esau and we lose our focus of what is major, what is minor.”
Rabbi Frand cited numerous examples in society, such as the parent who works long hours and, when his child says she misses him, he says he is working to give her what she wants. He mentioned a family who said they could not afford to give their son yeshiva tutoring because they were building an addition on their home. He talked about a mother who refused a girl for a match for her son because she scraped the plates at the table and not in the kitchen.
All of these examples, said Rabbi Frand, are examples of misplaced priorities.
Then he drove home the message of Rosh Hashanah, the 10 days of repentance and Yom Kippur — that each of us has a chance to examine the direction of our lives and where we are headed.
“We are the most fortunate nation because we have Yom Kippur,” said Rabbi Frand. “Most people in the world don’t have this and it takes something like the collapse of a company to make them re-think their priorities.”
Rabbi Frand said, “Think about your legacy.” When you die, he said, “do you want to be remembered by the number of cars you had, the square footage of your house or by the type of parent you were, the type of child you were to your parent?”