Really Rich
Financial problems put enormous strains on a marriage. Yet, people aspire to make so much money that they forget about their spouses and their children...
Last week, I was in our local grocery store when I bumped into a neighbor who told me that he’d just been made redundant from his job. His wife had been fired from her job a few weeks’ earlier. Later in that week, we had friends come to tea who were struggling desperately – and failing terribly – to balance their budget. Every month, they were spending thousands of shekels more than they were bringing home.
I called another friend in London who had just become unemployed; spoke to another friend here who is struggling to find work and make ends meet – and by the end of the week, it struck me just how bad the economic situation is getting, that so many people in my relatively small circle are being directly affected.
My husband and I know how worried and depressed people can feel when they are struggling with their finances: three years ago, at the height of the ‘boom’ we were in exactly the same boat.
My husband had started his own legal practice, and was doing OK – until his biggest client went bankrupt, owing him tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid bills. This was money that we’d banked on and money that we’d already spent. At the same time, my business went from billing £25,000 a month to less than £500, almost overnight.
At the time, neither my husband nor I had ever heard the word ‘emuna’. We both believed in Hashem, but I can see with hindsight that we believed in a very distant, ‘abstract’ sort of Hashem, who certainly wasn’t guiding every aspect of our lives. Boy, were we wrong.
To cut a very long story short, our rapid descent into debt really was the start of our real relationship with Hashem. Initially, I was so distraught and upset and angry at G-d. I couldn’t understand why he’d taken our parnasah (income) away, when we were always careful to give at least 10% to charity, and only a few months’ before, we’d taken the enormous leap of moving to Israel.
I felt like I was being punished, and I simply couldn’t understand why it was happening. I’d always had a tendency to get miserable, but within weeks, I’d slid into a full-scale depression. I was having trouble waking up in the morning, and it seemed as though all the joy had gone out of my life. Our shalom bayit became increasingly strained, as I (wrongly) blamed my husband for the situation we found ourselves in.
This continued for a couple of months, until Hashem had mercy on us, and hooked us up with our esteemed teacher and friend, Rabbi Lazer Brody. We went to visit Rav Brody, and he explained how lucky we were that Hashem was only bringing us closer to Him via our finances; as he so rightly said, we still had so many other things to be grateful for. We were healthy; we had beautiful kids and they were healthy. We lived in Eretz Yisrael. We had each other.
I was dumbstruck, for a lot of reasons.
Before my business tanked, I’d been working round the clock, weekends and late evenings. In the process of building my business up, without quite realizing it, I’d become obsessed with money. While this was going on, my husband, my kids and my spiritual life had really been neglected.
Some part of me knew that things were way out of kilter even when I was still going after more and more work. I remember writing a list of how I’d like my life to change when I got to Israel: I’d have time to occasionally cook a meal, instead of relying on take-outs and ready-made food; I’d have time to learn, and attend the odd shiur; I’d do more stuff with the kids; I’d stop putting work ahead of spending time with my husband; I’d have time to do more kindnesses for others.
But I was so caught up in earning and spending money, and I felt so trapped in that ‘aspirational’ cycle that I simply couldn’t see a way out. I couldn’t leave the business, and the money that it represented, so Hashem did an enormous kindness, and took the business away from me.
I didn’t see it like that at the time, of course. For a while, I was still so angry at Hashem for taking my work away. When I was working, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing in life, where I was going, what my purpose in life was. But as the days stretched into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the phone still didn’t ring, I understood that I couldn’t carrying on sitting there waiting for things to get back to ‘normal’.
Also, as I started to really talk to Hashem, I could feel more and more how miserable I’d really been on the inside, even with a big fat bank account. Having no money wasn’t easy – we ended up losing our house, as we simply couldn’t keep up with the mortgage.
But even that was a blessing in disguise. We’d bought our house in an area that turned out to be less than ideal for us, and we have ended up in a place that suits us so much better in every way, thanks to our ‘forced’ sale.
Also, by the time we sold the house, it had gone up in value by $100,000 – which took care of a large part of our debts.
But Hashem wasn’t done yet. My husband and I still had large debts on the businesses, too, and we had no idea how we were going to pay them off. But once we’d moved to our new location, within a few months Hashem had sent me a sizeable work contract – after getting nothing for months – which took care of my outstanding business debts almost to the penny and enabled me to get out of the business; and he sent my husband a friend who was willing to buy his company for the amount needed to cover his debt.
Within a month of moving to our new location, my husband also got a great job here in Israel.
I look back now, two years later, and I bless Hashem all the time for sending us all the financial difficulties we had then. If he hadn’t, I would probably still be miserably working my guts out, instead of spending time with my family and living a life filled with so many simple but profound pleasures.
When my husband was out of work for year, he started learning in a kollel, and it’s given him a taste for learning that continues to deepen, and a real appreciation of the fact that we should only be working to live, and not the other way round. My kids are so much happier – despite the fact that we have far less money sloshing around. And we are living in a community that suits us so much better.
The cherry on the cake is that we are now in the least ‘debt’ we’ve ever been in our lives, even though we only have one breadwinner.
I look back at the list that I made when I was a workaholic, and it reads like one big ‘dream come true’. I cook supper from scratch every night now – and I love doing it. I’m here for the kids when they come home from school, and because I haven’t been working all day, I have the energy to give them the attention they need. I visit friends, I learn torah, I sit in my house some days and spend hours painting and talking to Hashem. Our shalom bayit has improved a million percent, and most days most of the time, I feel truly content with my lot in life.
Yes, Hashem took away our businesses, our savings and our house. But in return, He has given us a life that is indescribably better. So if you are facing tough times economically, talk to Hashem and ask him to show you the good that is hidden in the situation.
And try to understand that as seemingly bad as it looks now, it might just turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you.
5/04/2009
thanks Thank you so much for the chizuk, much needed at the moment. It really helps to hear your experience. You mentioned you do hitbodedut in another article. How about writing about that next time? So many women, including myself, have such problems finding time for this crucial etzah.
Todah raba
5/04/2009
Thank you so much for the chizuk, much needed at the moment. It really helps to hear your experience. You mentioned you do hitbodedut in another article. How about writing about that next time? So many women, including myself, have such problems finding time for this crucial etzah.
Todah raba