Rabbi's Blog

Have you ever finished a job, did the work, and then crickets? The invoice sits unpaid. The check that's apparently in the mail. There's a particular kind of frustration in having earned something and being told it's coming… eventually.

Buried in this week's Parshah among its seventy-four commandments, is one of the most human laws in the entire Torah: "Give him his wages on his day; do not let the sun set over it." Pay your workers the same day, don't make them wait.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Our Sages teach that G-d keeps His own commandments; everything He asks of us, He does Himself. However G-d, who legislated against making a worker wait, appears to keep His own workers waiting a whole lifetime and then some. 

What's going on?

The answer is that we've been picturing ourselves as employees. We're not!

G-d desired a home in the lowest place, down here, in this physical world where His presence is hidden. He handed the world over to us to make it into a place where He can live.

That's not an employee's task. That's a partner. A partner has a stake in the outcome. Not just working for the prize but building the very thing they are going to share in.

That's us.

The big payoff, the profit that we split with G-d, comes at the end, in the World to Come. And what is it, exactly? Not a trophy handed to you for a job well done. “The reward of a mitzvah is the mitzvah." The closeness to G-d you create when you light a candle, give tzedakah, or sit with a friend who's hurting, that closeness is the wage. A partner doesn't get handed a prize separate from the business. They get to enjoy the very thing they built.

A partner in the middle of building still has to eat. You can't tend the flock on an empty stomach. So along the way, right now, this week, G-d is obligated, so to speak, to pay us our "wages and sustenance." The health, the livelihood, the doors that open, the obstacles that quietly disappear are all daily paychecks. Not a bonus. It's what makes it possible for us to do the work.

We're standing now in the month of Elul. Rosh Hashanah is a few weeks away. The judgment of Rosh Hashanah is, at its core, about the material; family, health, and sustenance. In the classic phrase: banei, chayei, umezonei.

The confidence we walk into that judgment with: not as beggars hoping for a handout at the courthouse door, but as partners in building G-d's home. No one starves their partner in the middle of a project. G-d wants you to have what you need, in abundance, precisely so you can keep building.

This Elul, don’t be the employee, grinding away, a little resentful, waiting for a payoff that feels perpetually delayed. Be the partner who understands that the work is the reward and that the paycheck arrives daily. Everything you've been given, your talents, your resources, the corner of the world that's yours, was handed to you for one reason: to build something with it.

You were never just working for G-d, you were building with Him.

Good Shabbos,

Rabbi Kushi Schusterman

A couple of yeshiva students passed through Harford County recently. As people met them for the first time, you could see a certain reaction forming. These young men were warm, unhurried, and entirely at ease. There was a look in their eyes that's hard to describe. Someone said it kindly, with a slight edge: "They seem so… innocent." What they meant, and didn't quite say, was naive or sheltered. Like life hadn't gotten to them yet.

I wanted to explain what they were actually seeing, yet couldn't find the right words. Then I remembered that someone else had this exact reaction seventy years ago, said it out loud, and got an answer I've never forgotten.

In the 1950s, a Reform rabbi named Herbert Weiner spent several hours in private audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He later wrote about it in his book Nine and a Half Mystics. At one point, Weiner got bold. He told the Rebbe that all his Chassidim seemed to share one thing: a kind of open, naive look in their eyes. A sympathetic person, he said, might call it t'mimut, purity and a less generous person might call it something closer to emptiness and simple-mindedness.

It was a rude thing to say to a man's face about the people who loved him. However, the Rebbe didn't take offense. He leaned forward and said: what you see missing from their eyes is a kera, a split.

Most of us, the Rebbe explained, live divided. Part of us is in the "spiritual" world and part of us is in the "real" world. The two are constantly pulling against each other. That tension, that internal tug-of-war, is what reads on a face as depth and seriousness. The look of someone who has struggled. His Chassidim didn't wear that look because they didn't have that split. Their lives weren't cut in two. Where there's no war going on inside, there's no war to see on the outside. What Weiner mistook for emptiness was actually the opposite: wholeness.

And then the Rebbe did something remarkable. Weiner had mentioned, earlier, that he had trouble sleeping. The Rebbe gently turned the whole conversation around and suggested that Weiner's restlessness came precisely from trying to live in two worlds at once. The thing he'd diagnosed as missing from the Chassidim’s eyes was the very thing keeping him awake at night.

I think about that exchange every time I catch myself, or someone else, mistaking a divided life for a deep one.

This is exactly the word at the heart of this week's parsha, Shoftim. The Torah warns the Jewish people, right before they enter the Land, against imitating the practices of the surrounding nations: the sorcery, the omens, the séances, the attempts to contact the dead. And then it lands on a single instruction: "Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha" - "You shall be wholehearted with the L-rd your G-d" (Devarim 18:13).

Tamim. Same root as tam, the "simple son" of the Four Sons at the Seder. The one we quietly assume is the slow one.

Is the Torah's ideal really to be a little dim? To not think too hard?

No. Weiner's story is the key to why not. Tam doesn't mean unintelligent. It means undivided. Whole. Not the person who knows less, but the person who isn't at war with himself. He's not naive; he's just not split. He doesn't try to outsmart his own destiny or go digging in the dark corners of the universe for answers he was never meant to have. He isn't standing with one foot in each of the two worlds, forever negotiating between them. He's in one world, G-d's world, all the way.

Those yeshiva students aren't sheltered. They'd simply been spared a war that most of us fight every single day: the low-grade tug between the person we are in shul and the person we are in the parking lot. Between what we believe on Shabbos and how we live on Tuesday. That war is exhausting. It's also, if we're honest, what a lot of us have quietly come to call "being deep."

We should all notice one place where we're living split. One world in our head and another in our hands. Let’s try, just for a moment, to close the gap. Bring the Shabbos version of ourself into the Tuesday moment. You may find that what you'd been calling depth was really just fatigue. The wholeness you mistook for someone else's naivety is available to you too.

Good Shabbos,

Rabbi Kushi Schusterman