#PracticalTakeout 4: The Wealthy Will Bring Moshiach
The Wealthy Will Bring Moshiach
From the book “As I Heard Them” by Rabbi Zalman Duchman
“I heard this from the Rebbe Rashab on Simchas Torah 5679-1918. They were talking about the fact that people were giving large amounts of Tzedaka, and the Rebbes son, the Friediker Rebbe, commented that people give money because money means nothing to them.
The Rebbe Rashab did not agree with this. “Who do you think will bring Moshiach? – the penniless?, he asked. No, the wealthy – they will bring Moshiach!”.
Why will it be that the wealthy will be the ones to bring Moshiach? Because it is precisely the service of revealing the lights of Tohu/chaos, which will bring about the final and true redemption. More often than not, the spiritually inclined have a hard time with this type of service - they have a very big attachment to the spiritual service - that's why it will be the wealthy - the ones who are more open to the lights of chaos, who will actually be credited with doing the final work in bringing about the redemption.
Tikkun Olam by Making Money from the series: Sparks of Things to Come By Tzvi Freeman
(since the masculine are a channel for parnassah/livelihood, this one is for the men!)
How do you make money?
As any successful businessperson will tell you, it’s all about connections. You put things together. Or people together. Or people and things together. And somehow, you’ve created more value in the world. Since you created it, you get a chunk of that value, often in the form of money.
Pretty neat, isn’t it? Something out of nothing. Now, how does that work?
It works because at its origin, our entire world is one big thought. Not just a mass. Or an energy field. But a thought. That thought was too great for any universe to contain, so it exploded into countless scattered parts that comprise the world in which we live.
We human beings come to the world with a faint memory of that primordial thought. That’s why we have a knack for seeing how those parts fit back together. When they do fit together, the world gets closer to that original thought—and that’s why more value appears.
That’s why any business that creates real value is a divine calling—because it’s fixing up the world. And that’s why we see that honest, value-based business is responsible—more than any other venture—for increasing peace, health, education, comfort and general well being throughout the world.
There’s another step after these pieces are put together: We have to find deeper meaning in those value-creating ventures. We also have to use the money we create and the opportunities afforded us for higher purposes. Acts of kindness and compassion, wisdom and meaning. That way we draw out the light our world holds deep inside—the light of that primordial thought.
That original thought exploded by design. The universe was never meant to be a top-down job. The thought was only the beginning—its fulfillment lies in our hands. Because the only receptacle for divine light, our sages say, is harmony and peace—and that can be created only from the bottom up. It’s only when we citizens of this universe do the work, putting the pieces together ourselves, that our world can contain even an infinite light.
And that’s just around the corner right now.