The Billionaire’s Lepyoshka

I have sat across the table from five billionaires.

Private dinners. Business meetings. Investment proposals. Conversations about numbers so large that an ordinary person's lifetime earnings could disappear inside a rounding error.

I learned something surprising.

Not one of them could fully explain why he was the billionaire.

They could explain how the businesses worked. They could describe the risks they took, the opportunities they recognized, the people they hired, the negotiations they won. Some were extraordinarily impressive. Some were difficult. Some were direct. Others possessed egos that seemed to reach the heavens.

But behind every fortune remained a question no spreadsheet could completely answer:

Why him?

Why did this person build the skyscraper while another equally intelligent man struggled to pay his rent?

I would spend years thinking about that question.

Strangely, one of the answers takes me back not to a billionaire's dining room—

but to my mother's kitchen.

The Bread

When my family emigrated to America, money was scarce.

My parents were starting over. There was no empire. No portfolio. No abundance waiting for us.

There was simply a family that needed to eat.

For a period, my mother made lepyoshka, the traditional Central Asian round bread I had known from childhood. Its ingredients were almost embarrassingly ordinary: flour, water, yeast, salt. The dough would rise into thick edges surrounding a flatter center, and when it emerged from the oven, the outside was crisp and golden while the inside remained warm and soft.

I still remember it.

But what I remember most is my mother making it.

She labored over that bread because her children needed food.

There is a holiness to a mother feeding her family when there is not much money in the house. No one puts her photograph on the cover of a financial magazine. There is no headline announcing the achievement.

But Heaven knows exactly what happened in that kitchen.

We did not remain in that financial condition forever. Those days passed.

The bread remained in my memory.

Years later, after sitting with people possessing extraordinary wealth, I began to understand why.

The distance between homemade bread made because money is scarce and a billionaire discussing another transaction may appear enormous.

Torah says the distance may be considerably smaller than we think.

Because neither person completely controls which side of that table Heaven assigns him.

Rebuilding the World

The Gemara tells an astonishing story about Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat, a great Torah scholar who lived in crushing poverty.

Once, after bloodletting, he had virtually nothing to eat. He put a clove of garlic into his mouth, became weak, and fell asleep. When the Sages later found him, they saw him crying and laughing in his sleep.

When he awoke, he told them what had happened.

In his dream, Rabbi Elazar had asked Hashem:

How long must I suffer from such poverty?

Hashem's answer is almost impossible to absorb.

Would you like Me to return the world to its beginning, Hashem asked him, so that perhaps you might be born at a time of sustenance?

Rabbi Elazar immediately noticed the word.

Perhaps?

Even after remaking the world, prosperity was not presented as a certainty.

He then asked whether most of his life was already behind him. When told that it was, he declined. He would not have the universe overturned for the remaining years of his life.

What an extraordinary image.

A man asks Hashem to change his financial condition.

And the answer takes him all the way back to the architecture of creation.

The Gemara is not telling us to become passive or fatalistic. Judaism demands effort. We work. We acquire skills. We conduct business. We negotiate. We build.

But perhaps it is teaching us humility about something modern people desperately want to believe we completely control:

outcomes.

Ten People

Put ten intelligent, ambitious people into real estate.

Give all ten courage, discipline, intelligence, and a willingness to work.

One may eventually build skyscrapers.

Another apartment buildings.

Another houses.

Another may renovate apartments.

Another may paint them.

And one may spend his career in real estate and still struggle to pay the rent on his own apartment.

Put ten talented people into diamonds.

One eventually owns interests in mines. Another becomes a wholesaler. Another owns a jewelry store. Another becomes a salesperson. Another cuts or polishes stones.

One becomes extraordinarily wealthy.

Another barely supports his family.

Certainly, choices matter. Talent matters. discipline matters. Markets matter. Timing matters. Effort matters.

But none of them explains everything.

Our Sages said this with remarkable clarity.

Rabbi Meir teaches that a person should teach his son a clean and easy profession—and then pray to the One to Whom wealth and property belong. Why? Because poverty and wealth are not guaranteed by the profession itself. The Mishnah concludes that the outcome depends upon a person's zechut. It anchors the idea in the words:

“Mine is the silver, and Mine is the gold.”

Notice the balance.

Learn a profession.

And pray.

Build the vessel.

But don't mistake the vessel for the Source.

That may explain something I noticed about the billionaires I met. They knew their businesses extraordinarily well.

But ultimately, even they could not answer the deepest question:

Why did so much pass through my hands?

Two Men

Years later, I saw something that brought the question much closer to home.

Two men were talking.

I knew them both.

One possessed extraordinary wealth.

The other had recently lost his mother and was going through an extremely difficult period. He desperately needed financial help.

I watched them standing together.

One had enormous resources.

The other had enormous need.

And neither seemed to know what I knew about the other.

I remember feeling almost uncomfortable.

If only the wealthy man knew how badly this man needed help.

And:

If only the struggling man knew how much the other man could help him.

The abundance and the need were standing only feet apart.

Infinity and finiteness, almost touching.

Something seemed wrong.

I went home and told my wife what I had seen.

“Why did I have to see that?” I asked her.

Her answer changed the entire scene.

“Because you saw what needed to be done.”

I misunderstood her.

“You mean I should ask the wealthy man to help him?”

“No.”

Then she said:

“You saw what Hashem wants you to do.”

I understood.

Don't become the broker of someone else's mitzvah.

Become the giver.

That man became a personal project of ours.

Not once.

For years.

With frequency and with substance.

And slowly I began to understand why perhaps Hashem had allowed me to see what neither of those two men could see about the other.

Why Did You See It?

We often encounter another person's need and immediately think of someone wealthier who should solve it.

He has more money.

She has better connections.

That organization should handle it.

Someone should do something.

Perhaps.

But there is another possibility.

Maybe you are the someone.

If Hashem placed the need directly before your eyes, perhaps the first question is not, Who else can afford this?

Perhaps the question is:

Why was I the one who saw it?

This does not mean one person must solve every problem he encounters. We have obligations, families, limitations, and judgment. Torah does not demand financial recklessness.

But there is a dangerous habit of outsourcing goodness.

We assume that because someone else possesses more, someone else carries the responsibility.

Yet Heaven does not necessarily send the mitzvah to the person with the largest bank account.

Sometimes it sends it to the person with open eyes.

The Assignment

This changed the way I think about wealth.

I once thought wealth primarily answered the question:

How much does this person have?

Now I think it asks a more interesting question:

What has Hashem asked this person to do with what he has?

And the same question applies to scarcity.

The person with little money still possesses a mission. The person with enormous money possesses a mission. One may be tested by what he lacks; another by what he possesses.

We should therefore be careful about reading someone's bank account as Heaven's evaluation of his worth.

A fortune is not necessarily a trophy.

Poverty is not necessarily a verdict.

The Gemara's Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat was a towering sage—and crushingly poor. His poverty certainly was not evidence that his life lacked greatness. The very story in Ta'anit makes that impossible to believe.

Nor can we look at a billionaire and confidently explain why Hashem gave him his billions. Perhaps his own merits played a role. Perhaps ancestral merit. Perhaps his mission requires wealth. Perhaps his wealth itself is his test. Perhaps there are calculations known only Above.

We do not possess Heaven's ledger.

But we do possess today's assignment.

The Billionaire and the Bread

And that brings me back to my mother's lepyoshka.

I have eaten with billionaires.

But I still remember that bread.

I remember a mother with simple ingredients making sure her children were fed.

At the time, I might have thought wealth meant having enough money that you no longer needed to make bread because money was scarce.

Now I understand wealth differently.

My mother's hands were already rich in something no balance sheet could measure.

They were doing exactly what needed to be done.

Perhaps that is the great question Hashem eventually asks each of us—not whether we became the billionaire, the developer, the jeweler, the wholesaler, the salesman, or the man struggling to make rent.

But:

What did you do from where I placed you?

Did you work?

Did you act honestly?

Did you support your family?

Did you learn Torah?

Did you recognize that the silver and gold ultimately belong to Hashem?

And when another person's need appeared directly in front of you—

did your hand open?

The Hand

I once thought the strange part of that encounter between the two men was that the person who desperately needed money happened to be standing beside someone who had an extraordinary amount of it.

I was wrong.

The strange part was that I was standing there too.

That was the detail I had missed.

I was looking at the wealthy man's hands when perhaps Hashem wanted me to look at mine.

That may be one of the most important lessons wealth has taught me.

Do not wait for the richest person in the room to become generous.

Do not assume that because someone else can do more, your portion no longer matters.

Do not spend your life identifying the hands through which Hashem should send help.

Look at your own.

Rabbi Elazar was told that changing his financial destiny might require turning the world back to its beginning.

Most of us will never be asked to rebuild the universe.

But every day we are given smaller worlds to rebuild.

A family.

A widow.

An orphan.

A person grieving.

A scholar who needs support.

A neighbor who cannot make the month.

A child who needs food.

Sometimes rebuilding a world requires millions.

Sometimes it requires flour, yeast, salt—and a mother's hands.

And sometimes Hashem places abundance and need in the same room and allows you to notice both.

When that happens, don't ask why the billionaire hasn't moved.

Perhaps the hand Hashem was waiting for was yours.