Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks at the Young Israel of Scarsdale

Rabbi Sacks: Steve, that's the nicest introduction I’ve ever had, thank you so much. Let me tell you a little secret. I think I did manage, you know, to get to be Chief Rabbi of various other… and things. And of course you only really worry about getting a knighthood so you can give naches to your mum. Aleha HaShalom. But actually, my mum sadly, she passed away a year ago on the first night of Sukkot. But she was there for the knighthood, peerage.

And I'm not sure she was terribly interested in the knighthood, but she got to meet the Queen. And I have said all the once, from the pulpit of Western Marble Arch, that I don't mind any of these attainments when I go, pe-pe-pe, till 120, 120 - and three months my bubba used to say. ‘Why three months?’ She used to say, ‘I don't want you should die suddenly.’

Pe-pe-pe, when I get there, I will not say I was Chief Rabbi, I will not say I was in the House of Lords. I will say, I give sweets to the children. That is the greatest of good I could ever aspire to, and I hope we will always aspire to make our children feel “ashrei yoshvei veitecha,” that shul is a child-friendly place, and how lovely it was to meet some of your children on the way in.

And friends, I'm sorry about the weather. I cannot believe that you actually came out to shul on a night like this. For that mesirut nefesh, I should probably stop talking to you.

I just enjoy being here, but the weather is difficult. Last year, the whole volcanic cluster, I must tell you. The worst weather we ever had in Britain was in 1987, when we had a hurricane in the South of England that actually blew down half the trees in the South of England.

In the middle of London, Hyde Park and Kensington Garden, half the trees were blown down and there was a bonfire. And that bonfire, from the wood that was burned, burned for two years. And one thing, Baruch Hashem, nobody noticed, that the night of this hurricane was the night after Shemini Atzeret.

We had just davened that morning for the first time, “Mashiv HaRuach.”

And when I came into shul the next morning, the first guy in school said, “Rabbi, next time can you please pray?”

Friends, it's wonderful to be with you. I was wondering what to say to you. I was just thinking about the cold weather - economically, politically, as well as meteorologically.

What is the Jewish response to difficult times? 

And these are difficult times. I mean, we left England, I think, when did we leave England? Tuesday, was it Tuesday? We lose all sense of time. In the room next to us in the VIP lounge was an old friend of ours, John Major, who was Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher. We were just talking, you know, we were just hoping we'd have Europe to come back to. I think Baruch Hashem, the last few days, they have hatched a deal together. 

But what actually happens? What is the Jewish response to adversity? And one of the most profound ideas, I don't know whether it came from Rahm Emanuel or somebody else, was that wonderful sentence, “never waste a crisis.” And that, to me, is a very Jewish idea. 

Let me explain. I'm Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, which means that when I began, that included Hong Kong. When Hong Kong went back to the Chinese, the community just asked us informally and unofficially to maintain that relationship. So we go there once a year. And always, when I visit a country for the first time, I try to meet, under my jurisdiction… we try to meet the Head of State.

So when it went back to the Chinese, we went to meet the Beijing-appointed Governor of Hong Kong, Mr. Tung Chee-hwa. And Tung Chee-hwa turned out to be a great fan of Jews and Judaism and a great fan of Israel.

He said a wonderful thing. He said, “Chief Rabbi, your people and my people have been around for a long time.” He said, “My people have been around for 5,000 years. Yours have been around for 6,000 years.” I wasn't quite sure about his arithmetic, but I didn’t correct him. He said to me, “What I want to know is what did you do for the first 1,000 years before you had a kosher Chinese takeaway?” I said, “Mr. Chee-hwa, what we did for the first 1,000 years is complain about the food.”

But what interests me is how come the Chinese and the Jews survived and flourished for so long. And I rather suspect that it might be to do with the fact that the Chinese ideogram for crisis also means opportunity. If you have a word like that in your vocabulary, then you handle the crises because you can see the opportunity within them.

There is only one language I know that goes one better, and that is Ivrit. Because the Hebrew for crisis is mashber. And mashber originally meant a birthing stool. So for Jews, a crisis is always chevlei leida, birth pangs. A crisis is always the beginning of something new and something very beautiful. And I can’t think of any more profound way to respond to any kind of difficulty, individual or collective, than to see crisis as the birth pangs of something new.

Jews confronted crisis the way Jacob wrestled with the angel. They said, “I will not let you go until you've blessed me.” I will not let crisis go until somehow I have extracted from that something positive, something of blessing.

And that is, of course, what Yosef HaTzaddik said in the words that almost, more or less, bring Sefer Bereishit to a close. He turns to his brothers who sold him as a slave and he says, “You intended evil against me but God turned it into something good.” And all that pain that I suffered was so that I could be in a position to save your lives and to save the great nation.

And any people that can think about crisis that way is going to have not only incredible resilience but a message to deliver to the world. And therefore I just want to share with you my reflections on the spiritual meaning of the current world financial crisis. And it went back, if you remember, to August 2008. And there was a very interesting event that took place…. Actually, no one noticed its deep spiritual significance. But it was deeply spiritually significant. 

There is an English sculptor called Damien Hirst. Stuffed animals… And anyone who can persuade people to give money for that must be an artistic genius. He put up for sale, three days before the financial crash of 2008, a sculpture at Sotheby’s.

It sold for 10 and a half million pounds. One of the highest prices ever received in auction for the work of a living artist. And what was it? It was a calf with golden hooves. And it was called “The Golden Calf.” And three days later, after somebody paid 10 and a half million pounds for “The Golden Calf,” the world markets collapsed. Now, I found that really rather divinely significant.

Catastrophe happens when you turn wealth into a golden calf. When you start worshipping, and you no longer see what gold really is, which is a medium of exchange, but instead you begin to see it as a kind of god, possession, which makes you, in Tom Wolfe's famous phrase from the Bonfire of the Vanities, “Masters of the Universe.”

“Adam bahul al mamono.” The greatest expression of financial booms and busts ever was given by the Sages. We become crazy. We do silly things for money. “Adam bahul al mamono.” They said this of course in connection with “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your life, with all your worth.”

The order seems ridiculous. If you love God with all your heart, with all your life, doesn't it follow that you love him with all your wealth? But the Sages say there are people for whom wealth becomes more important than life itself. And that then becomes a kind of madness. In pursuit of wealth, people do crazy things. They're willing to risk their reputation. They're willing to risk their own and other people's money. They're willing to risk ruin at any level. For what? For another zero at the end of their statement of personal wealth. This is the birth pangs of a return to sacred values.

There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of wealth, so long as we realise it's a means and not an end. And so long as we retain a sense of proportion.

I remember an occasion when a member of our congregation in Western Marble Arch, sadly no longer alive, the late Cyril Stein of blessed memory… one day I came on Friday, one Erev Shabbat, I saw he’d bought Ladbrokes, sorry, Hiltons, the hotel group. He bought all the Hiltons outside of America. So I wished him, when I came into shul on Shabbat, “Mazel tov, it was the deal of the decade.” And he turned to me and said, “Ah, thank you. I've just got another headache. It’s Shabbos, let's learn Torah!” And I thought, there is a man with a sense of proportion. 

There was another time, on Rosh Hashanah, we were doing Tashlich. I don't know if you realise in Anglo-Jewry, Anglo-Jewry which is kind of non-orthodox… and when I became the Rav of Western Marble Arch, they'd never heard of Tashlich before. I had somehow to persuade them that this was worth doing. So I said, you know, it's an ancient Jewish custom that on Rosh Hashanah we go to a river and you throw the Rabbi in the river. Boy, did we get a large turnout! 

Anyway, one year a man came, a member of the shul, to do Tashlich, and I'd never seen him come to do Tashlich before. And I said to him, “I wonder what made you come this year?” And the next day I read the papers, and I saw that the previous day he had just lost, - and this is 20 years ago - he had just lost 200 million pounds. 20 years ago, that was something. And the next time I saw him, I commiserated with him. And he gave me a smile and he said, “Well, it was paper money. When I had it, I never really had it, so when I lost it, I never really lost it.” And I suddenly realised that he had come to Tashlich symbolically, to let it go. And I thought, that was a kind of a sense of happiness.

And the result was that he wasn't thrown by the crisis, by his loss. And of course, he made it all back again. He became resolute.

And that is a fundamental point. 

Let me explain to you. When I became Chief Rabbi, they wanted me to go and have a medical examination. I assumed it was to test my sanity. But actually, it was just a physical check-up, and the doctor who was testing my health had me walk on a treadmill. And I asked him, “What are you testing? Are you testing how far I can go, or how fast I can go?” 

And he said, “Neither.”

So I said, “What are you testing?”

And he said, “I'm testing how long it takes you when you get off the treadmill for your pulse to return to normal.”

And that's when I realised that health is measured in recovery times. None of us can live a life in which, whether in business or career or other aspects of life, we are sure bad things won't happen. None of us is immune to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Bad things happen. The real question is what happens after bad things happen?

And health is the power to recover, and the power to recover is a direct measure of our own value system. If all that matters to us is wealth, then if we lose our wealth, we have lost everything. But if wealth is just a means to an end, then if we've lost wealth, we have not lost what really matters.

And that is recovery. That allows you to recover. So that is my first point.

One thing this current crisis should do is teach us not to turn wealth into a golden calf. We earn it, we use it, but we should never worship it. 

And the second point to me is crucial. And here it is. I thought that Hashem was telling us something about this crisis by way of the golden calf. So, you know, I'm just reminding myself about the biblical narrative. And it's very interesting, it's fascinating actually. Just before and just after the Golden Calf, just before, in Parashat Ki Tissa, and just after, in Parashat Vayakhel, Moshe Rabbeinu gives the mitzvah to Bnei Yisrael. And it's the same mitzvah.

Remember what mitzvah it is? Shabbat. And I wondered why, of all the mitzvahs, Shabbat was chosen by Moses as the tikkun, the antidote to the Golden Calf. 

And the answer, I think, is this. What leads to every financial crash, from the very earliest - on the Dutch tulip craze, to the South Sea bubble, to the Florida real estate boom in 1929 and various others, there is one unmistakable sign, a siman, that people are going crazy, and this is an artificial boom that is one day going to crash. 

What is the siman? The answer is people start focussing, obsessing on the price of things rather than the value of things. So for instance, I doubt it was the same here, I'm not sure if it was, but in Britain what led to the crash was the price of things.

Was that something similar here? What happened in Britain was property was rising alarmingly. The result was people were taking larger and larger mortgages, they were investing in property, because they saw that as a surefire investment and they were focussing on the price of a house, but not on the value. 

What is the value of a house? The value of a house is, that it's a home. And what is a home? A place where you bring up a family. 

Now while this boom was going on in house prices, the family in Britain was falling apart. I don't know if you know this, Britain has the highest percentage of teenage pregnancies, the highest percentage of single-parent families, and the highest percentage of children born outside marriage, in the world.

Do you know in 2009, 46% of children in Britain were born outside marriage. And that’s extraordinary. And of course everyone was in denial about that because they said what difference does marriage make? Marriage is just a piece of paper. Well, the average cohabitation in Britain without marriage lasts less than two years.

And the end result is you have a whole generation of children growing up without a stable relationship with their biological father and the result is tragedy. In 2007, February 2007, UNICEF, the United Nations Children Organisation, did a survey of 26 advanced countries and came to the clear conclusion that Britain's children were the unhappiest in the world. That report was ignored.

On the 13th of September 2011, just a few weeks ago, UNICEF did a follow-up report, which was even more chilling. It said that Britain's parents are trying to buy their children's love by giving them expensive clothes and expensive electronic gadgets. And what do the children actually want? The one thing that costs nothing, the one thing their parents are not giving them, which is their time. And it is crazy. 

And the result was that there was almost this surreal disjunction between the price of a house and the value of a home. 

Why then is Shabbat a tikkun for that? Because Shabbat forces us to focus on things that have a value but no price.

And that is what Shabbat is. Even the poorest Jew in the meanest shtetl of Russia on Shabbat, every Jew had a white tablecloth, a cup of wine, two candles, silver candlesticks, bread, and was a rich human being. You know, in the Kuzari, it says on Shabbat, the poorest Jew is freer than the greatest.

Shabbat allows us to renew the blessings of the family. Going to shul allows us to catch up on all the latest lashon hara. I mean, they used to say the art of conversation was dead.

I've already said that. The art of conversation is alive and well and exists during Kriat HaTorah. And on Shabbat, you go to the shul and you thank HaKadosh Baruch Hu for what you have, instead of worrying about what you don't have.

On Shabbat, you realise what has value but not a price. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev once was standing looking at the people in the town square, rushing here and there. And he went up to one person and he said, “Why are you rushing?” 

And the person said, “I'm rushing to make a living.”

And Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev said, “What makes you so sure your living is in front of you that you have to run and catch it up? Maybe your living is behind you and you have to stand still for a while so that it can catch up with you?”

Shabbat is when we stand still and let our blessings catch up with us. And that is something special. That's something that doesn't have a price. 

When Shabbat happens, you can't work, you can't earn, you can't spend, you can't buy. And that is when you forget the price of things and focus on the value of things.

Some years ago, just because I was so concerned about the general state of the family in Britain, I did a television documentary for the BBC about the state of the family. It wasn't a Jewish programme and it wasn't a religious programme, but I was so concerned that I did a documentary. And one little moment of that film is absolutely fascinating. It's stayed with me ever since. 

I took Britain's leading child care expert, a lady called Penelope Leach, who isn't Jewish and as far as I know doesn't have Jewish connections. And I said, you know, ‘Come to a Jewish primary school.’ I just wanted to see what her reactions would be. I didn't know what was going to happen. I just thought it would be interesting.

So we took her to a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning when the kids were doing the mock Shabbat. You know, the five-year-old mum and dad blessing the five-year-old children. The five-year-old bubba and the zayda schlepping nachas. And this non-Jewish lady sitting there, absolutely fascinated, enthralled.

And she wanted to work out what the kids were making of all of this and she was saying to the kids, ‘What do you like about Shabbat, what don't you like about Shabbat?’ And the kids said, ‘What don't you like about Shabbat?’ The kids said, ‘Oh, you can't watch television, it's terrible.’ And she said, ‘What do you like about Shabbat?’ And this five-year-old boy said ’What I like about Shabbat is that it’s the only day that Daddy doesn't have to rush off.’

And as we were leaving the school, she turned to me and she said, “Chief Rabbi, that Shabbat of yours is saving their parents' marriages.”

And I thought, from a non-Jew, that was an extraordinarily profound remark. 

There was another occasion when I got a very, very, very angry letter. That's actually what Chief Rabbi is for, so you've got somebody to write angry letters to.

And this was a really angry letter. This was a guy whose story was as follows. He said, ‘Chief Rabbi, you're always talking about inclusion, wanting to bring people in. And here you are driving me away.’ What was the story? He came into our office, marriage registrations, to register for marriage. And our office told him, sadly, we couldn't register the marriage. Why? Because the young lady he wanted to get married to had a non-orthodox, non-halachic conversion.

And this young man went ballistic. And I thought the only thing to do is pick up the phone to him. And I picked up the phone to him and I said, ‘I understand exactly what you are feeling. But look, you are about to get married. This should be the happiest day of your life. Don't turn it into World War III. I want you, please, to do the following. Number one, get married. The shul that converted your wife will host the wedding. And have the most wonderful wedding. Then I want you to go and have the loveliest honeymoon you can possibly have. And then, when you come back, ask your wife, say to her, ‘You've come so far. Would you like to do the one extra mile?’ And if she says yes, then I will register you for an Orthodox conversion and I will supervise it. And if she says no, then I wish you a life of blessing and happiness. 

They got married. They had the honeymoon. They came back. She decided she would like to go for an Orthodox conversion. And I thought, ‘Baruch Hashem, we’ve settled that.’

One month later, I get a really angry phone call from the same guy. Here is what he said. “Your lot, you want me to keep Shabbat? Me keep Shabbat? I'm Jewish. She needs to keep Shabbat!” 

It's true. It's true, isn't it?... If you want to build a nice Jewish home, do me a favour, just keep Shabbat. So, very begrudgingly… Baruch Hashem, one year later, I officiated at the wedding, at the remarriage. It was a lovely moment. 

However, one month before the wedding, I get another phone call. “Chief Rabbi, I must come round and see you!”

Well, I had to see him. I was dreading the encounter.

He marches in with his wife. He sits down, and he says, “Chief Rabbi, I just wanted to say thank you for bringing Shabbat into my life. Until now, I have been a workaholic. I work seven days a week. Now that I keep shabbos, I have time for my wife. I have time to make friends. I have time to feel part of a community. And now, I find that the work gets done in six days after all. I just wanted to say thank you for bringing Shabbat into my life.”

Friends, that is Jewish values at stake. Always focus on the value of things, never on the price of things. Prices are determined by markets, but values are determined by ideals.

Principle: give thanks. Modim anachnu lach. 

It is an extraordinary fact. Just think about this. Even given the economic difficulties, by any economic index, we are affluent beyond, vastly beyond, the expectations and the reality of people two to three generations ago. Whether you think in terms of income, or life choices, or amenities, or life expectancy, we have choices in supermarkets today - everyone does - that the wealthiest king did not have a hundred years ago. We can travel to destinations that one could have done. We have a range of entertainments and speed of communication unthinkable of a hundred years ago. 

At this same period, in two generations, there has been a rise between 300% and 1,000% in depression, stress-related syndromes, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, eating disorders, etc., etc., especially among the young. How come people who have become more affluent have become less happy? 

And there is a simple explanation.

The entire consumer economy is built on making us relentlessly aware of the thing we don’t yet have. You have the iPhone, but you don't have the 4G? Forget it. You have the iPad 1. Not the iPad 2! Oy no. Steve Jobs comes down the mountain with the two tablets. 

I mean, Ribbono shel Olam, watches, you have those watch advertisements in America. Watches used to be a device for telling the time. Then, as a by-product of John F. Kennedy's space programme, they discovered the characteristics of crystal ports, which allowed you to make watches that tell absolutely accurate time, and they're so cheap that they've been given away with cornflakes packets.

And now what have they done? They've turned the watch into a mystical artefact. Have you noticed this? They confer some kind of charisma on anyone who wears it. I love this advertisement: “You don't own a Patek Phillipe. You're only holding it in trust for future generations.” Ribbono shel Olam, what a shlemiel! He actually buys a Patek Phillipe to hold it in trust for future generations.

Every year, he gives it to his grandson, who says, ‘What a cheapskate! Couldn't buy me this year's model! 

In England, there's a lady called Victoria Beckham. She was… obviously, she was part of the Havdalah, she was one of the spices. She has just come out with a $30,000 handbag.

A handbag! I mean, sorry, do you know “The Importance of Being Earnest”? Do you know Lady Bracknell’s “A handbag?!”...

But it's hurting children. I went a few years ago to a conference on child poverty and believe you me, I am very concerned with child poverty. It's a real problem. In Britain, child poverty, despite the billions the government has poured into it, gets higher and higher. Why? Because of these one-parent families. Child poverty.

And what I was hearing from kids is ‘You don't understand what it's like if you don't have the latest mobile phone, the latest Nike shoes.’ And this is not real poverty, it's entirely artificial, contrived poverty and the real poverty is there in the mind. 

So a consumer society depends on making us unsatisfied with what we have.

In short, the consumer-led economy, by forcing us to focus on what we don't have rather than what we do have, turned out to be the most efficient mechanism yet devised for the production and distribution of unhappiness. And that is a crazy thing. 

The financial crash was caused in part by people spending money they didn't have, to buy things they didn't need, for the sake of a happiness that wouldn't last.

And that is the economics that treats money as an end and people as a means. And that is a precise inversion of what should be our real values. 

So what is the answer? Giving thanks.

There was a famous survey, it's called the Nuns Study. It's about a group of nuns in Minnesota, the Order of Notre Dame - or sorry, should I say Notre Dame [American pronunciation]. And this particular thing, this particular group of nuns famously offered all their records for medical research, and some of their bodies as well.

And it's very interesting, because although these nuns were in their 70s or 80s and the Order had retained these records, when they entered the Order at about the age of 20, each of them wrote a short autobiographical account of who they were and why they were entering the Order, and they were kept. So those records were then available to the medical researchers 60 years later, when the survey actually began. And what they found in this fundamental research is that the nuns who at the age of 20 expressed greater gratitude, 60 years later, lived longer, were healthier as well as happier.

It really is a segula for arichut yamim to say thank you for what we have. It is Ben Zoma's axiom, “Eizehu ashir? HaSameach beChelko,” “Who is rich, one who rejoices in what he has.” And that's why Chazal instituted every day for us to get up and make all the brachot of thanking God for giving us another day, thanking God for all the things that we otherwise would take for granted. 

And that really is the easiest way of transforming your life into a life of happiness. 

To think and then to thank.

“Tov leHodot laShem.” 

Happiness, as Kohelet discovered, is not having all the expensive things in life. Happiness is celebrating what you have. 

You know, I learned the secret of what went wrong in Kohelet's life very early on. In 1968, when as a 20-year-old student, I came to America and - amongst other things - I met… I had two encounters that changed my life. I had a meeting with Rav Soloveitchik and a meeting with Lubavitcher Rebbe zt”l. And as I was waiting to go into the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Chasidim were telling me a little story, which I think is absolutely fascinating. You know, the Rebbe, before he became Rebbe, ran Kehot, which is Chabad's publishing house.

So he was expert in the typographical symbols that proofreaders used. And he often used these to make a point with… very economical. And they told me that somebody had written a letter to the Rebbe and saying, you know, ‘I need the Rebbe's help. I am very depressed. I hardly have the will to go on living. I daven, but I am not inspired to keep mitzvahs and I'm not uplifted. I need the Rebbe's advice.’

And the Rebbe wrote him an answer without using a single word.

He just put a circle around the first word of every sentence. The word ‘I.’ 

Happiness comes from the ‘not I.’ 

There are two opposites in life. Ill and well.

One has an ‘I,’ the other has a ‘We.’ 

Happiness comes from the ‘We,’ not from the ‘I.’ 

And if you read Kohelet, the opening chapters, you will find he uses the word ‘I’ more than any other text in Tanach. ‘Kaniti li, baniti li, asiti li…’ I did this for myself, I did this for myself, non-stop I, I, I. 

And I'm afraid we're repeating the mistake. What do we have nowadays? The iPod, the iPhone, the iTunes, the iPhone. I, I, I. And happiness always comes when you forget the ‘I’ and you focus on the ‘We.’ That is the moment when we are filled with pleasure and we thank God for it. For in that lovely, lovely rhyme of that lovely line from the poet W.H. Auden. 

W.H. Auden once wrote, “In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start. In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise.” 

Just the act of praising itself generates happiness that cannot be bought in any other way. 

I want to tell you a story that to me was mind-blowing. It happened just a few years ago. There was a young man in our community, very frum, and as it happens very, very rich. And he was wrestling with a problem.

What present should he buy his son for his bar mitzvah? And the answer he came up with was the finest answer I have ever heard. And here is what he gave his son as a present for his bar mitzvah. He took his son for a week to a Romanian orphanage.

And they lived there for a week. With all the orphans, sleeping where they slept, eating what they ate. That was his present for his son's bar mitzvah.

And when they came back the son said, “Dad, when I'm older, do you think I'll be able to help them the way you do?”

And that is how you bring children up with a real sense of values, and how you develop wealth and… So I could go on like this for a long time but the truth is I'd like to give you a little sense of how difficult times can make you focus on real values that bring us real and lasting happiness. 

And let me just end perhaps with a little story that I found very moving.

There was a couple who I knew very well. I don't know if you're familiar with their names but I think I'm going to name them. The names Maurice and Vivienne Wohl. If you've ever walked around Jerusalem you'll find their names on all the buildings, especially near the Kotel or the Rose Garden by the Knesset, or that big new conference centre in Bar Ilan. They gave away more money than almost anyone in the world had done. They weren't blessed to have children so what they did with their money is they made it and they gave it away.

But what I found very moving, there was 30 years age difference between them. Maurice was a lawyer and as a vacation job, he gave a job to the daughter of a friend, at a princely sum in those days of £5 a week. And after the week, he was taking her for lunch, a young girl at the time, and they passed somebody who was derelict in the streets.

Maurice, this is back in the 1950s, gave the guy whatever it was 10 shillings, whatever it was yeah, a reasonably generous donation and then they walked off. And she said “Mr Wohl, would you mind please, towards the end of the week you’re going to give me £5, would you mind giving it to me now?” And he gave her the sum and she went right back and gave it to the beggar and he said, “Why did you do that?”’ 

She said, “Well, the money you gave him is not going to change him.” 

And they had their lunch, and the next day came for him to give her her salary, and he said, “Well, I'm not going to give you your salary because I'm not going to take away that mitzvah from you.”

But he asked her to marry him because he said “Her heart was bigger than mine.”

Now this was a couple that gave away hundreds of millions of pounds, but what struck me so much when Vivienne died at the age of 59, was that among the people who were most deeply in mourning were the waiters and cleaners at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

You see, they didn't want to waste money having a home in Jerusalem, so they stayed at the King David Hotel, and wherever they stayed, Vivienne got to know the waiters, the cleaners - what kind of family circumstances they had with their children, did they need anything with somebody ill, she knew all the names of all their families, and whenever they needed help, she would quietly give them that help.

And I thought to myself, that is what we mean when we say every Motzei Shabbat, “kol makom sheAta motzeh et gedulato, sham ata motzeh et anvetanuto” - where you find greatness, there you find humility.

There were other people who gave hundreds of millions of pounds but very few who at the same time cared about people that other people didn't even make eye contact with.

That is greatness.

Friends, the truth is there was a famous guy who was a friend of Queen Victoria, an eminent Jew, a very wealthy man, he had made a very good career move. He married a Rothschild. He was able to retire at the age of 40 and devote the rest of his life - he lived to be 101 and in the 19th century, 101 was worth something - and he did many good works and it is said somebody asked him once, ‘Sir Moses what are you worth?’ and he named a certain sum, and the man said, ‘Sir Moses, I know you've got 10,000 pounds,’ and Moses Montefiore gave the following reply, he said ‘You didn't ask how much I earn, you asked how much I'm worth. I gave you, therefore, the amount I've given to tzedaka thus far this year. Because we are worth what we are willing to share with others.’

And what I find so remarkable is that Hashem taught us this lesson through the very geography of Eretz Yisrael. Did you ever notice the following curious fact? There are two seas in Israel. There is the Galilee, the Kinneret, and there is Yam HaMelach, the Dead Sea. The one is full of life, the other one nothing can live in it, and yet they are fed by the same water that was in the Jordan system. So how come one is full of life and the other is dead? And the answer is very simple. The Sea of Galilee receives water at one end and gives out water at the other. The Dead Sea receives water and doesn't give. If you receive and you don't give, that's not life.

Friends, I hope some of these principles will help us reorient our lives so that we live for the things that matter, which are not the things we are told that matter. True happiness is born in hard times, because hard times force us to focus on the value of things, not the price of things. To celebrate what we have instead of searching after what we do not yet have. And that allows us to focus on what we can give to others, not what others give to us. 

May we learn and rehearse and rededicate ourselves to those values and then we will know, ashrecha vetov lach, we will find the happiness that lasts.

Thank you very much.