Saturday 15 October 2011

Money is a curse or blessing

Money is a medium of transaction. In today's world we can't live without money. For everything, we need money. But too much of everything is bad. When we think beyond our imagination it is good but when we are more than ambitious it will become curse. Suppose a beggar will always be a beggar, suppose he wins a lottery of 1 crore, what he will do with that, he will get confused. He cant think what to do with that. Some people feel that they and they alone are responsible for their success, that their intelligence and abilities made it so. This is the serious challenge of wealth: to not be deceived by your own ego but to remember that it is God who gives us the power to become prosperous. When you put money in perspective and recognize why it was given to you, it becomes a blessing instead of a curse. And by using your wealth for charitable purposes instead of spending it all on the desire of the moment, your money becomes eternal.
I have observed many people who have become extremely wealthy. In most cases, those who become very wealthy lose their psychological motivation to provide the means of support to their families. People who no longer have to earn money to survive unwittingly must turn to other things in order for them to seemingly have a purpose in society. And most of these other purposes are bad. Once anyone has achieved wealth, they usually turn to achieving power and influence in society and they are usually ill prepared to do things in the best interest of humankind. Rather, they turn to family wealth accumulation to create legacies much as the Pharos did in ancient Egypt.These days, our society is thinking about money all the time. And for good reason. I hope that the economic melt down will have at least one benefit for us. I hope it will force us to reconsider how we think about money, as individuals and as Jews. As a recent article in the New York Times reported, many people guilty of conspicuous consumption have seen this crisis as an opportunity to reexamine their lives. Much as the Great Depression taught a generation to conserve instead of spend, perhaps this downturn will have a similar effect.I challenge us to find the blessings that money provides, and to stay away from the curses so often tied up with money. If money goes in wrong hands it became a curse.

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