The Warning Labels on Money
Crystal and Silver on the Shore of Lake Michigan
Spring 1923, Chicago. A banquet at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, right on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Crystal chandeliers throw light across white tablecloths. Silver trays circulate. At the head table sit a few men who, between them, controlled more money than the United States government. That was the comparison one of the speakers used that night, and it was accurate. These men had risen from virtually nothing — farms, factory floors, poor neighborhoods — and built fortunes so large they’d changed the world around them.
Anyone in that ballroom would’ve told you these men were on top of the world and would be there for good.
Twenty-Five Years Later
Within a quarter century, every one of them was finished.
Samuel Insull once controlled half a billion dollars in electric power companies. When his empire collapsed, six hundred thousand ordinary people lost their savings and blamed him. Insull fled the country. He died of a heart attack in a Paris subway station. His body went unidentified for hours. When they finally searched his pockets, they found eighty-four cents — his total net worth.
Charles Schwab — the steel magnate, not the brokerage — was so wealthy that he built a seventy-five-room mansion on an entire city block in Manhattan. It had a swimming pool, a bowling alley, its own private power plant. By the end, he couldn’t pay the taxes on it and he died in a small apartment across town, owing three hundred thousand dollars more than he had. A wrecking crew tore the mansion down.
Richard Whitney was known as the “White Knight of Wall Street.” He earned that name during the 1929 panic when he single-handedly steadied the market by striding onto the trading floor and placing huge buy orders while everyone else ran for the exits. A few years later, he was led away in handcuffs and sent to Sing Sing prison. After his release, the man whose voice once calmed the entire stock exchange lived out his days milking cows on a small dairy farm in Massachusetts.
Jesse Livermore was the most famous stock trader in America. They called him “The Great Bear of Wall Street.” When the crash came in 1929, he was ready — he’d been quietly betting against the market for months through more than a hundred different brokers so nobody could see how big his position was. He collected a hundred million dollars in a matter of weeks. But Livermore couldn’t stop trading. Within a few years, every dollar was gone. He died in 1940 with almost nothing to his name.
And that’s only a few of them. Uber-wealthy men. Uber-fortunes that seemed permanent. Uber-ignoble endings nobody that night at the Edgewater Beach Hotel could’ve imagined.
A Ladder Going Up and Down
The Midrash on this week’s parshah saw this coming three thousand years ago.
In parshas Matos, after the war with Midian, the tribes of Reuven and Gad suddenly find themselves spectacularly wealthy — enormous herds, vast flocks, more livestock than they know what to do with. The Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah 22:8) uses this moment to open a window into how wealth actually works.
It starts with a story. A Roman noblewoman once asked Rabbi Shimon ben Chalfta a pointed question. “Your Hashem created the world in six days. So what has He been doing ever since?”
His answer: “He sits and makes ladders — lowering one and raising another.”
The Midrash connects this to a pasuk in Tehillim: “Ki lo mi’mitzrach u’mi’ma’arav, v’lo mi’midbar harim; ki Elokim shofet, zeh yashpil v’zeh yarim — For it is neither from the east nor from the west, nor from the wilderness or the mountains; for Hashem is the Judge — He lowers one and raises another” (Tehillim 75:7–8).
Not from the east — not from trade routes. Not from the west — not from market timing. Not from the wilderness or the mountains — not from geography, natural resources, or strategic advantage. Hashem decides who rises and who falls. That’s it. That’s the whole system.
The Gemara in Shabbos (151b) puts it in a single image. Wealth, it says, is a galgal hachozer ba’olam — a wheel that turns in the world. People rise on one side and fall on the other, and the wheel never stops spinning. The men at the Edgewater thought they’d climbed to a place with a ladder they controlled. But the wheel was already turning.
Even the Words Are Trying to Tell You
Here’s where the Midrash does something extraordinary. It turns to lashon hakodesh itself and shows that the very words we use for money contain built-in warning labels. There are four common words for money or wealth in lashon hakodesh. Each, the Midrash says, is telling you the same thing.
The first is nechasim — possessions. It comes from nichsim, hidden. Wealth is hidden from one person and revealed to another. You have it; then it’s concealed from you and uncovered somewhere else. Insull’s half a billion didn’t evaporate. It just moved — hidden from him, revealed to others.
The second is zuzim — coins. From the root zaz, to move. Money doesn’t sit still. It flows from one pocket to another. Always in transit. Schwab’s seventy-five-room mansion, his bowling alley, his private power plant — all of it zaz, moved right out from under him.
The third is mamon — wealth. The Midrash hears it this way: Ma moneh — what are you counting? You can count it, stack it, track it in ledgers and portfolios. But counting wealth can be an exercise in futility — you can count every dollar today and tomorrow the numbers belong to someone else. Whitney counted on his name, his reputation, his position at the head of Wall Street. What was he really counting? He ended up counting cows.
The fourth is ma’os — money. It suggests ma le’es — what is for a time. Wealth is temporary. It belongs to a moment, not to a person. It’s yours for a time, and then it’s someone else’s for a time, and the clock is always running. Livermore’s hundred million dollars belonged to him for a matter of months. Then the clock ran out.
Four words. Four warnings. The language itself won’t let you forget.
What Reuven and Gad Were Really Holding
This brings us back to the parshah. Reuven and Gad look at their sudden wealth — all those herds captured after the war with Midian — and their first instinct is to settle down right there on the east bank of the Jordan. Good grazing land. Don’t cross the river. Lock it in.
You can almost hear the Midrash smiling. Lock it in? With what? Your nechasim — your hidden-from-you possessions? Your zuzim — your coins that are already moving? Your mamon — the pile you’re counting that may not be there tomorrow?
Their wealth wasn’t the product of shrewd livestock management. It wasn’t lucky timing. It was Hashem’s decree — one rung on a ladder that never stops moving. He lowers one and raises another. Reuven and Gad were being raised. The question the Midrash is really asking is — did they understand what that meant?
To their credit, they did. When Moshe challenged their priorities, Reuven and Gad didn’t dig in. They agreed to cross the Jordan and fight alongside their brothers before returning to settle their land. The wealth was real, but their actions showed they understood it for what it was — Hashem’s gift, not their achievement. The mission came before the money.
Eighty-Four Cents in a Paris Subway
We don’t know what Samuel Insull was thinking in his last moments in that subway station. We don’t know if Charles Schwab, in his small apartment, ever looked across town toward where his mansion used to stand. We don’t know what went through Richard Whitney’s mind the first morning he woke up on a dairy farm having to milk cows. And we don’t know whether Jesse Livermore, in his final years, ever thought about what it felt like to hold a hundred million dollars for just a few months.
But Hashem knew – and even built into lashon hakodesh their story before they lived it. Every word for wealth is a word about movement, concealment, impermanence. Not a single term in lashon hakodesh for money suggests something solid, something you can hold.
The Midrash isn’t saying wealth is bad or that ambition is foolish. It’s saying — know what you’re holding. Know Who’s moving the ladder.
The men at the Edgewater Beach Hotel had every reason to believe no one could move them from their wealth. The Torah — and the very language Hashem built it upon — had every reason to know they hadn’t.
From Rav Avigdor Miller on Money by Yaakov Astor. Visit www.YaakovAstor.com
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