Ten Million Dollars in Sydney
Rabbi Ezriel Tauber used to ask people to imagine the following.
A deal has come across your desk that will earn you ten million dollars. Not over five years. Overnight. There is one condition, and it’s not negotiable. You have to be standing in a room in Sydney, Australia tomorrow to close it. Not a phone call. Not a signature sent ahead. You, in the room.
You get to the airport and they tell you the last flight out is sold. Every seat. The passengers are already walking down the jet bridge. There is no other plane that gets you there in time, and you cannot charter one.
So you find the manager. You put twenty thousand dollars on the counter and you tell him you do not need a seat. You will stand. You will sit on the floor. “Put me in the bathroom if that’s what it takes — just get me on that airplane.”
The manager looks at the money, picks up the phone and calls the head steward. “Listen. You take ten, I’ll take ten. Put him in the bathroom and keep your mouth shut.”
A Very Long Flight
You are on the plane.
It’s a very long flight. There is no seat, no meal, no window. Every ten minutes somebody rattles the handle and you have to come out and stand in the galley with your back against a cart while a stranger uses the room you are living in. Then you go back in. Then somebody rattles the handle again.
Hour after hour of that, in the dark, over the ocean.
And a hundred feet in front of you, in the nose of the same aircraft, sits another man.
He inherited more money than he has any idea what to do with. His wife has thrown him out of the house. He has nowhere in particular to be and nobody waiting for him at the other end, so he bought a first-class ticket around the world simply because he could not think of anything else to do with himself. The crew cannot do enough for him. He tips a hundred dollars with every glass of champagne, and he makes sure everyone on board knows it.
He has the best seat on the airplane. It reclines flat. They bring him whatever he asks for.
Now Answer the Question
Two men, one airplane, the same flight.
Ask a hundred people and a hundred people put themselves in the front of the plane. Who in his right mind chooses a bathroom over a flat bed and a waiter?
Rabbi Tauber’s answer is that we have it exactly backwards. The happiest man on that airplane is the man in the bathroom, and the most miserable is the man in first class.
Why? The man in the bathroom knows exactly why he’s on the plane. He has a destination! Ten million dollars await him. The discomfort is not a punishment — it’s a fare. Every hour of it is buying him something. You could make the flight twice as bad and he would still take it, because the seat was never the point.
The man in front has everything a passenger could want — but no destination. No reason to be on board. When the plane lands he has nowhere to go. That’s why he’s miserable. The few hours of flight are all he has, so he has to try to squeeze a life out of it — and it will not give him one.
Seventy or Eighty Years
“We are all on a plane,” Rabbi Tauber says. “For some of us, the trip takes seventy years; for others, eighty. But sooner or later the flight lands.”
This world is like the airplane. It was never built to be lived in. It’s just a vehicle. It has no purpose in itself and it acquires one only when it’s carrying you somewhere. A man who treats the vehicle as the destination has nothing beyond the physical, and he cannot get true life out of it no matter how good his seat is.
Which is also why being a Jew is not a free ticket. A Jew pays. He’s bound by hundreds of commandments, held back from a great deal that the world helps itself to, and in most centuries he has been despised for it. If he knows where he’s going, that’s not a tragedy. It’s what a fare looks like.
You can see it in how people get off an airplane. The passengers who knew where they were going walk out fresh and quick and head straight for the exit, because the good part starts now. The ones who thought the flight was the whole thing stumble off tired, drunk and empty. They never worked out that the destination was not the flight.
I Have Placed Before You Life
Our parsha puts it as a choice. “Re’eh nasati lefanecha hayom es hachaim v’es hatov — See, I have placed before you today life and good” (Devarim 30:15), and a few pesukim later, “Uvacharta bachaim — and you shall choose life” (30:19).
Choose life. But both men on that airplane are alive. Neither is choosing between living and dying; they are both breathing, both eating, both landing in Sydney at the same hour of the same morning. What separates them is not that one of them is alive. It’s that one of them is going somewhere.
That’s what the Torah is asking a person to choose — a destination.
Motzaei Shabbos
Selichos begin Motzaei Shabbos. And one of the lines we will say again and again in these weeks is “Nachpisa deracheinu v’nachkorah — let us search out our ways and examine them” (Eichah 3:40). Not to make us feel bad — but to figure out where we are actually headed.
It’s a passenger looking at his ticket, some hours into the flight, to check that this plane is going where he thought it was going.
Both men land at the same time. Only one of them has somewhere to go.
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