Once I visited my friend Marty Pearlmutter at his store in Dresher, Lester Martin Jewelers, and he showed me an envelope from a jewelry company with an interesting acronym on the envelope: EO”M. Knowing that the owners were from Chabad in New York, he asked if I could make sense of it. Marty was familiar with the letters commonly found on stationery, B”H, which stand for Baruch Hashem (blessed is G-d), but EO”M was new to Marty.
Recognizing the family business, I remembered the famous family history and its associated story.
This family has been in the jewelry business for many decades. Its founder’s name was Binyamin Kletzker. The story goes that one year when he was preparing his books for taxes, he worked through his ledger. When it came time to declare his total profit for the year, instead of filling in a number, he wrote the words “Ein Od Milvado,” meaning there is nothing else other than G-d. The family still keeps the acronym, EO”M on all business-related stationery.
What does it mean when a businessman looks at his business and recognizes that all of it comes from G-d? Doesn’t he deserve some credit for building it up? If he truly believed that it all belongs to G-d, then shouldn’t he have written this sentence on the first line of his ledger, not on the last?
What is the lesson here?
Before we answer, let's take a little detour by asking a question that doesn’t appear to relate to the lesson.
Can one self-incriminate? On the one hand, if you say something about yourself, it is valued as if 100 witnesses say something about you. On the other hand, what if you self-incriminate? Do you have permission to hurt yourself?
The Torah differentiates between self-incrimination that affects your finances vs. your body and soul. For example, we believe you if you say that you owe a person $100, but we don’t believe you if you say that you killed someone.
Why is it that, if you are trusted about yourself, you should always be trusted, but if not, not. Isn’t a truism always true?
Of course we always believe you. The question is whether you have the right to hurt yourself with your true testimony.
You see, the Torah teaches us that our body and soul are not our own. That is why we don’t have the right to hurt ourselves, even if we go to court and self-incriminate. On the other hand, money that you have earned is yours. Yes, we have to recognize that “all comes from G-d,” but only once we made it our own first. Once it is ours we have the liberty, and the responsibility, to give part of it away for Tzedakah.
Now we can appreciate the uniqueness of Binyamin Kletzker. Sure, he was a wise and successful businessman, but at the end of the day, he knew that he had to recognize that “there is nothing else other than G-d.”
As we find ourselves just weeks away from the High Holidays, it is worth taking a few moments to think of what this means to us; what does EO”M stand for? How can we incorporate this acronym into our daily lives?
Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova!