How can I help someone in my life become more generous?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau answers: “Make someone feel like a king, and they will give you like a king.” The stingiest person in your life, he says, can become the most generous one, because stinginess “is not a personality, it’s a recipe.”
What closes a person’s hand is not feeling wanted. A king whom people accept willingly gives at the scale of a king; a dictator also gives, but because he has no choice, and so he gives stingily. “Kingship is only activated when you feel wanted.”
He sees the same truth in how we relate to Hashem, who asks us to choose Him as King again every year: “He definitely doesn’t want to give stingily.” The way to open someone’s giving is to let him feel wanted and honored first.
Related concepts: Generosity that cannot be taken back · Relationships
In A Soul at Peace: Giving Like a King
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Rabbi Landau teaches that a person made to feel like a king will give like a king.
Underlying need or longing
Every giver needs to feel wanted; without it, something inside closes.
Deepest human truth
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes: before you ask someone else to give, let him feel that he is a king. That is always the key.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: The Cycle of Renewal: Elul, Holidays, and Light · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz