What does “Don’t say come back tomorrow and I’ll give” mean?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau explains Shlomo HaMelech’s warning, “Al tomar l’rei’acha lech vashuv umachar etein v’yesh itach”: don’t say “come back tomorrow and I’ll give” when you already have it now. The point, he says, is that “money isn’t just about amount, it’s about a moment.”
A seed planted in the spring becomes a forest. The same seed planted in winter just freezes. The same gift can change a life or arrive too late to matter.
He applies it to parents who hold everything back until they die, when the child is already sixty and the story is written, instead of giving a push at thirty, when a first home, a young family or a business idea can change an entire destiny.
Related concepts: Generosity that cannot be taken back · Another year has to be for something
In A Soul at Peace: What an Inheritance Really Is
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Giving later is not the same as giving now.
Deepest human truth
Money is about the moment. In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that “a moment that passes does not come back.”
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Parenting, Education, and Future Generations · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz