When You Eat from the Work of Your Hands

“When you eat from the labor of your hands, you will be happy, and it will be well with you.” Opening A man once came to me. He said, “I need therapy, but I don’t have the money to pay for it.” I told him, “Go open a business. Find a job.” He thought I meant that he should earn some money and save up enough, and then he could pay a therapist. But that was not what I meant. I told him, “Start working. Maybe you won’t need therapy at all.” Because the work itself is the therapy. The Happiness Is in the Effort The Book of Psalms says: “When you eat from the labor of your hands, you will be happy, and it will be well with you.” A careful reader notices a question right away. Why does the verse tie “you will be happy” to “the labor of your hands” and not to “when you eat”? After all, the goal is the eating: making a living, having a home, putting bread on the table. You would expect the verse to say, “When you eat, you will be happy.” But the verse says something else. Happiness is not the result of the meal. It is the result of the effort. “The labor of your hands” is where happiness lives. A person is not happy only because he has food to eat. He is happy because he worked with his own hands to get it. The Empty Space That Idleness Leaves Our Sages teach in the Talmud: “Idleness leads to boredom.” Another early work of the Sages, Avot DeRabbi Natan, explains this further. Idleness is not rest. It is destruction. The “boredom” it creates is not just the ordinary boredom of having nothing interesting to do. It is an empty space in the inner self, a hollowness that a person cannot bear. And where do the forces of darkness come in? Exactly there, into that empty space. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, explains that the evil inclination, the inner voice that pulls us toward wrong, does not need to conquer us. It only needs us to make room for it. When the mind is not busy, and when the heart is not filling a mission, depression and anxiety are waiting at the door. They wait there not because they are strong, but because they find emptiness. A busy person has no room for depression. He has no time for it. Heavy thoughts need emptiness to survive. Rabbi Schneur Zalman writes about this “heavy sadness and dark gloom.” Give the mind a mission, and no room will be left for darkness. The Curse That Is a Blessing Now we can understand something wonderful. After the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, Hashem said to Adam, the first man: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread.” Many commentators saw this as a punishment and a curse. Couldn’t a person eat his bread without sweating for it? But let us think about it more deeply. Perhaps the sweat is not only the punishment. Perhaps it is also the cure. The “filth of the serpent” had entered the human soul. Man was damaged, and a pull toward idleness and toward foreign, unwanted thoughts came into him. So Hashem gave him the hard work itself as a tool for repair. “By the sweat of your brow”: sweat purifies. The effort itself cleans the coarse, physical side of a person and pushes away the forces of darkness. There is no need to fight the bad thoughts head-on. You fill a person with the goodness of doing, and no room is left for them. Here is the new idea. Work is not a way to earn money so that you can buy therapy. Work is the therapy. Sweat is not a side effect of the effort. It is the purpose inside the effort. A Mission Is the Heart of the Answer Ethics of the Fathers, the Sages’ teachings on how to live, says: “Love work.” It does not say “get along with work,” and it does not say “put up with work.” It says love it. Work is not just something we do in order to live. It is part of what we live for. Now you will understand, my friend, why this problem is so severe in our generation. Technology offers people more and more ways to pass empty time, with no effort, no mission and no sweat. And what do we gain? A disguised emptiness. It looks like entertainment, but it leaves the empty space just as empty as before. When there is more free time and less hard work, anxiety does not go away. Just the opposite: it finds more room to grow.