大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Julia Neuberger

Celebrate the Good Things

Good Morning.

Do you remember the song 鈥淥h my darling Clementine鈥�, the daughter of a "miner, forty-niner" and the singer's lover? One day Clementine tripped, fell into a raging river and drowned. Her lover couldn鈥檛 swim, he didn鈥檛 even try to rescue her. But then he kissed her little sister and forgot all about her- so sad! It was only a year earlier than this song, on January 24, 1848, that James Marshall had found gold in Sutter's Mill in California, and the Gold Rush began. People rushed out west. By 1849, miners, prospectors and chancers had arrived in huge numbers. Wealth was to be had by panning or digging for gold. Some were successful and made millions. Most fell on hard times, or were cheated, with no gold and in the harshest of conditions.

It may seem like a different world, yet we still have rushes on particular shares, and stock market crashes. We still believe in Bitcoin- or think it鈥檚 a scam. We still believe you can get rich quick, though the evidence is against us. We still want to believe we can make a success really quickly. Easy money- that鈥檚 what we鈥檙e searching for. But of course there鈥檚 really no such thing, despite the pipedreams.

Nor does loads of money really make us happy, though we think it will. Lack of money certainly makes people miserable; poverty is neither ennobling nor healthy. But what makes us happy, once we have enough, is family and relationships, physical beauty, ideas, enjoying small things. The Gold Rush made a few people lucky. The rest ended up poor AND displaced. Let us learn from their poor outcomes to celebrate what we have, give thanks each day for the good things, and help those people who lack them to acquire them, so that they too can find contentment.