The Cherry on Top

The Knicks won the championship this week, their first in fifty-three years, and Jalen Brunson was named Finals MVP.

For those of us who grew up being disappointed by the Knicks in the 90s, this was nostalgic and exciting. But there was something else that stayed with me.

Two years ago, Brunson signed for about a hundred and thirteen million dollars less than he could have had if he had waited. He did it so the team could afford to keep good players around him, some of the teammates he had played with in college and wanted to win with again.

Nothing about it was guaranteed.

After winning the championship, a reporter asked him if the sacrifice was worth it. He said it was. And then he said that even if they had lost, chasing it together would have been worth it anyway.

The trophy was just the cherry on top.

We hear that, and part of us says: what a fool.

Because there is a script inside us that knows exactly what to say. Look out for yourself. Take the bigger number. Hold on to what is yours. Do not be the sucker.

Brunson did not want less, though. He wanted the biggest prize there is, and he went and got it. What he would not do was let the money make the decision for him. The number was enormous, and he kept his hand on the wheel anyway.

Most of us never manage that. We do not turn down a hundred million, but we face the smaller, more familiar version of his choice all the time, and we usually cave. We take the job for the respect it will bring us, against everything our gut is saying. We stay a year too long because the money is hard to walk away from. We talk ourselves out of the move, or the change, or the harder and better thing, because the prestige of staying put is just too good to argue with.

And it is not only money. It is the title. The image. The need to be right. The fear of looking foolish. The comfort of being needed. The small piece of kavod we have convinced ourselves we cannot live without. These things can sit quietly in the driver’s seat while we tell ourselves we are still the ones making the turn.

That is the test the Torah keeps coming back to.

The Mesillas Yesharim opens by saying that everything in life is a nisayon. Poverty is a test. Wealth, he says, is no less of one, and probably more. We assume the test of money is whether we will give some of it away. But there is an earlier one, before a dollar moves. It is whether the money is working for you, or you have quietly gone to work for it.

Korach failed that test about as loudly as a person can.

The parsha begins with two words. Vayikach Korach. Korach took. Chazal tell us that Korach was fabulously wealthy, and they read a pasuk in Koheles as if it were written for him: Osher shamur l’baalav l’ra’aso – Wealth guarded by its owner, for his own harm.

Osher shamur. Wealth being guarded. A person thinks he is protecting what he has, but the pasuk says the very thing he is guarding can become l’ra’aso, the thing that harms him.

He thought he was holding the money. The money was holding him. And it was never only the money. The same was true of the kavod, the position, the seat he was sure he deserved and did not have. He could not put any of it down, and it drove him into the ground.

Rav Dessler gave the diagnostic. In the end, he said, every person is either a nosein or a mekabel. A giver or a taker. Not by what is in your account, and not even by how much of it you give away. By which direction you are facing when you decide.

Which means you can write a big check to tzedakah and still be a taker, if underneath the giving the ledger is the thing actually running your life.

There was a sign on the wall in Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman’s house, which had almost nothing else in it. It said that in all his years, he had never seen a person who was mevater end up the loser.

Giving in feels like losing. Letting it go, letting someone else have it, walking past the bigger number, it feels like getting played. There is a voice in all of us that says if you do not grab yours, someone else will.

But that is the whole test. The only way to find out whether you are holding the thing or it is holding you is to set it down once and see if it lets you. Brunson set down a hundred and thirteen million dollars and found out he was still standing.

None of us will get his version of the choice. We get the quiet one, and we get it constantly. In a conversation. In a marriage. In a shul. In a boardroom. In a moment when no one would blame us for taking what we can get. Underneath each of them is the same small question: Am I making this decision, or has something else quietly taken the wheel?

I do not always like my answer. I doubt I am the only one.

The trophy may be the cherry on top.

But the freedom to make the call yourself, instead of handing it to the number, the title, the kavod, or the fear, that is the victory.