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While Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis was struggling through the longest hitless streak in Major League baseball, he received the following letter from a nine-year old boy: “Dear Mr. Davis, There are two things I want you to know. First, the way you play baseball has nothing to do with how good a person you are. Also, you are incredible. You’ve played in the MLB. You’ve done it for a long-time and everyone goes through a slump. Don’t give up. We’re rooting for you.”
It’s a sweet story and even more incredible considering the nine-year old, Henry Frasca, was a Boston Red Sox fan!
On a more serious note, can you imagine the pressure Chris Davis must have experienced trying to pull himself out of what probably felt like an endless slump? The baseball player went 62 at-bats without a single hit! Besides the possibility of being fired, I wonder what kind of identity crisis Davis may also have experienced. Professional success in our world today is no longer simply a means of attaining financial stability and it effects younger people in an even more serious way. Writer and activist Melanie Curtin polled 300 of her fellow millennials about self-perception and failure. 67 percent of them said they felt “extreme” pressure to succeed, compared to 40 percent of GenXers and 23 percent of Boomers. The recent spate of wealthy parents who bribed individuals to falsify college admission applications so their children could get into better schools, shows how far people will go to set their children up for professional success.
Success at what we do has become synonymous with success with who we are. Our careers and professional achievements have become a gauge of our self-worth and have come to define our very identity. As a result, there is an enormous pressure to succeed in our careers, lest we are seen by others or worse, we deem ourselves, failures not simply at our jobs, but in life.
This attitude is antithetical to everything Judaism cherishes. In Jewish tradition, our self-worth is formed by the ethical choices we make, the mitzvot we perform and the type of moral and spiritual beings we become. The Torah itself does not seem to have much interest in what we choose for a living or what we pursue as a career. What does interest the Torah is that whatever we do choose, we do with honesty and integrity. We are taught to avoid fraudulent commercial dealings, verbal deception and to have “accurate weights and measures” (Leviticus 19:36). We must ensure our workers are treated with dignity, that they are paid on time, and that we pay our taxes. Those are the aspects of what we do that define who we are – not how far we go in achieving success.
I remember after the movie Ushpizin came out in 2005, we were fortunate to host the lead actors Michal and Shuli Rand. Someone from the audience asked the Chasidic couple whether their decision to not allow movie theaters in Israel to air their film on Shabbat, hurt their success. Shuli answered: “It all depends on what you mean by success. Our success as actors may have decreased but our success as Jews and as people devoted to holiness increased.”
To define who we are existentially by how close we come to reaching our career goals is to negate our true sense of self. The kind of son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife, friend, Jew or human being you are – goes so much more to the heart of who we really are than any job or profession.
So, the next time you get frustrated with your job or your career is not progressing as you’d like, do what you can to move things forward but don’t confuse failure at work with failing at life. Just remember what nine-year old Henry Frasca told Chris Davis: “The way you play baseball has nothing to do with how good a person you are.”
Main Photo: Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles (Wikimedia)