Daniel E. Lapin - Business Secrets From the Bible: Spiritual Success Strategies for Financial Abundance

RABBI DANIEL LAPIN

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Copyright 2014 by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lapin, Daniel (Daniel E.)

Business secrets from the bible : spiritual success strategies for financial abundance / Rabbi Daniel Lapin.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-74910-4 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-74920-3 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-118-74914-2 (ePub)

1. BusinessReligious aspectsJudaism. 2. SuccessReligious aspectsJudaism. 3. WealthReligious aspectsJudaism. I. Title.

HF5388.L36 2014

658dc23

2013049991

TO SUSAN

Enjoy life with the wife you love all the days of your fleeting life.

(Ecclesiastes 9:9)

You might be wondering, Why Business Secrets from the Bible? Why not Tennis Secrets from the Bible, or Car Racing Secrets from the Bible, or Beauty and Makeup Tips from the Bible? One can find pretty much whatever one seeks within the pages of that mysterious and majestic volume that has had so much influence on the story of civilization. Over the years, many have projected onto its pages their own visions, fears, and hopes and have subsequently seen it reflect back confirmation of their convictions. Unfortunately, this has led to all kinds of misguided and invalid projections upon the Bible. The Bible can tell us much, but we cannot impose whatever we feel like upon it. The original meaning of the Bible must be preserved, even as we attempt to interpret the Bible.

But how to know the difference? Let ancient Jewish wisdom be your guide.

Meticulous meanings, diligent intergenerational transmission, and specifics laid out in the Oral Torah have helped preserve the original meanings. There is magic in what I call the Lords languageHebrew. Teachers of the Torah must impart a deep adherence and responsibility for original meaning on the next generation of faithful students of the Torah. Teachers should faithfully transmit to their students exactly what they learned from their own teachers. This has been the case for generations. Thus, within the authentic chain of transmission, there has been very little distortion and almost no imposition of personal agendas.

Fortunately, you dont have to take my word for this or for any other axiomatic propositions you will encounter in this book. I will ask you to unshackle yourself from the dreadful intellectual prison of expert-itis and allow room for your own powers of observation and deductive reasoning. Stop worrying about whether any expert has already published what I am about to disclose.

If many of this books propositions were already widely published, youd be wasting your time reading my repetitive account. Instead, you will gain enormous value from many of the premises presented and espoused within this book. You may wonder if they are in fact true. This is allowedagain, use your own powers of observation and reasoning. Reflect upon what you read here, perform diligent research, and arrive at your own conclusion. Dont surrender your discernment to others, regardless of how qualified they may be. Remember, nobody cares as much about your money as you do.

I invite you to evaluate the ideas espoused in this book for yourself, because I expect some degree of resistance. You may be skeptical of, or even disturbed by, the biblical origins of some of the ideas contained herein.

For someparticularly those who are not Jewish or Christian, or perhaps not even religiousyour initial instinct may be to reject this material because of its deistic or religious source. I have come to expect this, too. Many have been trained and schooled by the educational bureaucrats and propaganda professors of the academy to accept as true only that which originates from the academically anointed. Do not misunderstand me: I have the greatest of respect for authentic scholarship. But I also have disdain for the scam scholarship and bogus education masquerading as truth that is so common on American campuses these days. I have a sneaking suspicion that any course of university study that needs the word studies after it is most likely a waste of students time and their parents money. Have you ever heard of physics studies, mathematics studies, or computer science studies? No, of course notbecause those are real fields. I reject the political correctness, bigotry, and prejudice that have taken an undue place in our secular-only education system.

And yet, I witness prejudice within academia against all things nonsecular. Most universities today have adopted a blind and baseless hostility toward anything biblical. This is just plain ignorant. It certainly is not education. Teaching students to utterly ignore a text so preeminent as the Bible, a text that has shaped the outlook and beliefs of countless generations of very wise and accomplished people over two millennia, is doing a colossal disservice to young people.

Perhaps you do not believe in the Bible. I want to be clear that I do not intend to exclude you. I very much still welcome you to read this book and evaluate it on its own merits. I am confident that, if you approach this work with an intellectual openness, you will find value. Even if you are not currently religious, certainly you would not consider it immaterial that billions of people do believe in the truth of the Bible. As such, certainly you would not deny that the book has had a lasting and nearly unimaginable effect upon our history and our present lives. For example, billions of people date their letters, documents, and checks with the year in this format: AD 2014. They may leave out the AD and perhaps even be oblivious to the fact that AD is an acronym for