Is My Success Built from Materials Taken from Someone Else?

Is My Success Built from Materials Taken from Someone Else?

We are accustomed to measuring success by what can be seen at the end: the business has grown, the position has advanced, the home looks impressive, the children are succeeding, the community is developing, and the person receives recognition. Yet we almost never ask the prior question: what did we build this success from, and who paid for it? A person can reach an impressive professional summit while their children paid for it with years in which that parent was hardly at home. A manager can present extraordinary achievements, while some of those achievements were built on the work of people who never received credit. A person can be known by everyone as a figure of kindness, while those closest to them receive mainly the leftovers of their time and patience. The result may be beautiful, but Sukkot dares to ask about the building materials as well.

The Torah says regarding the festival of Sukkot: “You shall make for yourself the Festival of Sukkot for seven days” (Deuteronomy 16:13). The sages discuss the limits of the word “for yourself,” and Tractate Sukkah contains a detailed discussion of a stolen sukkah (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 31a). Rabbi Eliezer and the sages disagree about a case in which a person forcibly removes another from that person's sukkah, and the Gemara continues by discussing one who stole wood and built the sukkah from it. The halachic details are complex, among other reasons because of the laws governing land, transformation of stolen property, and takkanat hashavim, the rabbinic enactment intended to facilitate repentance. It would therefore be inaccurate to say simplistically that every sukkah containing stolen material is necessarily invalid in every circumstance. Yet the very fact that the sages pause in the middle of the festival of Sukkot and ask who owns the building materials opens a much larger question: is it enough that you built something good, or is the way you obtained the materials also part of the moral accounting?

The Gemara formulates the principle sharply regarding a stolen lulav: mitzvah haba'ah ba'aveirah, a mitzvah that comes through a transgression (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 30a). Rabbi Yochanan, in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, expounds the verse, “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery with a burnt offering” (Isaiah 61:8), and offers a parable of a king to whom the entire land belongs and who nevertheless pays customs duty, so that people will learn from him not to steal. The message is clear: the Holy One, blessed be He, does not need our offering so desperately that the way we obtained it becomes irrelevant. The prophet Malachi likewise rebukes Israel for bringing to the altar “what was stolen, the lame, and the sick” (Malachi 1:13). Not everything that arrives at a sacred place becomes sacred simply because of the destination it has reached.

King David expresses this contradiction in a brief sentence: “For You are not a God who desires wickedness; evil cannot dwell with You” (Psalms 5:5). The prophet Isaiah states the point even more sharply when he describes people who multiply offerings and prayers and, in the same breath, demands of them: “Learn to do good; seek justice, strengthen the oppressed, judge the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). The Torah does not permit a person to divide life into two departments, in one of which impressive things are accomplished while in the other someone else pays the price. Rabbi Yochanan likewise teaches in the Gemara concerning a stolen lulav that the problem is not merely technical ownership, but the fact that the mitzvah itself comes by way of a transgression (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 30a).

At this point, the question moves from the sukkah into life. There are forms of taking that do not occur in a store and do not end in a beit din. Not every unfair use of another person's time, effort, or trust is halachically defined as theft, and those definitions must not be blurred. But on the moral plane, it is worth asking whether some of our successes are being financed by someone else without our ever entering that price into the account. A father says that he works until midnight “for the family,” but the family may have preferred less money and more father. A manager receives praise for an excellent project, while those who worked through entire nights remain anonymous. A person gives many hours to the public and earns enormous respect, while at home everyone has already learned that there is little point in asking for that person's time.

Organizational psychology describes a phenomenon known as moral disengagement, the set of mechanisms through which people can temporarily disconnect their values from their behavior. Albert Bandura showed that a person does not have to think of themselves as someone doing wrong. Instead, they can change the story they tell about the act. They tell themselves that it is “for an important purpose,” that “everyone does it,” that the harm is minor, or that the person who was hurt should have managed better. Once the goal is perceived as important enough, it becomes easier to stop seeing the person who is paying for it.

Alongside this operates another mechanism, self-justification. We are remarkably skilled at explaining to ourselves why the choice we have already made was the correct one. Someone who works without end can say that it is all for the children's future. Someone who fails to give employees credit can explain that they are the one carrying the responsibility. Someone who expects family members to absorb their pressure can say that those relatives should understand how difficult things are. Each of these statements may be partly true, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous. The most effective excuses are not total lies. They are partial truths that conceal another truth from us.

The Torah already warned against the possibility that a sacred goal might become the justification for an unsacred act. Proverbs states: “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is His delight” (Proverbs 15:8). Tractate Bava Kamma speaks of one who stole wheat, ground it, baked it, and separated challah, teaching that the blessing does not repair the beginning of the process. The sages apply to such a person the verse, “The robber blesses and thereby reviles the Lord” (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 94a). A person can take problematic material, process it, invest in it, give it an attractive form, and even place a mitzvah within it, but the beauty of the result does not automatically erase the question of where the material came from.

This may be one of the most revealing examinations that Sukkot can offer us. Instead of asking only what I built this year, I can ask what I built it from. If I advanced at work, what happened at home during that time? If I became the person everyone can rely on, can the people closest to me still rely on me? If I built a reputation, who gave me the credit, and from whom might I have taken it? If I earned more money, is the only price the one that appears in the bank statement, or is there another price being recorded somewhere else entirely?

This is not a call to abandon a career, achievement, leadership, or devotion to the community. On the contrary, a person is meant to build. But the sukkah teaches that even when we are building something good, we do not examine only whether the structure stands. We also examine the materials from which it is made. Sometimes the repair is not to demolish what we built, but to return to someone what belongs to them: to give credit, return time to the family, thank the person who was forgotten, pay a fair price, or stop taking for granted the person who carries a large part of our lives for us.

Perhaps this is why the discussion of the stolen sukkah is so unsettling. A person can stand inside a structure that looks exactly like a sukkah, with walls, schach, and everything in place, yet the sages first ask who owns the materials. Before we admire the building, it is sometimes worth looking at the beams. In the end, the question is not only how high we managed to build our lives, but whether the people around us were partners in the building, or whether some of them became, without our noticing, its building materials.