by MRS. BAYLA BERMAN | May 15, 2026 5:57 pm
In[1] the early 20th century, arguably the most famous economist in the world was a man named Irving Fisher[2]. Fisher was not just an economist, he was one of those rare people who seemed to turn anything into gold. His father, a Protestant minister, died a week after he started at Yale University, but he managed to support his mother, brother, and himself by tutoring, and still graduated at the top of his class in 1888. Three years later, he added a PhD in economics, and then launched a remarkable career.
Irving invented and patented an early version of the Rolodex filing system. That alone made him a multimillionaire, but not the kind we have today. Today, the average home in the US costs over $400,000, so a millionaire is basically worth 2.5 average homes. In the early 1900s, a nice home cost about $4000, so a millionaire was worth about 250 homes!
Irving also wrote a bestselling health book called How to Live, that sold over 500,000 copies. He promoted diet and exercise long before wellness culture existed, founded the Life Extension Institute, and became one of the leading public intellectuals in America. He was brilliant, prolific, wealthy, and deeply confident in his own ability to understand the future. He was perhaps the first celebrity economist ever. His opinions were published in national papers, his advice read by millions, and even Congressman and Presidents consulted with him.
For a while, that confidence seemed justified. Throughout the roaring 1920’s, as the stock market soared higher and higher, Fisher made more and more money. He invested heavily in stocks, borrowed money to buy even more stocks, and publicly reassured people that the market was healthy and stable. Just days before the catastrophic Wall Street crash of 1929, Fisher made one of the most famous financial predictions in history. He announced that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau.”
Then the market promptly collapsed. Over the next few years, the stock market lost nearly 90% of its value. Fortunes vanished overnight. Banks collapsed. Businesses folded. The Great Depression swallowed the world economy whole.
But what makes Fisher’s story fascinating is not that he was wrong. Everyone is wrong sometimes. The truly fascinating part is what he did after he was wrong. He doubled down.
Fisher continued to invest in the same stocks that lost him so much money. He even borrowed more to facilitate these investments. For example, he had invested heavily in a company called Remington Rand. Before the crash, the stock traded at $58 a share. After the crash it plunged to $28 a share. Many people would have stepped back at that point and said, “Maybe I misunderstood something. Maybe I need to rethink my strategy.” But not Irving Fisher. He borrowed more money and bought more shares at $28.
Then the stock kept falling. A few years later, it was trading at just $1 a share. He lost virtually everything. And somehow kept losing. By the time he died in 1947, he was alone, penniless, supported by rich relatives, and entirely convinced that he was still right.
The tragedy of Irving Fisher is not that he made a mistake. The tragedy is that he could not stop making the same mistake. He was too emotionally attached to his own worldview, too invested in being right, too convinced that his original assumptions had to be correct. Reality itself could not convince him to change course. Every loss simply caused him to double down harder.
What makes the story even more striking is that another great economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, also lost a fortune in the crash. Keynes was also brilliant, arrogant, confident, and convinced he understood the economy better than everyone else. But there was one crucial difference between the two men, Keynes learned from his mistake.
Before the crash, Keynes had tried to predict the ups and downs of the overall economy. But after watching his predictions fail disastrously, he changed his strategy entirely. Instead of trying to forecast the entire economy, he began investing in individual companies with strong management and long-term potential. He adapted. He reassessed. He admitted, at least internally, that reality had taught him something important.
By the end of his life, Keynes had rebuilt his fortune and become enormously wealthy once again. His economic theories, known as Keynesian economics, became the backbone of the field of economics across the globe for decades.
Two brilliant men. Two devastating failures. Two entirely different responses. One said, “I must be missing something.” The other said, “No, I’ll just keep doing the same thing harder.” And if we are honest with ourselves, most of us are much closer to living the Irving Fisher model than we would like to admit.
One of the strangest things about human beings is that we often continue behaviors that are making us miserable, while somehow expecting them to eventually make us happy. We know the behavior is not working. We know it leaves us emptier, more anxious, more disconnected, more frustrated. Yet we return to it over and over and over again.
A person has a temper, and sees it damaging his marriage, distancing his children, and making everyone around him uncomfortable, but instead of stepping back and saying, “Maybe anger isn’t working,” he simply becomes more convinced that everyone around him just doesn’t “get it,” and would be much better off if they followed his demands.
People spend hours every day scrolling endlessly through social media, news feeds, videos, gossip, and outrage. They feel exhausted, distracted, jealous, anxious, and spiritually numb. Yet the next morning, before even getting out of bed, their hand reaches for the phone again.
People keep chasing money, status, validation, pleasure, attention, or comfort, believing that this next achievement, purchase, vacation, promotion, or indulgence will finally make them feel fulfilled. Yet each time the excitement fades faster than the time before, and they are left with the same emptiness they had before they got it.
And what do most people do? Double down. We may laugh at Irving Fisher buying more shares on the way down from $58 to $28 to $1, but spiritually and emotionally many of us do the exact same thing every day.
The Torah has a name for this force inside of us: the Yetzer Hara, the evil inclination, the voice that beckons us to continue destructive patterns simply because they are familiar, addictive, comfortable, or emotionally validating. It whispers to us, “Keep going. Double down. The answer is just one more step in the same direction. Don’t look. Don’t question. Don’t change.”
When our forefather Jacob wrestles with the angel that we are told represents the Yetzer Hara, he finally beats him, and asks him his name. In Judaism, a name represents essence, so Jacob is asking a really important question, what is your essence? And the angel answers, )Genesis 32:20), “Why do you ask my name?”
The simple explanation is that the angel avoids answering. But it can also be understood as the angel saying, my essence is “Why do you ask?” I am the force that convinces you not to ask questions. I don’t want you to think about how your life is not working out and what you can do to make it better. I want you to “just do it.” Just plow forward with all your mistakes, don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, and definitely don’t ask questions about how you can do better.
The Yetzer Hara’s recommendations are always irrational. The evidence is against him; every time we follow him we fall and fail and feel pathetic. So it doesn’t want us to ask questions. It simply wants momentum. Habit. Compulsion. Ego. Appetite.
The Talmud tells us (Kiddushin 30B) that Hashem tell us, “My children, I created the Yetzer Hara, and I created the Torah as its medicine. If you are engaged in the Torah, you will not be given over to his hands… And if you don’t engage in Torah, you are given over to his hands.”
The Torah is not simply a book of history, rituals, and information. It is the tool that allows a human being to step outside the insanity of repetition and ask, “What am I doing? Why do I keep going back to the same thing that keeps hurting me?”
The Yetzer Hara says, “You’re fine. Keep going.” The Torah says, (Ethics of Our Fathers, 2:1) “Calculate the loss of a Mitzvah against the reward, and the gain [that you think may be obtained through the committing] of a transgression against the loss entailed by it.”
The Yetzer Hara says, “Your next indulgence will satisfy you.” The Torah says, (Koheles Rabba 1:13) “no man dies with half of his desires attained.”
The Yetzer Hara says, “You can’t change.” The Torah says, you were created to change. (Deut. 30:19) “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—so that you and your offspring will live.”
The Torah has yet another benefit. Hashem tells us that by simply engaging with the Torah, (Into to Medrash on Lamentations) “the light inside of it will bring them back to the good.” Beyond the practical advice of the Torah, is the Godly light inside of it. When we ingest it, we become more Godly! More loving, more happy, more giving, more sacred, more grateful, more divine.
Torah learning is not intellectual study, it is recalibration. The Torah forces us to confront uncomfortable realities about ourselves. Without even saying the words, it asks the hard questions.
Why am I still speaking that way?
Why am I still chasing things that have never made me happy?
Why am I still feeding habits that are draining the life out of me?
Why am I doubling down on emotional stocks that have already crashed?
Next week is Shavuos, the Festival of the Giving of the Torah. It is not merely the anniversary of receiving a holy book. It is when we recieved the GPS coordinates for the exit ramp from the parking lot of misery to the open road of joy, accomplishment, and greatness. And every year, Hashem stands by on Shavuos, hoping to give it to us again.
The greatest asset you have is yourself. The greatest gift you can give someone is truly giving yourself to them. That’s what Hashem did when He gave us the Torah. As the Talmud tells us, Anochi, the first word G-d said to us at Sinai, is an acronym for “I wrote down my soul and gave it to you.”
This gift of Himself that Hashem gave us within the Torah gives us the ability to change course. It is the medicine to the Yetzer Hara. An animal runs on instinct. A human being can stop, reflect, reassess, and transform.
As we prepare for Shavuos, we can ask ourselves one simple but slightly uncomfortable question:
“Where in my life do I keep doubling down on the same mistake?” And as soon as we identify it (and I’m pretty confident most people know the answer already!), we can move to an even more important question: “How can I use Torah to finally break that cycle?”
I don’t know the specifics of the answer for you, but I know one thing. Like any medicine, we simply need to start taking it, and then keep taking it for as long as it says on the instruction label.
Have a Beautiful and Transformative Shavuos!
Pasha Dvar Torah
This week’s parsha, Bamidbar, talks about the different censuses that took place in the second year of the Jew’s sojourn in the wilderness. There are two separate censi (that is the incorrect term as censuses is correct, but it is a Latin word, so I like to pluralize it the way we pluralize other Latin words, namely with a suffix of i) that are talked about in our parsha. The first one counted the entire Jewish people except for the tribe of Levi, and the second one counted the tribe of Levi. Before describing the census of the Levites, the Torah discusses their genealogy briefly:
“These are the descendants of Aharon and Moshe, on the day that G-d spoke to Moshe” (Numbers 3:1)
Rashi points out a refreshing idea: [Scripture] mentions only the sons of Aharon, yet they are called the descendants of Moshe —because he taught them Torah. This teaches us that one who teaches another’s son Torah is considered as if he fathered him. (Rashi, on loc.)
Rashi points out that this fits with the end of the verse; “On the day that G-d spoke to Moshe”- They became his descendants, since he taught them what he had learned from the mouth of the Almighty.
The idea is beautiful, but the only problem is that the Torah seems to be calling them the sons of Aharon on the day that Moshe heard the commandments from G-d, not the day that he taught the commandments to Aharon and his sons. According to what we’re saying, the Torah should have said “These are the descendants of Aharon and Moshe, on the day that Moshe spoke the word of G-d to them.”
The Nachal Eliyahu learns from this that the job of a teacher, mentor, or leader does not begin when they start teaching, but rather when they learn the material themselves. A person who is going to teach something to others needs to learn it in a far more comprehensive way because the people he teaches are different than him and may look at an issue in a different manner.
Therefore, even while Moshe was learning the Torah from Ha-shem, it was as if his teaching job had started, and that’s why the Torah begins referring to Moshe as the father of his students on the day that G-d spoke to him.
(I know this is an oft-repeated concept of mine, but I believe it is fundamental, so it bears discussion from many angles.) We are all teachers and leaders. Whether it be our children we lead, our neighborhood, actual students, or even friends that look to us as a role model, we all teach. In that vein, it is important for us to learn things in a way that they will translate fluidly into lessons for others. Then we can start our teaching even while we’re learning, our leading even while we’re following!
Parsha Summary
The first Parsha in the fourth book of the Bible, called “Numbers,” starts off by earning the book its title with a counting of the Jewish people tribe by tribe. Rashi explains that since the Jewish people are so precious to G-d, He constantly counts us, just as one would count his treasures numerous times (remember that nursery rhyme, “the king was in his counting house, counting all his money…”).
Nachmanides gives three reasons for the counting, including the idea that this was a way for each and every Jew to get personal attention from Moshe and Aaron, and to be counted as a unique individual amongst the larger Jewish nation. The sum total was 603,550 males of age for army service , which was twenty to sixty years old (not bad for a people that had only 70 people descend into Egypt a mere 210 years earlier!). This did not include the tribe of Levi, whom G-d would later command Moshe to count separately. One of the reasons the Levites were counted separately is because they didn’t serve in the army, as they were serving in the Temple. Additionally, there would later be a decree that the people from the general census would die during the forty years of wandering in the desert because of a major sin they had committed. G-d didn’t want the Levites to be part of this census, because they were the only entire tribe that remained faithful to G-d during the sin of the Golden Calf.
The next part of the Parsha deals with the layout of the camp in which the Jews traveled in the desert. Basically, it was as follows. The Tabernacle was in the innermost camp, surrounded on three sides by the Levites and on the fourth by the Kohanim, or priests. Surrounding them were four sets of three tribes spreading out to the East, South, West, and North (an easy way to remember that is Eat Soggy Wheaties Never). Each set of three had a special banner, and the layout paralleled the layout Jacob commanded his children to use when carrying his bier to Israel from Egypt. It also imitated the manner in which four sets of heavenly angels surround G-d’s throne. (I’ve been trying to get my kids to sit in such an orderly form around our dinner table, but no luck so far!)
The Torah then enumerates the progeny of Aaron, but calls them the offspring of Moshe and Aaron. Being that Moshe was the leader who taught them Torah, he had a spiritual paternal role. It is fascinating to see how the greater a leader becomes in the Torah world, the more obvious it becomes that he feels as if each and every Jew is his own child.
The Torah continues with G-d telling Moses that the tribe of Levi will forever serve in the Temple, instead of the firstborns who were originally supposed to serve. This was due to each group’s respective role in the Golden Calf crisis of 1312 BCE (the Levites abstained and objected: the firstborns were among the participants). Following this announcement, G-d tells Moshe to make a separate census of the tribe of Levi. After the census is a special ceremony in which the Levites redeem the firstborns and the sacred responsibility of service passes from one group to the other.
The last part of the Parsha deals with a topic that will be continued next week, the transport of the Tabernacle. The tribe of Levi was split into four groups. The progeny of Aaron became the Kohanim, the priests, and their role was to perform all the primary services in the Temple, such as bringing the offerings, lighting the Menorah and burning the incense. The other three groups, the families of Gershon, Kehas, and Mirari were the Levites, and they provided the ancillary services, such as opening and closing the gates, transporting the Tabernacle and its vessels, and singing during the offering of the sacrifices. (I am a Levite, and definitely inherited my Levite vocal cords, so you can all feel free to stop by my office to hear a rendition of Hava Nagila in its full chazzanish glory or in the full glory of chazzanut.)
When the Tabernacle had to move from place to place (it moved over 30 times during the 40 years in the desert, and this was before the times of the double-wide trailers) it was the job of the Levites to transports it. Here the Torah tells us the breakdown of the different families’ responsibilities. The family of Kehas merited to move the most holy vessels, such as the Menorah, Holy Table, and the Holy Ark. Since these vessels were so holy, they had to wait for the Kohanim to wrap them in special moving cloths (there was no Tumi® luggage in those days), before they could transport them.
Let’s end with one last lesson from the carrying of the vessels. The Sages tell us that the Holy Ark, which contained the Tablets and the Torah, actually lifted itself into the air and carried the Levites who were assigned to carry it! If that was the case, why does the Torah tell us to appoint Levites to “carry” it: why don’t we just let it fly by itself? This is meant to be a lesson for us. When we support a Torah lifestyle or Torah institutions, we need to remember that although on the outside it appears as though we are carrying the Torah, in truth, we are the ones being elevated, uplifted, and supported by it!
Quote of the week: A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. – Samuel Fremont
Random Fact of the Week: 70,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S!
Funny Line of the Week: I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.
Have a Remarkable Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham
[1] Authors Note: In this piece, I tell the story of two famous economists, and their divergent trajectories. Both were incredibly famous and influential at times. But both of them were bad people. One was a leader in the eugenics movement, and the other a degenerate of the lowest order. So while we can learn from one detail of their lives, neither should be viewed with favor.
Source URL: https://partnersjewishlife.org/the-celebrity-economist-who-forgot-to-take-his-medicine/
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