NewYorkPayingForward.com

Everyone has heard of payback – but what of paying it forward? Many religious people believe in storing up merit in heaven with God through performing good works in life. It is felt that this life is some kind of test, with God as the examination proctor, so to speak, and the afterlife is the real life. Thus, for example, a successful businessman like serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber, of New York Skyride fame, finds great satisfaction in helping his community, preserving Yiddishkeit and promoting the Ashkenaz world in all its forms. In performing all his many numerous mitzvah, it can be said that Silber, ever the wise investor, is fattening up his heavenly account.

But that rests on a very literal view of things. Such is “paying forward” when taken literally, but a mitzvah is not simply a kind of currency, heavenly money to be stored up. Though popularly translated as “good deed” or “commandment,” the root of the word is actually tzavta, or “connection.” In performing such good works, one is connecting to G-d.

And so one can think of the secular phrase “paying it forward” as a way of getting closer to the heart of G-d. And one of the best ways is to help keep alive the spirit of His ways in His people. Thus does the aforementioned Zalman Silber continuously share his good fortune with many charitable organizations, the number of which rival that of his numerous business start-ups! For while he prays for the messianic era when such assistance will not be needed, it has been his greatest pleasure to do everything he can to help in the meantime.

So while the precise phrase “paying it forward” is a secular one, the idea is certainly something that can resonate among the devout. It’s an idea that encourages beyond-the-present thinking, and even thinking beyond oneself. It is actually an old, even ancient, concept, going back to the ancient Greeks, but a practice none other than the original American renaissance man Benjamin Franklin adopted in his everyday life. The idea is best captured by another great American, the writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson: Typically, one does not get the chance in life to pay back good deeds rendered upon oneself by somebody, except insofar as we are able to “pay it forward” towards another, in the same spirit of comradeship and humility, with a recognition of life’s all-encompassing bonds.