To succeed in life, many people believe they need luck.
Rabbi Scolnic of Temple Beth Shalom in Hamden, Conn., plays the lottery once in a while, though he believes those who play have only a slightly better chance of winning than those who don’t.
“But when I look at my ticket, and I see that I don’t have a single number right … I feel like a schlemiel,” he said.
Schlemiel is a Yiddish word for a habitual “bungler,” someone who makes mistakes because of incompetence.
According to Rabbi Scolnic, there are two kinds of schlemiels – born and self-made.
“Are we born losers? Are we people who just have bad luck in everything we do? Or are we people who do it to ourselves? Are we people who make our own bad luck?” Scolnic asks.
He believes the answer is both.
Sometimes life tricks us, and sometimes we trick ourselves. Sometimes life upsets our apple cart while we aren’t looking. Sometimes we upset our own apple cart for no good reason.
As we grow old, nature plays a cruel trick and weakens our ability to see and hear. But if we lose our inner vision, our sense of direction, our goals in life, that is our fault.
We act like schlemiels when we are so busy working that we forget why we are working. We act like schlemiels when we think everything in life is a matter of luck … and don’t realize we help make our own luck.
For what is luck?
Luck is happening to have a cake in the freezer when company comes … because we were wise enough to put it there – just in case. Luck is being ready when the chance presents itself because we are prepared. Many have said it, but Arnold Palmer is attributed with the famous quote, “It’s a funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get.”
Creating luck is learning from our failures, profiting from our mistakes and bouncing back from our defeats. Luck is not avoiding every defeat … nobody is that lucky. Luck is recovering from our defeats and starting over again. Luck is having a failure instead of being a failure.
Rabbi Scolnic tells the old story about a religious man who wants to win the lottery. He prays to God – all day, every day. Finally he hears a voice from Heaven that says, “I am trying to help you win the lottery. But you have to help me. You have to buy a ticket.”
It sounds a bit silly when you first hear the story, but not when you think about it. We have to buy a ticket in the great adventures of this world instead of complaining about our bad luck.
