Life, liberty, and the pursuit of livelihood
The pursuit of livelihood is arguably one of the greatest motivating forces in life. People invest years of training, relocate across the world, develop unlikely relationships, and may even neglect loved ones in their quest for employment.
As believing Jews, we have another extremely potent tool in our parnassah-earning arsenal: bircas hashanim. This brachah speaks in the language of agriculture, alluding to fertile soil, crop yields, and precipitation. For the agrarian society of yore, this was the expression of livelihood, a season’s harvest was the equivalent of a few months’ salary. Therefore, the Yaaros Devash teaches, this is the place to daven for parnassah.
According to the gemara (Megillah 17b), this brachah is a request to Hashem that the “mafkiyei shearim” (price gougers) not succeed in artificially raising the prices of wheat, thus rendering it unaffordable. The intention in this brachah is that Hashem provide such abundance that price gouging be rendered ineffective.
Rav Chaim Friedlander (Sifsei Chaim) notes that today we see another method for “mafkiyei shearim” — to inflate the price of fruit and vegetables, the surplus is simply thrown in the sea or buried underground and left to rot.
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