Sometimes, a book that is exactly what is needed right now appears. “I’m Not the Boss, I Just Work Here” is one of those books, providing much-needed relief to those suffering from depression and threatened with financial ruin due to COVID-19. But even for those who are not coping with those issues, the book provides precious takeaways.
It is all the more intriguing because “I’m Not the Boss, I Just Work Here” (Toby Press) is actually an updated and republished version of a book that Howard Jonas, founder and chairman of IDT and Genie Energy Ltd., wrote 17 years ago. Apparently, some truths are universal and eternal.
“I’m Not the Boss, I Just Work Here” is only 102 pages — perfect for a cold or snowy Shabbat — but in that short space it packs vital business and entrepreneurial tips from an uber-successful businessman, coupled with takeaways from his personal struggle with depression and how he overcame it. Perhaps the book’s short length is part of Jonas’s message: you can convey the most important truths succinctly, just like the concept of “the elevator pitch” as start-up culture seeks to do.
Jonas opens the book by telling us that even though he is an Orthodox Jew, “I am not an expert on God… I am an expert on depression.” His house burned down, at one point his wife almost left him and he nearly went bankrupt several times. In the preface to the new edition, Jonas writes, “I lost hundreds of millions of dollars drilling for oil that wasn’t there and promoting technologies no one wanted to buy… [but] there is no mental, spiritual, or emotional depth from which you cannot rise… God is always there to help.”
Jonas dedicates part of his book to explaining his journey to God and this mindset. He lived through tumultuous times. After the Kennedy assassination, Jonas heard his mother cry, “Why is it always the good ones who get it? They killed him.” Jonas felt, “I needed an answer…But I had no answer.” The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Vietnam, and the Black Panthers prompted people to look for answers everywhere — “San Francisco, India, Tibet. Pot, acid, LSD.” “Me,” Jonas adds, “I wasn’t much for travel or drugs… So I started to read.”
He read Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith. Then, one day, Jonas picked up a Bible. “I was amazed. There it all was — the libertarian ideal.” For example, Jonas cites Abraham’s buying of the Cave of Machpelah as a burial place for his wife, Sarah, which would belong to his family eternally, as an example of property rights. “[And] just because you’re rich or in the government doesn’t mean that you have the right to step on anyone else…The courts are expressly forbidden to give any special treatment to the rich… But it was the Bible’s exceptions to libertarian principle that struck me even more forcefully,” he writes.
Jonas’s perspective really changed at the age of 17, when he read about the halachic concept of yovel (the Jubilee year), during which all farmland reverts to its original owner. As he thought more about it, Jonas realized that only God could have come up with such a system because it was “a perfect compromise between pure laissez-faire economics and wealth redistribution strategies, which just lead to a welfare-state cycle of dependence.” Because humans are self-interested, Jonas reasons, God is the only one who could have created such a concept. “The Bible really was God’s revealed Law. It was the source of all morality in the world.”
Jonas continued to ponder good, evil, controlling and non-controlling societies and personal responsibility — and he does so in his book with a deep empathy and a sardonic wit. Jonas believes, unequivocally, that God’s central value is liberty; he wants people to make their own choices.
Jonas asks, since God knows everything, what is the point of giving us challenges? Part of his answer is that “people who’ve lived through adversity and confronted challenges are deeper people than those who haven’t… The real idea is to challenge oneself every day… by attempting to climb new mountains. Someone who lives this way, when challenges are thrust upon him, will be well prepared.” He urges the reader to respond to tragedy not with hopelessness, but with love.
Jonas describes three classes of people in the world: shirkers who try to mooch off the efforts of others, regular people who do what is necessary but no more and those who “go all out to try to accomplish the most they can with whatever God gave them.” They may be CEOs, top athletes or janitors.
The value of being the third type of person was instilled in Jonas at a young age. In his book, Jonas relates that his father told him a story — “I have no idea where he heard it” — about how Joseph, when he was a lowly slave, kept sweeping when others had stopped, and that was why Potiphar noticed him, leading eventually “to Joseph becoming Viceroy of all Egypt and the savior of his people. Why? Because he kept on sweeping,” Jonas writes.
The legendary storyteller and author, Professor Penninah Schram, said in a workshop in an ATARA conference I attended in New York in 2009 that we should think about the first story we remember being told. “That story,” she said, “is the story that informed your life.”
It may not have been the first story that Jonas was told, but, he writes, “This story had a dramatic effect on my life.” Although neither I, nor my scholar husband, nor several Tanach scholars who are my colleagues could locate the story in traditional sources, that was irrelevant because its message was clear: Joseph worked hard, in difficult circumstances, and was ultimately successful.
Jonas clearly carries the values from that story to his work and his views on failure. “I’ve never insisted on hiring the guys from the best schools or with the fanciest resumes,” he writes. “I’ve always wanted the people with a fire burning in them…The charities that have the most appeal for me are those that give people the chance to elevate themselves.” Cooking schools, he says, are better than soup kitchens.
To that end, Jonas tries to hire only two kinds of people: those who are obsessed and intensive about what they do, and those who have had profound “failures, screw-ups on an astonishingly grand level.” Jonas adds, “It is how we deal with the aftermath of failure and hardship that truly defines us.”
“It is how we deal with the aftermath of failure and hardship that truly defines us.”
For Jonas, this conviction in recovering from hardship is personal. Jonas’s depression started in 1992. He infers that it may be linked to the time that he transformed his business life from a small family-type operation to a large telecommunications business, with new hires every week, new equipment, an expanded budget, a slew of press and a move fifteen miles away to New Jersey. Then his father was diagnosed with cancer.
Jonas began spiralling downward, going to a psychiatrist, taking (the wrong) drugs and contemplating suicide. He changed doctors and medication, and things improved a bit. But the real breakthrough came when he was in Israel, traveling near the Dead Sea. But no spoilers on that — to learn about his remarkable recovery, you’ll have to read the book.
He went on to have four more children with his wife, Debbie (they have nine altogether), to whom he attributes much of his ability to have come back from the depths. He continues to try to improve the world; in addition to his other business projects and his extensive philanthropy, the company he is chairman and CEO of, Rafael Holdings, is in Phase 3 FDA trials of an anti-cancer drug.
Would he prefer to turn the clock back and not have experienced failures and depression, and live a “plain, happy life?” Yes, he writes, “But this wasn’t my choice.” To Jonas, “Our job in life is to continuously undertake challenges and confront evil, so that we will grow as people, and so that we can help move the world closer to the goodness, and further from the evil, that God gave us the freedom to create.”
Jonas clearly hopes to pass his wisdom on to the next generation. One of the most touching chapters is about his grandmother, from whom he learned deep, formative lessons in life. In addition to passing on our values and experiences to the next generation, Jonas writes, “Remember that God wants us to be happy and enjoy life.”
You will want to read and reread this book, small in size but vast in wisdom. Keep it by your bedside or recliner. And, like your values, you will want to pass it on, along with your own stories, to your next generation.
“I’m Not the Boss, I Just Work Here,” Howard Jonas. The Toby Press, $16.95 (102p) ISBN: 9781592645565
The author lives in Israel. She is an award-winning journalist, theatre director and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com.
Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the 
