I Believe in Luck

Rich Moche, Prozdor Faculty

I believe in luck. My father taught me.

My father was an immigrant - a Jew born in Baghdad, he made his way as a young man through Southeast Asia and arrived in the United States at the age of 28. To survive, he had bought and sold anything and everything along the way. In America he continued the trader's life, selling garments, sewing machines, and then finally precious stones in New York's diamond district. I remember asking my father his profession, in order to complete a college application. It was 1974, and by this time he had been living in the United States for 25 years. "I am a merchant," he said.

The core of my father's world-view was the importance of luck. His years of wandering and struggle had made him wise. His favorite saying, always delivered in the same formulation, was, "Richie, listen to me. Life is more luck than brains." In my adolescent arrogance I heard an old greenhorn delivering another lecture. I presumed that an immigrant speaking with a heavy accent (albeit in his third language) knew less than me. I was too young to appreciate the meaning of his words and the importance of luck.

I believed that I made my own destiny.

My father's relationship with luck was not simple. He loved to gamble and I know he had many corollaries of his belief about luck. You have to play the cards you've been dealt, you can bluff, you can fold, you can learn from the other players, you can enjoy the camaraderie of the game and not care so much about a few dollars won or lost. He was not a fatalist. He worked hard. And he was a deeply religious man who was not above bribing the dealer by doing great acts of kindness and generosity. But he knew what he was up against.

When did I finally get his message? Maybe before he died, too young, at 73. I was 36 and people within my cohort had just started to die random and premature deaths, bear children with disabilities, or get stupendously rich by chance. As the years pass, I've come to appreciate more fully the importance of luck. Perhaps when you have been lucky (as I feel I have) you need to deny the need for luck. Luck is painful and scary because it is distributed regardless of merit. So you indulge the childish hope that if you close your eyes to misfortune it will not find you. But the suffering around you forces you to confront the brutal truth that bad things do indeed
happen to good people, for no apparent reason. And this has led me to what my father must have been trying to teach me - to have sympathy for the less fortunate and humility in the face of good fortune.

Thanks Dad. Now I get it.