At the H3 Business Halacha Summit, the world of business meets enduring inspiration

Photos: Agudath Israel of Illinois, Langsam Photography

They joined the world of business and finance while remaining dedicated to halachic and spiritual principles without compromise. They’ve all learned in yeshivos, yet today’s complex business world raises issues that are often uncharted waters for a nation historically more used to poverty than wealth. Is there a guidebook for this new generation of business people who are dedicated to raising the bar in halachic compliance?

Like so many other corporate events, the recent H3 Business Halacha Summit offered relevant speeches, industry-specific exhibits and a gala dinner attracting hundreds of businesspeople seeking both the content and connections often made at such conferences. Yet the similarities ended there. The participants who’d converged on the luxury Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel outside Chicago weren’t concerned about bottom lines. Their aspirations were instead geared upward — it was the top line they were looking to expand, hoping to up it several notches, as rabbanim and poskim gave words of encouragement and fielded questions, and successful businessmen gave advice not just how to maximize profits, but how to share them as well.

The annual summit began in 2018, when Agudath Israel of Illinois planned a small, rather tepid business halachah conference as an ancillary event to the biennial Agudah Midwest Convention, in order to focus on improving halachic standards in business. The feedback, though, was overwhelming, as companies across various industries implemented changes to their operations to ensure halachic fidelity. Today, it’s taken on new dimensions. Because it has also become a guidebook for a new generation of frum people blessed with wealth who have been thrust into a world of new rules and opportunities. How to inhabit the role of a Torah-oriented balabos, in addition to writing out checks for worthy causes?

“Reb Bentzion Fishoff escaped Europe and came to America where he built up an import/export business, and eventually became the chairman of Metropolitan Bank, serving as a successful banker into his nineties,” popular author and lecturer Yisroel Besser told the 700-strong crowd at what was in fact the third such summit this year, coming on the heels of similar events in Mexico City and Toronto.

“Reb Benzion once related to me how the first generation of survivors were just trying to stay alive, rebuild, and find the emotional bandwidth and headspace to recreate after the destruction. Then, in the 1960s, people started to save a little, then invested, and slowly Yidden started to make money. One of the things Reb Benny did was to bring others into his deals. I asked him why he did that — isn’t the nature of business to try to keep success private and within the club? He didn’t deny the question, but shared something profound: First of all, he said that people who live Torah have to have an ayin tovah, so if one can’t want another Yid to have success, there’s something wrong. But then he told me something else — that the more Yidden you bring in, the more zechusim you have, and maybe it will be in that zechus that a deal that would have otherwise done poorly will do well. You can go to any business seminar and hear some entrepreneur, motivational speaker or former athlete — but they’ll never tell you this, because we speak a different language.”