Amazing Teshuva Story that can change your life. (16 minutes)

1:27The young millionaire starts encountering problems. All of a sudden, everything that he used to touch would turn to gold. Now everything that he touches turns into ashes. All the deals that seemed like they were the best deals in the world start going bad. Problems arise. He's still not listening. He's still not changing. More problems occur. More money is lost. Friends turn into enemies. He's still not listening. He's still not looking up. Which reminds me of a story, a famous story that happened about 20 years ago or so in Tel Aviv. There was a guy who made about $3 million, which at that time in Israel was considered a lot of money. And he wasn't religious. He wanted to invest this money. You know, when you have money, you need to make the money work for you so it generates more money. Just as the Gemara says, you give someone 100, he wants 200. You give him 200, he wants 400. It never ends. This means that the desire of the rich is much higher than the desire of the poor. The poor, or the middle-class guy, who makes 50,000 to 60,000 dollars a year, mainly desires to maintain what he has, around 50,000 to 60,000. However, the person with 10 million...

2:51him it's not going to be enough until he gets another 10 million, which means that technically, it doesn't make sense, but in a real way, he actually feels poorer than the guy that has 50,000 because he needs more. So the guy is looking for an investment of three million dollars, and he goes into this real estate office. They tell him, "We're building these two big towers." And if you want, with $3 million, you can buy the 17th floor. He looks at the project and says, "Nah, not for me. I need something else, more interesting." He calls around, and one day he gets in touch with an old friend of his from school, who lives in Romania, and tells him, "Listen, I, uh," I have a proposition for you. If you have money, I have an opportunity for you. What do I have? A large piece of land in Romania, valued at approximately $3 million. And I assure you, the government is poised to purchase it. I have a strong intuition that the government is inclined to buy it. They're going to offer you a substantial amount of money for it. Why wouldn't the owner sell it? Why? Because he has it. So, why wouldn't he sell it to the government himself? No, he is not the owner; he's merely a broker, meaning he facilitates the transaction between the seller and the buyer.

4:13So the guy agrees, he buys, he invests all of his liquid money into this land, and he's expecting that the government is going to buy the land from him any day now. One month passes, two months pass, three months, four months, five months, a year, a year and a half; nothing happens. Now, he doesn't have a business running anymore like he used to. He sold everything, which means the money is not coming in anymore. But the bills are still just as high. He starts borrowing money from people, saying, "Listen, I'm eventually going to sell this land, and I'm going to pay you back." But more time passes, and he hasn't sold the land, and the broker is not answering the phone anymore. This is a problem. He gets a letter in the mail from the IRS in Israel, which says, "We've double-checked your taxes and confirmed that you owe $17,000." And Israel is different than America. In America, if you don't pay your taxes, they just send you more letters. And you don't pay your taxes, and they send you more letters. And, you know, eventually, if you continue to ignore them, you can get in trouble. But it takes a while. And even after you get in trouble, you get a lawyer. If you have enough money, you get away with it. The IRS in America is strong, but, you know, if you're smart, you don't mess with them. But nonetheless, they're civil.

5:39In Israel, it's very different. In Israel, if you owe money to the government, they come to your house and they take your stuff. They come to your house and they start taking your television, your carpet, and your furniture. This happens every day. They just come and take your things. If you don't pay your water bill, they'll confiscate items equivalent to the cost of the water bill. Doesn't matter that they evaluate themselves. So the water bill may be, let's say, $500. They're going to take $5,000 worth of stuff because they say, no, no, maybe you overpaid. It's $500; you start taking your stuff. Unless you go out with the money, you're not getting your stuff back. It's a very different type of IRS over there. So when this guy got the letter for $17,000, he got pretty scared. So, what do you do when you're scared and you need money? You go to borrow money. But none of the people that he knows are going to lend him any more money because he already borrowed from them, and he can't pay them back. He wasn't getting rent from the property? No, it was just land. Oh, just land. It was just land that he was going to sell to the government, and eventually, they're going to build on it. And the broker now is not even answering the calls. So...

6:57He finds out from someone he knows that there's a company in Tel Aviv that lends something called hard money. Hard money is like money with high interest. Where is it? It's in a building on the 17th floor. It's exactly the place that he was supposed to buy a couple of years ago with the $3 million. So he goes to the 17th floor and he's looking around. He's like, I should have owned all of this. All of these people should be paying me rent. He goes there. He borrows $25,000. He leaves the office. But he looks around and he's very upset. He says, instead of owning this entire floor and getting rent from all these nice companies, I own this wasteland that's not paying me anything. I lost all my money. So he says, you know what, at least while I'm here, let me look around the building. Let's go on the roof. Because the 17th floor is the top floor, one of the highest floors. So he goes on the roof. He's looking, he's wondering what's happening, thinking about why all this happened. After he cries for a little bit, he says, okay, let's leave. But he didn't realize that the building was still not complete.

8:16So the roof door could only be opened from the inside. You couldn't open it from the outside. Now he's stuck on the roof in the middle of the summer in Tel Aviv. Not fun. So he starts screaming and yelling, but nobody can hear him. He's on the roof. So he says, you know what? I have an idea. If I take $100 out of this $25,000 and I throw it on the floor, somebody's going to pick it up. They're going to look up. So he throws $100. Somebody sees the $100, puts it in their pocket, and runs. Nobody looks up. All right, you know, $100 is not enough. Let me get a few more people. He takes $500. He's going to die here; he can't stay on the roof. It's too hot. He takes $500 and throws it. The same thing happens. One guy, two guys, three guys, four guys, that's it. They got the $500. No one looked up. He's still stuck on the roof. At that point, he got so annoyed and so...

9:18He took the entire remaining $25,000 and just threw it in the air. By the way, anger, according to the Gemara, is the equivalent of Avodah Zarah, which is idol worship. One of the reasons is because when we get angry, we completely lose our sense of reality. So what is he supposed to do? We'll see what the rest of the story is. Since it's a real story, I can tell you what happened. So now he throws the $25,000 into the air, hoping that at least someone will look up. The $25,000 lands. The $25,000 gets picked up. Not one person looks up. Everyone leaves. Now he doesn't have the money, and he also doesn't have that much more time because he's going to burn up on this roof. And he is in quite a predicament.

10:20A few more hours pass. He's crying to himself. He doesn't know what to do. And he tries to break the door. He can't. It's a metal door. He tries to break the door. This is before cell phones became very popular. When you're on that high of a floor in Tel Aviv, There's enough screaming downstairs. But even if you were downstairs screaming, they wouldn't hear you. So, of course, they can't hear you from 20 floors up. So, he's sitting over there, doesn't know what to do. And all of a sudden, he looks to the right and sees a bucket. A bucket of what's called in Hebrew, chatzatz. Chatzatz is these little rocks that he makes cement out of. He didn't see it before. Maybe I can use this. He takes one of these small little rocks and throws it down, hitting somebody on the head. The guy immediately looks up and starts yelling at him, but he can't hear him. Nonetheless, he's glad someone noticed him. He's thinking, I can't lose this opportunity; I want to make sure this guy definitely calls the cops or takes some action. So, he takes a handful of rocks and throws them at him. As expected, the rocks hit other people, and they immediately call the cops. The cops arrive and take him away.

11:47And he tells them the story. He's like, listen, this is what happened to me. And they said, your story is so strange, there's no way you could have made it up. They let you go. They even give him a ride home. And throughout the whole ride home, he's asking himself this one question: Why is it that when I threw the money on the floor, nobody looked up? But as soon as I threw the smallest, tiniest little rock, not only did they look up, but they were all startled and attuned to what was happening. yelling, screaming, and then you realize, do you have an answer? Yeah, I think, can I give an example? I think it's like, God gives you all these blessings, and you don't even realize them; you're not thinking. But then, when God does one thing and you get upset, you get so mad, and... Exactly, this is exactly what he figured out. He says, when God gave me all this money, I didn't really think, about anything about it. I thought he was supposed to give it to me. I didn't even know much about him. I didn't look up. I thought that I was making the money. But as soon as I had problems, I got mad at Hashem. As soon as bad things came, I looked up. I blamed Him. I have to change it. And he decided at that moment that he's going to do teshuvah. Now, teshuvah takes time, but the decision is one second.

13:11It takes time to learn what you need to do, how to do it, who to call, and where to go. All these things take time. And even to get to a point where you can do it requires time to build yourself up. To learn Torah takes time, but it requires work every day. However, the decision to go on the right path takes a second. At that moment, he decided to do teshuvah, and he decided that he'll find out more about what this thing called Hashem is. And as he says, the story is that when he got home, he had bad news to tell his wife. He was so upset with himself and how he used to behave, especially now that even the money he borrowed, he doesn't have. The IRS of Israel is going to come any day and take their belongings. They even took the laser, the green laser that he had. I used to be a kid too.

14:17So now, he's sitting in his office in his house, and all of a sudden, he gets a fax. This beats the story; you now realize how old the story is, as people don't really use faxes anymore. He gets a fax: "Call me right away, I have good news." Who is it from? It's from this broker who hasn't answered the phone in almost a year. He calls the broker. The broker answers the phone. The guy immediately starts yelling at him, not even letting the broker talk. Why didn't you answer the phone? Wait, so there are no phones at this time? There are home phones. Yes, there are home phones. They didn't have lasers, though. No, they didn't have lasers. So, he calls them. He yells at them for a good 20 minutes. The broker says, "Are you finished?" He goes, "Okay, now I'm finished." He goes, "Okay, the good news is the government wants to buy your land for $30 million." Wow.

15:19And this person continued with the promise that he made that very day, with complete teshuva, gave a lot of tzedakah, and spent the rest of his life learning Torah. From 3 million to 30 million? Uh-huh. When governments want something, it doesn't matter how much money they're going to pay for it because it's other people's money anyway. Governments don't actually work, they just collect or print. So, the guy realized the truth, he woke up, he got the test. The guy realized the truth, he woke up, he got the test.