Confused Before Judgement Day (Shaare Ezra - Miami)

0:13Very big gratitude to Hashem for having us here. It's the first time we're here. Thank you for having me. I heard some good things about the place. I saw a few of your videos online. A prospering religious community is hard to find these days, especially in Florida. As with every shiur, we always try to get something out of it, regardless of where the community is from, or secular, or in between. I always tell everybody in this generation, everyone has to do teshuva. Every single person has to do teshuva. Anyone who doesn't think he has to do teshuva has to do a second teshuva. One for the teshuva that he really has to do, and the second one for not thinking that he has to do teshuva. As with every shiur, we always try to get something out of it, regardless of where the community is from, or secular, or in between. I always tell everybody in this generation, everyone has to do teshuva. Every single person has to do teshuva. Anyone who doesn't think he has to do teshuva has to do a second teshuva. One for the teshuva that he really has to do, and the second one for not thinking that he has to do teshuva. If you guys have any specific issues you want to talk about, you could always interrupt me in the middle. Nothing's prepared. Everything is yet to be Yishmael. And the reason why is because usually Hashem, when something comes out of the heart, Hashem gives you what to say, specifically for the tzibur itself. Sometimes I prepare something, I actually try to get the courage to prepare something, and then as soon as I show up, I forget everything, and Hashem tells me something else to say.

1:26So the shiur tonight will also be for Ilui Nishmat Gabriela bat Agatia. May Hashem judge her favorably. She unfortunately passed away this morning. It was a very, very big surprise. Someone that we knew, a very, very good woman, a tzaddeket. Unfortunately for us, she's not going to be around. But Baruch Hashem, she's in a much better place. We're only days away or a couple of weeks away from Rosh Hashanah, and some people are preparing. Some people still don't know it's actually coming up. The reality is that the Yetzer Hara's number one tool in every generation, but it seems like he's doing really well in this generation as far as fighting us, is to confuse us. Constantly confusing us. There's not a lecture that I do that someone at either the beginning, the middle, or the end doesn't tell me he's confused or she's confused. Sometimes we're confused because of what we see, sometimes we're confused because of what we hear. I heard that Rabbi so-and-so said this, so it's the opposite of what you're saying. I saw Rabbanit so-and-so look like this, and it's the opposite of what you're saying. A lot of people are just confused and...

2:54And that's why I try to tell everyone that anytime you're ever going to make a decision, you should always have a source, a reason, a reason why you're doing anything in life. Because without a source, it's a 50-50 chance. And Baruch Hashem for Am Yisrael for having a Torah. The Torah is the instruction set. Hashem Yitbarach gave us the biggest chesed in the world by giving us the Torah, which is an instruction set for everything in life, as you all already know. It's an instruction set for living, an instruction set for being married, an instruction set for succeeding in business, an instruction set for anything and everything you want in life. Sometimes we don't like to read the instruction set. We want to use our own opinion, because we like our opinion sometimes more than Hashem's. But anytime we want it, it's always available to us. Now, in the generation that we're in today, most people don't view the Torah as an instruction set. Most people view the Torah as a history book, something that was written a long, long time ago about some guy named Moshe and his friends. They wanted to hang out in the desert. Most of the generation today grew up just like me.

4:14Thinking that, you know, we identified with Moshe through a movie called "The Ten Commandments" from about 40 years ago. And the generation today is even worse than my generation, where they discovered Noach from a movie that Russell Crowe made—a guy on a boat—and they think that's Noach. That's the generation we live in today. Very few actually have the courage to go and look for the source and... I'll give you a little bit of background on myself. I'm assuming no one knows me here. Anyone who does, try to keep it as a short story, and then we'll go into some other things. I was born in Israel, lived there until I was 10 years old, and then we moved to the United States in 1990. When we first came to the US, I only knew a few letters of the alphabet but caught on quickly, as any 10-year-old does, and... By the time I was 15, 16 years old, I had three jobs. I had two newspaper routes, worked in a clothing store, was also in a shoe store, and also played football. In so many words, I adopted the goyish life. My dream was to become an NFL player. I wanted to be like the black kids at school. That's what my role model was. I went to public school, and I wanted to be like them. They were tall, they were strong.

5:42And I had no idea that being a Jew is something special. I mean, I was Israeli, but we left that in Israel. I was a good student in school, so I went to college, but then after a year of college, I realized that I wanted to go back to making money. I went back home, and I joined a firm on Wall Street. The first three years on Wall Street, I paid my dues, meaning I worked for other people, made them rich and me nothing. after about three years of doing this, I finally became an independent broker at a firm called Raymond James and started building my book. The problem is that Wall Street is not a place for weak people. Wall Street is the epitome of the survival of the fittest. So during those first few years, the most amount of money that I made in one month was maybe around twelve to thirteen hundred dollars. And Workdays would start at around 6 a.m., finishing at around 9 p.m., sometimes longer. And again, no breaks with the exception of maybe going to the bathroom once in a while. After three years, I started building my own book at this firm. But he told me that before I went on my own, he said, "Listen, you're gonna have to pay bills. You have to pay electric, you have to pay this, you have to pay the secretary, you have to pay all these bills." And I said, "How much are all these bills?" He said, "It's gonna be between four and five thousand dollars a month."

7:07Okay, well, that's about four times what I was making for the last three years. Kind of tough, but fine, no problem. So how are you going to get the money? I have no idea. So what are your intentions here? He's been in the business for 20 years, and I'm this little 20-year-old kid with long hair. I said, "To buy you out." I was very confident, very cocky, and also very naive. Found it interesting. He said, "Okay, go ahead. Just make sure the money is on time." The first month went within actually a few days after I started, or maybe two weeks after I started. September 11th happened. The market crashed even worse than what it was before. It wasn't exactly the best time in the world to do business in the stock market, but for me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. The reason why is because I had no clients, and everyone hated their broker.

8:07I needed to do is call them and convince them that they hate their broker, which they already knew before I called them and tried to do something that no one else wanted to do, which is invest more. I encouraged people to invest more money in a down market. This is what I did. But during the first six months of the business, I was suffering, literally not making any money. The little bit of money I was making was given to the branch manager and Had to borrow a dollar from this guy, Neat and Dmitri, every day in order to get a coffee and a doughnut to survive for the day. I would sneak on a bus. This was the first six months. Days would start at around five o'clock in the morning and end around one o'clock in the morning. The one thing I knew I had more than everybody else was my work ethic. I figured they were in the business for 15-20 years; I was only in the business for a few years. I didn't have their knowledge or their skills, but I could work double. They work nine hours; I'll work 18. And that was the idea. After about six months, I made my first $1,000. That was a lot of money for me. And then the next month, $5,000. And the next month, $10,000. And the next month, another $10,000. The next month, $17,000. In November of 2002, I made $117,000 in one month. After that, life would change. Then I would start making $50,000 or $100,000 a month.

9:28By 2003, only two years after I started, I became the third largest producing broker in the entire country. Even in a bad month, I would make $150,000 to $200,000. I broke company records and decided that it was time for me to leave the company and start my own. I started my own company, hired a bunch of kids that graduated school—some from Harvard, some from Princeton, and some from wherever it was—and tried to replicate myself. Build a firm, and over the next few years, build a substantial firm where I had to train over 135 people to become good salespeople. Because that's really the job. Most people think you go to Wall Street in order to invest in the stock market. And the reality is, you go to Wall Street in order to make sales. It's the ultimate sales job. And the reason why is because on Wall Street, you sell the intangible. You sell something that doesn't actually exist. It's a real company, but you don't get anything. Even if the guy buys $100 million worth of Microsoft, he doesn't get a little box of software in the mail. He doesn't get anything. He gets a statement that says he owns $100 million worth of Microsoft. That's it. He buys it because he has a dream that one day it's going to be worth $200 million.

10:45Other businesses, you have to sell something that's tangible. A car: the guy sees the car, okay, I'll buy the car. He sees the ship, he buys the ship. He sees software, he buys software. Here, you have to sell nothing; you have to sell a dream. And if you're good, and the dream comes true, you get more. It's the ultimate sales job, and that's why most people fail, because most people need to sell something that's actually tangible. I was pretty good at it. Some of the dreams came true, and a lot of people made a lot of money. Got to a point. During bad months, I would make $200,000. On good months, I would make over a million. By 2006, I had already reached a point where money wasn't really a problem in life. I had a fancy-schmancy apartment on the 35th floor on Wall Street with a 400 square foot balcony and a 2,000 square foot apartment. All the material things that I actually wanted, I had. The only thing I didn't have was an actual purpose in life. I had a mission, but I achieved the mission. You get to that point in life where you achieve your mission, you achieve your material success, and really the only thing you can look forward to is more material success. That's life. You say, "Okay, I want to be rich." Okay, now I'm rich. Now what?

12:12Something, okay, so you bought something. I wasn't really so materialistic, so I didn't really spend my money on planes and boats and stuff like that. I found it purposeless. Most of my money would be either giving it to people in tzedakah and giving it to people as far as helping them, investing into the firm, investing into the stock market. That's pretty much it. Somebody had a problem, they would come to me. Within 30 seconds, I would just ask them, "How much does your problem cost?" Just to save the time. They would tell me how much the problem cost. I would write them the check and say, "Good luck. You don't have to tell me the rest of the story." People wondered why I was being mean. I said, "No, it's not being mean. It's that I'm making thirty-three thousand dollars an hour. So, when you make thirty-three thousand dollars an hour, if you're going to spend an hour telling me the story, I'd rather just give you the three thousand dollars and I can make more." It wasn't exactly the nicest thing in the world to do, but it got them what they wanted and... The problem is that again, you go back, you give this person, you give that person, you make this, you make that, and you still end up with nothing. You have everything and nothing at the same time. So then I decided, okay, maybe I should take care of my health. I wasn't exactly sick, but I had hemorrhoids, which two-thirds of the human population has. And I figured, you know what, maybe I should take care of this because it's annoying me twice a year.

13:38I had nothing to do with my life, so I figured, let me just go to surgery. I went to a good doctor. The doctor said, "Listen, I've been doing this for 16 years. It's a very simple surgery." All that mattered to me was, how long am I gonna be out of work? He said, "No, it's uh, you're just uncomfortable for a couple of days. You come in on Wednesday, you come back to work on Monday." I said, "Okay, this is not so bad." So I went to the surgery on a Wednesday, but I didn't go back to work on Monday. In fact, I didn't go back to work for a long time, and the reason why is because when I woke up from the surgery, my whole body changed. Something happened in the surgery that, until this day, 12 years later, no one actually knows other than Hashem, obviously. But my body changed when I woke up from the surgery. I woke up with an enormous amount of pain, and they discovered something new about my body. I reject most drugs. I never did drugs in my life because I actually like my brain and My body doesn't like it, my body doesn't like drugs, so I rejected all pain medicine, and it wouldn't work. So, after screaming and yelling for a while, they had to give me the most amount of morphine legally allowed to finally calm me down. They didn't know exactly what happened, but they knew that something wrong happened. However, they wanted me out of the hospital because, after all, it was an elective surgery. It's not a surgery you stay there for a while; you're there for a couple of hours, and you go home.

15:02So they knew that if I stayed there—they only found this out later—they would have a lawsuit on their hands. So after I calmed down, we left, bought a shawarma on the way home, and got to my apartment. I told my wife and parents who were with me, "It's been a very interesting day; now I know what Gehinnom looks like." Going to sleep. I'll see you guys tomorrow. I woke up 45 minutes later with more pain than I did a few hours earlier. Only this time, it didn't stop for 62 days. For the next 62 days, the most amount of consecutive sleep that I was able to get was 15 minutes. For anyone that's ever interested in what happens to your body after you don't sleep for a long time, you slowly start to die and... So, my body started failing. I started urinating blood, my eyes started bleeding, my ears, everything started bleeding. You know, when you say, "By the way, it says that if there's one opening that's closed or one closing that's open, you can't really survive," you know that? It actually happened. It's actually true, by the way. Verified. So,

16:27body started failing. No one knew what to do. Doctors had nothing. No one knew; people just pretty much said something went wrong. "He's slowly dying, but we have nothing to do." But after about two months of this, my body started to come back to itself. I only had to take about 25 pills a day of painkillers to survive instead of a few hundred. Little by little, I started going back to life and started going back to work. Couldn't really work much, but at least I could show my face. Business started going down, market started going down, friends started becoming enemies because when you're weak, all the vultures come. Sometimes the vultures call themselves your friends for a really long time. So, nine months after that, I feel a pain in my leg and Thought maybe I pulled the muscle, but by the next morning, I'm in the intensive care unit and they're telling me that I have an infection in between two muscles that if I had waited another one or two hours, it would have exploded, gotten into my bloodstream, and I would have died on the spot. We have to have an emergency surgery, and this one is much, much worse than the first one. This time, I actually have to be in the intensive care unit next to the people that are dying for the next couple of weeks and

17:54so a few people died next to me. We're comparing yelling and screaming. After a little while, I'm released. I go back home. Same thing. Painkillers, work. Try to crawl to work, for example, to walk from here to the end of the room, which to an average human being will take about three seconds, will take me about 15 to 20 minutes. And six months later, I have another pain in a different part of the body. I'm back in the intensive care unit and undergoing another surgery, followed by recovery in the intensive care unit, painkillers, and so on and so forth. Then, three months later, I'm back again. If you notice, the times keep getting shorter and shorter between the surgeries, eventually reaching the point where it's happening every month, and... Then eventually, it gets to a point where I have to be at a doctor or a hospital every single week, twice or three times a week. I'm in pain 24 hours a day, but it's not pain in one part of the body. The one thing that no one was able to understand is why there's recurring pain and infections everywhere in the body. It's not connected to the surgery. They can't explain it. There's no cure. There's no diagnosis. There's nothing. And since I had some money, I had some good doctors, too. I...

19:18I thought, this continues for seven years. For seven years, 24 hours a day of pain and suffering. During this time, I can't really work; the business goes to almost garbage. Whatever is left of it, a few people take. The twenty million dollars that was made was miraculous, but it was a bigger miracle losing all of it. I Everything that could go wrong went wrong. The stock market went down. The investments went down, and everything went down. Hashem natan, Hashem lakach, yehi shem Hashem mevorach. God gave, God took; may His name be blessed. But all this time, I didn't say all of these things. I wasn't exactly a smiley person. I actually got to a point where I didn't want to live. day my mom realizes that the situation is getting worse and worse, and she decides that she wanted to call some rabbis to get some blessings. So even though I wasn't religious, I would go to shul a couple of times a year. I would donate a bunch of money to all the rabbis that would come to my office all the time. But none of the people that I had in my life were actually willing to help. I

20:42In fact, the one main thing that changed everything, that I never mentioned in any of my story until today, is something I only remembered recently. You know, as a person's mind gets cleaned up, Hashem gives him back his memory, Hashem gives him back some of the things that happened that he forgot, some things that became part of his subconscious. There was a turning point before everything actually changed during the last surgery. It was very different than any of the other surgeries because every other surgery I got to a point where I knew what it was. I knew it was an abscess. I knew it was an infection of some kind. I knew they had to cut it. And I knew the recovery. I knew the whole thing already. It was enough times you get to know it. But this time it was different. This time the body itself, the skin changed. And it was in an area that you don't even want to imagine. And it was in a just... Changed the body in such a significant way. I just said to myself, this is the one I'm probably not going to make it through. And I went into the surgery saying, I'm not going to wake up. I had this feeling that this is the last time. I had this feeling that I'm not getting out of this one. Baruch Hashem, I don't think any of you have ever thought that you're not going to wake up if you go to sleep, hopefully. It's a terrible feeling.

22:09It's the first time that before they actually put the anesthesia in my system, and I went to sleep. It's the first time that I cried and started realizing this is the time I have to tell everybody goodbye. My mom gave me a Tehillim. She said, "Why don't you read this one, Tehillim number six?" I haven't read Tehillim in years. I read Tehillim. I said, "Okay, might as well. I'm gonna go meet Him, might as well talk about Him right before I go." I woke up out of the surgery Surprised that I'm actually waking up and they told me, "Sir, we have good news and we have bad news." I said, "Okay, the good news is we didn't have to do a surgery." I said, "Okay, so what's the bad news?" "We have no idea what's wrong with you. We have no idea what's wrong, we have no idea what this is, we have no idea how to cure it." It's okay, I kind of like the good news.

23:10Went home, over time it went away. But at this point, I realized that I have to do some cheshbon hanefesh. I have to do some accounting, try to figure out what's the point of my life. Why did I get a second chance? One day, my mom starts calling different rabbis all over the world, tries to get some people on the phone. After about two hours of calling and no one answering, a woman answers in Israel. My mom asked for a certain rabbi, and she says, "I'm sorry, ma'am" in Hebrew, "it's the wrong number." there's nobody here by this name. My mom starts hysterically crying because she's been calling people, you know, rabbis, for two hours, and finally she got a voice, a sign of life. And it's the wrong number in the wrong country, and my mom starts crying and the makes a miracle, and the woman on the other side of the phone happens to be a woman who identifies my mom's voice, even though they've never spoken on the phone before. The reason why is because she's her niece whom she hasn't seen in many years. She says, "Doris," which is my mom's name. My mom is in shock. She says, "Who are you? How do you know my name?" She goes, "I'm Pnina. I'm your niece, and..."

24:29How'd I get to you? I don't have your phone number. We've never spoken on the phone. I don't know. But if you got to me, then obviously Hashem wants something. She says, why are you crying? Why does everybody know? The whole family knows by now. My son is dying. I need somebody to give him a blessing. I'm looking to try to get to a big rabbi. She says, why don't you call my brother Ephraim? Aside from being a talmid chacham, he also lives a couple of doors down from Rav Ovadia. Why don't you maybe connect to the Rav? Maybe you can do something. She'll talk to me. Of course, I'll talk to you. Your daughter Doris. Your aunt Doris from America. Everybody's gonna talk to you. Why not? So she calls her brother Ephraim. He's, of course, in a kollel, but he gets back to her. Little does my mom know that at this moment, while she is trying to get me a blessing, I'm trying to contemplate how to say goodbye to her because I'm thinking of committing suicide. Once you have pain for 24 hours a day for about seven years, you start to not really want to live much. She talks to her brother Ephraim, and I didn't know that he actually existed when we left Israel. He was still a baby, younger than I am. Apparently, I got to the end of my rope. Hashem gives you a test, but only ones you can handle. I got to the ones you can handle part, and then I got to the part where I can't handle it anymore.

25:58If I'm asked, "Does your mom speak Hebrew?" she would say, "Yeah, he speaks a little Hebrew." She was like, "Can I talk to him?" I said, "No, he's not gonna talk to you. He doesn't talk to anybody anymore." And at that very moment, I called my mom, trying to think maybe I'm gonna be nice to her and say goodbye before I go to Never Neverland. But I hear my mom crying. And I ask her, "Who made you cry?" She says, "Ephraim, Ephraim, why don't you talk to him, brother Ephraim?" I'm like, "Who's this brother Ephraim? Why is he making you cry?" She goes, "No, no, he can help you. He can help you, just talk to him." I said, "Just stop crying. Tell whoever you want to call me, just stop crying." It's the worst thing in the world to hear your mom cry. So he calls me, and right away we hit it off. He tells me, he goes, "You ever heard the story of Yehuda and Tamar?" I said, "No, who's Yehuda and who's Tamar?" And he tells me the story of Yehuda and Tamar. And I found it fascinating, especially when he told me some of the Midrashim of how this is the root of Mashiach. I found it very mentally stimulating. So I started asking him questions, questions I always had. Now, the amazing thing about a chacham that knows how to deal with the tzibbur is that he makes you feel smart, even though your questions are not so smart sometimes.

27:15So I would ask him a question. He's like, "Wow, what a fantastic question. You know who asked the same question? Rabbi So-and-So, he would tell me the name of the rabbi, 852 years ago, in this book, on this page, on this line." I thought to myself, what are the chances he has the book of the question, he has the book right in front of him? I didn't know people think like this. He has the book of my question. Wow, what a miracle! He gives me the answer of this Rabbi who thought about this question 852 years ago, on this page and this number. So I found it fascinating. So I said, "Okay, well, what about this other question?" He's like, "Wow, what a fantastic question. You know, this Rabbi asked the same exact question 350 years ago, in this book, on this page." I said, "He has both books next to him?" So I just kept asking questions just to see how many books he has in front of him, because again, we don't see each other. And every book he had in front of him, and the page number, something unbelievable. I thought I was smart. I had a very high IQ. I was a hedge fund manager. All this stuff that I thought was significant. And I felt like I was this big. So now, we spoke for an hour and 40 minutes.

28:34After the call, I ran to my wife and told her, "He has the answers." She asked, "Who?" I replied, "Rav Ephraim." She asked, "Who's Rav Ephraim?" I told her, "Who's Rav Ephraim." She then asked, "What answers?" I said, "Everything. He has the answers to life." She said, "Good. Talk to him as much as possible. You've been looking for them." So, the next Thursday at four o'clock, he called me again. My wife becomes my bodyguard. No one's allowed to talk to me when Rabbi Ephraim calls. We speak for three hours. Same thing. I ask questions. He gives me answers with page numbers that make me feel good about it. The next week we talk again. We speak for five hours. The next week for seven hours. And then, every week, Thursday at four o'clock, my office shuts down. I speak to a friend for seven hours straight, asking him every single question that I could possibly imagine. Dinosaurs, aliens, questions that I didn't even know I had, questions that other people had—every question you could possibly imagine, I asked. People ask me, "How do you know so much?" I say, "I don't really know so much; I just asked a lot of questions, and they gave me answers. But for the first time in my life, he gave me answers with a source."

29:51Not his opinion. I care less about people's opinions because I like my opinion better than theirs. I want somebody else's source. Where did it come from? And he would give me the source. And little by little, I started realizing that I have to start changing my life. But for the first time in my life, I actually had a reason. I had answers. After nine months of questions and answers, I started getting to the point where I started learning myself every day. Little by little, I started growing. Little by little, I stopped caring about the market and stopped caring about business because even though the market and the business were deteriorating and my health was deteriorating with it, I stopped caring. The pain didn't go away. The money went away. The business went away. But I stopped caring because the highest high that a human being can get is the high of his neshama. when his neshama finally gets the real answers that he's been looking for his whole life, and the Yetzer Hara's number one mission in the world is to confuse you into submission, to confuse you, to stop looking for the answers.

31:10confuse you to tell you now, "There's no answers for this stuff. There's no answers for what you want. Just go do something else. Go find something else. Go study something easy. Go do something easy. Why are you asking such big questions?" People ask big questions, and as soon as they don't get an answer, and somebody tells them, "No, I don't think there's an answer to this," they just give up. But the problem is that when the question is significant and... Creates a suffix, it creates a doubt, it creates an inner doubt in the Torah world. We call doubt Amalek. That doubt, that Amalek, is what breaks us when the Yetzer Hara comes back again. When the Yetzer Hara comes back in different ways, whether it's money problems, health problems, marriage problems, kids' problems, and every other problem in between. It's not the problem that breaks us; it's the Amalek that's been there the whole time. All of a sudden, the guy says, "Yeah, but where was God during the Holocaust? Yeah, but what happened to the world before God, and what happened here? And what are all these big philosophical questions?" By the way, all of them have answers. There's not a question that matters to our life that doesn't have an answer. If you want to look for it, you'll find it.

32:38People ask, "Where was God during the Holocaust?" All they need to do is look at this week's parashat Ki Tavo. It says exactly where He was. He was the one pressing the button, saying, "Do it, do it, do it." Why? Because of what we did two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and five weeks before the Holocaust. And... But when a Jew looks for answers and he can't find them and he gives up, the Yetzer Hara has this over his head as a tool that he's going to use at some point or another. And sometimes the Yetzer Hara can wait for a person for five, ten, or twenty years with that Amalek inside him, and he never knew that's the reason. Once I started finding answers, I realized that there are a lot of people who also have the same questions. The excuse for why they're not close to Hashem is because of those answers, or rather, the lack of answers. For example, where it says that there are dinosaurs or no dinosaurs in the Torah, the average person who doesn't learn Torah every day does not know. In fact, the average person who does learn Torah doesn't know.

33:56Sometimes they don't ask it. Sometimes they ask, and the rabbi that they asked is not an expert in this particular field, so he doesn't know. So they think, "Oh, if my Rebbe doesn't know, that means that there's something wrong with the Torah." Or they think there's something wrong with this, or there's something wrong with that. By the way, it says "taninim gedolim." "Taninim gedolim" means large reptiles, giant reptiles—that actually means dinosaurs. So the Torah has every single answer; we just have to look for them. Yet, we can't assume that every rabbi is an expert in every single thing. Some rabbis are experts in halacha, some rabbis are experts in Torah and science, and some rabbis are experts in other things, like mussar, and so on and so forth. Just like there are different doctors and different lawyers, there are different rabbis. This part I didn’t know. Sometimes there are people that pretend to be a lawyer just to collect a retainer fee. Sometimes there are doctors that pretend to be doctors because the name of the building is after them, but they don't actually do any medicine. They just collect to do the administrative stuff. They graduated medical school 30 years ago, but they haven't performed surgery in maybe 15 years. They have other people do it for them, but the whole business is after their name. They pretend.

35:20that they're doctors. Unfortunately, the Gemara in Masechet Sotah, page 49b, says that before the end of times, there's going to be some fake rabbis too. They make pretend. They tell you that they're rabbis, but sometimes they're not. Before that last surgery, my mother went to one of them, because he was the one that would come to my office two to three times a week. She said, "Why don't you tell him something? Why don't you tell him to keep Shabbat? Why don't you tell him to do something, keep anything? Do you know that his wife is not Jewish? Do you know that he doesn't keep kosher? Do you know he goes out? Just why don't you tell him something?" He says, "It's not my job. It's not my job to tell him to do teshuva. It's not my job to tell him to marry a Jew. It's not my job to tell him to keep Shabbat." says, "So whose job is it?" He says, "It's not my job. His job was to collect a few thousand dollars a week for me. That was his job." The yetzer hara confuses you to think that you are a tzaddik because you give a little bit of tzedakah. Unfortunately, it's one of the biggest yetzer haras in our generation for people that are successful. You have a lot of really smart Jewish people in Am Yisrael, baruch Hashem, and...

36:47making the same mistake that I made for many, many years, thinking that just because, in your eyes, you're a decent human being—you give some money away, you do some decent things, you help people that ask for help—that makes you good. You define good. Hitler also thought he was good. You must remove your ego. He wasn't anything near good, but when you define good, that means it's subjective to you, to your own definition, and During these last few weeks, we've been saying Selichot, and during Rosh Hashanah, we recite the very famous Yerushalmi that Teshuva, Tefillah, and Tzedakah ma'avirin et roah ha'gezeirah—that doing Teshuva, Tefillah (prayer), and Tzedakah is what can help us overcome the terrible decrees of the world.

37:54Now I asked, why is it that it has this order? Why is it teshuva, tefillah, and tzedakah? Why isn't it tzedakah, tefillah, and teshuva? And one of the chiddushim that I had that explained at least my perspective of it is that if you look at Mishlei, chapter 15, verse 8. Shlomo HaMelech gives us the secret. He said, "The offering," meaning the korban of the rasha (the wicked person), "is an abomination to Hashem." But His desire is the prayer of the upright. The way of the wicked is an abomination to Hashem, but He loves the pursuer of righteousness. Stern discipline awaits one who forsakes the path, and one who hates rebuke will die. Here Shlomo HaMelech tells us something very, very interesting.

39:22All of us know that we say in Tefillat Shacharit every day that since we don't have the Beit HaMikdash anymore, a replacement for Korbanot, the offerings, is our Tefillot. So, Shlomo HaMelech says the Tefillot of the Rasha are considered disgusting in the eyes of Hashem. The Korban of the Rasha Even if his money is also considered an abomination as well. What is Hashem looking for? He's looking for somebody who likes mussar. He's looking for somebody who likes rebuke, somebody who likes to hear the truth because the truth is the only way that's going to change us. If all of us hear that we're tzaddikim, neviyim, and nevi'im, like our mothers told us our whole lives, we're never going to change and... If everyone is perfect, what's the point of Rosh Hashanah? If everyone is perfect, then what's the point of teshuva, one of the mitzvot of the Torah? And Shlomo HaMelech tells us something critical. The reason why teshuva, tefillah, and tzedakah are in that order is because without doing real teshuva, regardless of where we started and regardless of where we are today, our tefillah and tzedakah are irrelevant.

40:50Without a person doing real teshuva, trying to figure out what they have to fix, what midah, what character trait they have to fix, what mitzvah they have to work on, what limud they have to add. Without actually doing cheshbon hanefesh on a regular basis to figure out how to fix the reflection they see in the mirror. Without doing it, our tefillah on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is not going to help us. We came one way, and we go out the same way. And if anyone thinks, "No, but what if I buy a $10,000 Aliyah for this and an Aliyah for that?" Good for you, but it's not going to help anything. Why? You first have to start with teshuva. You can't buy God. There's no bribery in Shamayim. There's no bribery in Shamayim. Now, what's the problem? Why is it so difficult for us to do teshuva? The Gemara in Masechet Shabbat says, a person does not see an obligation in himself, naturally. A person looks in the mirror and he sees the terrible things in everyone behind him. He sees the guy behind him has a bald spot. The woman behind him is not modest.

42:15The Rav over there is not paying attention. He looks at everybody else. He's not looking at himself. He looks at everybody else, and that's the Yetzer Hara at its best. I'll be not my breast live. HaRav Avigdor Miller, ztz"l, said that people who give tzedakah to people who are not kosher, it's actually part of Hashem telling them that He doesn't want their tzedakah. Why? Because they haven't done teshuvah. So it's similar to the sin of wasting seed. Anyone that has financial problems... They come to me for advice. The first question I ask them is not what business they're in. I don't care what business they're in. Why? I was in the business world. I know millionaires and billionaires in every business and broke people in every business. There are plenty of people who made millions of dollars selling dog food and Q-tips to hotel chains and little screws, and there are plenty of people who are broke selling buildings.

43:41$25 million, but by the time they sold it, they had mortgaged their house three times. The commission only pays for what they have borrowed for the last few years. So, looks can be deceiving. People show you a professional: he's a doctor, he's a lawyer, he's a real estate broker. It doesn't make a difference. If Hashem decides this one's going to have money, he's going to have money regardless of how much he works. The Gemara, Masechet Rosh Hashanah page 16a and Beitzah 16b... Says that Hashem gives us parnassah and He decides it on Rosh Hashanah. He decides what parnassah we're going to get. He doesn't say He decides what parnassah we're going to get depending on our profession. He'll give us this amount of parnassah if you're a stockbroker, this amount of parnassah if you're a lawyer, or this parnassah if you're a rabbi. No. He says He's going to decide the parnassah regardless of what you work, regardless of what your profession is, and regardless of how much you work. Meaning whether you work two hours a day or 20 is irrelevant. Meaning that anyone who has a little bit of emunah is never going to work a minute of overtime, not a minute more. People say, "No, no, I'm working tonight. I can't come to the shiur." Why? You don't believe in God? We need two shiurim for you. "No, no, of course, I believe in God. I'm just doing my hishtadlut." What hishtadlut? You need to help God? What kind of God do you have? My God doesn't need any help.

45:09Stop watching a lot since I retired from Wall Street. I never need money again because God runs the world. But yet, the Satan confuses us to think that He doesn't. And sometimes a person comes and he has financial issues and... Even though he has a lot of hishtadlut. Even though he works two jobs. Even though he has almost no learning. He has no time to learn, he has no time to teach, no time to eat, no time for family, no time for anything. He's only working all day, but he never has any money. You ever meet those people? They don't stop working, but they never have any money. There are plenty of those people. They have a lot of work, but no bracha. Because Hashem tells us He's going to give us as much help based on our hishtadlut, but based on emunah also. Your hishtadlut is dependent on how much emunah you have. Someone asked, "How much should I work, K'vod HaRav?" He says, "Depending on your emunah." He says, "What do you mean, K'vod HaRav?" He says, "If you have emunah of 100%, go learn 100%."

47:00They have a lot of work, but no bracha. Because Hashem tells us He's going to give us as much help based on our hishtadlut, but based on emunah also. Your hishtadlut is dependent on how much emunah you have. Someone asked, "How much should I work, K'vod HaRav?" He says, "Depending on your emunah." He says, "What do you mean, K'vod HaRav?" He says, "If you have emunah of 100%, go learn 100%." If you have little baby emunah, then you have to work and go make money. The Rabbi of Rabbi Akiva says, someone that asks, "What am I going to eat tomorrow if he already has food today?" has little baby emunah. If Hashem gave you food today, why are you questioning Him about tomorrow? Did He fail you today? Do you actually have a real reason to ask? But people have questions about parnasah all the time, and it's the number one tool that the yetzer hara uses against them to convince them not to come to the shiur Torah, to convince them not to study Torah with the rav, to convince them that they don't have time for God.

48:22During prayer, you're going to see sometimes, how special I'm not here, but I know in other places I've been, even sometimes you see people playing with the phone during tefillah, during the shiur, during everything. It's like if they don't make the sale on eBay now, in the middle of tefillah, in the middle of the chazarat hashatz, it's not gonna happen. They have to do it now. And I always ask them, if God is on your phone, why don't you go into the phone? Go pray to the phone. No, no, I just gotta make a deal. It's gonna make a deal, so I made a lot of deals. It didn't work out so good. If Hashem doesn't want it to work, it doesn't work. But when a person actually comes and he says, "Listen, I have some problems with finances." The first question I ask him is, "Are you Shomer Brit? Do you preserve your Brit?" "Yeah, I got a Brit Milah." I said, "No, no, not the stuff they didn't ask you about."

49:25asked if he did brit milah on the eighth day. I said, "Every day after that." And to my surprise, the vast majority of the Jewish world does not even know the magnitude of this sin. In the English-speaking world, I don't know if any of you have internet, but in the English-speaking world, anyone that watches shiurim online, you can test this yourself. Type in English. In Hebrew, there's more. In English, type Grama Brit, wasting seed, a lecture by Wasting Seed or probably, and you'll see a total at this stage of maybe eight hours total. Shalom bayit, eight million hours. It'll gain two million. Sukkot, one million. Come up with eight hours, maybe nine. I'm seven. I'm seven out of the eight hours. Or maybe there's now nine hours because Rav Zitron did a shiur recently. English, I said. Hebrew, Baruch Hashem, we have. In English is the deficit. In English, we have a Great Depression. Now, why is it such a big deal? Because if you look at the Shulchan Aruch and ask Rabbi Yosef Karo, "What's your opinion, Da'at Torah, about Grama Brit?" And he says this is the biggest sin in the Torah.

50:53So how come the biggest sin in the Torah doesn't have anyone talking about it? Because it's not politically correct. It's a very unusual subject for the politically correct Western world to talk about. People are uncomfortable with themselves. So that's why a lot of the people that have connected to me over the last few years have not actually been just Ba'alei Teshuvah, just people that came from the same life that I did, but in fact the opposite. There are more religious people that have come to my doors that have grown through the yeshiva system. Some are still avreichim. Some are not. Some are just religious. They've gone through the yeshiva system in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. After they watched our wasting seed shiurim, they never knew the magnitude of the sin. They never knew this is a World War 7 inside their life. It's a cancer.

51:53The reason why is because most of us never asked the question. Because the Amalek, the Yetzer Hara, convinced us we don't need to know. Everyone does it. It's okay. It's no big deal. And that's the Yetzer Hara's job. The Yetzer Hara's job is to convince us that asking one question, if somebody doesn't know, just move on to the next thing. Look for something easier. Look for something easier. Look for something just whatever is in that book. Just read that and... Whatever the issue is, just do that. Ask the rabbi. If the question isn't known, forget about it, move on, don't ask too many questions. Be like the Christians—they have been. But that's the reality today. People are scared to ask questions. If they get a "no," they get a "yes," and they don't know what to do with themselves. But that's actually what we've been fighting ourselves for the last three thousand three hundred years. Am Yisrael doesn't stop asking questions, and the reason why is because everything we have is question that's relevant to our life has an answer. Now, some people ask a question: What do I do with relatives and friends that all of us have who are not keeping Shabbat? Do I invite them to Shabbat or do I not invite them to Shabbat?

53:21If he comes and he comes to the Beit Knesset with a car on Shabbat, do I give him an aliyah, or do I not give him an aliyah? What do I do with these things? In reality, there are answers in the Torah for these questions. But the one answer that no one really likes to talk about is our responsibility beyond the aliyah and the aveirahs. The mitzvah of tochecha, the mitzvah of rebuke, the mitzvah of telling another person they're wrong. Going in the wrong direction. You're not allowed to drive on Shabbat, even if it's a big mitzvah. What if he's a big donor? He can be Bill Gates; he can be Donald Trump. It doesn't make a difference who he is. There's no mitzvah obligation to go to the Beit Knesset. It's nice, but it doesn't override the Ten Commandments, and it doesn't override Shabbat. All of us know somebody that drives on Shabbat to the Beit Knesset. In America, it's become normal and...

54:21Ran into a young kid maybe a few months ago in a gas station, and we started talking. I said, "You're Jewish?" She goes, "Yeah, I'm religious." I said, "Oh, okay, baruch Hashem. Where do you belong? Where do you go to daven? So, which Beit Knesset do you go to?" "Well, no, I don't really go to Beit Knesset." "Unique type of religious," I said, "though, maybe you just moved?" You lived there for a long time or no? No, I lived there my whole life. You just don't go to Beit Knesset? No, no, I don't go to Beit Knesset. Okay, so how do you keep Shabbat? No, I don't keep Shabbat. Wait, what kind of religious are you? Reform? He goes, no, I'm Orthodox. I said, you're Orthodox? But you drive on Shabbat? He goes, yeah, what's the problem? So you're not supposed to drive on Shabbat. He goes, no, I'm not that religious, like I'm not at that level yet. I... I'm not at that level yet, he tells me. I said, oh, okay, all right. He goes, what about your father? He goes, oh, no, my father's very religious. My father's very religious. I said, yeah, he doesn't drive on Shabbat? He goes, no, he drives on Shabbat. I said, so what makes him very religious? He goes, he drives to shul every Shabbat. He goes to shul. He's very religious. He goes to shul every Shabbat. I said, yeah, but he's not allowed to drive on Shabbat. He goes, listen.

55:45i know you're a rabbi and everything, but listen. Do you know how much money my dad donates to the Beit Knesset every year? I said, so? He's really religious! Every year, every year he donates no less than a hundred thousand dollars during Rosh Hashanah. And I said this is the Churban of the generation. This is the destruction of the generation. People are led to believe that they're religious based on the checks. This is the Satan. Now, the gematria of the car is 199. If you add Amalek to it, which is another 240, you get 439. 439 is the only solution to removing this Amalek from us, and that's the word tochacha, rebuke. If we don't tell our brothers and sisters that they're not allowed to drive on Shabbat, they're simply never gonna know. Now, deep down inside, everybody knows you're not supposed to light a fire. Deep down inside, everybody knows you're not allowed to eat pig.

57:08Deep down inside, everybody knows that you're not allowed to do certain things. It's just that they don't know the price. Now, if someone told you, "Don't drive fast," you might say, "Okay, that's your opinion. I'll try." But if they said, "Listen, if you drive fast, the cops are going to catch you, Then they're gonna put you in jail for five years for driving fast on this road. What are you gonna do? Oh, I'll walk. Why? It's not worth the risk. What happened? What changed? Both people said don't drive fast. The other one told you the price. If you tell people the price of the sins we make, all of a sudden the picture changes. If you tell your kid don't run... He's probably gonna continue running. If you tell him, "If you don't stop running, you're not gonna go play with your friends," you're not gonna do something. If you put a price on it, all of a sudden he stops running. All of a sudden, he's a little tzaddik, a little Rabbi Akiva. Why? There's a price. In the book Ach Tov L'Yisrael, in Perek Bet, one of the books that my Rav, Rav Ephraim, wrote. It's a halachic book with questions and answers and...

58:34Answers the question: What is the din of a Muslim? Is he an oved avodah zarah or not? Is he an idol worshiper or not? And he brings several sources, one of them being the Rambam. The Rambam discusses the halachot of avodah zarah and he says the Yishmaelim, they're not of the avodah zarah. They don't worship idols. They're not like the Christians that have shituf and have split G-d into three, bar minan, and their whole religion is based on avodah zarah. So the Rambam says, if the Yishmaeli takes the wine, if he takes the wine and he touches it, uncooked wine, you can still sell it. You can't drink it, but you can still sell it. But the Christian, you can't sell it and you can't drink it. A Jew that's a Mechalel Shabbat, even if it's your brother, even if it's your father, even if it's your mother, even if it's your son, even if it's your favorite person on earth, a Jew that violates Shabbat doesn't have the din of the Yishmaeli, of the ISIS member. He has a din that's worse than him.

1:00:03He's considered worse than an ISIS member. He's considered like the Christian, Hashem. But we have brothers and sisters, almost 20 million of them. Almost 20 million Jews in the world that we know of, and only 2 to 3 million of them actually keep Shabbat, which means that 17 million of them have the din of an Oved Avodah Zarah. How could this be? How could some of our cousins and brothers and sisters have a din worse than ISIS? And very few are saying anything. The reason why, Rabotai, is because at the end of days, the same Gemara in Masechet Sotah, page 49b, says that in the end of days people are going to hate the truth. It's going to be a lot of rude people. There's going to be a few people with truth, but they're going to have a lot of enemies. And the only thing that we can rely on is Avinu Shebashamayim. Now the good news is that Avinu Shebashamayim gave us exact instructions of what to do. He didn't say, "Oh, trust me, I'll take care of everything." He didn't say that. What did He say? He says, "I gave you an instruction book."

1:01:29the instruction book. If you look at the order of mitzvot that the Rambam gave us, he took from the Torah. The fourth mitzvah is Yirat Shamayim. Why is Yirat Hashem his treasure? The fear of Hashem, that's his treasure. Why is the fear of Hashem his treasure? Because the first treasure he gave us is Shabbat and... After he gave us the treasure of Shabbat, what does he have left? He has Yirat Shamayim. How do we exercise Yirat Shamayim? First and foremost is our own Teshuvah. The second step is fulfilling the Torah. Which mitzvah is the most difficult for this generation to fulfill? Mitzvat HaTochacha. The mitzvah of rebuke. The mitzvah of telling our brothers and sisters, I love you, but I have to tell you the truth. I love you, but I have to tell you the truth. What's the truth? The truth is you're going in the wrong direction. You're not allowed to marry this woman. You're not allowed to marry this man. You're not allowed to eat this. You're not allowed to eat that. You have to be a little annoying. Why? It's the only way they're going to change. There was one person that told me that I was very, very annoying. And it's not really nice to hear that you're annoying. Especially when you work really hard. You work 20 hours a day trying to help people.

1:02:56Free—no one pays you anything other than Hashem sending you money miraculously every day. Somehow the bills get paid. Somehow you're more comfortable working for free than you were working for making half a million dollars a month. So the last thing you want to hear is that you're annoying. Figure, thank you something—no, this lady says, "You know, you're very annoying." Okay, then she continues and says, "And I want to thank you." Oh, that's good. It's good. So sure, start with the thank you. "You're annoying"—figure of speech. I said, "Why, thank you. This is because if you weren't annoying, I would have never changed my life. If you didn't constantly remind me that my direction is wrong, I would have never changed. I

1:03:58a woman had discovered almost three years ago that she had cancer. A different story she just published on our website, b'ezrat Hashem.org. We have a section on the website called Teshuva Stories, and some of the people that have done Teshuva write their story. It's very motivating. So she wrote the story, and she said a few years ago she discovered that she had cancer and... The doctor told her, "I'm sorry, ma'am. It's terrible. It's horrible. You have six months to live." She cried. After she finished crying, she figured, "What am I gonna do? Okay, maybe I should go to Israel, so at least if I'm gonna die in six months from now, at least it's Eretz HaKodesh." So she went to Israel. She went to the Kotel. She cried hysterically, and...

1:05:00realized that her whole life has been a complete waste of time, moving from boyfriend to boyfriend, relationship to relationship, thinking that the goyish lifestyle was somehow going to materialize at some point. She was very, very healthy her whole life. She went to the gym four or five times a week. She was a health freak. She ate all healthy food, and now she discovered she's dying, and she's not even 40 yet. She never got to be married. She never got to have any kids. But now she was crying to Hashem because she realized that her whole life has been one big waste. When she came back from Israel, miraculously, two days later she got a phone call, and the doctor said, "Listen, woman, we don't know exactly what happened, but somehow there's an opening for you to have surgery immediately." She said, "This was the biggest miracle I've ever witnessed because usually, it's at least a one-year time frame waiting for this surgery. That’s why they gave me six months to live. There was no way to fix it; there was no way to have a surgery. But now I'm going to have a surgery." They had the surgery; she woke up out of the surgery, and a different doctor shows up and says, "I heard you went to Israel." She says, "Yes." "I don't know who you prayed to, and I don't know what you did..."

1:06:26Somehow, they took the cancer that had spread all over your body and put it into a little dot, and I took it out. And you're completely healthy now. You don't even need chemo. But she admits, after she had this nice recovery, what did she do? Did she start keeping Shabbat? Did she stop dating and doing everything that a goy does, even if he was born a Jew? No. Nothing changed. Why? No one told her to change. No, I told her, "Listen, you know, maybe you should do teshuva. Oh, I mean, who knows? Maybe start keeping something." Maybe no one said so, and she continued going back. But a year later, she said, "You know, maybe I feel bad about myself. I don't know why, but I feel bad. I feel terrible. I'm gonna go to the Kotel again." She went to the Kotel again. She cried hysterically again, but this time she was not crying for a physical recovery. This time she knew there was something wrong with her neshama. This time she knew that she got a gift of a second chance from Hashem. And she didn’t really feel so comfortable with her end of the bargain. She didn’t feel like she was doing anything for it. So after she finished crying, she writes that she looked to the left on the women’s side of the Kotel and...

1:07:51There's like a little wall, a tiny wall, there that separates the men and the women. Bochurim still don't know. And on this little wall, there was one CD. There was one CD; there weren't hundreds of CDs, just one CD. And it happened to be in a language she understands: English. She looked at the CD. It says, "From Wall Street to the Western Wall." This looks interesting. So she asked, "Who does this belong to?" Some lady says, "Take it. It's yours. It's yours." "For me?" "Yeah, yeah. It's for you." "Okay. Somebody gives you a gift. You take it for free. Why not? Same price." She says, "I put it in. I never took it out. My whole life changed since then. That's the CD you have in front of you over here." It's the first time in her life. She figured out it's time for her to change. It's time for her to wake up. It's time for her to do teshuva. Cancer didn't scare her enough, but the CD did. Not that there are any gruesome details in the CD. It's the same thing like this; it just reminds you of the things you already know inside you. But no one reminded you for a while, so maybe you forgot.

1:09:14Dr. Ramchal says in the beginning of Mesilat Yesharim, he's not giving any chidushim. He's just telling you things that you already know, but you don't really think about them too much for a while. So it's easy to forget. During this Rosh Hashanah, you're gonna see a lot of people you don't see the whole year. You, Baruch Hashem, you don't really look like you need to do some big teshuva. You need to do little teshuva. Everybody needs to do some teshuva. Everybody here looks like you're shomer Torah, shomer mitzvot, shomer Shabbat. If not, watch my lecture, you'll start. Everybody here, Baruch Hashem, looks like tzaddikim kedoshim, but you're the minority. You're the minority. You only have one rabbi. How much could he do? You need to also tell people. Why? Because some people he's not gonna see. Some people I'm not gonna see. Some people the other rabbis are gonna see. Some people only you're gonna have the zechut to see because they're not gonna come to beit knesset. But they'll come to your house. They're not gonna come to the beit knesset, but they'll come to your neighborhood. They're gonna come to the beit knesset, but they're not gonna talk to Kavod HaRav. They're not gonna talk to me. They're not gonna talk to anybody. They're gonna talk to you. And if they're there to talk to you, that means that Hashem sent them to you. Because that's part of your teshuva.

1:10:41And that's why if you look at the prophet Yechezkel, he says, make sure you don't let your sins be an obstacle in your own teshuva. Well, how are the sins going to be an obstacle in my own teshuva? I did teshuva, so doesn't that cancel out the sins? He says, no. Some sins you can't do teshuva for by yourself. Some sins you can't fix by yourself. Why? Some sins are too big to fix by yourself. So for example, Someone that didn't grow up religious like me, even though Baruch Hashem you keep Shabbat today, when you show up to Shamayim on Yom HaDin, they say, "Sir, good for you. You kept Shabbat every day this year. Good for you. There's still a problem in your account." Why? What's the problem? You didn't keep Shabbat for the first 30 years. There's still a deficit in your account, sir. There's still a deficit. You're still missing Shabbats in your account. Okay, but I'm keeping it now. Good. Even if you keep for another seven years, that's good. We're not complaining about that in Shamayim. We're just saying there's a missing Shabbat for 30 years. There's still a deficit in the account, sir. You have to pay the money back. So what do you do with such a thing? I can't go back to the past.

1:12:05The Prophet Yechezkel says, "Don't let your sins be the obstacle in your own teshuva," meaning that the only way to do teshuva for certain sins is by getting somebody else to keep it. The only way to make up for that loss, that deficit that we have in our past of things we didn't do until we learn them, is by getting somebody else to keep that mitzvah. Somebody else keeps Shabbat because you told them that if you drive on Shabbat, you consider it as going against the Torah. Because you told them that if you keep Shabbat, then you become part of this army of Hashem. But if you don't, you consider your Judaism to be on suspension, and things like that shake the heart. No one wants to have their Judaism on suspension, even the atheist. And if you tell them to keep Shabbat, you're gonna make a lot of money, technically you're lying to them. The reason why is because there are a lot of tzaddikim that keep Shabbat and they're broke. Telling anyone that they're gonna keep Shabbat and they're gonna get reward in this world is only bound to fail. People try to sell Judaism like it's a business. They try to tell people, "No, no, if you keep this mitzvah, you'll have a lot of parnasah." It's not true all the time. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. And if this one guy depends on it being so, and after a year or two of keeping Shabbat his parnasah not only didn't go up, it went down, what do you think is gonna happen? He's not gonna keep Shabbat ever again.

1:13:33So we can't sell Judaism like it's a business. We're not doing a transaction with Hashem. We're selling Judaism because we have to. And you tell them, listen, you keep Shabbat because Hashem said so. And if not, there's a few other things He said too. Depends on how tough the cookie is, you tell them. The point is, you tell them what it actually says in Parashat Bechukotai, Parashat Ki Tavo, Parashat Ki Tisa—all the stuff that's half the Torah. I'm not talking about going into the Zohar and starting to talk about the midrashim of Gehinom. You don't need to go crazy. Just tell them the basic stuff of what it says in Parashat HaShavua, what we're supposed to teach a six-year-old kid. You tell him that, and now he's going to keep Shabbat. So what does it mean to us? That means that every Shabbat, it's like we kept two Shabbats. Now what about if his wife keeps Shabbat now too? Now it's three Shabbats. What if he has little tzaddikim, kids that are not keeping Shabbat? Now you have five Shabbats, ten Shabbats. So now what we messed up over 20 years, we can fix in two. So we go up to Shamayim on Yom HaDin, and it says, why is he a tzaddik? I barely know anything. No, tzaddik, there are 500 Shabbats a week. 500 Shabbats a week are kept because of you.

1:14:47Why? You said a few words that made you feel a little uncomfortable, but you fulfilled the mitzvah of tochacha. You fulfilled the mitzvah of tochacha, rabotai. The reason why I'm telling you is because I know you know people who are not religious. Because most of us are not. And if we all depend on each other only, no one's gonna do their job. It's the obligation for each one of us to take advantage of this holiday. This holiday is coming up. There are a lot of people that are clueless like me, who don't know anything. They show up to shul, and they think, I came to shul once or twice, they wear white clothes like they're a little dove. And they think, oh, I'm gonna buy an aliyah, two aliyot, five aliyot, and then I should get all the parnasah in the world. We have to tell them something. Why? Mashiach is around the corner. Mashiach is around the corner and just like the Gemara says in Masechet Avodah Zarah, page 3b, beginning of 4a: Once the Mashiach comes, there's no more conversions. There's no more teshuva. There's no more nothing. Clocks out. Finished. What are you gonna say to your cousin that didn't do teshuva? What are you gonna say if he says to you, "Wait, you knew, you didn't tell me? You knew, you didn't tell me he's here? Mashiach is here!" Now people think we have to worry about Mashiach.

1:16:10But the reality is that my friend who died this morning, she also worried about Mashiach. She worried about Mashiach so much, she sold everything here in America. She lived in Florida and she left everything behind. She took some money, she moved to Israel. Why? She said, I'm getting ready for Mashiach. I said, yeah, but your husband's still here. Yeah, but I'm ready for Mashiach. Yeah, but your kids are still here. I'm going for Mashiach. Yeah, but we're good. It doesn't matter where we are. If we're not good, it also doesn't matter where we are. If we're good, if Mashiach came, even if we live in Saudi Arabia, Hashem is going to save us. If we're wicked, even if we live on top of the Kotel, nothing's going to help us. The Gemara in Masechet Shabbat, page 55, says that a person who sees another person sin and doesn't say anything, in Shamayim it's like he sinned. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was a very, very rich man aside from being a tzaddik. His maaser, I did a heshbon one time, was 1.2 billion dollars a year in today's money. 1.2 billion dollars a year in cows. They said one of his cows was a mechalel Shabbat. So Chachamim say, "What, he had one cow? He had a lot of cows." Yeah, but one cow was a mechalel Shabbat. He goes, "Only one cow?" He goes, "Really, it wasn't his cow."

1:17:36What do you mean it wasn't his cow? He said it was his next-door neighbor who had a cow, and she carried the pa'amonim, she carried some things on Shabbat, some bells on Shabbat. You're not allowed to carry on Shabbat. Shabbat is for you. It's for your family. It's for your kids. It's for your servants. It's for your animals, like the Torah says. And Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah saw his neighbor's cow was carrying something on Shabbat. He didn't say anything. So in Shamayim they said Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah was mechalel Shabbat. Now he had Ruach HaKodesh. We don't have anything. I barely have a wind. He had Ruach HaKodesh, so he knew when in Shamayim they said he started fasting for the rest of his life. He fasted for the rest of his life doing teshuva for his next-door neighbor's cow. Why? Because in Shamayim they said Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah was mechalel Shabbat. Because he didn't say anything to his neighbor. We have friends. We have family. We have neighbors. Everybody knows at least one person. It's a mechanism, but let's try to arrive at Rosh Hashanah with a game plan to try to get one other person to start keeping Shabbat. One other person to start keeping something significant. That's just keeping Tzedakah. Tzedakah is good, but without real Teshuvah, Tzedakah is nothing.

1:18:58This is the reason why anytime somebody says, "I want to speak, just get me people," I don't need money. You have a lot of money. I have nothing. I lost every single penny. Every single penny I had, I lost. Literally went to a negative balance. So how are you going to survive? I said, "God runs the world." So how come you don't want any money? An average speaker gets 900 bucks for an hour of speech. How come you don't get any money? I said, "Because the yetzer hara likes money." But he doesn't like me. So if I tell them I'm gonna take money, then what are they gonna say? They'll say, "No, no, no, we have a tight budget. We have a tight budget." So what's gonna happen? No one's gonna do teshuva. No one's gonna invite. No one's gonna do anything. I'll be sitting at home looking at my computer and say, "Oh, wait, I wish I could help them and them and them and them." Okay, let me just continue reading. My cave by myself. Abutai HaKedoshim, there are 20 million of us who don't even know what Shabbat is. Sometimes, even if they're already keeping Shabbat, they don't know they're not allowed to do certain halachot. This Rosh Hashanah, if 1% of what I said meant anything to you, forget my story. My story is just the living details of what happens when you don't listen to Hashem and you have a tough head like mine. Warning, warning, warning— it gets worse and worse and...

1:20:13saw hell. I know what it looks like really, really well. That's why I'm so scared. I'm scared. It's going to happen to more people. The reality is we don't have to be worried about Mashiach, because each one of us, שמים, could be like my friend, where we have our own יום הדין today. She was worried about Mashiach in the future, so she went to Israel. Mashiach arrived early for her. I I want to make sure that when I go up there, whenever that is, whenever Hashem decides, I tried my best. Anyone I knew, I told them something. Anyone I knew, I told them Shabbat. Anyone I knew, I told them to keep Taharat HaMishpacha. I told them something. I don't know that much. I don't know that much at all. But whatever I know, I told them. Why? When I go up to Shamayim, I can say, "Hey, you know what? We gave you a mouth, you used it. We gave you a talent, you used it. We gave you some money, you used it." You have some Torah, Baruch Hashem. Share it with the public. Share it with people. What's the worst that can happen? They're not going to listen? They're already not listening. Everyone that's worried about, oh no, but maybe they're going to get cooled off. Someone that's ice cold doesn't get cooled off. Somebody came to the Lubavitcher Rebbe and said, I have an issue. What if I tell my friend to keep Shabbat and he doesn't want to listen, and he gets angry at me?

1:21:38And he gets frustrated at me and he curses me and da da da da da. He says, listen, let's imagine that you have this friend, and you're roommates, and you're both in the room. One day, your friend comes home for Shabbat. You know, for Shabbat, you wake up for Shabbat, you go to sleep for Shabbat, some people are like that all the time. He comes home for Shabbat, he's in a bad mood. He says, listen, I'm going to sleep. Don't wake me up. You're saying, don't wake me up. That kind of attitude. What did I do to you? Don't wake me up. Don't wake up, you tell them. Don't wake me up. You're taking out all your anger on me. You'll get all frustrated. He's all frustrated. He goes to sleep. You leave the house. You go downstairs. The Lubavitcher Rebbe says, but by the time you get downstairs, you smell smoke. You turn around, you see it's fire. It's fire. What are you gonna do? I'm gonna go tell my friend. Oh, okay, so you run upstairs, you run, you run, you run to your friend, right? Yeah, but your friend told you not to wake him up. Your friend told you, "Don't wake me up." He's gonna get angry at you. Who cares if he gets angry? I have to wake him up. Why are you gonna wake him up? Because I'm gonna save his life. It's the same thing with teshuvah.

1:22:56When they're cursing you and screaming at you, and they don't want to listen to you, and they don't want to come over, and they want to get cooled off and all that stuff, that's because they're still sleeping. Once you wake them up, they're going to tell you the same thing like that woman told me: Thank you for being annoying. By the way, that woman is my wife. Any questions? As soon as you invite me again. Yes. Yes. I was keeping kosher in my own version. When I found out what kosher was, I realized I wasn't keeping it correctly. So, I was keeping kosher, meaning I wasn't eating meat and pig outside. I would eat kosher meat, but I would eat non-kosher cheese and pasta and things outside. The problem is that once you learn the kosher laws, and you also learn a little bit about food, you realize that, for example, if you go buy pizza at a non-kosher place, not only are you eating non-kosher dairy, which you're not allowed to have as a Jew, but also you're eating milk and meat, because part of the sauce and the cheese of the goyim is made from meat. That's why if you go to the regular supermarket, you'll see that the cheese aisle...

1:24:12The kosher section has like five parts, five different brands. Non-kosher, 500. Because they use a lot of different parts and ingredients that we're not allowed to use from the stomach of the pig and other animals that we're not allowed to use. So when you eat non-kosher pizza, you're actually eating non-kosher meat. Same thing with other items. For example, a lot of people think that if they go to a non-kosher place, they're going to have salad. "I'm gonna go have salad. What's the big deal with salad?" As a matter of fact, salad is sometimes worse than eating bacon, egg, and cheese. Why is it worse? because the goyim don't have the obligation of cleaning the vegetables, their vegetables have bugs. Every vegetable, all vegetables you buy, have something on it—a worm or maggot or something is on it. They don't wash it like we do with soap and salt, and so on and so forth. They just wash it superficially, throw some water on it to make it look sparkly. By the time you realize you ate the worm, it's already inside your stomach. So for them, it doesn't matter. They like worms. Sometimes they even eat them. There's actually a new food. There's a new protein shake in America. A new thing started where they actually take a bunch of cockroaches and make a protein shake. I'm serious. There's a new company that started in the last year and a half that makes protein shakes out of cockroaches in America. It's a multi-million dollar brand.

1:25:37Delicious point is that for them, eating bugs is not a big deal. For us, it's six sins. It's like eating pig six times. So that so-called salad from a non-kosher place is actually worse than eating pig. So that's the type of stuff that I did not knowing. I didn't do anything intentionally against God, but the reality is that shegagah talmud oleh zadon and... the Mishnayot Pirkei Avot says that if you make a mistake as a result of not learning, in Shamayim they don't count it as shogeg (accidental); they count it as mezid (as if you did it on purpose). The reason why is because you didn't study Torah on purpose. You didn't learn what to do on purpose. So, just like for example in civil law, l'havdil, if you drive 150 miles an hour on the highway and you're from out of town... And they tell you, "Listen sir, we're going to take your license, we're going to send you to jail, we're going to do all these things." Why? "I didn't know. I didn't know I can't drive 150 miles an hour here." Sorry, sir. Your ignorance is not going to save you. Your ignorance is not going to save you. It doesn't make you innocent because you don't know. You were supposed to know. Why? Because once you subscribe to have a license, you have an obligation to know. Once you subscribe to be a Jew, you're obligated to know.

1:27:04Obligated to know, and that's the thing. None of us can go up to Shamayim and say, "Oh, I didn't know." There's no such thing as "I didn't know." We have to know. That's why all of you are here. That's why we're all here. We're here to know. Yeah, Baruch Hashem, rabbis to teach. Actually, so there's a few rabbis teaching. Baruch Hashem, there's a lot of Torah here. The key is to know and then to share. Anything else? We all wish each other a Shana Tova, Shana Metuka, G'mar Chatima Tova. With the help of Hashem, we continue to publicize the Torah and fulfill our mitzvot and teshuva. Baruch Adonai L'Olam. Amen and Amen. Amen.

1:28:14Guys, there are free CDs. If anyone wants CDs, please take them. Guys, there are free CDs. If anyone wants CDs, please take them. Used to be, used to be, used to be. Thank you very much. Used to be, used to be, used to be. Thank you very much.

1:29:21There are two CDs in here. This one, track number five.