From Wall Street to the Western Wall!! Interview with TeNak Talk

0:39Welcome to Tanakh Talk. I am your host, William Hall, broadcasting live out of Kingsland, Texas, USA, with episode number 20 of Testimony Tuesday's special event today, doing it on Sunday, out of the ordinary, but this is an extraordinary guy, and so this is perfectly fitting. Welcome to the screen, Rabbi Yaron Reuven. Thank you for having me. Such an awesome... Awesome. I have to start this whole thing off by just saying I watched your testimony, your full testimonial video, and it was a long video. In my opinion, it was too short. I could have listened to that. I could have taken every 10-minute section and asked you to expound on each 10-minute section for another hour or two. It was just amazing. Absolutely amazing. Such a delight. And it's definitely a unique story. Most of the testimonies that I do are really people who are simply in Christianity as a child, grow up Christian, and then they leave. But you've got a unique story, one I've never heard of before. And more importantly, a story that I think, Rabbi, I've been wanting to hear about, the whole thing about money and who do you choose, God or money, you know?

1:53And so, everybody, this is Rabbi Yaron. Would you like to just introduce yourself? Sure. First of all, thank you very much for having me on the show. It's a huge honor for me because I've actually been watching your work for some time now. Oh, wow. Wonderful. Also, I actually got familiar with you through Rabbi Tovia Singer, whom I started following. Back, I think, towards the beginning of my journey, my teshuva story, back, I'd say, towards the end of 2012, my rabbi, Rabbi Efraim Kachlon, told me, "Listen, there's an English-speaking rabbi whose whole mission is to debunk Christianity. You should look into it." So I got familiar with him, and then little by little, eventually got to your work, and I've been actually watching your show as often as I can. Oh, Hashem, we've been very busy over the last couple of years doing kiruv, so I have less time to watch videos than I'd like to, but every time I get a chance to, I do. And I actually watched your recent video where you made the whole move with the office, with the studio. Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool. For somebody like me that's in it also, it's very impressive because it shows the level of dedication that somebody has to their work. That's something you always want to be a part of. So, Baruch Hashem, thank you for having me.

3:12Well, I'll tell you what, it is definitely my pleasure. And I'll let you in on a little secret. I've had several people ask me if I know you. And both of the most recent ones would say, "Well, if you don't, you need to know this guy. You need to know this guy." And that's why I kind of reached out to you. And then we reached out to each other. And then finally, time made it so that we could do today. And so I think it's going to be great. I think you're going to be a fantastic addition to the Tanach Talk Network, that is for sure. Because it's... I'm really looking forward to it. I want to let everybody know that the phone lines are indeed open. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to call in. Let me see if I can find the phone number that I usually put in here. There it is right there. Put that on your screen right now. Yeah, so definitely call in as we're going along and say hi to the Rabbi and ask him whatever question you've got on your mind about his journey. For now, all I'm going to do is base my random questions off your main video, and then we'll put a link somewhere after the video.

4:19In fact, that's what I'll do. I'll actually embed a link to your full testimony at the end of this video. So once everybody's completely watched it, at the very tail end of it, there'll be a link they can click on and actually watch it. And you've got to watch it. I mean, it can be 10 hours and it's still too short. Trust me, it's just a really great story. So, we'll get going with this. Going back to my previous statements, I've never heard anybody who has had quite this particular journey that you've got. Just even the whole money thing and how you were so deep into Wall Street. I would like for you to maybe even throw in a few spoiler alerts to your actual testimony. Tell us a few highlights. your testimony, of course, that's the whole reason for today anyway, is to kind of do a highlight, and we'll refer them back to the main video after this one so they can see. Sure, sound good? Go ahead. Sure, I mean, to summarize it in a simple sentence, it's the story, I guess, as it has to do with, you know, going from nothing to something, you know, the American dream that everyone wants to live, aspires to be a success.

5:35Uh, you know, thank God there are a lot of opportunities in the world, but America, as always, you know, at least for these last couple of hundred years, has monopolized the market on the American dream. And so going from nothing to something, anyone that's trying to build something up will connect to that part of the story. The next part of the story talks about having everything but at the same time feeling like you have nothing, which is a part of the story that a lot of people who have already made it in life can connect to. uh, can, uh, can connect to because sometimes you can have all the material in the world, but you still feel, you know, a certain sense of emptiness. Uh, that's where I got to. And by having success, most people say, "Oh yeah, listen, the guy made a hundred thousand, $200,000 a year. He successfully has a nice house. He has a nice car." No, that's not what I mean. The type of success that we're talking about is on a bad month, making $200,000 or $300,000, uh, you know, on a good month, a million and a half dollars. you know, millions and millions of dollars, success, fame, you know, being on television, having a firm with a bunch of, you know, educated people working for me. They’re much older than me. I'm the youngest guy in the room, but yet they're all working for me. You know, all the things that people see on TV that usually actors or athletes have, I had as a young guy. And pretty much anything and everything that someone would want to have materially.

7:02We had the ability to have it if either we had it or we had the ability to have it. Uh, even though, interestingly enough, I was never really materialistic. I liked money as far as making it, but as far as having it, it was quite a bit of a headache because, you know, a lot comes with it. Uh, so that part of it, a lot of people connect to. But the next part, which is my favorite part, is when the Boss upstairs knocks on your door and He says, "Hello, I'm here, so you haven't paid attention to Me. I just want to let you know that I'm running the show, and from now on, I'm going to show you a few more things. You start seeing Hashem, you know, God as we know Him, the one and only God of Israel, run the show. If it was a miracle to make the money, going from literally nothing—you know, being at one point in my life $35 away from being homeless—to making millions of dollars...

8:02and having a firm, a hedge fund, a brokerage firm, and an insurance company, and all types of wonderful things in the business world, if that was a miracle, losing everything was ten miracles. Because even if you tried to lose that kind of money, to make that many mistakes, and to have everything and anything that could go wrong go wrong, you still wouldn't do it. It was literally much more of a miracle going down than it was going up. But alongside the money loss was a 26-year-old perfectly healthy person one day and a few hours later turning into the sickest person you could possibly imagine, that everyone says is dying on any given day. Right, mainly from stress, I guess. And having a simple surgery that I didn't even need to have. An elective surgery, one of those surgeries where it's just annoying. It's similar to, let's say, for example, somebody wanting to have LASIK surgery because they don't feel like wearing glasses anymore, so they have a laser surgery to fix their eyes. Or someone that wants to remove, I don't know, some type of piece of skin that he has. You know, an elective surgery, something you literally do not need to have, I mean, it annoys you, bothers you, I don't know, once in a while, but really a surgery that...

9:24Two out of three people have this; it's called hemorrhoids. So, I usually don't start with it simply because most people get worried when I say, "Oh, maybe I have it." No, you don't have it. This was, like I said, all the hand of Hashem getting involved or having a surgery where the doctor was an expert, you know, almost 20 years in the business, very well known. And obviously, having money, I didn't worry about getting an expert. and he told me, "Listen, you're probably going to feel uncomfortable for a couple of days, but on Monday, you're back to work," which was really my only concern—when am I going back to work? And having a surgery in the morning and waking up out of the surgery a completely different person, a different body, a body that's in pain and pretty much fighting for my life for the next seven years. Wow. Because everything, my whole body started failing, and you know, we'll go into more details. Either later on, or we also go into it in some of the longer videos. But again, you go from poverty to wealth. And then Hashem runs the show, takes everything away from you. Everything that you thought you had, you now don't have. And you're in a position where you're forced to do something about it. And that's where HaKadosh Baruch Hu comes in.

10:49And usually, and that's why I tell people all the time, you know, my lectures are mostly about Mussar. Mostly, even though we talk about Parashah, we talk about, you know, obviously all parts of the Torah, you know, sources as often as possible. But if you pay attention to the way that I speak versus the traditional English-speaking rabbi, I'm a lot more harsh, you could call it, where I tell you how it is. You know, I don't sugarcoat. I don't... delete parts of the Torah because it's not convenient to hear, even if it's parts that are difficult to hear, like, for example, the parts about the curses that are in the Torah, where Hashem told us that, you know, there's different levels of curses where if we continuously sin, we could even get to a point of such starvation where we'd eat our own children. Wow. This is actually literally written in the Torah in a couple of places, both in Parashat Bechukotai and Parashat Ki Tavo. And most Jews don't even know these parts exist simply because, you know, they don't speak Lashon HaKodesh. They speak Ivrit, which is modern Hebrew, but not the holy language. Or they just didn't pay attention. And really, most people just think, oh, maybe it's an exaggeration. Maybe it's some type of, you know, analogy of something. No, no, no. This actually happened multiple times throughout history.

12:16And we did a lecture about a year ago about the Holocaust, which is hard for everyone to talk about, myself included, but we still have to bring out the facts. And the point of me bringing the Holocaust up was not to remind ourselves of a sad memory of six million holy souls being murdered and many, many other people obviously also murdered along with them—tens of millions of other people, millions that were not Jews, murdered around the world. It's not about that. It was about the fact that this was all already written, that it will happen in the Torah by the one and only Creator that could actually know that this would happen. This was promised. This was prophesied. And so one of the things that actually happened during the Holocaust was this very disturbing prophecy of actually eating children. Obviously not intentionally and so on, so anyone that wants to watch it. There's a whole lecture I have about the Holocaust, and there's even a movie that we made about it. But the point being is that I bring out the inconvenient facts—the things that no one really wants to talk about, no one wants to hear—simply because I know that we need to hear it. Because if we didn't, then Hashem wouldn't write it. You know, if it was supposed to be some type of secret...

13:38then we wouldn't write it. He wouldn't write it in the written Torah. And the reason why this is one of the main things that is attractive to me, not necessarily just the disturbing parts, just in general, the stuff that is politically incorrect, is because I know that had I known this, it would have made a difference. I can't tell you that I would have done Teshuvah earlier. I can't tell you that I would have become anything. I would have changed my life or anything like that. But one thing I can tell you for sure is that when you have information, you make different decisions than when you don't have information. So when I had rabbis come to my office two or three times a week, you know, once in a while, they would tell us something about the weekly parashah. uh, you know, we'd give them tzedakah as often as they came, and it was, you know, it was an open-door policy. I've always respected religion; I've respected Judaism. I was born Jewish, I was born in Israel, and, uh, moved to the United States when I was 10 years old. And, uh, you know, lived in a, uh, traditional home, you could call it, where we, you know, we kept certain mitzvot that were convenient to us, but there were certain mitzvot that weren't, and we didn't. Uh, so for example, if, uh

14:56kosher food was easy enough to get, we'd eat it. If it wasn't, we wouldn't. If a holiday was something that we thought was important, like, for example, Passover or Yom Kippur, we'd observe it. But a day like Shabbat, the Sabbath, which we didn't think was really such a big deal, even though it's one of the Ten Commandments, we thought it was optional. So we didn't keep it. So, you know, it's again, as a result of ignorance, you make foolish decisions. foolish decisions, but nonetheless, when the people that know don't tell you, when no one tells you, you're going to continue making those decisions. So that's why that's the stuff that I try to bring to light because I know that when people find out about this, it's much easier to understand why certain things in life happen, why life is the way it is. There are actually answers in the Torah. You just have to look. And we had the merit to learn it, even though my journey was a little bit more difficult than I wish for anybody to have, even my enemies. Still, it was the necessary journey.

16:09I think a lot of people might agree that in situations, I mean, there's a handful of different types of stressful situations that someone would never want to encounter. One of them would be, you know, heartbreak from a marriage or, you know, a loss of a loved one or money or loss of a child. So all those individual things. And so for me, I think... You know, I've been married for 17 years now, but I've never really had money, not even to an nth degree of the scale that you've encountered. And I think that if I had, and then I had that change, that such a dramatic change from those funds, I think that might just send me into a panic attack, have a heart attack, and die from it. I don't know. But I know that would have stressed me out big time, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, no, it's not an easy transition. Going from nothing to something is definitely a major high. All of a sudden, you can buy whatever you want. You don't have to worry about the electric being turned off. You don't have to worry about borrowing money so you can eat. I mean, it's a major change. Usually, when someone gets rich when they're young, they tend to make a lot of mistakes. But because I was in the financial services business, my profession was managing money.

17:32Uh, I didn't make those common mistakes like many people do, which, you know, buy fancy cars and planes and all that nonsense that people waste their life on. Uh, I invested all of my money either in my profession, which was, you know, in my business, uh, or I invested it into the stock market, which is what I did for a living. Uh, so I invested everything into it and it was so, and I lost it exactly where I invested it. It's not like I, uh, it's not like I, uh, you know, invested it into some new idea that never existed. The same way I made it is the same way that I invested it. The same way that it grew is the same way it disappeared. And the interesting part is that losing it, by the time I actually lost a lot of the money or all of it, I knew probably a hundred times more than I did when I made it. invested it into some new idea that never existed. The same way I made it is the same way that I invested it. The same way that it grew is the same way it disappeared. And the interesting part is that losing it, by the time I actually lost a lot of the money or all of it, I knew probably a hundred times more than I did when I made it. There wasn't necessarily a lack of knowledge or anything like that. It was literally, if you know the details of what happened, it took a while to lose. It wasn't like one day. It literally had to be the hand of God involved, because it wasn't just one thing that went wrong. It was everything and anything that could go wrong, went wrong, right? And you know, these friends that were my employees turned into enemies and started stealing from me. I mean, everything that went wrong, everything just went wrong. It was just bad. And yes, I did want to die. Because aside from having the stress of losing money, which you're used to being a winner and now all of a sudden you're a loser and it's not just your money, it's also other people's money. So losing other people's money was much more difficult for me than losing my own money, because my own money, I always had confidence that I'd be able to make it again.

18:52started stealing from me. I mean, everything that went wrong, everything just went wrong. It was just bad. And yes, I did want to die. Because aside from having the stress of losing money, which you're used to being a winner and now, all of a sudden, you're a loser. And it's not just your money, it's also other people's money. So losing other people's money was much more difficult for me than losing my own money because with my own money, I always had confidence that I'd be able to make it again. Um, and even though it wasn't religious, I believe that God gave it to me and I believe that God took it. It was never really an issue of belief in God; it was just a lack of knowledge of what He wants from me. Right. But losing other people's money was very difficult because I was used to making money for years. Everything we touched turned to gold. So now, losing was very difficult. I started getting, you know, nervous breakdowns at times and really just you start losing your mind. But that wasn't the most difficult part. The most difficult part was enduring all of that when I was in pain, physical pain, 24 hours a day. I would have to go to a doctor two to three times a week. We went to more than 50 different types of doctors, from holistic medicine to traditional medicine, from the best of the best or the average guy, everything and anything you could possibly imagine. We tried steroids like athletes do, acupuncture. I even got to a point where I became a part of a study for ozone treatment where they would actually inject me with ozone, which is air pretty much, which is purified air, purified oxygen, to try to purify my blood several times a week. And for anyone who didn't try it,

20:18the best of the best or the average guy, everything and anything you could possibly imagine. We tried steroids like athletes do, acupuncture. I even got to a point where I became a part of a study for ozone treatment, where they would actually inject me with ozone, which is air pretty much, which is purified air, purified oxygen, to try to purify my blood several times a week. And for anyone who didn't try it, I don't know how it feels for anybody else, but for me, it felt like I was dying. It felt like I had, uh, it was, I was literally like after the treatment, I would feel like I was, I got like some type of cancer treatment or something. It felt like I was dying for a while, but in hopes that this is going to work out. I did this for some time, literally trying everything and pretty much living on painkillers. No, I didn't get high because when you actually have pain, you don't get high. just uh really just a shock, like my whole life turned upside down in one day. November 18, 2006, was a couple of months after I had my biggest month of my career. I made 1.6 million dollars in a month, you know. Wow, it was fantastic. I went on vacation to Las Vegas for a month.

21:43and played in the World Series of Poker and a bunch of other tournaments. I used to be a high-stakes poker player and played with some of the best players in the world. Because I had a lot of money, it was very difficult to play against me simply because I wasn't scared of losing. Plus, I was a math guy, so that kind of helped. And so I just made a bunch of money. I had a vacation. I was with the love of my life. which we get into the details of that in the story also, who actually was not Jewish at the time. Everything was great. Everything was fantastic. I had more money than I knew what to do with, you know, everything was going in the right direction. Even though there were certain things that weren't perfect, everything was going in the right direction. I was only 26 years old, and I already had more than enough money and more than, you know, most people would wish for. And then I decided, you know what, let me take advantage and have a surgery that will just annoy me for a couple of days but will solve a problem that won't annoy me, you know, anytime in my life. So on November 18th, 2006, just a few months after I had that biggest month and everything was fantastic, I had the surgery and woke up out of the surgery, screaming my lungs out, asking everyone to kill me.

23:09No one would listen. They continued giving me morphine. And then we discovered I never took drugs in my life since I liked my brain. I discovered something interesting about my body, which was that it rejects most medicine. Oh, wow. So my body was not accepting the morphine. It didn't work. So they just continued giving me more and more and more and more. And then it eventually got to a point where they gave me the most amount of legally allowed morphine, which eventually calmed me down. ...where they gave me the maximum legally allowed morphine, which eventually calmed me down. Now, throughout all of this time, which seemed like an eternity—although I don't know, I guess it was less—it was the type of pain where it felt like taking a knife, like one of those really big, scary daggers they have in the movies, or like hunters have, and just cutting your body up over and over and over again, never stopping. And by the way, it was also attached to electricity. Oh, boy. Wow. So it was hell. So when people ask me, "Oh, do you know anything about hell?" I'm like, "Yeah, I saw it. You experienced it firsthand, basically." So my body calmed down, and I thought everything was fine. And the doctors were excited to release me because, again, after all, this was all an elective surgery. You're not supposed to stay at the hospital for a hemorrhoid surgery. So they said, "No, listen, this was just a hiccup. You're fine now. You're calm. Go home."

24:39I said, "Okay, great." Went home, on the way home, we picked up a sandwich of shawarma, got home, and thought that, "Okay, guys, this was a very interesting day, thank you for coming, I'm going to sleep, and expecting a better tomorrow." Little did I know that after I closed my eyes, I would wake up 40 minutes later, and I would actually have worse pain than I did a few hours earlier, only this time... It didn't stop for 62 days. I can't even wrap my head around that. That's just... it didn't stop. Yeah, I was actually thinking about it now. I mean, it's been over 10 years now. It's hard for me to even think about it, but it didn't stop. The pain did not stop for more than 15 minutes at a time for 62 days. And I mean, my body started failing. I started bleeding from my eyes, my ears. I started urinating blood. Everything just went wrong. The doctor said, "We have no idea why it's happening. This has never happened in the history of medicine that we know of. Everything that's happening to him is not related. Completely different body parts are failing. We had surgery on a rectum. What does that have to do with his legs? What does that have to do with his eyes? What does that have to do with his ears? What does that have to do with his chest? What does that have to do with his liver? It has nothing to do with it."

26:07I mean, basically, you know, a superficial surgery has nothing to do with anything except that the same G-d that gave me the body is also the same G-d that managed the surgery. So everything went wrong. And after about two months, a little over two months... Uh, the pain started subsiding to some extent, and, you know, I was able to just manage life with, you know, just a bunch of painkillers and, uh, started going back to, you know, myself like little, you know, still dealt with a lot of pain, but nowhere near where it was for those couple of months. And, um, but again, you know, thought that I just had another chance at life. Uh, so, um, went back to work, went back to work. and little by little was getting better, at least that's what I thought, until about nine months later, I got a pain in the back of my leg, close to where the surgery was, but not the same body part, and I just thought I just pulled a muscle, a hamstring or something. I didn't really think much of it, except that I woke up the next day not being able to walk and in immense pain. Emergency room, they told me that I had an abscess, which is an internal infection.

27:27connecting the muscle of the leg to the rectum, which is, you know, they said how it got there and how you have a surgery, we have no idea. All we know is that it's so big and it's so dangerous that if you had waited a couple of hours, it would have exploded, gotten into your bloodstream, and you would have died instantly. Oh my, wow. So it's not like an infection you have in your finger, and you just put some Bacitracin on it, and everything's okay. You know, it's an infection where you have to go to an emergency room, they cut you up, and you have to stay in the intensive care unit for a couple of weeks because they have to keep the whole thing open. They can't even stitch it up because they have to continuously open it every day. So that was a lot of fun. So how long were you – how much overall time did you spend in the hospital throughout each one of these sickness stages? Do you have any rough idea? I mean – Average, I mean, after that first surgery, I was there for a couple of weeks, and pretty much every time I would go to the hospital, I would have to be there for, you know, usually about four or five days to two and a half weeks. So over a span of how long, do you think? Over seven years. Oh, seven years, gotcha. I mean, I went to many, many doctors, many surgeries, and many hospitals. I can't, honestly, I don't know. Okay.

28:48My medical file is about six feet thick. So, you started this downfall around 2006. Yes. Okay, and that was when your financial downfall started first, and then your body started failing. But you mentioned something that I find is going to be a very, very important part of today's shiur, and that is the love of your life. Because part of your testimony that makes it so amazing, in my opinion, is you have your own testimony, but you also have a testimony of your wife who was not Jewish and who – had to go through the struggles of you rejecting her Messiah and things of that nature. And you had to go through the struggles of her wondering whether she was going to leave because of all the troubles you were having. When did you meet her? Was it before 2006 or after? Oh, it was before. We actually met in 2004. Okay, so she knew you in the high times. Yeah. Yes, so she knew me when I was pretty much getting on the big wave. I had just become a millionaire, but it was still my first million. She was working for a company that I was doing business with, and she was actually trying to leave Wall Street at the time. But since I was the company that she was working with, about 40% of their total revenues were coming from me directly. They had 350 people, but 40% was coming from one person.

30:17So they had to do whatever they could to make me happy. And so the people that they had servicing my account, if you will, were not cutting it. She was the best in the business. So even though she was trying to leave, they said, "Listen, do us a favor and just help him for a little while until we find a replacement because everyone else is either quitting or we're firing them. They're just not doing it. You know, he's doing multimillion-dollar trades and they're screwing up, and it's costing us a ton of money. So just make him happy. Do what you got to do." So she started helping me, and we became friends on the phone. She was in Florida; I was in New York. Again, both of us living completely separate lives. But again, when you spend a lot of time on the phone with somebody doing business, you eventually become friendly. Now, I thought that she was, you know, charming, amazing, and very, very smart. I right away understood she was the best in the business because she was just doing things that were impossible as far as the business was concerned. So I respected her a lot for the business. But as far as, like, on a personal scale, I didn't know what she looked like. So I thought she was probably, I don't know, five, six, 700 pounds, and she was wheeled into the office to help this guy from New York. I didn't know anything. All I knew is that she was just this charming, amazing person, but that's it. Anyway, we became friends over the phone. One day, the company had a conference in 2004, which they invited me to, and they had her...

31:45be my tour guide, like to show me around, because we were already friendly for maybe six months or maybe close to a year even at that point. But again, we never, I had never seen her before at that point. So I went there and I saw this beautiful, amazing woman that was, I'm like, this can't be. And it was, so for me, it was like, wow, this is unbelievable. But the problem was both of us were in relationships. So there was nothing to be. There was nothing to happen. It was just, you know, still, she was beautiful and great, but that's it. And I thought that was where it would end. Plus, she's in Florida. I'm in New York. Nothing could be more different. And even though I wasn't religious, I had always planned on marrying a Jew. So she wasn't Jewish. So I said, this is the furthest thing from reality. Little did I know that, again, Hashem has different plans. Uh, so He just, you know, laughs at us when we try to make our own plans. Sure. And, uh, so anyway, we became friendly. After that trip, after we met each other, we became a little more friendly. We ended up leaving our significant others, if you will, whom we were extremely unhappy with even before we met each other. That's actually part of what we talked about most of the time—how unhappy we were with who we were with.

33:10Uh, and, uh, we started dating, but again, long distance. Right. Right. Uh, but you know, so she would come to New York once in a while and go to Florida and, you know, it was great, but it was not a real relationship as far as what I thought it was going to be. And, uh, but then one thing led to the other, we fell in love and we decided, okay, this has to go somewhere. The problem is that again, I'm still Jewish. So even though I'm not religious, definitely don't believe in J.C. Penney. I don't believe in Jesus, right? I've always found it to be foolish, even as a kid. You know, I would have debates with my non-Jewish friends because I went to public school, and I would just tell them, "You really believe that story, that some guy was born out of nothing and he's really God at the same time?" It just never made sense to me. And again, I wasn't educated about Torah; the story just never added up, and no one was able to answer questions. Uh, and I would just, you know, we would just jab at each other. They would make fun of Judaism, and I would make fun of Christianity. You know, that's what kids do. So again, I didn't know a lot, but I knew that the story itself didn't make sense. And, um, she, on the other hand, actually grew up in a semi-religious home. And interestingly enough, she actually wanted me to become a religious Jew. Oh, not a Christian. Not that she was Catholic, right?

34:33No, she was Christian, and she was Christian, and she was very, very well-learned in Christianity. But she, like many Christians that I've met since, have pretty much created their own religion. And that's one of the things that I actually found out later on, is that I don't think there are two Christians who believe the same thing. Most of them just take what they want from the New Testament and pretty much make their own religion up and call it Christianity. They call it Lutheran and this one and that one. But in reality, it's their own version. Everyone has their own version of Christianity because one guy says it's the Messiah, the other one says it's God, the other one says maybe it's a mix, the other one says it's a tzaddik, it's a prophet. Everyone has a different version of the story. No one actually believes the New Testament for what it is. I guess maybe that's the reason why there are 200,000 versions of it. But needless to say, it was very interesting for me that this woman that I fell in love with,

35:34actually doesn't want me to be Christian. She actually wants me to not only be Jewish, but she wants me to be a religious Jew. She wants me to start learning Torah. So she bought me my first Tanach, but the Hebrew version. So she didn't buy me, like, a New Testament with the New Testament. She never, ever introduced, she never told me about the New Testament, never talked about it. We'd actually have jokes about it that would call it the remix. I'll call the New Testament the remix. And, you know, I told them, "Why would you go with the remix? Why don't you go with the original? The original is always a classic." And we'd laugh about it. But again, we decided early on that religion was not going to separate us. If Hashem wanted you to be Jewish, you'd be Jewish. If Hashem wanted me to be Christian, I'd be Christian. We both believe in Hashem, the same Hashem. We don't believe in some guy; we just believe that Hashem is who He is. And that's it. And this happened. Whenever you believe that some guy died and he's the Messiah or he's this or he's that, I don't know, I think it's foolish, but it has nothing to do with anything in our life. We're living life in a different direction. We're not overly religious. So what we did is we'd actually observe the Jewish holidays that I was observing my whole life. We'd keep kosher. You know, I kept Pesach. I kept Yom Kippur. You know, some of the big holidays I would keep.

36:55And she'd keep them with me. She'd actually come to the synagogue with me. She would encourage me to give more and more tzedakah. And that's it. It was never really an issue. But the problem started in 2006, when we got married. We got married civilly. We never had a big celebration or a big party, even though we had all the money in the world. We knew that both families had a problem with the issue. Obviously, we can't get married in a Jewish wedding because she's not Jewish. And I'm definitely not going into a church. So we're just not going to have a wedding. We're going to have a civil wedding. We're going to go to the court, get married, and live happily ever after. And if we want to go on a honeymoon, we can just do that every week. We don't have to do it once in a lifetime. So that's what we did. We just went to the court, got a couple of friends to come with us. to be witnesses, got married, and that's it. Everything just stayed as is. And, um, she was never, she was interested in helping me. She was interested in, you know, helping me build my business. And she, she, we started a new business together and, uh, she took, she helped me take the business to the next level, but she was never really materialistic. She was just, you know, we just were business people, very successful, very professional. Um, and, um,

38:20We did whatever we could to help everyone around us. And that's why I said, you know, as far as having money, I was never really into buying stuff. I was really more into, you know, making it because most of the money that I had that wasn't invested in the business was given to other people to help them, help them with their business, help them pay the rent, help them with whatever tzedakah they had. I liked giving it. I guess Hashem created me in an interesting way where I just never really valued money. To me, it's a tool. To me, it's the same thing you look at, let's say, a hammer. I look at money. You're never going to worship a hammer. Even if you think the hammer is the greatest hammer that was ever created, you're still never going to worship it. You're still never going to lose sleep over it. You're never going to think about whether you should lend it to somebody or not. It's a hammer, after all. and it's replaceable. That's the way I've always looked at money. It's replaceable. It's paper. Um, so that helped me. It helped me make it because I wasn't afraid to ask for a lot of money if I was doing a deal with somebody. Right. Um, and at the same token, it also helped me, you know, keep my head, uh, after having it, not start to do drugs and all types, you know, and prostitution and all those stupid things that people do. Um,

39:44And anyway, so I had my, I had the relationship that was the best relationship in the world. She wasn't really materialistic, and I, you know, we both liked building something special and tried to help a lot of people, and everything was going great. So then after the surgery, I was, you know, pretty much certain that she was going to leave because if I were her, I would have left. I mean, there was no reason in the world for you to stay with someone who's constantly sick, in pain, 24 hours a day, screaming, yelling, cursing the day he was born. Um, pretty much, I would ask her to kill me on a day-to-day basis, literally. Uh, and, uh, obviously she didn't listen. And, uh, and, uh, honestly, I never understood why she stuck around until later on, but I'd say at that point, I just didn't understand it. I didn't get it. I told her, listen, you're still, you're a young girl. You've got the world in your hands. I mean, Why? No, I don't want to ruin your life. I mean, I'm going to be like this. I mean, you know, I thought initially I was going to get healthy after a few months. I thought I was going to get healthy. But then after the first surgery, I realized, OK, maybe this is not going to be as easy as I thought because it just got worse. And then a few months later, there was another surgery and a few months later, another surgery, and it just continued becoming worse and worse. Eventually, it just got to a point where after a few years of just...

41:12Nothing, it's just getting worse. My body is getting worse. I got to a point where I said, it's not getting better. You should leave. You should go on with the rest of your life. You should do something else. Don't feel bad, it's okay, I understand. I wouldn't stay with me. And the most amazing thing that anyone's ever told me, or I think anyone's ever said, is that she said, listen, our whole life was literally... Revolved around making me happy, and if making me happy had to be done when I was sick, then so be it. So you have this unusual relationship, and the person that's supposed to pretty much, you know, look for the next door to run out is actually, you know, saying that there's no chance in the world that she's leaving. And it's not even a thought; it's not even an option. And so you don't even know what to do with yourself at that point, right?

42:12man. So now it's like part of you wants to live because you don't want to make them upset. The other part wants to die because you're tired of the pain. After a few years of going through this real-life version of Gehinnom, and seeing over 50 doctors, constantly encountering one failure after another, I got to a point where I said, okay, you know what? I don't want to ruin her life. I thought I was going to commit suicide. And I said, you know, it's not even just that I don't want to live. I don't want to ruin her life, right? Because, again, we're still very young. We've still got a whole life ahead of us. Why ruin it? We're just being surrounded by this sick guy. And so I started thinking about it. I started planning it. I started thinking, what am I going to do? And this, again, I still had a bunch of money. I was losing, but I still had a lot to lose. So it wasn't about money. It was just purely about not wanting to be in pain anymore. Because when you're in pain, nothing means anything. All the material in the world means absolutely nothing. So I had breaks in between. For a couple of months, I would feel somewhat okay. I would only have to take maybe five or ten painkillers a day and have a decent life.

43:37versus other times when I would have to be in and out of hospitals. So I would have breaks, and during those breaks, we'd have as much fun as possible. We'd go to the casino, go on some vacation, or just hang out and watch movies. So we'd have fun during that time. But those were small increments of time that made life worth it. But when it got bad, it got really, really bad. So during those times, I started thinking about, okay, this has to end. And one of the things that the sages teach us is that Hashem is not going to give you a test that you can't pass. Meaning everything that you're dealing with now, yesterday, tomorrow, whenever, it means that Hashem knows you can pass this test. However difficult it is, However impossible it seems, you can pass it. There's a reason you got it, and the reason why you got it is because you can pass it. Somebody else may not be able to pass it. But you, Hashem created you in a way that you can pass that test. And as soon as it gets to a point where you can't pass that test, He says, if you look for Me, you'll find Me. And it's in chapter 4 of the book of Deuteronomy.

44:59It talks about the end of days, it talks about Am Yisrael sinning and going to false gods, which if you look through Torah codes, you see that the false gods that it's referring to are Christianity and Islam. But either way, one of the things it says in verse 29 in chapter 4 is that from there you will seek Hashem, your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all of your heart and all of your soul. And this is specific promise from Hashem, where if you look for Him, you'll find Him. But He doesn't say if you just look for Him like you know, you look for keys. If you look for Him with all of your heart and all of your soul, you'll find Him. You have to exert an extraordinary amount of effort. You have to be willing to face the inconvenient truth. You have to do things that you don't feel like doing, that you don't want to do. You have to make yourself uncomfortable. Like anything in life, if you want to succeed in anything in life, you have to be willing to become uncomfortable. And this is one of the things that most people don't want to do, especially today. The reason why many people stay average is because they're not willing to do something that is going to make them uncomfortable.

46:15They're not willing to take a certain risk financially. They're not willing to take a certain risk relationship-wise. They're not willing to take a certain risk with, let's say, their beliefs and faith, and so on. People like to be comfortable. Yeah, right. And in America, it's even more so, which is the reason why America doesn't really manufacture anything anymore. We are just the number one producer of convenience. We're a servicing business. as a people, that's what Americans do. We provide convenience. So they provide you a convenient way to socialize with people across the world. So they created Facebook and Twitter and all the social networks. We provide services in America to make life convenient because it fits the mentality that we have. So when you tell somebody, "Listen, in order for you to get to the answer," you're going to have to pretty much admit that everything you know could very well be false. Your whole life is a lie. And that's where I got to. And so, as we're kind of running out of time, I wanted to kind of close up. Now that we're kind of at that point, just give us a quick summary of how you and your wife finally came to terms spiritually and how heavy of a struggle it was for you.

47:39So at that point, we had to start realizing, okay, so obviously God, the same God we both believe in, is not happy. So through a series of different miracles, I was introduced to my cousin, who ended up being my rabbi, Rabbi Ephraim Kachlon, and then later on to Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi. And also along the way, I also started studying the work of Rabbi Tovia Singer and Rabbi Zamir Cohen. And the reason why all of these different rabbis came along is because we both started trying to figure out, okay, what does God actually want here? But aside from that, I started realizing that the situation that we're in is not good. She's Christian. I'm a Jew. Something's not good. Something doesn't work because I wanted to have kids at some point. What do we raise them as? A Jew, a Christian. How? How? And so, in essence, what I ended up doing is that I ended up becoming a little bit obsessed with discovering the truth. But my goal was actually to see whether the Torah was real or not, first of all. After that, after figuring out that it's 100% real, I always thought that the New Testament was real. I just thought it was second best. There were some mistakes, and I just thought it was second best. I never thought it was outright fake.

49:04i never thought it was man-made, fake, falsehood. i never thought any of that. i just thought it was, like, second best for the rest of the world maybe, not for Jews. so then i started saying, okay, listen, so can she convert? why would she convert? because she believes, like, i'm not going to make her convert into something i'm not keeping myself. so then i started studying it. and the first rabbi i actually came across was Rabbi Tovia Singer. and i started realizing that there's something wrong with it. Now, I tried introducing Rabbi Tovia Singer's videos to her, but she said he spoke too fast. So I said, okay. All right. So let's try somebody else. That's funny. So then I saw the debate by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi. And after I saw that debate first by myself, that's when I officially realized that it's not a problem. It's fake. Like the whole thing, the whole New Testament is outright fake. It's just a man-made story. And there's a million and a half things wrong with it that I already heard from Rabbi Tovia Singer, but for whatever reason or another, the debate by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi put the nail in the coffin, where it pretty much made me realize that now it's not a situation of whether she wants to convert or not. It's not a situation of whether she believes or not. It's a situation where right now I'm trying to save her soul. I no longer care about getting married or religion or anything. Now, I just want to save the love of my life from...

50:30practicing idol worship for the rest of her life and being doomed. So nothing mattered at that point. Even my own sickness didn't matter anymore. I started pretty much nonstop studying and trying to provide different proofs of how it's fake. And I tried having her watch the debate, which was, you know, an interesting story of its own. Long story short, for months and months, I would pray and study. And we both got to a point of studying, and praying to see what the truth is. And eventually, she saw—she actually, on her own, it had nothing to do with me—started finding things that I never even looked for that proved the New Testament wrong and the Torah right. And eventually, she just told me, "Listen, it's fake." I said, "Yes, I know it's fake." She goes, "No, why didn't you tell me it's fake?" I said, "I know, I've been telling you it's fake for a while." She goes, "No, but it's really, like," she started, like, hysterically crying. "Like, this is, like, I lived a lie. Like, I don't have anything now. What do I do? Maybe, you know, she didn't even know that she could convert. She goes, "Maybe I'm not allowed to convert." So, again, having Rabbi Ephraim Kachlon along the way helped us a lot. But long story short is that she eventually ended up going to an Orthodox beit din, converting. We ended up making sure that everything stayed 100% kosher. We actually had

51:55a chuppah that same day. So we're not living together as Jews, you know, even, you know, unmarried for even a day. So we made sure the same day of the conversion is the same day of the chuppah, of the actual wedding. And that was, you know, the biggest, the greatest day of my life. Wow. And, I mean, obviously, the story continues after. There's a lot of different details to it. But I think the biggest thing that I've learned personally from the story that I think that all of the listeners, whether they're Jews or they're Noahides or they're Christians with some doubts, or even they're full-blown Christians trying to recruit Jews, God forbid. The reality of it is that anyone who is looking for the truth... Really the truth, the real truth, not like the truth, the convenient truth. The real truth, Hashem said, you'll find it. You'll find it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but if you look for it really, really hard, you will find it. Which means that as long as you have doubts, which everyone has until they find Hashem, like the real version of Hashem, as long as you have doubts, that means you haven't looked hard enough.

53:18So, and once we got married and we found Hashem, I little by little spent more and more time learning Torah, less and less work. Eventually, I got to a point where I stopped working and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to teaching everyone and anyone that would be willing to listen. Even though it's primarily focused on Jews, I have, Baruch Hashem, many, many non-Jews that I teach either as Noahides or to help them convert and, in so many words, get people to the truth, get them to the starting point. Because the truth is just a starting point; it's not the finish line. Once you get to the truth, that's when you can actually start living. Now, that means that you could start potentially living at 60 years old, but at least you're starting, right? And so, as it stands now, you seem to be perfectly healthy and Yeah, that's the amazing thing. Baruch Hashem is that without any doctor's help from this world, only from the Doctor, the one and only Doctor above, the closer I got to Hashem, the better my body became. I started healing naturally without any medicine, without anything, without exercise, without nothing. Just miracle after miracle.

54:44I just got healthier. I still have some issues here and there. But if you compare the old days to today, I mean, I'd say I'm 99% better. You really can't compare the two. In the old days, I wouldn't have been able to have a conversation with you for this long without, you know, screaming a few times in pain. Oh, man. Thank you. So, it's been one miracle after another. This is why I'm so passionate about what I do—because not only do I see how it affected my marriage, my personal life. But I know that even though Hashem doesn't make miracles like He did for us at Mount Sinai in the open, miracles are very much alive and well. It's just personalized miracles for the people who have the merit to see a miracle. For whatever reason, I had the merit. Hashem has given me the miracle on a day-to-day basis. I think it's awesome that your story, including this physical miracle of healing, as bad as you had it, the closer you got to Torah and to Hashem and the truth of there being one God, your body started aligning on its own. And the same thing happened to me. There was something that I... There was this rash that I had on my bottom for years. I mean, like...

56:00Wow. Seven, eight years. My wife and I researched different types of cream and all these other ointments and stuff. And finally, I gave up. And I just thought, you know what? That's it. I was still a Christian in the Messianic field there. And eventually, I just gave up on it completely. And then here we are on our journey out of the New Testament. And then all of a sudden, I'm just looking down like, where did it go? It was there. It was there for years. And it wasn't until I started drawing closer to Hashem through Torah and Torah only, or Tanach only, that that's when my body itself started curing itself through Hashem's power. So I think it's amazing. Yeah, I mean, listen, Hashem is amazing if you just let Him in and no one else. That's why it's the first commandment. Right. Just let Him in. Forget everyone else. That's actually the reason why He never told us where He buried Moshe, because He knew we'd idolize Moshe. Oh, my. You know, I mean, He knew we'd idolize him. I mean, he's the only one that ever spoke to Hashem face to face and spoke to Him like you and I are speaking.

57:01Right. Even closer. That's why He never told us where He buried him, because He knew we'd ruin it. We'd ruin the history of Moshe. We'd ruin everything. So He said, listen, just make sure if it's the best of the best, the prophet of all prophets, I don't want you to idolize him or even have him as a middleman between you and I. Obviously, I don't want you to have anybody else. Not a rabbi, not Jesus, not Muhammad, not anyone. No one. Only you and I. That's all I want. And that's also the reason why each one of us is obligated to get that truth to people because people are constantly ruining it. They're ruining the first commandment. relationship you're supposed to have with Hashem. It's a personal relationship. He told you, "Hey, you do this, you'll have eternity. You'll have the greatest of great, you'll have amazing, amazing things—maybe even in both worlds—but you'll definitely have eternity. But if you get anyone in between... that's the worst. That's why it's the first commandment. Don't get—I don't want your friends, I don't want some prophet, I don't want anyone, I don't want anything between us. It's just, "I'm your Creator, you're my child." That's it. That's all I want. And that's, again, it's what you do is something that, again, I've always admired simply because what you're doing is, you're fighting for the Book of Wars. Hashem, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 21, Verse 14, calls the Torah the Book of Wars. And

58:25The wars of Hashem. What do you mean by the wars of Hashem? Wars of Hashem means that Hashem is constantly fighting for the truth, to publicize His own truth. And we, as people, keep ruining it by throwing other things into it, whether it be money, modesty, other religions, or other distractions. Don't ruin it. It's the beginning. Just let it be. And once you let it be, once you just let Hashem run the show... and just start doing what He wants, everything changes. Everything changes. Even the problems, they don't necessarily just go away all the time, but even the problems, you start understanding why it's not really a problem, but rather it's a step to the next big thing. There's a benefit out of the problem. There's something good that's going to come out of it. Everything is for the good. And that's what we learned from Rabbi Akiva, from our sages, that everything is for the good. That's what it means. It means that it's not that Hashem is just going to make your life problemless. You have to have problems in order to achieve anything in life. You have to go up the ladder in order to get to the top. And that ladder is not easy. It gets harder and harder. But when you understand that there is a purpose for this problem, it's no longer viewed as a problem. It's viewed as one step closer to the Creator. It's one step closer to Hashem. So if we put something else in between us, we're ruining it. Right, right. Indeed. Be'ezrat Hashem is the website for Rabbi Yaron Reuven.

59:49It's viewed as one step closer to the Creator. It's one step closer to Hashem. So if we put something else in between us, we're ruining it. Right, right. Indeed. BeEzrat Hashem is the website for Rabbi Yaron Reuven. It's on your screen, B-E-E-Z-R-A-T-H-A-S-H-E-M. I just did that all together because that's how it's spelled. Anyway, so you also have a Facebook page. I'll put that up on the screen too. You'll find it the same way, and that is just simply type in, I don't know if it's like I've got it on here, facebook.com forward slash BeEzrat Hashem, but really you can just search BeEzrat Hashem on the Facebook search bar, and you'll be able to find it that way. So either way, you can find them there. So I think Rabbi and I are going to plan on doing a few projects here in the upcoming weeks. Definitely a Torah parsha from time to time, maybe once every few months. And then maybe something else a little special going on here and there. So I really hope you guys enjoyed it. And Rabbi, I really am thankful for you for coming on the show. It's been a real pleasure for me, and it's been a long time waiting. I can't wait to get you here once again.

1:01:05It'll be good for us. Everything is in God's hands. He's going to help us. That's what that means. With God's help. That's wonderful. I love learning new stuff. Thank you so much, Rabbi. Thank you all for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time. Shalom.