Getting Rid of Anger @ Young Israel (Los Angeles)

0:14It's extraordinary to be here at Young Israel here in Los Angeles. Thank you very much for having me. It's nice to see some familiar faces and some new faces. I was asked to speak about a few topics, one of them being my personal story, but since I'm kind of bored of my own story because I lived it, I'll tell you some other stuff too. But also some other things, some things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. believe that, you know, most of my life I was in the secular world, and I suffered the same dilemma that most people suffer today in the Jewish world, which is that unless you've delved into Torah really seriously, it's very easy to think that the Torah is not relevant to our life today. I'll give you an example so, and this is again, this is not necessarily just from the secular world; this is also from the religious world. You see a lot of people that are just confused today, simply confused. Some of them are confused and secular; they call themselves atheists, they call themselves masorati, they call themselves whatever they want to call themselves. Sometimes they go so far as to the extent of being part of the thousand people a week that convert to Christianity, Hashem.

1:33This is only in Israel. I'm talking about this not including the US, which has much worse numbers, or they go to the extent of intermarrying, going and marrying into a different religion and not realizing the consequence that it carries. Because again, if no one tells you, how are you gonna know? If no one told you how to do your job, how would you learn it? If no one told you anything, how would you learn it? Trial and error is usually the system we use in our day-to-day life, but in Judaism and in life, the error is very, very costly. So you could do trial and error, like I did, but the error is very costly. It's very, very expensive. Because sometimes you find out the error when you're already 60, 70, 80, or you've already invested an enormous amount of time, effort, money, and so on into it that by the time you realize you've made an error, it's so difficult, almost impossible to undo it. My job has been, since I left Wall Street and decided to spend, b'ezrat Hashem, the rest of my life in this world at least trying to get Am Yisrael back to Hashem, to tell people what apparently some other people don't want to do or no one did. It doesn't really make a difference. The goal is to save people from having the same dilemma that I did because my dilemma was very, very expensive—not just in money, but in life and in pain. So...

3:00The Jewish world today, chavot, chavot, have a seat right here. The Jewish world today is very confused, and this is not just coming from the secular world where you see a person doesn't know if God exists, and you could prove to him that God exists scientifically whether it's through pesukim in the Torah or scientific knowledge. Different things in the Torah are just truly extraordinary. For example, you could see we have a three-part movie series that, Baruch Hashem, one of your amazing members, Albert, helped us produce, ashercha v'ashercha kecha. It's a Torah in science and ancient wisdom showing how you could literally prove God in this Torah scientifically. This has been a very, very successful movie series, very similar to the one that Rav Mizrachi has done over the years, but just with some other new things. helped us produce, ashrecha v'ashrecha chelkecha. It's a Torah in science and ancient wisdom showing how you could literally prove God in this Torah scientifically. This has been a very, very successful movie series, very similar to the one that Rav Mizrachi has done over the years, but just with some other new things. that perhaps weren't mentioned there or were mentioned in a different way. The point being is that you can prove God scientifically. You can prove the Torah scientifically. It's not just rationally. It's not just logically. You can prove it scientifically. For some people, this works; for some people, it doesn't. For some people, it's just not enough. And those people are not always secular; those people are sometimes very religious. Sometimes they wear a kippah, sometimes they have a beard longer than mine, and

4:30A beard is free, by the way. Even the goat has it. But the reality, you know, a beard doesn't make you religious. That's why Hashem gave it to the goats. So, the reality is that sometimes they have a beard, sometimes they have a hat, sometimes they look more religious than anybody in this room. But sometimes they don't have an ounce of emunah. Emunah is something you only carry through a combination of learning from sefarim, as well as experience. And by experience, I mean hard experience. Not the experience of going to the park and enjoying yourself. Looking at the way you know the sun and the wind and your kids run—no, that's not experience. Experience means life experience, difficulty, nightmare—whatever you want to call it. The reality is that's experience. When someone asks you, "Do you have experience?" they're not really asking if you worked for A&E for the last 20 years or if you worked for Discovery Channel, or if you worked for Pfizer or Coca-Cola. They're asking if you have gone through hell and back, and can you know what to do by now? If you do, we want to hire you.

5:36If you don't, we need somebody else that's cheaper, and we'll teach him. So this experience is costly, but it's valuable. But sometimes people don't want to learn. So, for example, I'll give you a life story, a real story that happened to me this Shabbat. After we left Beit Knesset, I'm staying at my brother's house, and outside of the Beit Knesset, I was waiting for my brother to come out. He was talking to a few people, and a religious guy came up to me and said, "Oh, I'm sorry I haven't been able to come to the lectures this past week. I had a lecture every day, but I wasn't able to come. I'm sorry," and so on and so forth. "By the way, is the blue light on? On the microphone." "It is, yeah." The microphone's on? That would be terrible to have the whole lecture with no sound. That's happened to me a few times. So he asked me, he's like, "Yo, I'm sorry I missed the lecture. I really wanted to talk to you. I really want to talk to you." I said, "Sure, well, what about?" He goes, "Well, you know, it's kind of like business-related, so it's kind of Shabbat, but you know what? Shabbat Kodesh! Shabbat Kodesh!" This is what he tells me. After Shabbat, we'll talk about it. So I'm thinking he's gonna ask me about some halacha: are you allowed to do this, are you allowed to do that? I don't know, something. He's telling me it's Shabbat, and he knows he's religious. He knows you're not supposed to talk business on Shabbat.

6:54So, so far we're on the same page. He says, "And by the way, the stock market. I'm thinking about investing in the stock market, and since you have experience in the stock market, I don't know who to trust because everybody says the same disclosure: 'Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.'" And he starts talking about the stock market. This is one hundred percent business on Shabbat from a religious guy. Now, I could do two things. I could tell him, "No business on Shabbat," and... But that's not really going to help him. Why is it not going to help him? Because he already knows no business on Shabbat. He's religious. He's got a beard. He's got a hat. He's got everything. The goat was already jealous of the beard. But he knows. But he says for Shabbat Kodesh, we're going to talk business for Shabbat Kodesh. Meaning we're so confused. We don't even know what Shabbat is. So the second option was the following. I asked him, well actually, I first told him, You know, there's a story about the Chafetz Chaim. The Chafetz Chaim, alav hashalom, was kodesh kodeshim. And someone came to him with the same exact question. And he said to him, "Kvoda Rav, I'm looking to make more parnassah, so I'm going to start a new business. What do you think?" He says, "Okay, so you want to make more parnassah, okay. So why do you want to start a new business?" So he repeats the same thing. He says, "No, Kvoda Rav, I want to make more money, so I'm starting a new business. What do you think?" He says, "Okay, fine, so you want to make more money. So why are you starting a new business?"

8:22He says, "No, no, you don't understand. The business is to make more money, so that's why I'm starting the business." He says, "I don't understand. Why do you think you're going to make more money if you start a new business?" What is it like? It's like somebody that has a barrel of wine, and he says, "I want to make more money." So he just makes a second opening to the same barrel. At the end of the month, how much does he have? The same exact thing; it just has two openings. So he thinks foolishly, "You know what? The second opening is not working. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have a third opening." At the end of the month, what happens? The same exact one. He says, the vessel remains the same. What makes you think that another business, another real estate investment, another anything, is going to make you more money? It's coming from the same place. He says, don't you have to do hishtadlut? He says, yes, but what makes you think that opening another business is that hishtadlut? So the guy says to me, looks at me, you know, and he's confused a little bit. He says, yeah, these are really nice stories, but in today's age, it's very difficult to believe them.

9:22i said to him, "Well, since the easy way didn't work, I have to go a little harder. I have to step it up a little bit." So I said, "Well, listen, you know, the thing is, though, you're right; it's very hard to believe them. But just to let you know, if you don't believe such stories, you're considered 100% a heretic. You're considered 100%. Why? You think you're making the money? That's a problem. If you think you're doing anything in this world and it's not Hashem, that's a problem." That's a serious problem. Because it says in the Gemara, Masechet Rosh Hashanah, page 16b, and Masechet Beitzah, 16a, that Hashem decides what kind of parnassah and how much you're gonna get on Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah, you go to the Beit Knesset, everybody says, Well, sorry, we messed up. Hashem, give me parnassah. Hashem decides, okay, Steve is gonna get a million bucks. David's gonna get a hundred thousand. Whoever is going to be... Yeah, Steve's good. You know, Wilbur is going to get negative a million. And so... So the point is, He decides how much everybody is going to get. He decides. But the Baal Shem Tov said, "I don't understand."

10:35Hashem decides on Rosh Hashanah how much I'm gonna get. Why does the Mishnah, which came before the Gemara, say that He also checks every day? If He already checked on Rosh Hashanah and decided on Rosh Hashanah, why is He checking and deciding every day also? So one day, a guy that was selling water... Passed by the Baal Shem Tov and Baal Shem Tov, Shalom Aleichem, how are you? He said, oh, Baruch Hashem, Kvoda Rav, very good, I have a job, 20 years I'm carrying water, making parnasah, everything is good, everything is good, thank you, Baruch Hashem. The next day he sees the same exact guy, nothing changed, the weather is the same, he says, how are you? He says, ah, Shalom Aleichem, what kind of job I have, it's so hard, 20 years I'm carrying this heavy water, it's so difficult, I don't understand why Hashem did this to me. But Hashem says to him, "Wow, you just gave me a chiddush. You gave me an insight. Me? I give you? I'm carrying water for 20 years. What insight do I have?" He says, "For 20 years, I'm trying to figure out if Hashem already decided on Rosh Hashanah how much I'm going to get, why does the Mishnah say He decides every day? If He already decided on Rosh Hashanah, what is He deciding every day? So on Rosh Hashanah, He decides how much I'm going to get. Every day, He decides how I'm going to get it."

11:51i'm gonna get it from my job. I'm gonna get it from an accident. One guy was decided in Rosh Hashanah. So now you're gonna make a million dollars, but his salary was only a hundred thousand. Why? A bus hit him so he got the other nine hundred thousand. What kind of parnasah is that? Parnasah that you want? No logical person wants that kind of parnasah. He says, "Don't thank you for the million dollars. I'd rather have the hundred thousand." Be very happy and Be very happy, no accident or nothing. But believe it or not, there was one guy I knew, this guy Danny Spiegel that I knew from years ago. Somebody asked such a question, he goes, oh, this guy's such a lucky guy, he got hit by a truck and he got $15 million. He actually said this, and I was looking, I was like, this is maybe 20 years ago almost. I'm looking at this guy, something's wrong with him. He doesn't realize that the bus and the train and stuff, when they hit you, it hurts. He doesn't realize; he's just thinking about the bank account. He doesn't realize; he doesn't see with his eyes. But that's sometimes us. Sometimes that's us. Sometimes we have no idea what's right, what's left, and we make ridiculous mistakes. We go against the hand that feeds us, Hashem.

13:00teaches us things on a day-to-day basis. For example, one of the best Mussar books that you could ever read is your Siddur. Siddur. Simple Siddur. Now, somebody looks at you and says, Siddur, Mussar, what are you talking about? Just pray. That's the point. On Yeshiva, you have Tefillat Shemoneh Esrei three times a day. Three times a day you're supposed to do Tefillat Shemoneh Esrei, also known as the Amidah. And in the Amidah, you're supposed to say Modim Anachnu Lach. The Modim. You know, in the Amidah you say Modim. Everybody knows Modim. Why? We go over it twice. The chazan says, you forgot to do it or something happened. There's Rabbanan. We have to do it again. When he goes over the Shatz, he goes over the whole tefillah. You say Modim Anachnu Lach. You do it again. But Pachad Yitzchak says we're making a mistake here. Why are we making a mistake? We think that we're saying "thank you" to Hashem twice because it says "Modim Anachnu Lach," which means "we thank You," and then later on it says "nodeh," which also means "we thank." So "nodeh" and "modim" are technically the same word. But Pachad Yitzchak says no.

14:10means also "I acknowledge." means "I think." First, you need to know where it's coming from. Acknowledge the hand that feeds you. Then say thank you. You can't say thank you if you don't know where it came from. If you're just saying thank you blindly, it's worthless. Somebody left you a present. Say, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. Your wife is saying, whoop, thank you. I did it. What are you thanking her for? Thank you. I gave you the food. What are you thanking? Were you just thanking the walls? I'm the one that slaved all day for the food. What are you thanking? The walls? The parrot? Who are you thanking? Me, right? Say thank you to me. I beat you to it. Say thank you the right way. Who are you thanking? Who are you thanking? Your friend? Acknowledge where it came from. Acknowledge where it came from. Then say thank you. If you don't know where it came from, your thank you is worthless. Hashem says this is in your tefillah three times a day. If you don't know where it came from, your tefillah is worthless. If you don't know where your parnassah is coming from, everything is upside down. So first things first, Hashem says start your day with thanking Hashem. Thank you, Hashem.

15:29For bringing back my neshama and having emunah in me, to give me another chance. You had mercy to have emunah in me. Hashem has emunah in me. Hashem has emunah in you. What do you mean Hashem has emunah in me? You're supposed to have emunah in Him. What we don't know is that Gemara Masechet Berachot says that every night when we go to sleep, our neshama goes to shamayim. There's a small part of the neshama that stays here, and a large part of the neshama goes up there. That's why sleep is considered 1/60th of death. So the neshama goes up to Shamayim and says, "Hashem, this guy, he's a rasha. Look, he stole from this one. He spoke lashon hara about this one. He looked at this girl. He looked at that. He tells on you, tells on you all the things you did. So Hashem, look what this guy did. I don't want to go back. Before you put me in his body, I was a tzaddik. I was kosher." put me in his body. This guy, Hashem, look what this guy is. Don't put me back. I don't want to go back. Hashem says, "I have emunah in him that today he's going to do...

16:33Hashem, yesterday You said the same thing, and it didn't work. He says, "I command you to go back. I have emunah that today he or she is going to do teshuva today," and He forces the neshamah to go back. Why? Today is going to be the day. Today you're going to do teshuva. So that's why you say every day, "Thank you, Hashem, for having emunah in me." Why emunah? Today I'm going to do teshuva. Today I'm going to actually go to the Beit Knesset. Today I'm going to give tzedakah. Today I'm going to keep Shabbat. Today I'm going to do whatever I didn't do yesterday. Sometimes you wake up on Tisha B'Av, you ever wake up like that, in a bad mood? Nothing happened yet, but you're already angry at your wife. She didn't do anything. She's still sleeping, but you're angry at her. Nothing happened. Or sometimes she woke up. She's looking at you. She's thinking, "Oh man, I married this guy 30 years ago." What, 30 years ago you married him; now you're upset? She's upset already. Nothing happened though. Why are you upset? Why so upset? I... Because the neshama heard some bad news. Why? It says, look, Hashem, look what he did, look what she did. She wore a miniskirt, she wore a tank top yesterday, Hashem. Hashem says, yeah, you're right. It's all the same thing. It says, Hashem, it's time to punish. Hashem says, what she did yesterday, what he did yesterday,

17:49Gotta do something about it. It gives the neshama bad news. The neshama knows the bad news; the body doesn't. That's why the neshama wakes up. The neshama wakes up with a bad mood. Why? It knows today is going to be a bad day. Today is going to be a bad day. Why? I heard today there's going to be a flat tire, there's going to be this, going to lose some money—all the different things. Today is going to be a bad day. So what does a smart person do? A smart person knows: I woke up with a bad mood. It's time to do teshuva. Why? So tomorrow is not the same thing. So tomorrow is not the same thing. What does a fool do? He starts breaking stuff, making today even worse than yesterday. So what does that guarantee? Tomorrow is going to be worse. Not knowing any of what I just said to you most of my life, every day was a bad day. Regardless of how much money we made, regardless of what we did, it didn't make a difference. Every single day I'd wake up, and instead of cursing. Why? I always thought I was late to something, even though I was the boss.

18:49Even though I was the boss, I made the times, I made the hours, I told everybody what to do. I always thought I was late, so the first word out of my mouth, I'm not joking or even exaggerating, the first word out of my mouth would be a curse. Oh, why? I'm late. To what? It's five o'clock in the morning. I don't know, to something. Why? This guy is getting bad news today. So the problem is that when you don't know, you don't know how to fix it. Now, we came to the US when I was 10 years old. I was born in Netanya. And in the US, what we didn't realize is that we are in a generation of yetomim, of orphans. It's very hard to find real leaders. It's very hard to find the real truth in the world. It's very hard to even find real friends. So a real friend is not a friend that is there to borrow money from you. A real friend is not there to come to your parties. A real friend is the one that tells you, "Hey, by the way, you're going in the wrong direction." That's a real friend. A real friend is going to tell you when the train is coming to hit you, "Hey, move out of the way, buddy." That's a real friend. A real friend is going to tell you some tough things sometimes, but it's true. It's tough to find real friends. Why? Because everybody has a bias. Everybody wants something. They're friends with you when everything is good, but they disappear like smoke when everything is bad. That's just the reality in the world today.

20:12Sometimes they want money. Sometimes they want your girlfriend. Sometimes they want your wife or something else. Sometimes they want your job, but they befriend you first. "Oh, I didn't mean to take the CEO job. Oh, you wanted it? What do you mean? I was the CEO for 20 years. Of course, I wanted it. Oh, I didn't mean to. Okay, well, can you give it back? No, and now I have it." See, that's the thing. It's that people pretend like they're your friends, but the reality is there's always a bias. It's hard to find a real friend. An old smart man told me one time, he's like, "Listen, at my age, if you have one friend your entire life, you're a very lucky guy." At that time, I had maybe 20 or 30 friends. I'm like, "Wow, 20 or 30? Live and learn." I thought he was joking. Then I realized, "Wow, he knows what he's talking about." So, when I was young, I had friends like everybody else. I was in school like everybody else, had some jobs when I was in high school, and... I was a good student in school, but I got introduced to making money very, very young. I already had my first job when I was 10, working in a flea market. Then, by the time I was a teenager, I worked in a flea market on newspaper routes and also worked in a couple of stores selling shoes, selling clothes, all types of things. By the time I was 17, I was already a very good salesman. I was already making $100,000 a year selling computers and electronics and...

21:29Realized that, you know, I wanted to do more, but in order to do more, maybe I have to go to school. So I tried continuing this education stuff, and I went to a very good school called Binghamton University. I had nearly a perfect GPA, but at the end of the year, I decided that I didn't want to go back. The majority of the people that were there didn't have a clue of what they wanted. All they wanted to do was party all day, and even though I enjoyed my share of partying, it still wasn't necessarily my life. i realized that staying in school is just a complete waste of time for me because I just want to make money. I didn't want to be a doctor. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I just want to make money. How do you make money? You could do it through one of those professions, or you could do something else. So I figured I already know how to be a salesman, so let me do something else. So I got into Wall Street. Now, the first three years of working, I just paid my dues, meaning my bosses made a fortune, and I made nothing. And I'd make a couple hundred dollars a week. They made a couple hundred thousand. Good deal. After three years of doing this, I finally became independent within a company called Raymond James. This big firm had about 5,000 brokers at the time. The first so-called partner, boss, or whatever you want to call him, after he

22:49some shady business with me and stole some stuff from me. The owner of the branch told me, "Listen, you can go on your own. You could be independent, but just make sure that the $4,000 a month in bills that I'm due comes on time." So he asked me, "How are you going to get this money to me? Do you have any money?" I said, "No, I already spent it. I don't have any more money from the old days when I actually made money." "So how are you going to pay?" I said, "I have no idea." But I'm not going to go to another firm and start this whole game again. So I'll figure out how to get you the money. He's like, all right, so what's your intention here? At this point, I'm 21 years old. I have long hair, like a ponytail. And he's been in the business for 20 years with short hair and professional. And I tell him to buy you out. That's my intention here. So he found it very amusing. I was actually very serious, but... Neither one of us knew what was going to happen. He found it amusing enough to give me a chance. As long as his money was paid, every month whatever money I got went to him for the first six months. It was very difficult because pretty much every penny I made went to him. So every day I would have to borrow a dollar from this guy, Dimitri, so I could buy coffee and a doughnut. That was my food for the day. After six months, I finally made a thousand dollars for myself, which was like a million dollars, and

24:10Then you fast-forward to the next month; I made another five thousand, the next month I made seven thousand, and fifteen thousand. In November of 2002, about a year after I started, I made one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars in one month, which was a new record for the office. Life changed forever at that moment because, at that point, not only had I made money, I made money for a good reason—my clients made money in a terrible market. The market went down twenty-six percent; we actually made seventy percent. It was a pretty good deal, so they started telling me about all their friends and... So at that point, money started pouring in. $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 a month. By August of 2003, a year later, I became the number three producing broker in the entire country for that company, Raymond James, out of 5,000 people. The rest of the top 20 list were people that had been in it for years—20 years, 25 years, 30 years. Like, who's this new guy? One day, the CEO of Raymond James calls my office and talks to the supervisor, the compliance supervisor. The compliance supervisor let me hear the call after the fact. I don't think he was supposed to, but such is life.

25:24Supervisor asked. I only listened for about 30 seconds of it because I lost interest, and the reason why is because the CEO of the company asked, "Who is this guy?" And he's like, "This young kid works hard. He's here at 6 o'clock in the morning. He leaves at 1 o'clock in the morning. He's pretty much here all the time. He sleeps here practically. It's a kid, but how is he making money in a bad market when the rest of our experts are losing?" He works hard, does research, does this, does that. He goes, "No, no, really? How is he making money? Does he have insider information? Meeting him, there's no way that this young kid is doing something that the experts, the best of the best, are not able to do. It's not acceptable. We're spending a billion dollars a year on research, and this kid's doing it for free. How could it be?" So, at that moment, I realized that I have to make a decision. I'm either going to stay there forever and play by their rules, pretty much use their research and their tools and their everything and pretty much be like a lot of little sheep in the mix of things, or I start my own thing. And that's what I did. I started my own firm. I started hiring people. Money continued pouring in, baruch Hashem. And that was life. Life was based on money. Now, money itself never really mattered to me. To me, it was always paper.

26:43For some reason or another, Hashem didn't make me with an inclination to care about money. Not when I was a kid, not when I was older, not today. It just never really mattered to me. You needed to eat, to drink, but as far as toys and things like that, I never did any of that. Even though we had a ton of money, we never bought planes or fancy-shmancy cars or anything. The fanciest thing I had was an apartment. But I need to live in it too. Other than that, it was, you know, a stock portfolio. That's it. I like buying stuff that was valuable that I can increase in value. But as far as watches or anything like that, I never spent a single dollar on jewelry, even though I have family in the business. It just never mattered. None of it mattered to me. But I like the chase. I like, you know, the actual aggression of actually winning and the feeling of winning. And that was the case every day. Every day was another day to make a million. Every day was another day to make something. When my friends, or in some cases my employees, would go on vacation and I would work, when they would come back, they would tell me about their story of, "Oh, he met this girl, he met that girl, he met this," and I'm like, "Yeah, I made this money. Yeah, you met some girl and she doesn't know who you are and you spent $5,000 on that and I made $200,000. So, I don't know, do you think it was worth it?"

27:57So that was what mattered. But as life progressed, money became less and less meaningful because then you start looking, "Okay, so then I made money, now what?" We got to a point, "Okay, so we made a dollar, made a million, made two million, made five million." Okay, so now what? You start printing money pretty much, start making so much money you don't know what to do with it. Okay, so you invest in this, you buy this, and you do this. Now what? You start looking for the meaning of life. You start looking for happiness. So, what do you do? Okay, so you find a relationship. I tried a few relationships that didn't work out. But one day, I met an amazing woman who was actually my trader. She worked for a different company in Florida. I was in New York on Wall Street. We struck up a friendship on the phone, but I never knew what she looked like. One day, I was invited to a conference, and I saw what she looked like, and I decided I have to be nicer.

29:03So, we became friends, and then I convinced her to go out on a date with me. We had a long-distance relationship for a little while. Then I decided that, you know what, why don't you move out to New York? She said yes, and we started a firm together, and we started a life together. There was only one problem: she was perfect in every single way, but she wasn't Jewish. Interestingly enough, even though she was brought up Christian, she wanted me to be a religious Jew. She bought me my first Tanakh. She said, "You know, you really should learn this." She knew the book of Proverbs, which in Hebrew is Mishlei, by heart. I said, "You know, you're a Jew; you should really learn this stuff." I And I said, "Ah, later on when I'm older and I'm this and I'm that, I'm more focused on this." He goes, "No, it's really going to answer a lot of the questions you have, a lot of inner battles. You're always angry. You're always upset. So you're making all this stuff, but there's nothing here. Like you're upset, like upset constantly. I suffered from depression for years for no reason. I would just one day wake up and nothing happened."

30:16Just, you know, one day, I made six hundred thousand dollars in a day. It was like the highlight of my career at that moment. And I just went back to work, and one of the people said, "Wait, didn't you just make like a ton of money?" I'm like, "Yeah." "What are you doing, like working?" He's like, "Why?" I said, "What else am I gonna do?" He's like, "Why don't you go and party?" "For what? I have to go to work." It didn't matter to me, all this money. That was just life. Other than that, nothing else interests me because here was the only thing that I was looking to challenge. And to make money requires a challenge. Requires mental capacity. Requires you to make certain trades, make certain sales, get certain things to happen. Going out, having a few drinks had no interest whatsoever. But this, when it comes to just the material world, is not enough. It's not enough. Eventually, it gets old. So my wife told me she should read this Torah and said, "Yeah, one day, one day, one day. It's not really relevant to my life. Moshe Rabbeinu was nice, but he's from 3,000 years ago. I need something more up-to-date." And I know it had so much value. Now, the Rambam says that before the Mashiach comes, there are going to be 15 days of darkness. Whatever we saw in Egypt will be magnified.

31:36In the book of Jeremiah, Hashem Yitbarach says to Am Yisrael that when Mashiach comes, Hashem will no longer be known as the God that took Am Yisrael out of Egypt, but rather the God that took Am Yisrael out of the land of the north and the rest of the world. If you look at today's map, there's only one place in the world that has the word "north" in it: North America. Interestingly enough, North America also has the most Jews in the world outside of Israel because it includes Canada and the United States. And Hashem says in the book of Jeremiah that before Mashiach comes, just like He took us out of Egypt, He's going to take us out of the land of the north and the rest of the world. Meaning that the land of the north has the most Jews logically, as we see today. And the rest of the world is the rest of the world, whether it's France or wherever else, Australia, and so on and so forth.

32:36Before all this happens, there are going to be a lot of problems. There's going to be a war called Gog u'Magog. It's going to be mayhem. First, Esav and Ishmael are going to get into a fistfight, Esav being the Christians and Ishmael being the Arabs, the Muslims. We're seeing some of that starting now. After that... Nevi'im say that both of them are going to realize that all of this fighting is because of one thing—it's called Jerusalem. And this Jerusalem place is under the control of these little people called Jews, whom they both commonly hate anyway. So they decide to stop fighting each other, then they go fight the Jews, and the prophecies get scarier and scarier. And... If I told you all of this two, three, four hundred years ago, all of you would say, "I ask you guys, is he a prophet?" Today, you don't need to be a prophet; you just turn on the news. It's happening. Whether you like it or not, Hashem is not waiting for your business to get a big contract. Hashem is not waiting for you to finish the remodeling on your house. Hashem is not waiting. Time is out.

33:54Rambam says that these 15 days of darkness are five times what we had in Egypt. In Egypt, we had three days of darkness. During those three days of darkness, Hashem killed many of the Egyptians, but unfortunately, many of the Jews too. Eighty percent of the Jews died in the plague of darkness; some say much more. Some say it wasn't one out of five. Bnei Yisrael said that when they left Egypt, 80% died and 20% survived. But Rabbeinu Bahya ben Asher says it was one out of 500,000, meaning that only two people out of every million survived. Two people out of every million! We used to have 300 million members of Bnei Yisrael, and only three million left. he says, meaning it was potentially even worse. Why? Why was there so much bad? Why was it so bad? Why did Hashem kill so many of us? Just leave us there. He says, if you don't want to do teshuva, there's no point. You don't want to fulfill the mitzvot, there's no point. Why? I created the Torah 974 generations before I created the world, meaning the world was created

35:09For the Torah, not for Bnei Yisrael. Bnei Yisrael is to fulfill the Torah. If Bnei Yisrael don't want to fulfill the Torah, I take it back. In the Gemara Masechet Shabbat, we see something peculiar. One of the greatest Baalei Teshuva in all of history. His name is Reish Lakish. Reish Lakish used to be a gangster, head of the gangsters. Reish Lakish says, how come When we see parashat Bereishit, we see every day it says, "It was evening, it was morning, the end of the first day. It was evening, it was morning, the end of the second day. It was evening, it was morning, the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day." But then when we get to Yom HaShishi, to the sixth day, it says That's like he says, this is a superfluous letter. There's a letter. There's a hey, there's an extra hey in this word. What do we need this extra hey for? Why does Hashem use an extra hey? There's an extra letter. We know the Torah has three hundred and four thousand, eight hundred and five letters—a lot of letters. We know not even a single one of them is extra.

36:21Not a single one is extra, not a single sentence, not a single letter. What is this extra letter? We have an extra hei. All the other days, it says Yom Rishon, Yom Sheini, Yom Shlishi, Yom Revi'i, Chamishi. Yom HaShishi, you say it in Kiddush on Shabbat. You say it all the time. If you don't say it, we have to do a different shiur. So what is this Yom HaShishi? Why do we have this extra hei? Yom HaShishi means it's the sixth day. Not sixth day. The sixth day. There's an extra "the." There's an extra word. So Reish Lakish says this is a signature. What's the signature? It's of a deal. A deal made between Hashem Yitbarach and the angel that's in charge of the earth. There's an angel in charge of everything. Angel in charge of the sun, there's an angel in charge of the moon, there's an angel in charge of grass, telling it to grow every day. Is there an angel in charge of every single thing? Yes, it's one of the servants of Hashem. Why does Hashem need help? No, but that's not the way of a king to just do everything himself. So he has servants. That's why he created angels. So, the angel that's in charge of the earth, Hashem says, "Listen, we have a deal. Now that I'm creating everything, we're almost finished with creation, we're creating man, but just so you know it's all for the Torah."

37:40A little while from now, I'm gonna give this Torah to these people called Bnei Yisrael. If they accept it, we're gonna get the Shabbat. We go from Shishi to Shabbat. We're gonna fulfill the mitzvah of Shabbat. If they accept the Torah, they're gonna keep Shabbat. We get the Shabbat, we finish the week, Baruch Hashem, the world continues. If they don't, the Gemara says... Then we're going back to Tohu Vavohu. We're going back to what we were before all this. Why? There's no point. So the Hei, the extra Hei, also has a numerical value of what? Five. What's five? Five books of Moses. If Am Yisrael accepts this Torah, they accept the five books of Moses, we get the Shabbat. If they don't accept it, we're going back to Tohu Vavohu. We're going back to nothingness. Why? The world was created to fulfill the Torah. Now, when a person is on Wall Street and interested in finding frauds on Wall Street, finding deals on Wall Street, finding interesting things to make money out of, you start telling them things about Moshe Rabbeinu, Avraham Avinu, all this stuff. It's like, yeah, it's nice. It's a good story. But how is it relevant to me? And the reason why is because we think that the Torah is an option. It's optional. If you want to keep it, keep it.

39:00If you don't want to keep it, don't. That's what I thought most of my life. I said, okay, so Hashem said don't work. I believed in Hashem, at least my own version of it. He said, don't work on Shabbat. I said, okay, no problem. I'm not going to work. I'll go to the casino instead. It's not work. It's fun for me. No? Mistake. So Hashem said, you know, don't light fire. I'm not lighting fire. I'm only driving a car. Lighting fire on Shabbat. I'm only driving a car. I didn't realize that according to one of my engineering students, he said that when you drive a car, every five minutes you're lighting six thousand fires. You drive a car on Shabbat every few minutes, it's six thousand, not one fire. It's six thousand fires. So when a person thinks they're making a mitzvah by going to be connected with their car, they violated Shabbat probably sixty, seventy, eighty thousand times. They think they do a mitzvah, but they're violating the Ten Commandments. They're violating the entire Torah. There's no mitzvah. There's no commandment to go to shul. There's a commandment to keep Shabbat. It's the fourth commandment. It's the fourth commandment. It says, no, you know, I'm the only God, don't use my name in vain, don't worship idols, keep Shabbat, and then go to shul. No. The next commandment is to respect, to honor your parents. There's no commandment to go to shul. If you can go to shul by walking, ashrecha.

40:17If you can't move, move closer to the shul. But there's no permission in the entire Torah for anyone to drive on Shabbat to go to shul. The only time you have permission is if you go to the hospital because there's a life danger. Then Shabbat is on hold. Shabbat is on hold. Why is Shabbat on hold? Because we want to save his life so he can keep more Shabbatot. Which shows us that it's not that his life is more valuable than Shabbat, but rather that Shabbat is more valuable than his life. So we want to keep him alive so he can keep more Shabbatot. So now, Rabotai, Hashem told us that before Mashiach comes, we're all going to get this wake-up call. Am Yisrael got a wake-up call. Didn't want to teshuvah, Hashem says, "Okay, I made a deal with the malach. I made a deal with everybody. You don't want to teshuvah, you're ruining the whole deal. So I'll just save the ones that want to fulfill the deal; the ones that don't, I don't need you." The Rambam says before Mashiach comes, it's gonna be 15 days of darkness, not three, and...

41:24Because He's closing the store on the entire world, meaning it's not just on the side that He's finishing the accounting with; He's finishing the accounting with everyone. And that's why the Prophet Zechariah says that before Mashiach comes, two-thirds of the world will die. And the way he describes it 3,000 years ago, it's an exact description of an atomic war. Very scary. If somebody does teshuva, they have nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter where you live. You can live here, you can live in Afghanistan, you can live in Israel. If somebody does teshuva, they have zero to worry about. If someone doesn't want to do teshuva, they have everything to worry about. Why? Because they're not on the protected list. So now, before these 15 days of darkness, before this big war, before all this bad news happens, Hashem is going to give each one of us a bunch of chances. So first, He sends you a text message. Then He sends you an email, sends you a WhatsApp, sends you a Facebook friend request. He sends you a letter. He knocks on your door. It's a bunch of different checks.

42:41Many of us ignore these checks. Sometimes it's a flat tire. Sometimes it's a money loss. Sometimes it's a little bit of pain on your side. Different checks. I ignored a lot of these checks. So on November 18th, 2006, I wanted to have elective surgery. It was only a couple of months after I made the most amount of money I made in my career. I made $1.6 million in one month. Technically, it was made in one day. So I took a vacation for a month. I went to Vegas. I thought that life was grand. I played in the World Series of Poker. All these fancy schmancy players, which, by the way, are complete losers. No, in real life, they're good poker players, but in actual real life, they're all degenerates. They all do drugs, they're all, you know, connected to the degenerate life, prostitution, and so on. They look good on TV, though. So anyway, You're in that business. It's part of the business, unfortunately. It's the same thing as being a celebrity. It's part of the business; it comes with it. So now I had a vacation. I made a lot of money. Everything was good. I figured, you know what, I have some spare time, I have some spare money, and let me fix my health a little bit. There was something that was annoying me once in a while. Maybe once or twice a year, I had hemorrhoids like two-thirds of the population.

44:02annoying me enough to say, you know what, let me look into it. So my brother told me about one of these doctors that he knows, this guy in New York, Dr. Lacqua, and I went to go visit Dr. Lacqua. Dr. Lacqua was a very big, professional, successful doctor. He says he does two, three, or four surgeries per day. It's like a factory and He said, "Listen, you have a common problem. Don't worry about it. Two-thirds of the population has it. Pregnant women have it, old people have it, young people have it, kids sometimes have it. Everybody has it. Don't worry about it; it's not a big deal. It's not cancer. It's hemorrhoids. I have a surgery." I said, "Okay, no problem. This is not a big problem. Good, but how much time am I out of work? That's the only thing that matters to me. Why? Every hour that I work is $3,200." To work for one hour, show up to work one hour, average $3,200. Meaning that if I take off a day, 10 hours work is $32,000. You do the math, I take off a week, it's a lot of money. So how much time? He said, listen, you come on Wednesday, you're back to work on Monday. I said, okay, that's worth it. So I came on Wednesday. I thought everything was good. We had the surgery; I went to sleep, like most people go to sleep.

45:18Only difference is when I woke up, I didn't wake up like most people. Most people wake up maybe a little uncomfortable. Maybe they don't feel like waking up. Maybe a little discomfort. Maybe they're still tired. But very rarely does somebody wake up screaming and yelling in pain like somebody took a dagger that's connected to the electric outlet and started cutting up their body over and over again without stopping. That's the way I woke up. massive pains, screaming my lungs out and begging whoever would listen to please kill me and take me out of my misery. Now, this pain just wouldn't stop, so they gave me morphine, and it still wouldn't stop. They gave me more, and it still wouldn't stop. The same God that I've been ignoring for most of my life, or at least treating Him like He was one of my boys, and... Keeping what I felt like keeping, doing what I felt like doing, He said, "Oh, you need Me? Sorry. When I called you, you didn't answer. Why do you think I'll answer you?" If anyone thinks that I'm exaggerating, you actually say this in your parashat shavua every year: parashat Bechukotai and also parashat Ki Tavo. Hashem Yitbarach says to Am Yisrael, "Va'halachtem imi b'keri..."

46:41If you treated Me with casualness, I went with you with double casualness. Meaning, if you treat Me like I'm one of your friends and you casually keep My mitzvot, what you like you keep, what you don't like you don't keep, what you like to eat you eat, if it's allowed or not allowed, you just treat My Torah like it's a newspaper. Then you get two punishments. One punishment is for sin, one punishment is for treating Me like I'm one of your boys, like I'm one of your friends from the bar. called, he didn’t answer. The nightmare of all nightmares came to life for me, at least. After a while of screaming and yelling, they gave me the maximum amount of morphine allowed. They told me that this would kill most people, but it's allowed legally. It finally calmed my body down. I thought that it's finally over. I Now, since this was an elective surgery, there was no planned hospital stay or anything. It's just, again, hemorrhoids. This wasn't supposed to happen. So they thought, ah, it was a little mix-up, a little mess-up, but it's over. He's come. Good. Please get out of here. Go home. I went home. We picked up a shawarma sandwich on the way. Had a nice sandwich. I said to my family, thank you very much for coming. It was a very interesting day.

48:04I didn't know what your genome looks like now. I do, but I'm going to sleep. I thought it was over. I went to sleep. I woke up 45 minutes later with worse screams than I did before. Only this time, it didn't stop for 62 days. Not six hours, but 62 days. 62 days of screaming and yelling and watching my body die. My body started failing. Something happened during a surgery. They did something to one of the nerves. No one knows to this day, over 13 years later, what actually happened. We know now it's a nisayon (test), but nonetheless, physically, we have no idea. All they knew is that my body started failing, and I started dying slowly in a very interesting way. I started urinating blood, my eyes started bleeding, my ears started bleeding, and... was taking about 20 to 30 painkillers, sometimes as many as 50, and then dipping my body into boiling water, the type of water that would hurt if it touched your hand, the type of water that would be like tea. But this would be like a different type of pain, so for me, it was like numbing. And then it would allow me to sleep for 15 minutes, and then I would wake up because all the numbing wore off, and we started all over again.

49:23was taking about 20 to 30 painkillers, sometimes as many as 50, and then dipping my body into boiling water—the type of water that would hurt if it touched your hand, the type of water that would be like tea. But this would be like a different type of pain, so for me, it was like numbing. And then it would allow me to sleep for 15 minutes, and then I would wake up because all the numbing wore off, and we started all over again. When you don't sleep for a long time, you start dying, and that's what was happening. But after two months, Hashem had mercy. Apparently, I called out His name enough times and remembered who my Maker was, so He gave me another chance. Pain started subsiding for no reason whatsoever. I started coming back to myself to some extent and said, "Okay, so maybe you can start going back to work, maybe start going back to life." Still have no idea what just happened, but second chance at life. I go back to work. I'm still in a lot of pain. It's very hard for me to walk, so to go from here to, let's say, for example, the end of the room would take me 15 minutes instead of 15 seconds. And then I went back to my life, went back to using my brain to make money, went back to running my business in pain, but nonetheless still back.

50:47Nine months later, I get a pain in the back of my leg different than any other pain I've ever had. By the next day, I'm in the emergency room, and they told me that I have an infection between two muscles. If I hadn't shown up to the emergency room at that moment, if I had waited maybe another hour or two, the abscess that's in between those two muscles was ready to explode, go into my bloodstream, and probably kill me within an hour. So we have to have an emergency surgery, and you're going to be in the ICU for a while, next to all the people who are dying and got shot and so on. So I was in the ICU for the next three weeks, pressing the morphine button 24 hours a day, and then a second surgery. Back to life, back to work, back to Wall Street, back to painkillers, but back. So it was over. Still no teshuva. Still no Shabbat. Still married to the same amazing woman who wasn't Jewish. I thought I had another chance at life. This was just a, you know, happenstance. It happens. It happens to people. People get into accidents. People's stuff happens. So it happened to me too. You know, everybody says, oh, it's never going to happen to me until it happens to you. I said, okay, so it happened to me. Big deal. I'm still here. Be positive. Be optimistic.

52:09Six months later, another pain, different side, completely unrelated to the first two. Back in the hospital, another emergency surgery, another ICU unit, more pain. Three months later, back in the emergency room, in the ICU unit, another surgery, more painkillers, more pain. And then every month, and then every day. Then I got to a point where I had to be at a hospital every month and see the doctors at least three to four times a week. I became part of an experiment because they had no idea what happened to my body, so they figured they would just try stuff. I went to a dentist one time because I had a problem with my tooth. He told me that I have to donate my skull to the lab at one point after I die. I said, "Why?" He said, "Because it's unusual. It doesn't go to sleep." Your body doesn't go to sleep like a normal person's. I have to give you more shots than most people. It doesn't make sense. You should donate your skull to science. He found it amusing. I did not. He still collected the $5,000 for the root canals that he did. What a joke.

53:24So then after that, I went to a different experiment. Another guy told me that we should inject your body with ozone. Ozone therapy, it's called. They inject your body with purified air, which logically you would think would kill you, but actually it's supposed to heal you or purify your blood. To me, it felt like they were killing me and injecting me with poison. I did this for a while. Every time I did it, I felt like I was dying for a few hours. But I thought maybe this is going to cure me. Little by little, my body started deteriorating. It wasn't just pain from the lower body; it was pain everywhere. One day I woke up, and my legs started hurting. The next day, they doubled in size. I'm in the emergency room again, and the doctor over there, who's supposed to be an expert that went to school for a million years, tells me maybe it's from the heat. I said, "You think that my legs doubled in size in 24 hours because of the heat?" and... He's like, "Yeah, why not?" I said, "Maybe your brain is shrunk from the heat. You went to school; you should go back to school if that's what you think happens." It wasn't a good diagnosis. I don't think he liked my response either. So my legs doubled in size. Now, I can't walk. I walked with a cane for the next year and a half or so, and...

54:43Idiot from my building thought that it was a style, like a fashion statement, so he got a cane for himself. To see another 20-something-year-old guy walking around with a cane, thinking it's a fashion statement—people would do anything just to get some looks. My cane was pretty cool, though. So anyway, life was grand. How long did this last? Seven years. seven years of 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no break of pain. 24 hours a day. Some of the pain, I'm telling you about, some of the pain, I'm gonna spare you—I'm not gonna tell you; it's really too graphic. If anybody wants to know what happens, again, oh my, I could tell you, but that's what was happening. It got to a point where it was so bad that I started giving surgeries to myself and Doctors were fools. They were simply cutting me just to see what happens, so I said, "Forget the doctors. Let me just do this myself." If an infection appeared, all I knew was that I needed to get it out. Okay, so I don't have Novocaine. Okay, so I can't make myself numb, but I can definitely cut myself and scream and yell in pain. But at least I'm not in the hospital for the next two weeks. So you start giving yourself surgeries. You start suffering, but you suffer quietly and...

56:01And this continued, rabotai, this was a nightmare. When Hashem says, you're gonna need me, you don't want to realize it until it's too late. So I started realizing that these 50 doctors that I've gone to, specialists, you know, normal, regular, whatever type of doctors, acupuncture, science, experts, best in the world, worst in the world, whatever you want, we went to everyone. Started taking steroids like athletes. Everything and anything you can imagine, we tried. At the same time, the business was going to nothing because, obviously, when you can't work, you can't make money. It got to a point where life was not much fun, and I didn't really want to live much. So one day, I decided, you know what, maybe it's time for me to leave this world and... Start planning. Now, one thing that Hashem does say, out of the many things He says, is that He's not going to give you a test that you can't handle. Apparently, I got to that point. I couldn't handle it anymore, couldn't handle the test, couldn't live, didn't want to live anymore. My mom, God bless her, saw that I was not just physically not well, but also mentally not well. I...

57:28You know, to sit next to me at dinner was very uncomfortable because I would be constantly in pain, and all of a sudden, I would get a shock of pain out of nowhere, like as if you're getting electrocuted. It's very, very uncomfortable to be next to me. So, I started becoming very antisocial, not wanting to be next to people. My mom saw that I wasn't doing too well, and she started calling some rabbis to see if maybe I could get some blessings. One day, she calls everywhere. She had a little black book full of rabbis' names. She called America, Israel, wherever she could get, and no one was answering for two hours. Two hours she's calling, and no one's answering. Until somebody answers in Israel, and a woman says, "How can I help you?" She asked for a certain rabbi's name. She says, "I'm sorry. It's the wrong phone number." And my mom starts crying because she's been calling for two hours looking for help. She finally got a human being to answer the phone, but it's the wrong phone number in a different country. And then Hashem makes a miracle happen. The woman on the other side of the phone, that's the wrong number in a different country, ends up being a family relative that actually knows my mom's voice somehow, even though they've never talked on the phone before. Her name was Penina, and she was my mom's brother's daughter.

58:45And she asked my mom, Doris, she says her name. My mom was in shock. "How do you know my name, stranger?" She says, "Well, I'm your niece." She says, "How did I get to you? I don't even have your phone number." She says, "Well, I don't know how you got to me, but if you got to me, then apparently Hashem wants us to talk." She was actually part of the family that was religious. She says to her, "Okay, so why are you crying?" She goes, "My son is dying," etc., the whole story, the short version of it. And she says, "Why don't you call Rabbi Efraim, my brother? He's always wise. And he also happens to live a couple of buildings away from Rabbi Ovadia, before he died." You'll talk to me, of course, your daughter Doris. You're the aunt for America. So of course I'll talk to you. You can help whatever you can do. So she called her brother Efraim. Rabbi Efraim was in the kollel, but he called her back, and the first question after she tells him a brief part of the story, the first question Rabbi Efraim asks her is, "Does he speak Hebrew?" She says, "Yes, he speaks a little bit of Hebrew." Rabbi Efraim says, "Okay, so can I just call him and ask him?" She responds, "He's not going to talk to you. He doesn't talk to anybody."

59:52It became, like I said, very anti-social, and at that very moment that she said he's not gonna talk to you, I happened to call my mom for the first time in God knows how long. Because I started thinking, okay, I'm gonna leave this world soon, so let me be nice to my mom. Let me call her. So I called my mom, but exactly at the time she says he's not gonna call you, and she answers the phone. She was crying on the phone throughout, and she's crying, and I'm asking her, why are you crying? Who's making you cry? Just talk to him. Talk to him. And I asked, who? Talk to who? And... She says, talk to Ephraim. I'm like, who's this Ephraim? Why is he making you cry? And she says, he's your cousin. Maybe he can help you. I said, okay, just stop crying. Have whoever you want call me. He calls me. And I see that this guy is not like some of the people that I know. He's not interested in money. He's really not interested in anything other than finding out things about me. And he has a lot of really good stories. So he tells me the story of Yehuda and Tamar from the Torah in Sefer Bereishit.

1:00:53Starts telling me different interesting stories, and I see this guy has some, you know, real, real knowledge that's beyond the knowledge that I'm expecting. So I start asking him questions, and he makes me feel good about my questions. "Oh wow, this is a really good question. Rabbi So-and-so asked the same question 850 years ago in this book on this page." And this time, how does he happen to have the same book? How does he know the page number? It was unbelievable. I'm like, okay, I mean, how do you know the page number from 800 years ago? It's long. It's old. I didn't know that's how Talmidei Chachamim think. So he gives me the answer, and he makes me feel good about my question. So I say, okay, let me just ask another question. So I ask another question. Again, he does the same thing. He goes, oh, wow, what a really good question you have. It's not a new question. I said, really? He said, yeah. Rabbi So-and-so asked the same question in this sefer 380 years ago on this page, in this paragraph. And I said, he happened to have both sefarim next to him? So I just keep asking questions for an hour and 40 minutes and he has answers. But it's not answers like I had answers, like opinion. Everybody has an answer. You ask people, you ask a Jew a question, I'll give you three answers if you want. We're not asking, I'm not asking for opinions. I'm asking for an answer. An answer means there is only one. I want to know what God's opinion is. And he shows me sources. He shows me a verse. He shows me a page number.

1:02:18He shows me that somebody asked this question. I wasn't so special after all, so I say, "Okay, this is a very interesting conversation. I really want to talk to him again, but I never got his phone number." But he called me again a week later, Thursday at four o'clock. This time I asked questions for three hours. The next week he called me again, Thursday at four o'clock. We spoke for five hours. The next week he called me again, and we spoke for seven hours. Every week, we would talk for seven hours straight. My... Christian wife that always wanted me to be a religious Jew was as excited as can be. She said, "You're finally getting the answers you've always wanted and didn't know where to get them. From now on, no one is allowed to talk to you on Thursday at 4 o'clock except for Reb Efraim." She would be like my bodyguard on Thursday at 4 o'clock. As soon as Reb Efraim calls, doors shut. No one's allowed to see or talk to me. No one's allowed to talk to him. No one's allowed to knock. Doesn't make a difference. If Moshiach shows up, he has to wait until he finishes or until Friday. Why? He's getting answers. She was as excited as ever. And everything I would learn, I'd start writing it down because it was really interesting. So I started filling up notebooks of stuff. Amazing stuff. And every time it's brand new. He'd come to my house, and I still have notebooks full of stuff. It's unbelievable stuff. I knew she'd read from it.

1:03:43But after I finish, I have to give this shiur to somebody. Who? My wife. So I started giving her these shiurim. I learned this, I learned this, I learned this. We started learning everything together. Little by little, we started realizing, oh, Houston, we have a problem. I finally want to be a Jew. She wants me to be a Jew. But to be a Jew, there are some certain things you need to do. You need to listen to the Torah. You need to listen to Hashem's opinion. You need to do what He says. You need to keep Shabbat. You need to keep kosher. You need to be married to a Jew. What am I going to do? You can't just tell someone, "Hey, stop being a Christian." You can't just tell somebody, "Stop breathing." You stop breathing first. See what happens. You can't just tell somebody, "Stop doing something." So what do I do? I'm not leaving. Who would have survived with me through this hell that I've been through for the last seven years of getting home from surgery and this and that? She's the only one that was there. No one else was there. God bless everybody else, but no one else was there. No one knows the nightmare that I've gone through other than her.

1:04:54No one stuck with me. No one cleaned the blood. No one made me feel like I'm still a king even though I can't walk. No one was there. You think I'm going to leave that? Anyone who would have said such a thing to me, I would have thrown out of the window. So that wasn't an option. But at the same time, that's going against God's opinion. You can't be a hypocrite. He said, okay, there's only one solution. We have to find out what's true. If Christianity is true, then we're both going to be Christians. if it's not, then she's going to become a Jew, but now she's going to be a Jew willingly. I'm not making her do anything. She's going to want to do it on her own. But how do you do this? So I started investigating Christianity So I'm learning Torah, but now I'm also learning the hypocrisy of Christianity. And I started realizing that Christianity, I always thought it was like second best. I thought, you know, my logic was, I always made fun of Christians because I said, why would you want to be a Christian if the original Christian is really a Jew? It doesn't make any sense.

1:06:02But at the same time, it made sense to them. There are two billion of them. So I figured, okay, it's like a remix. I called it a remix. You know how they would take some music from the old days, put a new beat on it, and make a whole new $10 million out of it? So I figured that Christianity was like a remix of Judaism. What I didn't realize is that not only was it not a remix, it was 100%, and it is 100% falsehood and 100% idolatry. I didn't realize, and neither did she, until we started looking into it. Now, it wasn't so difficult for me, but it was much more difficult for her because I already had a bias; she didn't. So I started looking at Christianity and started realizing that every single page in the New Testament has a mistake. But we're not talking about mistakes that are difficult to discover; we're talking about mistakes that any six-year-old could discover if he just looks into it. For example, a It says that Yaakov Avinu, in the Torah, it says it twice: Yaakov Avinu came down to Egypt with 70 nefashot, 70 souls. This is what it says in the Torah, a.k.a. the Old Testament. Now, Christianity has something called the New Testament, which means that it’s a continuation of the Old Testament, meaning that the two agree with each other. It’s just a new version; it’s the continuation of the old book.

1:07:28Essentially, what that means is that the two books need to agree with each other; they cannot contradict each other. This is called a postulate. A postulate means that there is a given; there have to be certain things. For example, it could always be where the Old Testament, a.k.a. Torah, is right and the New Testament is right. It could mean there could be a possibility that both have the right answer, and Another postulate is that the Old Testament, the Torah, can be right, but the New Testament can be wrong. That's also a postulate; it's also a given. But it could never be that the Old Testament is wrong and the New Testament is right. That could never be, and the reason why is because the Old Testament came first. It can never be that the New Testament has information that contradicts the first. It can never be because it came first. So now, the Old Testament, the Torah, says that Yaakov Avinu came down to Egypt with 70 souls. The New Testament says 75 in more than one place, meaning that their God forgot how to count, forgot how to do math, forgot what happened 1500 years before. They also have the wrong address for Ma'arat HaMachpelah.

1:08:51They put it in the wrong city. This is stuff that you could verify because Ma'arat HaMachpelah still exists. It's under the control of Arabs, but you can still find out. It's still there. They have the wrong address in the New Testament. They also have one sentence that says that their J.C. Penney is the son of God, but another couple of places say that he's also connected to David HaMelech. How can you be connected to David HaMelech if you're the son of God too? And then they show you that their Joseph guy, who took a married woman, by the way, and had intimate relations with her, and that's where J.C. Penney came from, is connected to David HaMelech. The only problem is they show you 25 generations in two different places, in two different books of their books. But the list of 25 in both places is different: 25 different people in both places. Many, many other nonsensical errors like this, that two billion people in the world believe today. Unfortunately, some of those people are Jewish. Why do so many people believe this? Because most people made the same mistake I did. They didn't check. For 30 years, I didn't check.

1:10:1530 years, I just assumed that it wasn't relevant to my life. I assumed that Wall Street and money and material things were relevant, but the Torah from three thousand years ago, I didn't check. Then I realized that God's opinion doesn't change. Even Bilam the wicked knew that. Even recent archaeological discoveries have shown this. showed that even the goyim have verified our Torah in their side of the world. For example, there was a discovery in Jordan. Actually, this discovery is in their museum in Jordan. It was discovered in 1967. They discovered a scroll in one of these places of idolatry and But this scroll says that they're worshipping this goddess of sex, and their leader is a person by the name of Bilaam ben Be'or. Who's Bilaam ben Be'or? He's in our Torah also. What was this whole thing, and how did he almost destroy all of Am Yisrael? We failed due to sex crimes. We went and made intimate relations with the Midianites and the Moabites.

1:11:38Says the whole story though, but from their side, not from our choice, not a Torah scroll. It's their scroll telling the story from 2,800 years ago, 3,000 years ago. It's saying what happened in their version. But this is hidden in Jordan and it was discovered in 1967, but most people don't know it exists. I didn't until recently either. Because why? We didn't check. You don't check, you don't find out. What do we spend our time checking? We're checking if we're going to make money. We're checking if our bank account went up or went down. We're checking if the gas company took the money this week. We're checking if we have milk in the fridge. We're checking where the cat is because there's poop somewhere. We're checking a lot of things. We're not checking where God is, though. So I started checking and I started realizing this Christianity now is no longer second best; this Christianity is idolatry. So now I'm not really caring so much about her conversion anymore. I'm caring about her life. It's because now my loved one is worshipping an idol, and she doesn't even realize it, just like two billion people don't realize it. So I started showing her things that I found out, and she starts checking. She starts realizing, "Wow, there's some problems here, but I need more than just this." So we start researching and researching and researching, and one day we discover a debate by Rabbi Mizrachi between Rabbi Mizrachi and a Christian professor who trains at Columbia University. He trains priests and pastors and so on, and they had a debate a few years ago. The debate is, in my opinion, by far the best debate between a Jew and a Christian. Hundreds of thousands of people have watched this debate. I don't think anyone ever agreed that the Christian professor won.

1:13:02researching and researching and researching, and one day we discovered a debate by Rabbi Mizrachi between Rabbi Mizrachi and a Christian professor who trains at Columbia University. He trains priests and pastors and so on, and they had a debate a few years ago. The debate is, in my opinion, by far the best debate between a Jew and a Christian. Hundreds of thousands of people have watched this debate. I don't think anyone ever agreed that the Christian professor won. It was really an embarrassment that they had zero answers to any real questions. All he had was just like faith, and you know, you should believe and hope, but no actual concrete evidence. Unfortunately, the yetzer hara that exists in all of us convinced my wife that she shouldn't watch this debate. So even to convince her to watch it was very difficult. Finally, she started watching it, but she didn't like it, so she really didn't pay attention and... Then I tried to give her something else and offered some debates by Rabbi Tovia Singer, who is also an expert in the field. Yetzer hara again came up and convinced her that he talks too fast, so she didn't want to listen to him. Anything I would give her, there would always be a distraction. It would always be an interference; something always happened. So, we just continued doing research on our own. Eventually, she found something on her own. There's a

1:14:27Website called AskNoah.org, which had an extraordinary argument proving the number one issue that Christians have against Judaism, which is the Oral Torah. Now, the Christians say that they believe in the Written Torah, but they don't believe in the Oral Torah. That's the difference. We're saying that there is no Written Torah without the Oral Torah, and The reason why is because you cannot understand the Written Torah without the Oral Torah. You can't understand it. Now, I didn't know enough to explain this, but she found something extraordinary. She found a way to explain how this is indisputable. One of the ways is the fact that there is something called a codex, and In Hebrew, it's called "Keter." "Keter" means it's a certain book that was a scroll that was written many years ago with the "Nikud," with the vowel system. Now, when you see your scroll that you have here, Baruch Hashem, one, two, ten, however many you have here, Baruch Hashem, ken yirbu, anyone that comes and sees the Sefer Torah and reads it sees there's something missing from what you have in your books on the shelves. What is it? It's the dots. There's no dots.

1:15:41For anyone who doesn't read Hebrew, it just looks like a bunch of dots. For anyone that knows Hebrew, those dots are actually the vowel system. Like in English, the vowel system consists of the letters a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. That's the vowel system. It's the foundation of the language, meaning every single word in the English language must have at least one of those letters in that word. Without it, there's no word. That's the vowel system. It's also the punctuation system. Now, in the Sefer Torah, there's no punctuation, there's no vowels. But there is a book called the Keter. The Codex in English has them, so whoever's reading from the scroll actually needs to know both because otherwise, he's going to mispronounce all the words, and he's actually not going to know what it says. What is it like? It's like, for example, if you say the word, you know, "Moses went to the store." Now, in English, if you say "Moses," you spell it M-O-S-E-S. Now, what happens if you take out the vowels? You have to take out the O; you have to take out the E. So now "Moses" has turned into "MSS," and

1:16:50Miss S went to the store. It's a completely different person. Meaning that without the vowel system, there's no Torah. Forget about the mitzvot. You can't understand a single word or a single sentence in the entire Torah. This is by far one of the best proofs that the Oral Torah is a fundamental part of the Torah that we got from Mount Sinai. And that's exactly the part of the Torah that all the people that go against the Torah have. Why? Because the Oral Torah is the one that obligates you. That's the one that tells you that if you're angry, it's considered 100% idolatry. Someone that takes a remote, he's upset, he still has a TV in his house. He hasn't realized that it's bad for his marriage, his life, and his time. And he still has it. He watches TV, and he got upset because his team lost. So sometimes people that are really passionate about sports, what do they do? They get really upset. They take the remote and they throw it. So the Gemara in Masechet Shabbat says that if somebody takes something...

1:17:50throws it out of anger. Even if it's money, it's considered as if they've worshiped an idol. Now, this is something that probably everybody here has done at some point in their life. I know I have. Not over sports because I never cared for it, but over something. Why do we do it? Because we didn't know there was something so wrong with it. What does Hashem really care about me throwing something? Anger about it is one of the things that a person needs to understand. It's like committing suicide both in this world and the next. The reason why is because when a person is angry, Hashem says that you're only angry because you think that you're running the world, and the world didn't play to your tune and World didn't agree with your plan. So you're upset. In essence, you've turned yourself into God. You're thinking that I'm supposed to—Hashem is supposed to dance to your tune—you ask and He fulfills. Hashem says, "I don't dance to your tune. You're supposed to dance to Mine." If you are so upset and you've actually gone to the extent of throwing something, breaking something, then that means that you've officially started worshiping yourself. You have a problem with anger.

1:19:09You've actually gone to the extent of throwing something, breaking something; then that means that you've officially started worshiping yourself. You have a problem with anger. So bad that the Gemara says that if somebody was decreed to get 70 years of good, and Shamayim decided on which years this person would receive the reward and great things, if he takes something and breaks it out of anger—like I did a million and a half times on Wall Street—all 70 years of good are deleted. That extent over what not every day one time it can happen. That is how much Hashem detests anger because it shows that we have zero emunah in Him to such an extent that we think that the world has to operate according to our tune. Now the Chachamim say some serious things about it. They say someone who learns Torah and values Torah knows that it's very hard to learn Torah, especially in the beginning.

1:20:18Sit there; you have to delve into the things. It's not just summarized for you like it is in this lecture. Usually, you have to get to the bottom of things, and it takes a while. The Midrash says, as a matter of fact, the same Baal Teshuva says someone that gets angry, wisdom departs from him. Where do we see the source? We see Moshe Rabbeinu is the source. Moshe Rabbeinu was angry three times in the entire Torah. Moshe Rabbeinu, the prophet of all prophets... Even the Mashiach is not going to be as great as Moshe Rabbeinu. In the book of Bamidbar, chapter 31, we see that Moshe became angry at the officers in charge of the troops, and the very next verse says that Elazar the Kohen gave a ruling to Am Yisrael regarding the war. So the chachamim say, why did Elazar give them the ruling? Why didn’t Moshe give it to them? Because of his anger, he forgot. Moshe forgot what to do. Moshe forgot the Torah momentarily because he got angry. And this happened three times to Moshe Rabbeinu. This anger has a root. Anger comes from ga'ava. Anger comes from ego.

1:21:42Now, most people that are egotistical don't consider themselves egotistical. Trust me, I know. And the reality is that if you tell a guy, "Why are you angry?" He's like, "Oh, because he made me mad." Of course, if he didn't make you mad, then you would be psychotic if you were still angry. Somebody had to make you mad, but why are you mad? Because it didn't go according to my plan. That's the key: my plan. Anger has to do with I, me. Something didn't go according to me. I had a plan. I did this. I, I, I, I, I. And when you're so consumed with "I," you forget that there's also a "he" and a "she" and a "you" and a "somebody else." When you're so consumed with yourself, you forget that the rest of the world exists. You're so consumed with your own ego, you forget that your wife is there listening to you.

1:22:42You forget that your husband is listening. You forget that your student is listening. You forget that your employee is listening. You forget that they're there. You forget that they have feelings. I saw a person really upset one time and I said, "Why do I have to suffer for your bad mood? You have a bad mood, fine. Why do I have to suffer for it though? I didn't do it. Somebody else made you upset, fine. But why do I have to suffer?" I wish I would have said the same thing to myself. I was on Wall Street because every day I woke up that way. Every day, I was mad at somebody for no reason whatsoever. Now, working on our anger is very difficult because it requires us to change our brain; it requires us to rewire our brain. Now, the Baalei Mussar say that there's only one way to do that: learn Mussar. Now... Rabbi Tzach Blazer, one of the key talmidim of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, said in the book Ohr Yisrael, in the beginning, he says in his day, almost 200 years ago...

1:23:58We have plenty of diseases, physical diseases, but Baruch Hashem, we have just as many medicines for them. Meaning, if you have a disease of some kind, we have some doctor or some pharmacist or somebody that has a cure for it. He says there's only one disease for which not only are there no doctors, but no one wants to be a doctor. And that's spiritual sickness. When people get angry, when people get depressed, when people have no emunah, when people have no yirat shamayim, people have all of these horrible spiritual diseases, no one wants to be a doctor. Why? Because there's only one medicine, and it's called mussar. It's called teaching mussar to the public. And the reason why is because when you teach people mussar, you're teaching them things that sometimes they already know, but they don't want to do. reminding them of what they know and they choose actively not to fix. Everyone knows anger is no good. Everyone knows being cheap is no good. Everyone knows that being arrogant is no good, but they still do it even if their wife or husband complains. Everybody complains to such an extent that the Gemara says an arrogant person gets to such a point that even his family hates him, and he stays arrogant. I

1:25:27Greedy person gets to a point where Hashem made a specific halacha just for him. What's the halacha? Your body right now as a Jew is considered holy. Your body is 100% holy. Why? You make mitzvot. You make mitzvot, you make your body holy. You read from the Torah, you're holy. You fulfill a mitzvah, you're holy. But after somebody dies, Hashem, after 120, the second they die, their body is what? Tamei. Why is the body tamei, the Chachamim ask? Why did you go from holy to tamei? Why did that happen? For what? He says because there are some people who are so greedy that if the body wasn't tamei, if the body wasn't impure, the inheritance that the father leaves their kids wouldn't be enough. The house, the car, the building, the business, it wouldn't be enough. They'd also want to split the skin. No, no, you got the house. I'm gonna get Abba's skin. I'm gonna get his face. I'm gonna get his leg. I'm gonna just get—that's how greed gets to a person's mind. So Hashem says, "Hey, the body, leave it alone. It's tamei. It's not tamei because it's really tamei. It's tamei because greed is such a big disease that if He didn't make it tamei, you'd have family members fighting over a body and..."

1:26:49Person without Mussar is a person without medicine to cure his illness, and the illness cannot go away like a headache. We discovered that Christianity is nonsense. It wasn't this together, but she discovered that the Oral Torah is a must-be, so it's a prerequisite. She realized something was wrong with her equation. She continued looking. One day, I discovered a movie called Torah and Science by Rabbi Yosef Mizrahi and... watched part one together; both of us were amazed. Then we wanted to watch part two, but it didn't work, so we watched part three. The three-part movie is four hours long and is available for free on YouTube. It's called "Torah and Science" by Rabbi Yosef Mizrahi. It's amazing. Part two didn't work, so we skipped to part three. Part three was amazing. And then she said, "Listen, I'm very confused now. I know that Judaism is real. I know the Torah is real. I know that Christianity is nonsense. But still, there's something there I've been doing my whole life. I need something. I need a sign. I need something." We knew for sure that what we had couldn't stay. But at the same time, we knew that neither one of us was leaving. So she did something insane that I would never approve of. But thank God she did it.

1:28:15night after we watched those two movies, those two parts, I went to sleep. At some point, she went to pray, and she prayed to God and asked for something special. She said, "God, he's not leaving, I'm not leaving, but neither one of us can stay together according to the conditions we have. So either give me a sign that You want me to convert to Judaism or just kill me instead." It's interesting she actually did such a thing for a few reasons. Number one: you're not allowed to ask Hashem for signs. So ignorance was bliss; ignorance was good for her because we're not allowed to ask Hashem for signs. You're not allowed to say, "Hashem, if You do this, then I'll do that." You're not allowed to give Hashem conditions. You can't say, "Hashem, give me a parking spot right now, and I'll give my sale."

1:29:19Guy did that one time. He said, "Hashem, give me a parking spot because I have a meeting right now, and I can make a million dollars, and I'll give maaser." As soon as he finished his sentence, somebody pulled out. He said, "Oh, don't worry, I took care of my own." So she asked Hashem for something you're not allowed to ask for. The second reason is she was willing to give up her life for somebody that's not her. I wouldn't do it for anybody else. I don't think anybody else would do it. You could say you would do it, but in reality, when push comes to shove, most people wouldn't do it. She prayed, she got an answer. The Chachamim say that there are three levels of prayers. There's the prayer of Moshe Rabbeinu, there's the prayer of David HaMelech Rabbeinu prayed 515 times to Hashem in Parashat Va'etchanan, and we know that each one of his prayers is more significant than all of the prayers of all of Am Yisrael put together. We learned this after his sister Miriam got sick. Hashem gave her tzara'at for speaking Lashon Hara.

1:30:36All of Am Yisrael, millions of people prayed for her. Nothing happened. No healing, no solution, nothing. Aaron comes to Moshe and says, "No, she's your sister, pray for her." He says five words, and she gets cured. So, the same Moshe Rabbeinu in Parashat Va'etchanan prays 515 times to Hashem. He says, "Hashem, please let me go to Eretz Yisrael. Let me be me. Let me be a servant. Let me be a cow. Let me be a bird. Let me be anything. Let me just go in there." Hashem says, "Rav lach, anach, no more prayers from you." 515 prayers, no more. Why? If you do 516, I have to let you in, but I don't want to let you in. Why? Because Israel is going to sin a thousand years from now, and the Satan is going to come to me and say, "They made such a sin, to such an extent, you have to destroy all of them." Now, if you're the one that builds the Beit HaMikdash, we'd have a problem. Why? Because at that time, I'm going to tell the Satan, "Listen, I know they sinned, I know I have to destroy them, but I have something of equal value. What is it? It's My house. I'll destroy My house instead of My people—the Beit HaMikdash." But if you build the house, Moshe, I can't destroy it. Because everything you do, I've already decided is permanent. So, I don't want you to pray 516 times, because if you come into Israel, then Am Yisrael will be over in a thousand years from now. And I don't want to kill them.

1:31:59The second level of prayer is David HaMelech. David HaMelech prayed to Hashem endlessly to be the one that builds the Beit HaMikdash. Hashem says, "You can be the one that builds the foundation, and your son will build the rest of it, and your descendants will be in Mashiach." "Hashem, when will I die?" He says, "I can't tell you." "Can you at least tell me the day?" He says, "You're going to die on Shabbat." So, every day and every Shabbat, David HaMelech would learn Torah non-stop because he knew that his learning Torah was so powerful that the Satan was scared of him when he learned Torah. Satan couldn't touch him. So, one day, Satan tried to fool him by playing with the tree outside. He didn't know what was happening. He says, "Well, what's happening?" He goes outside, sees him, and momentarily forgot. Then, he was learning Torah, got distracted, and that's when Satan killed him. So the Chachamim ask, what does it mean? Every time he learns Torah, somebody makes a disturbance outside, and he goes outside? What kind of learning Torah is that? Even if you're learning a math book, a history book, a science book, any book, if somebody makes a noise outside, you go outside? If somebody beeps outside, you go outside? If you're focused, you don't go outside. So why did David HaMelech, Kodesh Kodashim, Mashiach, who comes from him, go outside when somebody made a noise outside? What, he wasn't focused?

1:33:23Because he was focused on what he was supposed to be focused on—the will of Hashem. He says if somebody is playing on a tree on Shabbat, they're violating Shabbat. They're violating the word of Hashem. I have to go tell them. Why? Because if you violate the word of Hashem, it has a mitat (death penalty). So either I'm gonna rebuke them and they're gonna stop, or I'm gonna beat them until I kill them. One of the two has to happen. I can't let it be. Why does the mitzvah in the Torah, one of the 613 mitzvot, state, "You must rebuke your brother"? You see him driving on Shabbat, you must tell him, "You're not allowed to drive on Shabbat." You see him eating non-kosher, you have to tell him, "You're not allowed to eat non-kosher." You have to tell him. Why? Because the Gemara says, the Oral Torah says, if you don't tell him, the sin goes to your account. You thought you were keeping Shabbat for 70, 80, 90 years. You go up to Shamayim, and it's like, "Oh, here's Steve." The Mechalel Shabbat. We gave him a million dollars a year, and he violated Shabbat. Steve says, "No, I'm innocent. I kept Shabbat every year. What are you talking about? I kept Shabbat all the time." They go, "No, no. All your friends, they all violated Shabbat. You never told them one word. You never tried. You never said anything. You always said, 'Oh, no, they got to do it on their own.' Okay, they didn't do it on their own. You died. No one's going to tell them now." So, the Gemara says, you have to tell. It's a mitzvah in the Torah. So, that's the second prayer, David HaMelech.

1:34:47The third level of prayer is higher than Moshe Rabbeinu and also higher than David HaMelech. And that's the Tefillah of Choser Oni, someone that's desperate. A poor man that's desperate. Why? His heart is completely broken. Hashem sometimes will want you to get to a completely desperate state because He wants your prayer. The reason why He gave Am Yisrael food every day instead of giving it to them once a year could have easily been said. I'm standing in front of you. I'm not screaming. I'm not yelling. At least it's not part of the theatrics. And we decided that we're going to take it seriously. We got more and more religious. We went to Israel, and... We toured over there. We continued to learn. We came back. We moved from New York to Florida to start a whole new life. You can't really be Jewish on the 35th floor in New York. We moved to Florida. We still had a little bit of money left, maybe about half a million dollars, from all the millions we made. We figured, okay, we'll start a whole new life. I had a little bit of a hedge fund left, and I was making a few thousand dollars a month to survive. My money was in the market. I said, okay, we'll be fine. I was...

1:36:08managing a small portfolio of clients, and learning the rest of the day. Then my rabbi told me, "Okay, news. What's the news? You have to start giving a shiur Torah." I said, "Me? I don't know anything." He goes, "Exactly. Whatever you learn, tell them that." I said, "But I don't know anything." He goes, "Exactly. So that's going to force you to learn. Learn and tell them that." He says, "You have the ability to speak, so speak. Other people are not like you. They don't have to go through hell and back before they realize that Hashem is not joking." Okay, he's kind of right. So the first student was my mover, the guy that helped us move from New York to Florida. He was helping us build the bed, and he heard some Jewish music. He said, "Oh, Jewish music. You like Judaism?" He goes, "Yeah, yeah, it's good." I asked, "You like Torah? You want to come to a shiur?" He goes, "Who's gonna come? Like me and you?" I said, "All right, fine. When? Tuesday night, nine o'clock?" He said, "All right, I'll be there." He came to my house and... I told him, "Listen, I'm gonna tell you what God said. You do whatever you want. I'm not gonna use my opinion. I'm just gonna tell you what He said." The reason why is because no one ever told me. The rabbis that came to my office every week never told me. They just asked me for tzedakah. I'm gonna tell you, and I'm not gonna ask you for anything." He's like, "Fine." Twenty-five, thirty minutes into it, I tell him not to drive on Shabbat. He goes, "What do you mean? I'm not supposed to drive on Shabbat?" I'm like, "You know it's forbidden on Shabbat." He was like, "Yeah, but to the shul. I'm okay, right?" "No, no, especially to shul, you're not allowed to drive."

1:37:38What do you mean? I've been driving to shul on Shabbat for 22 years. No one ever told me anything. I said, "That's the problem. No one ever tells anybody anything anymore. It's up to you to learn. Newsflash, you're not allowed." He started keeping Shabbat. Baruch Hashem, he ended up keeping Shabbat, keeping more mitzvot. Then he got married, had a kid recently. Kosher kid with a chuppah, kiddushin, everything. I started seeing this work next week. I had three students next week I had forced to and then five and then ten and more people started showing up to my house on Shabbat, we'd have 15-20 people. And we gave shiurim and I became more and more interested in this and less and less interested in the business world. But still, I needed to survive. But Hashem said, "Listen, you talk a lot about emunah. Emunah is easy to talk about; it's very easy. Everybody talks about it. It's a very, very popular subject." Nine out of ten lectures talk about emunah. But as soon as somebody tells you he has emunah and he gives you examples, you start thinking, oh, there's something weird about this guy. Like, as soon as you find someone that has emunah, it's weird. Because it's not normal to have emunah. It's easy to talk about it. Somebody tells you he lives off of nothing, that he completely depends on Hashem to provide parnasah, you're like, oh yeah, it's like 3,000 years ago. What about today? Somebody says, no, no, it's miracles. You survive off of miracles.

1:39:04Yeah, no, really. What's the real story? How do you really survive? So Hashem says, okay, I perform miracles for you. I have to do another one. This one's gonna be a little more difficult. So I want you to focus on doing lectures all the time and kiruv all the time. And the reason why is because I have a lot of businessmen like you; I just don't have a lot of Jews though. I need more Jews. So, since you're getting some people that become Jews again and... Need you to focus on that. So that half a million dollars—you know that half a million dollars that I had left from the millions and millions and millions and millions and millions—He took that too. One day I wake up, 9:30 in the morning Eastern Time, the market opens. I got a few million that I'm managing for clients; I got the half a million that's part of the portfolio. That's my money, used to be much, much more. At 9:35, it's all worth zero. Something went wrong, something went... Long story short, I'll save you the time. It's worth b'diyuk zero.

1:40:06At 9:36, I shut off the computer. I say, "Hashem natan, Hashem lakach, yehi shem Hashem mevorach," which I learned from Iyov. He told his wife after Hashem took all his money, he said, "God gave, God took, may His name be blessed." It's His anyway, right? He took it. I have a shiur Torah to get ready for in a few hours. I shut off the computer, I get ready for my shiur Torah. Until this day, the people that attended that shiur didn't know that I lost all my money that day. But the reality is, from that moment on, I realized that Hashem wants me to do this—what I'm doing right now in front of you. So we focused on that. We started an organization called Be'ezrat Hashem. That's the same organization whose name you see on all the posters over there for "Asher Yatzar" that we give out everywhere. Different people all over the world get these "Asher Yatzar" posters. They put them outside of their bathroom and say the blessing. Why? Because you should thank Hashem that your body works. I know what it feels like when it doesn’t.

1:41:07Then you have the CDs. There's almost 80 hours' worth of shiurei Torah on those CDs. Some people don't have a CD player in their car, so they just use a CD as a flyer to go to my website. There is over a thousand hours' worth of Torah there. Another thousand or fifteen hundred hours' worth of Torah from Rav Ephraim, the one that's been here the whole way. And Baruch Hashem, we've been doing shiurim day and night everywhere we can to get Am Yisrael to come back and Hashem over the last several years. We've had many people do teshuva, many people convert from Christianity to Judaism, and many people come back from Christianity who were already Jews but had converted to Christianity. We got them to come back home after they realized what kind of stupid nonsense they were dealing with. We had many Jews come back home, Jews that didn't know right from left. Now people ask me, "What do you really need to do this?"

1:42:07Now, the typical answer people would tell you is money. It's not true. Yes, money is needed, but it's not really the necessary thing. The main thing you need is people that care. That's it. You just need people with a heart. Because kiruv is something you can do for free. Just share the message. Take this lecture. It's going to be online tomorrow and share it with your friends, share it with your children, share it with people. That's it. You have money? You could donate, good, all this stuff costs money. You don't? It doesn't make a difference. You can still help without a single dollar. We need millions, but we don't need it from you. We need it from everyone. You don't have to give it. All you have to do is take this lecture and share it with people. You can do kiruv for free. What's in it for you? The Prophet Jeremiah says that Hashem told him, "If you bring a precious one from a sluggard, you'll be like My mouth." If you bring someone who used to be a Mechallel Shabbat and make him precious again, make him a Jew again, make him keep Shabbat again, you'll be like My mouth. So the Chachamim ask, what does it mean to be like Hashem's mouth?

1:43:22Hashem says, "I created the world with words; you can too. You pray, I do." Even to the extent where I decree that someone will die, but you don't want them to. If you help people do teshuvah, I'll stop it just for you. I've seen it many times, and I'll finish with one example. And then you guys can ask as many questions as you want, unless you want to go to sleep. One question, one story: one guy said to me... My two-year-old kid had something in his head. Hashem, what do I do? I said, do kiruv. He said, no, no, but what do I do for my kid? Do I pray? I said, yeah, do kiruv. Do kiruv. He goes, okay, fine. He donated $1,000 for the CDs. Now, he didn't really think much. He went and continued praying. A few days later, he calls me. He says, "You're never gonna believe it." I said, "What?" He says, "My wife took my son to get the final check before the surgery for what he has in his head. Hashem, a two-year-old can have surgery?" I said, "Okay, so what did the doctor say?" Well, he said, "Where's the kid?" And my wife said, "He's here. He's right here." He goes, "No, no, where's the kid with the problem? Because this kid doesn't have anything."

1:44:49It kind of works, doesn't it? I said, "Yes, I'm serious. There are a lot of people in the world who are businessmen. Some of them even have Jewish mothers. But there are very few Jews. To be a Jew, Rabotai, you have to keep Shabbat. To be a Jew, you have to keep kosher. To be a Jew, you have to keep Hashem's opinion, not yours. Sometimes our opinions agree and sometimes they don't; we still have to pick His." Now, there's two choices, the Rambam says. You can either do teshuva from shiurim like this that are easy and painless, unless you were pained by my speech, or you can wait for other things. The key of the speech, the reason why I do this, is because I'm afraid that some people are going to choose the second option. They're going to wait for Hashem to talk to them. When Hashem talks, it hurts. So, b'ezrat Hashem, this will give us all chizuk. Ourselves, for our children, for our friends, for our family, for our neighbors, for everyone we know and everyone we don't know. When you do Kiruv, don't do accounting. Just give them the information. There are extra CDs, more than there are people here. Give them out. Give them to people. The personal story is in there along with many other things. Give them to people. You never know; maybe one of these people has been looking for an answer their whole life and finally it's in there. Even if they throw it in the garbage, still they're one step closer to Teshuva and...

1:46:10Sometimes you have to get to a point of desperation. Maybe you're going to help them get to the answer. Maybe you're going to help them get to the point of desperation. Either way, do something. All we need is people that care. The rest of it, Hashem provides anyway. Any questions? Yeah? So when you talk about the 15 days of darkness, so if we go back to Egypt, it was three days, right? And by Jews, like regular, normal Jews... Yeah, the ones that are righteous will see. The ones that are righteous have nothing to worry about. The ones that are wicked have everything to worry about. If somebody does teshuvah, everything will be good. If somebody doesn't do teshuvah, they should pray for Mashiach not to come. That's the truth. I have a question. How do you know your teshuvah is acceptable? If you're working on it every single day, then you know that you're going in the right direction. If you're coasting, if everything is clear and everything is good, that means that something is missing. Because teshuvah is not a one-step process.

1:47:23Teshuvah is much more difficult than the most difficult career on the planet. Whatever career you had in your life, whatever job you had, teshuvah is even more difficult. Because teshuvah is not just keeping Shabbat. There's plenty of robots that keep Shabbat. There's other things. So teshuvah has to do with the mitzvot. You have Shabbat, you have kashrut, you have taharat hamishpacha. You have all the mitzvot that are logical. You have Sukkot, Pesach, and so on. But then after that, you have to work on yourself. Meaning, the Torah's main objective is to perfect you as a human being. This means you have to perfect all the negative character traits you have, one at a time. So if somebody is naturally an angry little gremlin like I was, then they have to work on their anger. They have to realize that when they're angry, it's not only making Hashem upset, it makes Hashem hate them. Because it's a form of idolatry. The example is that in the Gemara Masechet Avodah Zarah, it says that Avraham Avinu had 400 chapters for his tractate of Avodah Zarah. Like we have the Avodah Zarah tractate, which has five chapters, Avraham Avinu had 400 chapters. So the Chachamim asked, why did he have so many more? He says that the other 395 extra were forms of anger that a person would have and how to fix it.

1:48:37Being about is that the mitzvot are there for us to perfect ourselves. If someone is stingy, they have to work on it. If someone is arrogant, they have to work on it. Each negative character trait they have, they have to work on it. This book, for example, which I was hoping to go over, but you know we lost time, this book is a very, very good book. It's called "Remove Anger from Your Heart" by Rav Avraham Tobaleski. This particular one is one of a series. It was translated to English. It's English and Hebrew. This is specifically about anger. Anyone that has the same issue, like I've had most of my life as far as anger, this is a phenomenal book to read. But it's not one of those novels that you just read one time and finish. This is one of those things that you meditate on, you start thinking about it, what is really the meaning behind this, and so on and so forth. Musar. You'll see that the first hundred pages of this book are different quotes from different sages throughout history that tell you how critical it is for you to learn Musar every day—not passively, not once in a blue moon, but every single day. Some of them say it should be at least two hours a day. I’ll bet people would learn two minutes a day.

1:49:49Because really, people don't learn, so Musar is something critical. And that's the way that you're going to perfect yourself as a human being. If you're learning Musar every day, it's a matter of time before your Torah is perfected. Over time, you'll see that as you learn more and more, you have to do more and more. In the beginning, it's just Shabbat, and later on, you start seeing, "Oh, wait a minute..." have to work on this. I have to work on this, and most people think that they have good character traits, like, for example, being grateful. Once you learn Mussar, you realize that most people don't even know what being grateful is. I'll give you an example. Let's say, for example, you wanted to write something new, you want to write a new idea, and you didn't have a pen. Somebody had a pen, and you asked them for a pen. Now, what do you say? Thank you. Now, why are you saying thank you? provide you with a pen. That's it, right? Just a pen. The reality is, doing that, if you really delve into it, is being ungrateful. Saying thank you for the pen only is actually ungrateful. Why? Because he didn't bring you just a pen. The only reason you were able to write the entire idea is because of the pen. Now, once you start thinking about it, that idea is going to be transferred somewhere else. You're going to benefit out of that idea. It could be the next business idea, it could be the next Torah thought, you could write a whole book because of this idea. The person that gave you a pen, technically, is a partner in all of it.

1:51:16So we only say thank you for the pen, because rationally, that's what we got. In reality, we got a partner. He's a partner in everything that comes out of it. So when we say thank you, we're saying thank you for something that's very, very simple that we just got. We're not realizing the outcome. What we got when you say thank you to your parents for bringing you life, you're not realizing, "Wait a minute, if I didn't have life, I wouldn't have a wife, I wouldn't have a husband, I wouldn't have kids, I wouldn't have fun, I wouldn't have a good time, I wouldn't have a purpose in life." You're thinking, "Thank you very much for being together one day 30 years ago, 80 years ago, and I'm here in the world." In reality, you survived every single day because they cared that you were going to survive. They gave you food, they gave you all the different things. So when we say thank you using our rationale, really, we're ungrateful. Only way you're going to get to the deeper root of everything, whether it's gratitude or anything else, is by learning it, by learning Musar. So teshuva has to do with all of that. Yeah? You touched on depression a little bit. Okay. How can we help secular Jews who are fighting depression? Do teshuva.

1:52:24That's the only way. Because depression, which I suffered from most of my life, is not something that's based on the physical. Even though most people think that they're suffering because they lost money, or they lost a wife, or they lost a husband, or something like that. Feelings, love, and all other feelings are something spiritual. So when someone tries to fix a spiritual flaw with something material, with something physical... It's like putting a bandage on a heart attack. You know, even if it works by some fluke, it's only temporary. So the only way to fix something spiritual is with something spiritual, and the only thing that's pure spiritually is the Torah. So if you can get them to see that their real problem is that they're disconnected from the source. They're disconnected from the power outlet that's called God, and disconnected from Him to disconnect from a purpose. They have no point to their life. Their whole point was money, and as soon as they lost money, there's no point to life. But the reality is that everybody knows that it's not the point of life. There are plenty of people that are happy without it. There are plenty of people that are depressed with it. So the reality is that a person cannot get out of depression

1:53:48a longer-term basis purely by themselves. It has to be with Torah. That's why you'll see, for example, many celebrities, many really successful people, you know, with all the money in the world, with family, with kids, with all the material stuff you could possibly imagine, still commit suicide. You know, whether it's the comedian who killed himself a year or two ago or Robin Williams or many others like him, I mean, these people had all the material in the world, including a wife and kids and friends and fame and fortune and whatever you want, all of it, and it was still meaningless. So that's because inside, the neshama knows it needs something else, and when a person simply is not providing it, there's no answer for him. So the question is, is it better to be a depressed poor person or a depressed rich person? the answer actually is a depressed poor person, and the reason why is because a depressed poor person always has hope that if he gets rich, he'll get out of his depression. It's all nothing. It's all nothing.

1:55:10But that's the thing: someone who doesn't know Hashem doesn't know anything. He thinks that if he's going to get money, he's going to get out of his depression. The guy that already has everything has no hope. So that's the thing. So really, the most important message you need to deliver to people is that you should ask yourself, why are you in this world? And... What's the point? Okay, so money? Okay, you had money, you lost money, then what? Kids? Okay, you had kids, they moved on, then what? Wife? You had a wife, or husband, you had, okay, then what? You have to ask yourself constantly, then what's the point? And that's the thing. People who don't ask themselves what's the point, they get into depression because they start thinking that there's no point. Sick parents, okay, so if you know, again, it's very difficult to deal with sickness personally and sometimes even more difficult to deal with it when someone else you love is going through it. But if you know where it's coming from, it has meaning. Torah doesn't solve all your problems. Anyone that tells you that if you start doing teshuvah everything will be fixed is lying to you. That's not the way Torah works. That's not the way Hashem works. Hashem is not our servant. He's not Santa Claus.

1:56:23like people try to portray Hashem like He's going to give you everything you want. It's not true. Hashem is not your servant. Hashem said He's the King. We're the servant. The reward, the real reward, is after this world. It's not here. So anytime somebody gets any form of reward here, the Rambam explains that it's not really for you here. It's for you because you did something good. He gives you the ability to do more good. So if you gave tzedakah, Hashem will give you more money, not because He wants you to have more money, but because He wants you to have the ability to do more mitzvot and give more money. If you had a wife, so He's gonna give you the ability to have kids now. Why? Because you got married, so you did one mitzvah, He's gonna give you the ability to do another mitzvah. Now, the thing is though, if a person thinks that if they do teshuva, everything's gonna be fixed, they're misled completely. And the reason why is because you see it throughout history, Even in the beginning, sometimes you'll see a lot of miracles, a lot of wonderful things. At some point, the training wheels come off, just like with your kid. In the beginning, you have training wheels on a bicycle, and she thinks she's riding the bicycle great and everything is good. Then you take off the training wheels, and she falls off. But you still keep them off. Why? Because she has to learn how to start riding the bike normally. Same thing with Hashem. In the beginning, He gives you training wheels. He helps you a lot, and...

1:57:41gives you special miracles, special things. Eventually, He starts taking off the training wheels because you have to learn how to cope. The reason why is because He's training you for the bigger tests. The bigger tests are necessary in order for you to be the best version of yourself. The best version of you is not going to happen by itself. You're not going to become, for example, if you're working out in the gym, you're not going to become a bodybuilder lifting five pounds like when you started. Over time you have to lift more. Five, then ten, then fifty, then a hundred, then a house, then two houses, whatever you have to build. But eventually, you have to lift more. Why? Because you have to put more pressure in order to become stronger. Same thing with life. In order to become a better version of you, softer body and a stronger neshama, you have to go through more difficulty and more tests. That test is a necessary part of teshuva. So when people are selling Judaism like it's a product in the store where if you do it, everything will be fixed, it's only bound to fail. Many people start doing teshuva, they see difficulty and abandon everything, and that's because they were sold a bag of goods. That's wrong and

1:58:49Judaism is not necessarily going to fix your problems, but what will it do? What will the Torah do? It will give you a reason. It'll give you a reason for all the problems. It'll give you a purpose. That's more valuable. So, to finish up, because I know some of you want to go—it's late tonight—I'll give you one story and then you can go home. Anyone that wants to ask questions, you can ask after. I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable not leaving or anything. So, I'll give you one story. Rabbi Akiva married Rachel. Rachel was young, beautiful, and a daughter of the richest man of the land, Kalba Savua. Now, Kalba Savua didn't like that they got married because Rabbi Akiva was ignorant, didn't know any Torah, and he was broke. So, he didn't have anything going for him. But he had good middot. Rachel, the 18-year-old, saw this 40-year-old with good middot, good character traits. She thought, he's a good one for me. So, he cut her off from the inheritance, cut her off from everything, and they became dead broke. All they had was straw. Now, one day they had a baby, a little baby girl,

1:59:51They had enough just to put, you know, the baby with the straw. They didn't have a house, didn't have a bed, didn't have anything. And her husband got really upset. She used to have beds of gold. She used to have a castle. She had never been, you know, her baby, her little girl, a little princess, doesn't have a bed. All she has is straw. She felt bad for herself. So Hashem saw that they have pure hearts, and the reason why she did all this is for Him. The reason why she's just to fulfill His will, to learn Torah and so on. So He sent Eliyahu HaNavi. So Eliyahu HaNavi came as a broke person, as a homeless person. He said to her, "Excuse me, excuse me, please, please." So they said, "Oh wow, somebody knows us. Yeah, how can I help you? How can I help you?" He says, "Listen, we just had a girl, and we had a baby, and we don't have anything for her. Do you have some straw maybe? Maybe you have some straw to help us make a bed for her?" So Eliyahu HaNavi came and said, "Yeah, of course, straw we have." He started getting some straw, got a sack of straw, gave him the straw, and he comes to Rachel, he says, "Look how rich we are. We have straw. Some people don't even have straw."

2:00:51So the Chachamim ask, "Wait a minute, if you're already sending Eliyahu Hanavi, why can't Eliyahu Hanavi show up with a check for a million bucks? Why can't Eliyahu Hanavi show up with some cash, some diamonds, some jewels, some straw? For what? Because Hashem is not trying to solve your problem one time." He's trying to solve your problem permanently. If He gave Rabbi Akiva a million dollars, it would have only solved the problem temporarily. Because the problem was not the money. The problem is that we're not happy with our share. And who is rich? Someone who is happy with their share. Once you know that the straw is a lot, because somebody else doesn't have straw, it's already like you have a billion dollars. The problem is that most of us don't realize that we have a billion dollars. We want the other guy's straw. So b'ezrat Hashem, this helps us do teshuva and gets us all stronger. Anyone that has any questions, you can always contact me via text, email, and so on. My information is on the CDs. Baruch Adonai le'olam. Amen v'amen.