If it's good for you, then it's in the Torah. (8 minutes)

0:50I told the guy the story a few days ago. It's a very good story. There's a big sage named Ibn Ezra. Ibn Ezra? Ibn Ezra was a huge sage, a giant Chacham. He had so much Torah in him; it was amazing. But what he didn't have was luck. He said himself that if he started a business of hats, people would be born without heads. If he started... a business of umbrellas, it would stop raining. And if you started a cemetery, people would stop dying. That's how little luck he had. So Ibn Ezra was very, very poor. So one day, Reuven goes to a shul. He wants to go to a shul. He wants to say something. He wants to teach a little bit. But they look at him and how he looks. These are all rich, successful people, and they look at him. He's a poor guy. They don't think he knows anything. They say, no, no, no, no, no. Get out of here. Get out of here. They kick him out. He says, oh, okay. You want to do this to me? I'm going to teach you a lesson. So the next week, he goes into the market and he sees this guy...

2:05Dressed nicely, he starts talking to him, and the guy, he's like, you know Torah? He goes, no, I don't know anything about Torah. He asks, well, what do you do? He replies, I sell meat. So he's a regular meat salesman, but the guy had a little bit of money. He says, okay, listen, how much do you make a month? Let's say just for argument's sake, for the example, he says, I make $2,000 a month. He asks him, do you want to make $200,000 in one month? Yes, of course, he eagerly responds. He says, okay, come with me and just do whatever I tell you. So the guy wears a suit, big stomach, beard, looks the part. So he comes back to the shul with Ibn Ezra. And again they see Ibn Ezra, they go, no, no, no. He goes, no, it's not for me, I'm not here for myself. I just brought this big giant tzaddik from out of town. So who is this guy? No, no, he's a big tzaddik. He's so righteous that you guys are not on a level where you can hear his voice. So everything that he says, he has to tell me, and I have to tell you. I'm like, really? How wise is this man? How wise is this man? He's like, listen, ask whatever you want, and he's going to tell me. So they ask him a difficult question and

3:35He reaches out to the meat seller. He reaches out to the meat seller, and the meat seller doesn't say anything into his ear. Ibn Ezra obviously knows the answer, so he tells him the answer. Okay, so he reaches out to him, the guy who doesn't know anything, obviously, and pretends like he's whispering something into his ear. Ebenezer doesn't say anything; he knows the whole Torah. So he tells him, "Okay, this is the answer." Then they ask him another question. He pretends like he's listening to the guy and gives him another answer. Another answer, another answer, another answer. They're like, "Wow, this guy's a giant chacham." They start donating money to him. This one guy says, "A thousand, two thousand, five thousand."

4:49One thousand, two thousand, started giving them money. Four days in a row, they're asking questions, and Evanessa is giving them one answer after another, after another, after another. They've never seen anything like this. So after four days, they got the two hundred thousand. All the richest people in the city came to see this giant chacham. And they see this guy, this big guy with this poor man next to him, and The man doesn't speak, he only talks to the poor man, and the poor man's giving them all the answers. So after four days, Evanesa tells the meat seller, "Listen, we got the 200,000 that I promised you. I'm leaving. I proved my point." The meat seller responds, "No, no, what do you mean you're leaving? I made 200,000 in four days. Look how much money we can make in another month." Evanesa replies, "No, okay, you make it. I'm leaving. I don't need this money. It's not for me." The meat seller asks, "Okay, but what do I do? I don't know any Torah." He goes, "Listen, they're going to ask you three questions." He says, "What are the three questions?" The first question one guy is going to come to you and say, "Listen, I want to divorce my wife." You respond, "Okay, so what do I tell him?" You tell him, "Come back next week." He asks, "Why come back next week?" You explain, "Because he goes home for a week, and after a week he's going to get along with his wife, he's going to forget he wanted to divorce her." The guy is a fool; he doesn't know anything, so he's repeating, "Come back next week, come back next week, come back next week, come back next week."

6:16Over and over and over again. Okay, the second question they're going to ask you is, somebody's going to tell you, they'll say, "Listen, I dropped my tefillin, what do I do?" And you tell them, "Pick it up, kiss it, and give tzedakah." The guy's like, "Pick it up, kiss it, give tzedakah. Pick it up, kiss it, give tzedakah. Pick it up," repeating over and over. He's a fool; he doesn't know anything. He's repeating it over and over and over again. The third question they're going to ask you is, "Listen, I have this meat..." I slaughtered this animal. I don't know if it's kosher. He says, put the lungs in the water. If there’s a bubble, it’s not kosher—treif. If there’s no bubble, it’s kosher. Put it in the water. If there’s a bubble, it’s treif. If there's no bubble, it's kosher. He repeats it over and over and over again. Okay, Rav Dessler says, okay, I'm leaving. Goodbye. So this meat seller, like I told you guys several times, is a fool. He confused all the questions. So a few days later, somebody comes to him and says, "Listen, I want to, you know, I dropped my tefillin." So he tells him to come back next week. Another guy comes to him and says, "Listen, I have meat. How do I know it's kosher?" He goes, "Pick it up, kiss it, and give tzedakah," instead of putting it in water.

7:41Another guy says, "Listen, I want to divorce my wife." He goes, "Put her in the water; if there are bubbles, she—no, there's no divorce." Completely confused, they thought, "What is this guy? This guy's crazy, he doesn't know anything." So they go after and they start saying, "What do you know?" They kick him out and go find Rabbi Avin Natan. "What did you do? Why did you send us over here? This guy doesn't know anything." He goes, "Ah, he doesn't know anything all of a sudden when I was there." You asked them all the questions, he gave you the answers because you saw he's dressed nicely, but it was really me who gave you the answers, the guy who's poor. He teaches us a very, very famous quote that inspired the saying I just mentioned to you. He says, don't look at the jar, look at what's inside it. So, modern people changed the verse a little bit, and they said, don't judge a book by its cover. But it means the same thing, showing us that anything that's of true value, anything that possesses real wisdom, must come from Torah.