Let's Rebuke The Rebuker, READY GO!!!!! (12 Minutes)

1:10Don't want to turn them off. Instead, they contact me, and I said, "You know, you shouldn't rebuke people. It's not a good way to help people do teshuva. It's not a good way to help people get closer to Hashem. You're supposed to do it out of love, and..." Supposed to do it, say nice things to them, say that they're good and they're nice and they're wonderful, and Hashem loves them, and that's how you help people do teshuva. Usually, my question is, how many people have you helped do teshuva? And the answer is always the same, zero, nothing. I said, how do you know this shtick works? Then he says, well, all the rabbis are using it. Look, Rabbi, don't say "Rabbi so-and-so, he's got 500,000 followers." He's got a hundred thousand followers, he has an organization that gets a million dollars a month in donations, he wrote 27 books, he did this, he did that. I said, okay, but how many people did he help? How many people did you benefit? Well, if nobody benefited, how would he get all these donations? I said, donations don't mean somebody benefited; it just means donations. It means money came in.

2:33One thing has nothing to do with the other. But the worst part of it all is that even though this is expected, the most difficult parts to deal with are when you have these people come to you from a place you never thought they would. They used to call themselves your friends, and This happens regularly and just last night, this person that used to come to my house showed up unannounced. He came and decided that it's time for him, with his zero experience, to rebuke me and tell me that I'm not doing right and I'm not doing this and I'm not doing that. He thinks he knows more than me, and... He learned a lot more than me because he's religious from birth. And even though he's only 18 or 19 years old, that doesn't mean anything. He knows more than me; he's more learned than me, and he did this, and he knows that, and he knows, and he's got all these books. He's got a whole library of books, and he knows all of these tzaddikim he came across, that he's met in his life. The problem is the tzaddikim don't know him.

4:01He knows them; he saw them from afar. Maybe they gave him a nod, but they don't know him. He has the books, but he never read them. I know people like this my whole life. When I was in the business world, these people would come to my office and... Yeah, I know Carl Icahn and Eddie Lampert and all these different bigwigs, all these different billionaires. I know this guy, I know that guy, this billionaire and this millionaire. I'm friends with this guy, and this guy's my neighbor. I said, "Oh, wow, okay, good. So you want to go into business? No problem. I'll give you a job. Why aren't you working in a big firm with all these contacts?" "Oh, no, no. I want to work at a small firm." There's always a nice excuse, "I want to work at a small firm." I said, "Okay, you got it. I..." They're lost. My benefit, they fall for it every time. You got this contact and that contact, no problem. Go, ready, go. My little daughter, she likes saying, "Ready, go." I said, "Okay, ready, go." So they start working. A week passes by, two weeks pass by, a month passes by, three months pass by, and I see that they're the least productive people every time. But they're very good at telling me about who they know, and...

5:15they know this one, they read that book, they met that one, and this one's their neighbor, and this one is this, and this one is that. So during the financial crisis of 2008, for anyone who had a bit of experience, it was evident that it was the biggest opportunity in the last century to invest. Invest when the market is down, not when the market is up. You buy when everyone's selling. It was an opportunity to buy if you had cash. We had an opportunity to buy a company that was worth at least a billion and a half dollars for 85 million—nothing, peanuts. You make money on day one. I didn't have 85 million liquid, needed to raise the money. So where do I go? Hey, the couple of guys that know this one and that one and this one and that one, right? I said, hey, this is chump change to the people you know. These guys do $85 million deals each on a daily basis. Pick up the phone. Call them. Set up a meeting. I'll show up. Ready? Go. You have the contacts. You know Eddie and you know Steve and you know this one, and you know that one. Ready? Go. You've been here six months, warming up my chair, collecting a salary. Fine. No problem. Now it's the time to use these contacts. You said you know this one and that one and this one and that one. Ready? Go. All of a sudden, it's a busy signal.

6:43All of a sudden, I don't know him that well. I'm not really sure if he's going to talk to me about it. I don't know. All of a sudden, it's not like that. It's not like that. It's always an excuse. What do you mean? You put on your resume that you know this one and that one. You know them. What happened? Now it's go time. Go. Nothing. Zero. Zero. Same thing goes for all these heroes. I know this Tzadik, and I read this book, and I have a collection of books. Yeah, you know all these people; they know you. They know you; they're gonna vouch for you. They tell you that what you're doing is right. Because if what you're doing is right, you have to rip half the Torah because it's rebuke.

7:44That means that everything that Moshe Rabbeinu said is hate. And then you have to rip the other half of the Torah because everything that Hashem said was rebuke also. Rebuke does not mean hate. Rebuke comes out of love. You rebuke someone to correct them. Because it hurts you to see them failing. It hurts you to see them going the wrong direction. You see your son keep putting the puzzle the wrong way. You're not going to let him just continue wasting his life in the wrong way. Tell him, listen, that one piece, it's going to ruin the whole puzzle. Just take that one out. Not because you hate him. Because you love him. You see your son writing the wrong way. You're going to say, no, no, honey. It's the wrong way. You want to go that way. You see your neighbor doing something wrong, building something wrong. You say, "Hey, neighbor, that one thing over there, it's going to be in your way after you finish. You just don't see it now, but I have experience. By the time you finish, it's going to ruin the whole thing. You're going to have to destroy the whole thing." Oh, why'd you say it? Because I love you. Not because I hate you.

9:11But David HaMelech warned us about it. And he said in Tehillim 118: "They encircle me. They also surround me, but in the name of Hashem, I cut them down. They encircle me like bees." But they are extinguished like a fire consumes thorns in the name of Hashem. I cut them down. David HaMelech is telling us several things in one of the chiddushim we had, Baruch Hashem. It's not the devorim, it's not the bees that are obvious that hurt the most. It's not the Esavs of the world that try to debate me about Christianity that I care about. It's the so-called tzaddikim, the ones who think they're tzaddikim. They come to me and say, "Oh, I'm here in the name of Hashem. In the name of Hashem, I'm here to rebuke you. I'm here to tell you you're doing wrong." I said, "Okay, no problem. You think I'm wrong, no problem. But how come all the Mechalelei Shabbat in your community, you don't rebuke them? How come all the women walking in your shul half-naked, you don't say a word to them?"

10:37Come, all the people that are intermarried; you welcomed them into your shul. Why? Let's say my strategy is wrong. Fine, I'll accept it. What about yours? In the name of Hashem, they come, and how do they come? The Gemara says they come like bees. They think they're doing a mitzvah, but it says we fight them in the name of Hashem. All of these fakers will be destroyed eventually. We don't wish harm on anyone; we want everyone to do teshuvah. But before you get in the way of someone who's trying to sacrifice their life to help people do teshuvah, ask yourself a question: All those people you know, all those tzaddikim, all of those books that are on your shelves that you haven't read, do they agree with you? Or is it just like three verses in some parsha that you mistranslated?

11:40Those books, those Gemaras, the Zohar, the Mishnah, all of those books, all of those tzaddikim that you claim to know, are they really going to vouch for you? Are they going to sign a check for 85 million? Or when you reach out to them, will they say, "Hey, I rebuked the guy who left a life of millions to work for free to help Am Yisrael do teshuva. I rebuked him, so he stopped. He's not doing it anymore. He gave up, he retired, he went back to Wall Street"? Will they vouch for you in the next life? Will they come to you in the next life and say, "Yeah, yeah, he did right"? You did right. I'll vouch for him. They wrote the check. They wrote it. All they said was, "No, I don't know. I wouldn't even mess with that guy." I blessed him. It was an accident. I didn't know it was him. It was before he did this craziness. I wouldn't have blessed him if I knew. Oh, it wasn't like that. I wasn't sure. All of a sudden, no one knows. This is important to know. It's important to know because, unfortunately, the Gog u'Magog that we've been talking about for the last three years...

12:41doing lectures, it starts at home, it starts inside. The aura of love is inside. The yetzer hara is inside; Satan is inside. It's all inside. What are we doing today to help Am Yisrael do teshuva?