New Insights From Wall TeShuva Story (Congregation Zichron K'Doshim - NEW YORK)

0:12Good evening, everyone. I hope you'll turn off your cell phones. We have the privilege tonight to have Rabbi Yaron Reuven. Especially since it's before Shavuos now, and everybody says it every day, they say, this is our life. This is our life. So obviously, coming here to hear a shiur, you're testifying that Torah is your life, so that when you're davening every day, the berachot in Kriyat Shema, you're saying the truth. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce, everybody knows him, so please enjoy.

1:23First of all, thank you very much for inviting us, tizku lemitzvot, to the host, tizku lemitzvot. It's a big mesirut nefesh to arrange a shiur. And as we always say when we start shiurim, a person is connected to HaKadosh Baruch Hu only if he reminds himself on a constant basis that everything and anything that he does is only because of Hashem. People ask all the time, The question, you know, the whole story, which we'll go over a little bit tonight: Why change? Why move from Wall Street business, which is, in essence, what everybody tries to aspire to—success in Wall Street, success in business, success in money? Why leave all of that and go work for free, and hopefully enough people give tzedakah so you can pay rent? Why do such a thing to yourself? Don't you know why you like torturing yourself? Are you such a sadist? Is something wrong with you?

2:30The reality is, what you'll discover in this shiur today, you'll discover from the story, is that at some point a person has to test his own character. At some point a person has to find out who he really is. And one of the things that I discovered in my life is that what you want to do, what you don't want to do, doesn't really matter that much. The whole point of the world is what HaShem wants to happen. What does HaShem want to happen? And the choice that a person has in this world is whether they're going to decide the right choice or the wrong choice of whether they will become a vessel that HaKadosh Baruch Hu can use to show the good or the bad. Either way, you'll be used as a tool. Either way, you'll become a vessel. If a person wants to be a vessel of truth, he wants to tell people the truth, tell people to come back to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Why? HaKadosh Baruch Hu says, oh, you're a good partner. I'll keep you around for a while. I'll take care of all your problems. Somebody takes on Torah, somebody takes on the burden of Torah, which is publicizing it, learning it, and fulfilling it. Hashem says, I'll take all Malchut, all of the things of this world, I'll take care of it.

3:55What, the IRS wants to go after you? I'll take care of them. What, the bills? I'll take care of them. The doctors? Them too. Anything and everything. It's easy to learn it, it's easy to say it, but it's very hard to do. We all have learned it in Pirkei Avot or in different Sifrei Mussar. The hard part is doing it. And the reason why is because the test is every day. So, when I first came to the United States, almost 30 years ago, We came from a very traditional family that originated from Tripoli. In that generation, everybody was righteous in comparison to our generation. Even the people that weren't very learned still knew that you had to keep Shabbat. My grandfather, a"h, Saba Gabriel, once had a test. What was the test? they came to him and told him that they don't like the fact that people are not working seven days a week. From now on, there's a rule: everybody has to work on Shabbat. He said, "Your government has nice rules, but they're not for us. We're Jews; we don't work on Shabbat." They said, "Listen, we know they all listen to you, and if they don't listen, we're going to go after you."

5:18Sabba Gavriel, who didn't know how to read or write, said, "You go after me. No problem. It doesn't make a difference." He wasn't some big talmid chacham. Like I said, you could see his book somewhere else. No, he just knew Jews are not allowed to work on Shabbat. Jews are not allowed to light fire on Shabbat. Simple. That's all he knew. And that's what he did. So when nobody wanted to work on Shabbat because Gavriel said it, they put everybody in jail. Everybody went to jail. Then they put my grandfather in a private cell, and one of the chief commanders came inside. He said, "I'm going to make an example of you. Until you tell everybody they're going to work on Shabbat, we're going to hit you until you die or you tell them to do it." He said, "You can do what you want. We're not going to work. We Jews don't work on Shabbat." Long story short, this commander doesn't do his own blood shedding. He has people do it for him. So he leaves, he brings another Amalek inside, goes into the cell. But the good news is that this other person knew who my grandfather was, and he knew that my grandfather was one of the heroes of the town. And he said to him, "Listen, I don't want to hit you. I don't want to hit you, but if I don't hit you, he's going to kill me."

6:36So my grandfather said, "Listen, if you put one hand on me, you're not coming out alive. So it's your choice." He didn't touch him, but he had to pretend he did. So he started hitting the wall. The commander was happy to hear somebody screaming, even though nothing really happened. And everybody left. He got the satisfaction that he made an example of something, but in reality, nothing changed. Everybody continued keeping Shabbat. This is the generation from almost 100 years ago. I was born in a generation of not such heroes. We don't have such heroes. My generation, we went down a little bit because our parents and our grandparents didn't keep to the strict letter of the law. We adapted technology. We've adopted technology and all of the modern things of the world. And little by little, a person that's not true to the Torah can become a goy. When we came to the United States, even though we went to a traditional Mamlachti school in Israel, you know, it still had boys and girls, but everybody wore a kippah, even the girls sometimes. We went to a traditional school; we had tzitzit, but on the weekends, most of the kids weren't really religious. So, we would go to the beach. Most of the kids weren't religious, so you didn't exactly keep Shabbat unless your parents were watching. Sometimes the parents didn't keep Shabbat, so it was like 50-50.

8:00As soon as we came to the U.S., since we were all already 50-50, we were all on the borderlines. When the yeshivot in America said that they charge $500 to $1,000 a month per kid, it was very easy for my parents to say no. Why? We didn't have the money. It wasn't a matter of, I don't want him to go to a Jewish school. It was a matter of, I can't afford it. can't afford to send a kid to a Jewish school, so what's the other option? You have to send a kid to school. Oh, there's this other school called public school. Okay, public school sounds good. Well, they teach them English—oh, it's a good subject. And teaching math—perfect subject. Science—even better. So, me and my brothers went to public school. we didn't know is that the public school is full of goyim, and, unfortunately, once you're surrounded by goyim for a long enough time, you become just like them. You start liking them, you start befriending them, and you start adopting their behaviors, their reality. And little by little, the little cute kids that you had at home that said at night don't really want to see my son. little kids that were very, very close to your hearts and liked to go to beit knesset a few times a year don't really want to go to beit knesset anymore. Why? Because they see Christmas trees in Rome, they see Christmas trees in school, and they want a Christmas present. The shock of my life when I was 10 or 11 years old was when one of my classmates, one of the few people who was actually Jewish,

9:25Hanukkah was around, and I said to him, "Also, you guys celebrate Hanukkah?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah, we have a Hanukkah bush." I said, "What's a Hanukkah bush?" I didn't know. I never heard of such a thing. Hanukkah bush. We didn't have that. We didn't develop with the Reform in Israel yet. We didn't know what a Hanukkah bush was, and... I said, "What's a Hanukkah bush?" And he started telling me it's a bush. I said, "Do you celebrate Christmas, like the Nochrim, like the Christians?" He goes, "No, we're Jews." I said, "So why do you have a bush? Why do you have a tree in your house?" He goes, "That's what we do in America." So I went to my house and asked my mom, "Are we going to get a tree?" She wanted to hit me. She wanted to send me to a different town. She said, "What tree? We're Jewish people. What's the matter with you?" I said, "No, my friend has a Hanukkah bush." You don't know what you don't know. don't know what you don't know. So, okay, so we're not going to get a Hanukkah bush. Can we at least get the presents? We didn't have presents in Israel. In Israel, you get a little bit of chocolate, you watch the fire, you know, the little candles, eat some sufganiyot. Okay, finished, that's it. You get a little chocolate, you get a little donuts, finished. In America, they have all these presents and this and that. Why? Where did the presents come from? From the goyim?

10:36That's where it came from. Well, people buy, you know, these mountains of presents for their kids. For what? Or eight presents. Why? Are you competing with them? They get one present, we get eight because we're better? You have to be a millionaire just to survive the holidays. What if you don't have the money? So you can't be religious either? So you see, Rabotai, sometimes even the religious among us adopt some of the laws of the Goyim, the Chukot HaGoyim, and we fall. We fall victim to consumerism, to materialism, to all of the different things that little by little chip away at our Judaism. adopt some of the laws of the Goyim, the Chukot HaGoyim, and we fall. We fall victim to consumerism, to materialism, to all of the different things that little by little chip away at our Yiddishkeit. it's not that you necessarily fall in one shot, but if you take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, one day you start watching baseball even though it doesn't really make any sense and it's boring at first. Then, a little while later, you start watching football because that's the natural progression. You eventually want to go from this small ball to a bigger ball, and from small people to bigger people trying to kill each other. Before you know it, you're a Jewish kid that wants to play in the NFL even though you're five feet tall and slower than molasses. Still, you want to be an NFL player. Why? Because

11:41that's who you're watching TV all day. That's who you're watching TV. By the time you're 18 years old and maybe you have a little bit of muscle, you figure, oh, maybe I'll be a runway model. Maybe I'm going to go to a studio and take some pictures. They take some pictures, I'll make a smile, they'll put me in a Calvin Klein magazine. Little by little, you start adopting some of the stuff that's around you because you think this is what you're supposed to do. This is life. This is life. And this is what happened to us. Between me and my three brothers, we pretty much tried everything. Everything and anything. Already at 10 years old, we had jobs. We were making money as high school students. Most kids were still asking their parents for allowance. We were trying to help our parents just survive. We all had jobs, we all had something, but we went to school too. I liked school, I liked learning how to think, I liked getting good grades, so I was one of the four that actually did pretty well in school. Most people thought I was going to be a lawyer or a doctor, but when I discovered that you have to go to school for at least another 10 or 20 years to be a lawyer or a doctor, I decided that I quit before I started. But still, I went to university,

12:50I went to Binghamton University and I had a very good GPA of 3.9. They said to me that this is very good, but it's only the first year and it doesn't really matter. So I said, "What's the point then?" They said, "Oh well, if you want it to really matter, you have to go for another seven years. You know, three more years here, then grad school." It didn't make any sense to me that you have to go for another eight years to finally pick what you want to do. Why can't I just pick it in the first year? didn't realize that capitalism rules the world at that point. I just thought that, oh, maybe, you know, I could just pick. I want to be a psychiatrist. Can I just do that now? No, no, you have to take all types of prerequisite courses in order to eventually be allowed to take the psychiatry classes, the biology classes, and all these other classes. Why? Because every year you go there, you waste your time, smoke marijuana, go to clubs, waste your parents' money, and borrow some more money from the government. What happens? They get the money. little by little, you adopt their laws, you adopt their mentality. You start thinking, "Wow, this is a fantastic system." You send your kid to an eight-year program just to hopefully learn one year. Every parent in America, their dream is, "My kid has to go to school, my kid has to go to, you know, some university, and then some grad school," because hopefully, they become one of a million doctors. The reality is that a doctor is not what he used to be anymore. You could be much more successful simply being an entrepreneur.

14:10But because you don't know what you don't know, you fall into the system. But I had something going for me. What went for me is that we didn't have much money. So after a year of paying for school, I had to drop out because we didn't have money to pay for school any further. So I had to go back to the work world. Now, since I was already used to making money, I needed to get a good job. So somebody introduced me to the electronics business. I did that for a little while and made a few dollars, but I hated it because I knew it was unethical. You know, they were selling stuff that's brand new, but in reality, it was refurbished, fooling people left and right. A guy comes in for a thousand-dollar computer, and by the time he leaves, he has spent four thousand dollars on stuff that he doesn't need. And even though that makes you a very good salesman, it also makes you a ganav, a thief too. So I hated the business and I wanted to leave, but I wanted to make a lot of money. So another friend of mine introduced me to the brokerage business, being a stockbroker. So I started working for a firm in Staten Island, but I only lasted there for a couple of months. Eventually, I went to a different firm in the city. But the rules were that you pretty much have to pay your dues, something that the current generation doesn't actually understand. You have to work for them, you have to make them a lot of money, and eventually, they allow you to make a little bit more.

15:28That's it, that's the way it works. So you come into the office at eight o'clock in the morning, you work till about eight o'clock at night, maybe you have about a half-hour break in between, and you do it all over the next day. So I did that for a few years, working for other people, paid my dues, learned the trade, learned what to do, learned a little bit about the stock market, and I saw my boss getting really rich. He started buying all types of cars and jewelry and houses, and I'm still making my $1,000, $1,500 a month. It was barely enough to survive, so I had to get a second job. But the Jew in me that didn't keep Shabbat, the Jew in me that didn't keep many mitzvot, still always knew that I'm not allowed to work on Shabbat. So I never worked on Shabbat, Baruch Hashem. But still, on Sunday I worked, and sometimes at nights I worked, and sometimes I would do anything I could do to possibly make a few dollars, make side gigs, all types of stuff. I had to survive. After three years of this, I realized that there's no way for me to continue growing with this company. I had to leave. I left, went to a different company, paid my dues there for another few months. And then eventually September 11th happened. Now after September 11th, most people would think this is the worst time in the world because the market had already dropped 50% a couple of years before it. And then after September 11th, the market dropped another 26%.

16:53So it was hell on earth for anybody that was a stockbroker. I had good news. The good news for me was I had no clients, so nobody hated me. But everybody hated everybody else's broker. Why? Because everybody else lost their money. I'm the only guy that didn't lose anybody's money. I didn't have any clients. So while their broker was hiding under his desk because he lost his clients so much money, I was as fired up as can possibly be. I said, well, I can take everybody's clients. Why? They hate them. I don't even have to say I'm better. don't have to do anything. All I can do is just recommend something that I think is a good idea, believe in it, research it, find out if it's good, you know, and then recommend it and hopefully build up enough of a client base. Hopefully, it works out, and that's what I did. So while everybody else was hiding under their desks, hoping that one day the economy would recover and the dot-com bubble would unburst, I was trying to acquire clients. But during the first six months... I didn't make any money whatsoever. So I started having to get to a point of borrowing a dollar every day from a kid named Dimitri that worked in the office so I could buy coffee and a donut because that's all I could afford to eat. And that's what I ate. And every day I would have to sneak onto a bus because I didn't have money for a MetroCard.

18:07a few times they'd throw me off the bus because, you know, they caught onto my trick where I would put in the MetroCard and act like I was surprised, like in Hollywood, "Oh, it didn't have any money. I'll get you another one, just let me sit down so I don't fall." Then, I'd go to the back and hope that the guy forgot about me and fall asleep. By the time I got back home, you know, everything would go away. This worked out for a little while, and once in a few times, Hashem, you know, gave me a nice special bonus by having the guy be one of those people who actually was a makpid. He made sure he got his $1.50. He made sure he got his $2, so after a couple of stops, when I didn't have the money, he'd throw me off the bus and I’d have to wait another hour for the next bus. Baruch Hashem. Anyway, this continued for a while. But I believed in it, I believed that it was gonna work. And while the rest of the world thought I was crazy, my family, my friends... believe that this is gonna work, and eventually it did. After about six months of this nightmare, I made my first thousand dollars that I could actually keep. For me, it was all the money in the world. The next month, I made five thousand; the next month, I made seven thousand; the next month, I made ten or eleven thousand; the next month, sixteen thousand. And by November of 2002, a little over a year after September 11th, I made one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars in one month.

19:25This broke the office record. Nobody made that kind of money in that office. And I got on the map. I got on the radar. One of the reasons why was because the idea that I had actually worked. The investment that we invested in, baruch Hashem, actually worked. People actually started making money in a down market. So naturally, everybody thought I was a genius. And they started sending me all their friends and all their extra money and all their other accounts. Little by little, my business started growing. I started investing in some other things and they also worked. By August of 2003, I became the number three top-producing broker in the entire country for that firm, which had about 5,000 people. The CEO of the company, named Raymond James, called my office and asked, "Who is this kid? Where did he come from? Who is his father that's so rich that's giving?" They replied, "No, no father, no nothing. This is just a kid that works really hard." He then asked, "But how is he making money?" People, when all of us are losing money, we have the top research analysts in the country. We have this, we have that, to do all the different, you know, reasons why they should be making money. How come we're losing money and he's making money? So he does his research, he invests, he makes people money. Well, I don't know, he just works non-stop. So the manager of the office, this Indian guy, did me a favor and he recorded the conversation and let me hear it after the conversation ended.

20:56was shocked because, at the end of the conversation, the CEO said, "Listen, there has to be something wrong. Maybe he's doing something illegal, maybe he's using insider information." He said, "This kid doesn't even know what insider information is. He's so new. Just leave him alone, because no, it does not make any sense that this kid is already one of the top three best brokers in the country when the average career on the list is 25-30 years. He's only been in it for a few years." So I realized at that point that if you're gonna be part of a big company, you're gonna be part of a UPS, you're gonna be part of a Merrill Lynch, you're gonna be part of a Bank of America or a Chase or Coca-Cola or an Apple, you have to fit in. You have to do what they do. In Rome, you have to be a Roman. That's the way it works. Well, guess what? I'm Israeli. I don't like being a Roman. so I said it's time for me to leave. I'm not interested in doing what they're doing. I'm interested in making people money and doing my own thing. I left and started my own company, and to my surprise, I actually became more successful because of it. My clients, who were all entrepreneurs, actually appreciated that I was an entrepreneur. I left the big firm and started my own shop, and they started sending me more clients and more friends.

22:11Over the next year, I actually became more successful. A bad month was a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and a good month would be over half a million dollars. I started hiring analysts, all types of research people, and brokers. I had a whole slew of people that worked for me, some of my old friends and some new ones. B'ezrat Hashem, money was plentiful. But what you discover when you get a lot of money relatively quickly is that life starts losing its meaning because when you don't have money, you have hope and that life will be better once you have the stuff you want. You know, you want a car, but you can't afford it. So once you get the car, you figure, oh, once I have the car, then I'll be happy. Okay, so you got the car. Two weeks later, whether it's a Bentley or it's a Honda Accord, it doesn't really make a difference anymore. It still drives on four wheels. So you say, oh, once I get the fancy house. I live in a little rinky-dink apartment, paying $700 a month rent. Oh, who's going to be happy in such a dump? Once I get my own place in the city, then I'll be happy. So I got a place in the city on John Street, and it was a nice 1,500-square-foot apartment, and it was really nice. And a month later, just a place. I said, no, I have to get a bigger place, a much fancier place. So I bought an apartment on Wall Street on the 35th floor, with almost a 2,000-square-foot apartment and a 400-square-foot balcony on the 35th floor. I mean, literally, they're rich and famous.

23:39i'm on this thing and guess what, a month later, two months later, I still have a bathroom, still have a bed, and still go in and out of the door. Nothing changes. Not an ounce of happiness increases. Okay, it's cool you have this apartment that has a pool inside the building and a gymnasium bigger than this building. All this stuff is cool, but for five minutes maybe 10. The best part was showing it to other people because they thought it was cool. But for you, you never actually use this stuff. So I gave a tour of the gym in the building maybe 50 times. I used it a half a time, not even a full once. People would come from out of town, you know, clients and people would come visit me. Oh, they want to see the place you live on Wall Street, the fancy schmancy place. There are guards, police, and dogs at the door. So they want to see what’s this building. It’s called the House of Morgan, meaning the old former headquarters of J.P. Morgan. That’s where I lived, right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. So you could literally go out and see the New York Stock Exchange across the street. So there are cops and all types of security. And I live there. So the clients like to come see it. And I would show them the pool, and I would show them the fancy schmancy stuff in the building. There’s a bowling alley, and there is a pool table and all types of stuff.

24:54And they would ask me, so why? You must have a lot of fun in this building. I said, no, this is actually only the 87th time I've shown it, but I've never actually used it. I never used it; who has time? Who has time to go play bowling in the middle of their work? But you like to show it. So you realize little by little that the material stuff in the world, it's fun, but it has a lifetime, a relatively short lifespan. you start looking for your meaning, your fulfillment, in other places. When the watch, the car, the house, and the bank account don't mean much, you start looking for other places. I would invest most of my time in the business, trying to build a business, trying to build what I thought would be an empire. But even that loses its taste once in a while. So I started doing other things, started reading different philosophical books. studying different things, and then eventually, I took on a hobby: playing poker. I liked math, I liked gambling, and I liked beating people. So, that's what I would do every weekend. I didn't go to work, but I went to the casino instead. Both of them, by the way, go to Gehinnom. Just in case somebody's wondering. Maybe the guy that plays poker, he's okay. No, you're not allowed to play poker on Shabbat. But I thought you were allowed. I thought it's not a bad thing. I figured, okay, at least I'm not working, right? So I went to the casino, and I played poker with the best poker players in the world.

26:17and I won a little bit. I played some tournaments and won some more. And I actually wanted to become a poker player. I started reading books about poker. But then, after a while, I started realizing that this is even worse than Wall Street. Wall Street, you know, people are trying to eat each other alive. In the poker world, they don't care if you're dead. They'll eat you too. You see the people, they don't leave the table. They all wear pajamas all day. Most of them are complete degenerate drug addicts. They sit at the table waiting for some fish, waiting for some fool to come so they can take everything he owns. And they sit there and sit there, and you see some of them with a newspaper, and some of them have somebody massaging them, and they all look like they live there, which, by the way, they do. Now, all the people that watch this stuff on TV, you see a lot of these famous poker players and you think, wow, he must have a great life. I met them. They're all miserable. They're all drug addicts for the most part and complete degenerate losers. Why? They live in a casino. How good could life be? A casino only looks good on screen. In reality, it's the worst place on earth.

27:23all of the people there are people that are literally willing to bet their mother just for the next card, just for the next thing, and it makes you lose your mind, lose your sense of reality. You become desensitized to reality, desensitized to money. You start throwing five-hundred, five-thousand, ten-thousand dollar chips as if they're a piece of plastic. So, after a while, I realized that, you know, maybe being a poker player is not the best idea in the world, but what else can I do? I don't really like Wall Street that much anymore, but it's a good business; I make good money in it. So, I figured, okay, you know what? Maybe I'll start taking care of my health. Now, throughout all this time, my inspiration to continue has always been my wife, my wife who helped me with the business. my wife, who gave me hope, my wife, who even tried to make me a religious Jew once or twice by buying me a Tanach and telling me that I shouldn't work on holidays. She was my inspiration to keep looking for the answer, and she kept telling me, "Yeah, the answer, you're always going to find it in this Torah." And I never understood why she was saying it because she wasn't even Jewish. But HaKadosh Baruch Hu will send you messengers in different ways.

28:44And as we're doing this already now, this kiruv, the speeches, the CDs, and everything else for now five, six, seven years, I realized that the last train is about to come. The last train for the generation is arriving. The last chance for everybody to do teshuva is around the corner. And the reason why is because now more than ever, everybody's getting a chance to discover the truth at least once. the past people would discover it in random times. You discover it, maybe you found a CD somewhere, or somebody invited you to their house, or somebody married into a religious family. Once in a while, you'd hear of somebody doing teshuva. Today, every day there's a story, every day there's a near-death experience, every day somebody changes their life, every day something new comes out in the Torah world that shakes the whole world apart. Today, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is making it pretty simple, pretty clear: time's running out. I have to close the store, I have to shut down all the books, but before I do it, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is telling us, "I'm going to give everybody a chance. Everyone's going to have a chance to discover the truth once and for all, and then do something about it. If you do good, you'll get good. Forever. If you don't do good, the opposite."

30:08I got my chance a few times, but I ignored it. I got a Tanach from a non-Jewish woman. I got a few rabbis that would come to my office at least three times a week. They'd never actually tell us anything about Torah, but they'd ask for money. They were pretty good about that. Three, four times a week, sometimes even every day. No one ever cared to tell me that I should keep Shabbat. No one ever cared to tell me that I should marry a Jew. No one ever cared to tell me that I should change my life in any way, shape, or form. But they were very, very good at asking me for money. And I hate them for it. And I talk about it all the time, how much I hate them for it. The reason why is because if they would have told me, there's at least a 50% chance I would have listened. I can't tell you for sure I would have listened. There's a very good chance I wouldn't have listened. At least 50%. I wouldn't have listened to them. I just kicked them out of my office. But if you're going to tell me that you're a so-called religious Jew, that you believe in HaKadosh Baruch Hu, and you love HaKadosh Baruch Hu, that means you have to love His children. That means that if you see one of His kids is about to be hit by a train called Gehinnom, because he's a Mechalel Shabbat married to a non-Jew, you should have enough care in your heart to say, "Hey, get out of the way. Get out of the way. You cannot do all the things that you're doing." But unfortunately, sometimes money blinds us.

31:26And when we're so busy chasing money, we forget that at the end of the day, HaKadosh Baruch Hu says, all the money in the world is His. You're chasing it. In essence, what you're trying to do is ask HaKadosh Baruch Hu for permission for more money. If He agrees, He gives you more. If not, He doesn't give it to you. to stop doing your job, which is publicizing the Torah, living the Torah, and fulfilling the mitzvot for the sake of money. That just simply means you're trying to rob Hashem. Unfortunately, sometimes that happens from the religious community. Not always, but it does happen. Yet it is in every one of us. So, I resent those people simply because I knew that they had a lot of opportunities. How many opportunities Well, let's do the math. I had my office for about 15 years, 16 years. But let's just do 10. Every week they would come three times, sometimes more. But let's just do one.

32:30Once a week, 52 times a year, that's 52 times 10 years. That means it's 520 opportunities, 520 opportunities to tell me at some point—maybe not in the beginning, maybe not in the middle, but at some point in the end—when you see me about to die, which you'll find out about in a moment. At some point, you should tell me, "Hey buddy, you know you should keep Shabbat. You know you should keep kosher, not kosher style." know you should marry a Jew, not someone who wants to be a Jew maybe sometimes. You know you're supposed to do certain things because Hashem said it, and just giving tzedakah is one mitzvah out of 613. It's a good mitzvah, but if you don't fulfill the rest of them, this mitzvah is not going to really help you much. In fact, even if you do all of the mitzvot but you skip a mitzvah called Shabbat, the rest of them are worthless. At some point out of the 522 times you would think, you should tell me. But they didn't. So what happens when the messengers fail? HaKadosh Baruch Hu has to get involved. Now you'll find out why I don't like them so much, these people. On November 18th of 2006, I decided to take care of my health and have elective surgery for something that bothered me once or twice a year, called hemorrhoids.

33:51Now, don't worry, two-thirds of people have it. Pregnant women have it very often, males have it, people that work out have it, many, many people have it. But don't worry, you're not going to have the same test as me, I'm very unique. At least that's what the doctors say. Now, when I went to the doctor, he told me this is a very normal case. You come into the office, you come to the hospital in the morning, within an hour or two we finish the surgery, you go home. You get rest, you feel a little bit of discomfort for a couple of days, which, by the way, means pain. And you go back to work on Monday. I said, okay, Monday, it's a couple of days' worth of work. I make about $3,000 an hour. So this surgery is costing me about a good $100,000. All right, I guess it's worth it. That's the logic of someone who is losing the meaning of life, pretty much. So I go to the surgery, and I don't wake up the same. When I wake up, I wake up screaming. I wake up yelling, and they ask me what's wrong. I yell back at them that I feel like they're cutting me up with knives that are connected to electricity, over and over and over again. I start begging them and anyone next to me to kill me because it's intolerable.

35:10Obviously, they don't listen. My wife arrives. She starts seeing me screaming and yelling. She starts hysterically crying. My mother arrives. She starts hysterically crying. I ask them both to kill me. Neither one wants to listen to me. And it won't stop. Eventually, the doctors start giving me more and more morphine. Doesn't work. They give me more. It doesn't work. They give me more. It doesn't work. Eventually, they tell them, "Listen, we gave him the most amount of morphine legally allowed. Most people would have already died from the morphine. If it doesn't work at this point, we can't do anything." Hashem, at that point, had mercy on me, and it started working. I calmed down. After I calmed down, everyone stopped sweating. realized that I just saw a version of Gehinnom I never knew before, and I said, "Okay, can I go home now? This place is not so much fun after all." So they released me because, after all, it was an elective surgery. That was mistake number two. We got home, we had a sandwich. I told everybody good night, and I went to sleep. Forty-five minutes later, the morphine wore off and

36:27started screaming, only this time it was much worse than the first time. Only this time, it didn't stop. Even though I had painkillers, even though I took 50 of them, even though I took everything we had, it didn't work. They gave me more, and it didn't work, and it didn't work for 62 days. 62 days of screaming and yelling, with the longest amount of consecutive sleep being no more than 15 minutes. The only thing that would calm my body down would be boiling water. Now, to everyone that wants to try it, I say: don't try this at home. Now, you ever boil tea? You made tea before, you made coffee before. Now, when it's boiling, you shouldn't put your fingers on it, right? Okay, well, the only way my body calms down is if I dip my whole body into it. So my body would go into such massive pain that this pain would just be a different shade of pain that's better than the other pain and would calm me down for 15 minutes. So go from Gehenom to Kaf HaKela.

37:35This would calm me down for about 15 minutes. I would fall asleep during those 15 minutes, and then the pain would start again. I'd start screaming and yelling again. And now, after you don't sleep for 62 days, after you don't sleep for even four or five days, your body starts failing. So my body started failing. I started urinating blood, started seeing blood in my eyes, getting infections everywhere. We went to the hospital. Now, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is very interesting. You see, when He wants your attention, He'll get it. When He wants your attention, He'll get it no matter what you want. But sometimes He's a little bit upset at you because He tried getting your attention a few times. He sent you a message, He sent you a text message, He sent you a WhatsApp, He called you, He knocked on your door. You didn't get His attention, you never called back. So this time, when He got your attention, He goes all out. So HaKadosh Baruch Hu says to Am Yisrael, if you do good, I'll give you good. He gives you 13 verses of blessings. But if you don't do good, 49 different curses we get. One of them is HaKadosh Baruch Hu says, I'm going to hide My face. What do you mean? You have no face. How are you going to hide Your face? How do You hide a face that doesn't exist? This is how You do it.

39:06Yosef HaTzadik was called Yosef HaTzadik by HaKadosh Baruch Hu, but he made a small, tiny, little, minor error according to his level. Well, after ten years of being in a hole in the ground called a prison, he asked the Egyptian whose dream he had just solved through Ruach HaKodesh. He told him, "Listen, if you remember to remember me and..." you remember to remember me. Tell them I'm here. He said "remember" twice. Who says you're going to put your trust in another person, not in me? For each "remember," you get another year in jail. Each "remember" adds another year in jail. You're already in jail for 10 years for a different punishment, and now you're going to be in jail for another two years. Now, it says here that Yosef HaTzadik said, meaning, remember to remember me, or remember to mention me. When the Egyptian went in front of Paro, it says that this person didn't remember Yosef and he forgot him. Obviously, if he didn't remember, he forgot.

40:30If he didn't remember, he forgot. That's what it means. Why are you saying it twice? So there's much that the Chachamim go back and forth. Why this? Why that? Because of the punishment. Because he said, remember to remember me. But also, this is something I had a little bit of insight on. The Chachamim say that technically this was a punishment on Yosef HaTzadik. Why? You asked for help from an Egyptian, from a human being. which means you forgot me. So you forgot me, I'll forget you for another year. When Hashem wants to hide His face, it doesn't look good. So when I was screaming my lungs out, The pain medicine didn't work. There was a small version of it, but then I went to the hospital because pretty much I was dying. We went to the emergency room, and you figure that the emergency room has good doctors. In Manhattan, each one makes a zillion dollars. You figured that all of them know what they're doing. So I go to the doctors, and I'm screaming and yelling in the emergency room, and the doctor comes in and...

41:42looks at me and decides how much it didn't make any sense. They barely even talked to me. They just decided what they're gonna do. Now, usually, they ask you 500 questions. Usually, they ask the family 550 questions. Usually, they look at you with, you know, very, very calm and, you know, just very careful. They don't want to hurt you even more. You're already in pain. No, here it was like I was cattle. So the doctor decided, okay She sends somebody, okay, you give them a catheter. Anyone that knows what that means, it's not much fun. Now, after they do that, the doctor says, calls another five big doctors, big nurses, each one of them, okay, hold him down. Five of them hold me down, and she decides that she's going to investigate the entire surgery, open the whole surgery, without giving me any type of anesthesia, without giving me any type of anesthetic, nothing. And she goes to the extent of putting her entire arm inside my body, like I'm a puppet. Now, you guys probably heard the scream; you just didn't know it was me. The type of screams that I screamed that day, the type of pain that I felt that day, I remember like it was yesterday.

43:06It'll wake up the dead. That was another aspect of HaKadosh Baruch Hu hiding His face. When He makes the smart doctors really stupid. When He makes a human being act like an animal. This continued for some time. I went to other doctors. Each treatment would be worse than the other. After a couple of months of this adventure, eventually, the pain started calming down. I would only have to take 20 to 25 painkillers per day just to survive, but still, nonetheless, it was better than the Gehinnom for those two months. So, my body calmed down, and I started going back to Wall Street. It would take me about 45 minutes or so to get to work, even though it was only about maybe a half a block away. For example, to walk from here to the end of the room for a normal person would take, I don't know, maybe a half a minute, 30 seconds. For me, it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of a half hour to 40 minutes. had a cane. I looked like I was 900 years old, even though I was still in my 20s, 26 years old. Some people thought that the cane was a fashion statement. You started seeing other Wall Street guys with canes at that time. It was very, very interesting. I wanted to hit them with the cane, but I didn't have the power. You started seeing some other guys walking around with a cane all of a sudden. They thought it was a fashion statement, like I started a fashion statement.

44:29So anyway, this happened. I had a very difficult time walking, running, breathing, or even tolerating anything. But nonetheless, I had hope. I figured that things were getting better or would continue getting better. Well, they got better for a little while. But HaKadosh Baruch Hu thought that I was going to get the message that it's time for me to say Shema Yisrael. It's time for me to change my life. I didn't get the message. So, nine months later, I felt pain in my leg. By the next day, I wasn't able to move. Within a few hours, we had to go to the hospital emergency room. The doctors did a short test. and they told me that I have such a big infection in between two muscles that if I would have waited another hour, maximum two, it would have exploded, gotten into my blood system, and I would have died within hours. I said, "Wow, you guys are really full of good news." So they said, "What we have to do is surgery." I said, "I have such great experience with surgeries, but yes, okay, let's have a surgery." Now, I didn't know how bad the surgery was.

45:34just knew the last one was really bad. This one, oh wow, oh wow, this one didn't let me go. It was so bad they didn't let me go out of the hospital. It was so bad I couldn't leave the intensive care unit where people are dying for almost three weeks. Three weeks I'm connected to morphine non-stop, pressing the button as if it's a video game non-stop. Now I'm in and out of consciousness. Hoping that it is eventually gonna be over, and then I fall asleep before I realize what I was hoping for. Eventually, this starts calming down, and I figure, okay, we're done. Eventually, they release me. I go back home, Baruch Hashem. I figure, okay, the worst of it is behind. We saw Gehinnom. We saw kaf ha-kela. Next time, we're gonna see Gan Eden. Well, you have to keep Shabbat? Forget it. I did. You have to keep kosher? Forget it. You have to learn Torah? Forget it. I didn't do any of those things. I just figured I have bad luck.

46:35so six months later, the other leg started hurting. I said, "Ah, can't be. What are the chances? I mean, how bad could bad luck be? Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I mean, come on." I went to the doctor. He said, "It doesn't look good, sir. You have to have surgery." I said, "When?" He said, "Immediately." Okay, so we go back to the intensive care unit. They tell me my situation is worse than I thought; the other guy was just being nice about it. I have to have surgery immediately. I'm in the hospital for another few weeks, but this time, since I didn't get the first message or the second message, they sent me some Mexican doctor, where apparently in Mexico, there's a certain type of people over there that don't have feelings for other people. He learned his medicine from the other people that I met in NYU. He also decided to check me without anesthesia, without any painkillers, without anything. This was a blast, guys. You should never try it though. So eventually, before I had to, you know, leave...

47:41They told me we have to check. So they sent me this guy, this Mexican doctor, and he decided he's gonna really check. He opened the wound. He put his hands in, and he started to take. Oh, wow. It was a lot of fun. It was a blast, I mean, if you ever wanted to learn my shiur again, oh, this is a little worse. Why did HaKadosh Baruch Hu say if you don't do teshuvah, if you don't do what I said, I'm gonna hide my face? Why do all the smart people become stupid, and... all of the things that make sense don't make sense. The world goes upside down. Why? I'm trying to get your attention. You didn't listen the easy way. You didn't listen to the shiur. You didn't listen to the CD. You didn't listen to the WhatsApp message. You didn't listen to all the other things. So I gotta get your attention in an unfortunately hard way. So, I still didn't get the message because I figured I just have bad luck and bad health. So now, three months later, I'm back in the hospital Another surgery. And then two months later, I'm back in the hospital. Another surgery. And then every month, every month I'm in the hospital. My business starts going downhill. The market starts collapsing. My investments start collapsing. My friends become enemies. Anything and everything they could do, they start taking as if they're all vultures. They take whatever they can just to survive because the line is down.

49:03Business starts going downhill. Investments start going downhill. I can't even work. I can't even protect myself. Life becomes hell. Literally. Now I get to a point where I have to go to the hospital every month, and that's not even enough. So, I start going to doctors on a regular basis every week. I have at least two to three doctor's appointments every week. We're trying a new doctor. We tried over 50 different specialists from everywhere, of every type of trade: regular, holistic, traditional medicine—all types of things. I even got to a point where we were so desperate, I joined a study. I became part of an experiment and... Started injecting my body four or five times a week with ozone just to see if something would happen to my body. Maybe it will purify. Maybe I'll die. I figured it was a 50-50 chance. And I became part of an experiment. He started, you know, writing down, "Okay, so you didn't react so well today. Tough luck, kid." So this was our only hope. I started taking steroids like the athletes. I had a lot of money, so every shot cost $1,500. Every day, a few times a day. Maybe that will work. All I got were side effects.

50:15started going to different types of doctors. They started saying, "Maybe it's a nervous problem. Maybe you have a nerve issue." So they started giving me nervous medicine, all types of drugs that affect your brain. Well, after about a couple of hours of taking one of those drugs, I started thinking and contemplating, "What would happen if I run into moving traffic?" And I started contemplating suicide. I didn't understand why I wanted to commit suicide. I'm not happy, but I'm not depressed. Then I asked my wife, "Honey, can you look at that medicine? Does it say anything about side effects?" She asked, "Why?" I said, "I don't know. For some reason, I'm starting to have vivid imaginations. My vivid imagination is starting to picture me running into moving traffic, me jumping off of a building. I don't know. I woke up this morning fine. Just after I met this doctor and he gave me this new medicine, I'm starting to want to commit suicide." So she started going into a panic. She looked at it. She said, "Yes, that's the first side effect." I said, "Okay, so finish with that one." And we tried all types of medicine, but the medicine didn't work. This continued on for over seven years. Seven years, every dollar that I had was going out the window. The friends became enemies. The doctors became pretty much a permanent part of my life.

51:33little by little, I started realizing that I don't really want to live anymore. Now, even though sometimes His message is harsh, sometimes His message is painful, at the end of the day, if He's still giving you a message, that means He loves you. Because if He didn't, there wouldn't be a message; there would just be a conclusion. So, He gives you a test that you can handle, even though you don't agree. At some point, you break, and at that breaking point, or right before that breaking point, that's when Hashem gets involved. When Am Yisrael got to Yam Suf, they got to the Sea of Reeds, everybody started breaking. Why? On one end, they have an ocean that doesn't end; behind them, they have an enemy with an army that's so big it doesn't end. the right and left are scorpions and snakes that the Midrash says were the size of humans—anaconda snakes that were the size of 10, 20, 30 people. They would eat people alive, so you couldn't go in the desert just roaming around. You couldn't go back to Egypt because they'd kill you, and then the ocean—who knows how to swim? We've been slaves for 200 years.

52:52So people started breaking. Some say, "Okay, so let's maybe ask for forgiveness. We'll become slaves again." Another one says, "Let's fight them. Let's fight. Let's at least fight. They're going to kill us, but let's fight at least." People started breaking. But there was a person by the name of Nachshon ben Aminadav from the tribe of Yehuda. He did a kal vachomer. Needless to say, he did a little calculation in his head using his Jewish brain. He said, "Figure this: HaKadosh Baruch Hu just destroyed the biggest civilization in the world for us." All these miracles, ten plagues, turning the water into blood, bringing the frogs, all types of wonderful things for us. He made the slave into the master. For what? So we could get here. For what? I don't know yet. But obviously, it's not to kill us. If He wanted to kill us, He would just leave us in Egypt. So, we're here for a reason. He heard Moshe say to Hashem, "Hashem, please help us." Hashem says to him, "What are you screaming to me for? Move forward." Move forward. We move forward with what? Show me you believe in Me. Show me that you actually have taken your emunah into action, and not just say, "I have emunah, I have emunah, I have emunah." As soon as you have a test, all the emunah goes into the garbage. Nachshon ben Aminadav got this message. He says, "I have emunah. I'm going to show I have emunah. I'm going to go into the ocean." Why? It's the only way that doesn't have 100% death.

54:19scorpions, snakes for sure, Egyptians for sure, the water. We're not soldiers. We just don't know how to swim yet, though. So he goes into the water. The water covers his face, even over his nose, and at that very moment, when he wasn't able to handle the test anymore because he was dying, he was drinking, drinking the water, drowning. HaKadosh Baruch Hu split the ocean. HaKadosh Baruch Hu is willing to split the ocean for every single Jew. All you got to do is put your emunah into action and... but sometimes you don't know what you don't know. Sometimes you don't even know where to start. So HaKadosh Baruch Hu has to help you through a messenger. One messenger that I had was my wife. She gave me a Tanach. She tried recommending different types of things for me to learn in order for me to be a religious Jew, even though she wasn't Jewish. But my other messenger was my mom. My mother, God bless her, is a very spiritual woman. She has had some very interesting dreams that never made sense to me my whole life. But they started to make more and more sense the more I learned Torah because many of them have a lot to do with the Torah. She knew that her son was in danger. She knew that her son was dying. She would go to all types of rabbis, and she only told me a lot of the stuff after the fact. And

55:37She would go to a lot of different rabbis and ask them for a bracha, bracha, bracha. She had a phone book full of rabbis. "Please, my son is dying. Bracha, bracha." She'd go to Israel, she'd go to this place, she'd go to that place. She went to a very big mekubal in Netanya named Rav Amos. And Rav Amos is one of the mekubalim. He's been there, Baruch Hashem, for many, many years. And Rav Amos doesn't usually see women. But, Baruch Hashem, my mom started hysterical crying and got everybody's attention in the middle of the night. And Rav Amos didn't need her to explain what was happening. She was crying, "My son, please help my son, he's dying." He looked at her, and apparently, whether he has Ruach HaKodesh or not, I don't know. All I know is that he had the solution. We just didn't want to listen. He said, "Your son has a big neshama, but the only thing that's going to help him is a big teshuva." Now, how is your mom going to tell you to go do teshuva if you went to public school? How is your mom going to tell you to go do teshuva if right now you're married to a non-Jew? How is your mom going to tell you to go do teshuva if you don't even know what you don't know? So my mom tried to give me different things, different ways, different... To get me in, give me a Tehillim book, give me a blessing book, give me all types of things, but I never took it seriously. Until I had no choice. After about seven years of this hell...

57:00I got to a point where I realized I don't want to be in this world, so I'm going to start thinking about leaving, exiting. But at least because I care about these people, let me be nice to them. Be extra nice to my wife, be extra nice to my mom. So I decided to call my mom and say hello, but I'm hearing her hysterical crying. She's crying hysterically. I say, "Ima, what's wrong?" She says, "Please, talk to him. Talk to him, please." I said, "Who? Who's making you cry?" She says, "Efraim." I said, "Who's this Efraim? Who's this Efraim? Why is he making you cry?" She goes, "It's your cousin. He's from Israel. Please talk to him." I said, "If it's going to stop you from crying, have him call me. I'll do whatever you want." I didn't know who Efraim was. I didn't even know I had a cousin named Efraim. Because when I left Israel, he was still a baby. But Efraim was the next messenger. I get a phone call from an Israeli number. I answer the phone, and Efraim starts the conversation, tells me who he is, and starts telling me, he says, "You like stories?" I said, "Sure." He starts telling me a story. Later on, I find out the characters in the story are Yehuda and Tamar from the Torah. And he starts telling me the story of Yehuda and Tamar, and how the whole thing happened, of how Yehuda

58:13had two sons, or three sons. The first son, Er, was married to Tamar, but he wasted seed, so Hashem killed him because Hashem hates wasting seed, even before Matan Torah. Then there was Onan. Onan also wasted seed, so Hashem killed him as well, because Hashem hates it. He hated it the first time, and He hates it the second time. From there we learn, by the way, that wasting seed is a sin both for Jews and non-Jews. Not just for Jews, because the law was already in play even before Matan Torah. We actually learn it originally from "one who spills the blood of a man within a man, his blood will be spilled." Blood of a man within a man. Obviously, it's not blood. If it's blood of a man, then we know it's regular blood. Blood of a man within a man, that means the essence of blood. The thing that's even bigger than blood, which is seed. So now, Rabotai HaYikarim,

59:20Ephraim, Rabbi Ephraim is telling me this story of how these two guys wasted seed, and then Tamar knew through prophecy that Mashiach is coming from Shevet Yehudah, and she wanted to be a part of this big mitzvah, so she pretended to be a prostitute so Yehudah would be with her. I said, "Why would Hashem do such a thing?" He says, "Because the Yetzer Hara knows that as soon as the Mashiach actually comes, Hashem is going to slaughter him. So, he's going to try to do everything and anything to ruin it. So, Hashem has to make anything that has to do with Mashiach look really, really ugly. The first look of all the stories connecting to Mashiach, you'll see, at first impression, look upside down, look really ugly." Lot with his two daughters, Yehuda and Tamar, David HaMelech and Batsheva, and so on and so forth. All these different stories in the Torah that have to do with Mashiach, all look upside down. Why? Because HaKadosh Baruch Hu wants to bring the salvation, but not in a very natural way. The point being, Rabotai, is that he's telling me the story, I found it very fascinating. And he said, you want another story? And I said, yes. Long story short, we talked for an hour and 40 minutes.

1:00:36Like the conversation, I hope for another one. He says, "Can I call you next week?" I said, "Sure." So next week, Thursday, four o'clock, he calls me. He starts, I start asking him questions. He gives me answers, but what kind of answers? He gives me fantastic answers, answers I've always been looking for. I've always had questions, but nobody had answers. I'd ask people, "Does the Torah believe in dinosaurs?" One guy said, "Yes," one guy said, "Maybe," and the other one said, "No." I said, "So one of you is a liar, one of them maybe is right, and the other one just doesn't know what he's doing." Like, how could it be that you have three different answers? Can somebody show me? Can somebody show me an answer of yes, something, whichever one it is? Baruch Hashem, Rabbi Fine was a personal messenger, had the answer with a source. He says, Torah says that there are dinosaurs. It's called taninim hagedolim. Taninim hagedolim means huge reptiles, which literally is what dinosaurs are. It's in the Torah. Fourth day. So I started getting answers with sources. And then I would ask another question about business. said, "Wow, that's a fantastic question. Rabbi so-and-so asked the same question 890 years ago in this book, on this page, and on this line." And I said to myself, "What are the chances that he has the book in front of him and remembers which page from 800 years ago?" So I just asked another question. I didn't really care about the other question; I just wanted to see if he has that book too.

1:01:57And I asked him another question, and he said, "Fantastic question." And I was proud of myself for asking fantastic questions. He said, "Yeah, see, Rabbi So-and-so asked the same question 450 years ago in this book, on this page, on this line." As if I knew what he was talking about. This book, I had never heard of the book or the rabbi. But I knew I asked a fantastic question. I felt good about myself. But I didn't know, where is he getting these answers from? Meaning, how does he have all these books in front of him? So I asked him, how do you have all these books in front of you? He says, "I don't have the books in front of me." didn't have Skype yet; it was actually a real phone call. He says, "How do you have all these?" "I don't have all the books in front of me." "So how do you know these answers?" He goes, "That's what you're doing: learn Torah. You learn Torah, and those will give you answers, and you have the answers in the books." And that's when something clicked, where I realized... He's not normal. Not to me. My life, I was surrounded by other types of people. This is not normal to me. Why? He knows books by heart. He knows lots of them by heart. He knows answers, people, and names—all types of wonderful things. I like this. I'm going to continue this. Can we have another conversation next week? Next week, Thursday, 4 o'clock, a 5-hour conversation. Same thing: conversation, questions, answers—everything, 5 hours straight, no break. Next week, Thursday, 4 o'clock, a 7-hour conversation.

1:03:17didn't even know how many questions I had until I started asking them and getting answers. Anyone that didn't get answers in their life, you should try it. It's mamash unbelievable—unbelievable to get answers to life's questions. But if you really care about the question, not just because you want to know the answer, ask questions you care about. I started getting them. And I started caring more about this than what was happening in my life. The pain was agonizing. I didn't care. The money was being lost literally faster than I made it. I didn't care about it. Life was going upside down. I cared less. Why? Thursday, four o'clock, that's my answer day. That's the day I get answers. After doing this for about nine months, I got a lot of answers. I got to find... saw that I'm changing my life, saw that I'm starting to fall in love with the Torah. I'm starting to learn even more than the Thursday four o'clock seven-hour session. He started telling me that I have to change certain things. So I said, "What's the first thing I should change?" He said, "You have to start keeping Shabbat." I said, "Yeah, I don't work on Shabbat. I just go to the casino."

1:04:32He says, "Exactly. You're not allowed to go to the casino." I said, "Why not?" He says, "Because going to the casino is stealing." I said, "No, I'm not stealing from the casino. I'm just playing poker against other players." He goes, "Exactly. What you do is 100% stealing." I said, "Why is it stealing?" He says, "Because you play against another person." I said, "Yeah, and sometimes the other person loses." He says, "Yeah, exactly. That's the whole objective, for him to lose." He says, "Yeah, but when he loses, he gives you the money." I said, "Exactly, that's the best part." He says, "That's exactly the worst part." I said, "Why?" He says, "He doesn't really want to give you the money." I said, "Yeah, but that's the rules." He says, "It doesn't matter what the rules are. The reality is he's giving you the money against his will. He doesn't want to give you the money. The minute he gives you the money, even though there were rules that you both agreed to, the minute he gave you the money, it's considered 100% stealing." you have a serious problem with Hashem. I said, I don't want to have a problem with Hashem. He tortured me already for a while. So I stopped gambling.

1:05:36And then I said, okay, so what else can I do on Shabbat? He says, on Shabbat you learn twice. I said, I learn the rest of the week. He said, no, no, on Shabbat you learn even more. I said, okay, fine. So I'll start keeping Shabbat. Now in the beginning, you don't really know what you don't know. So you start doing things. He said, oh, there's oneg Shabbat. He told me to make sure to celebrate Shabbat. So I'd say, no, I like certain foods, so let's make salads on Shabbat. And you know what? I like tomatoes. I like tomato paste. So I started grinding tomatoes on Shabbat. I'm thinking it's much fresher. It's much fresher if you make it on Shabbat. I didn't know it's not allowed to grind on Shabbat. So in the beginning, I didn't really know much. I would start telling him during the week. I'm like, oh, wow, I had some fantastic sauce on Shabbat with the jachnun, with the this, with the that. He goes, what do you mean you had the sauce? You made the sauce? I said, yeah. He goes, when did you make the sauce? I said, of course, right before I ate it on Shabbat. He said, look, I'm going to send you a book. So he sends me a book and I say, I guess I'm surprised to see the book. And what's the book? It's a children's book called 39 Melachot. 39 melachot of Shabbat, 39 restrictions of Shabbat with a bunch of pictures, and I asked him, "Are you kidding me? Is this for children?" He says, "No, no, this is going to teach you Shabbat better than another book is going to teach you." From there, I learned that he knew his student. Why? He knew I didn't know. I knew I didn't know.

1:06:54And the reality is if you give me a book, you give me a Shulchan Aruch, you give me a Yalkut Yosef on day one, I'm going to say thank you, but no thank you. I don't want to read a 500-page book. By the time I finish, I'm going to be Mashiach already. No, I need to know now. So you give me a children's book to learn Halachot Shabbat. That's when I discovered the importance of knowing your students. The Ramban writes to his son, Shema B'ni Musar Avicha. The Ramban writes to his son, My dear son, hear the musar, hear the lessons of your father. Now, the lessons of musar sometimes are a little bit of a pinch. You tell somebody that they violate Shabbat, it's a death penalty; it's not exactly good news. You tell somebody that if they gamble, it's considered stealing; it's not exactly nice to hear. So musar is not always pleasant to hear, but it's true. That's the most important. But the Ramban says, Shema B'ni Musar Avicha, listen to the musar of your father.

1:07:54Listen to the musar of your father. Why? Because if you're going to tell somebody musar, if you're going to tell somebody the truth, you always have to remember, at the end of the day, even though you're rebuking him, even though you're telling him things that are a little bit hard to hear, you have to remember, you have to act with a little bit of love like you're his father. because if you're just insulting people constantly, no, no, no, then eventually they'll say, "Listen, you're just an abusive person, leave me alone. I don't even want to know the truth anymore." So, you have to show a little bit of love. So, when I saw this children's book, I realized that, yes, it's not fun for me to have to change my life The fact that he knows his students' limitations shows me some love, shows me that he cares. He is a person that makes, maybe on a good month, 1500 shekels, which is $400 a month, and he decided to take some money and spend it on me, on writing by me in this book. And that's what I realized also, that when you're a ba'al teshuva, when you're a convert, when you're new...

1:09:03The old traditional way of teaching people has always been: you learn from childhood. You go to yeshiva, they teach you, let's say, the Aleph-Bet, and you're only three or four years old. They put some honey on the letters, so every time you get a good letter, you can have a little bit of a taste of honey. Beautiful. This generation is not the same. This generation, the kid gets an Aleph-Bet, and he wants an iPod. He gets a good grade in math. He wants a car, even though he doesn't know how to drive yet. His generation is a little bit different. So by the time we actually start learning Torah, sometimes we're adults. Sometimes we're not five years old. Sometimes we're 35 years old. Now, if you start teaching the 35-year-old like he's 35, guess what? He's not going to learn anything because he doesn't understand all the preliminary things. So if you're going to teach a Baal Teshuva or a convert, The beginning, the basics of Judaism, you have to teach them like a child. You have to assume they know nothing, and even if you have to show them pictures. Now, my dear friend, Rav Golan actually put this book together, which I think is one of the greatest things that you can possibly do for this generation, this Baal Teshuva generation. And Baruch Hashem, they're doing it in multiple languages. Baruch Hashem, in the next couple of months, this will be published and sold. They put this book together in multiple languages, including Chinese and Spanish.

1:10:29In English, obviously, and they're teaching you "Welcome to Judaism," meaning learn the basics. Basics of Judaism, but there's a lot of Jews is how to become a Jew. It is a fantastic book on how to become a Jew. There are a lot of other books that are going to tell you the basics of Judaism. What's the difference? Most of them are for adults. Most of them are just text. We need pictures. Why? Because we're brand new. I need to know, what does it mean? What does it mean, don't grind? What does it mean, don't winnow? What do all of these 39 restrictions mean? Where do I put the cup after I finish? Do I put it in the sink? Do I put it in the closet? Can I just use any cup? I need to see stuff. Why? Because we're children. When you're about, you're literally a child. so they put something together, and they literally have pictures along with every single law so you can have a little bit of an understanding, a visual, a visual of what's going on—not because you're not smart

1:11:35just because you're late, you're late to the show. You're only starting to do this at 25, at 35, at 45, and you don't know what you don't know. So they put a book together that's going to show you some pictures of what a Jew is supposed to look like, and I think it's a fantastic, fantastic thing. Uh, fantastic. Anyone who's a Baal Teshuva, anyone who's a convert, has always been looking for one particular book that's going to cover the Aleph Bet of Judaism. It doesn't cover everything, but it covers just enough to get through the day. Know enough to be a Jew. This is one of the things that my rabbi did, but with many books. He would send us literally children's books to start learning Torah. After a while of doing this, I started learning that there are other books. I started falling in love with it, and I started learning more and more. But then one day, he dropped the next bomb on me. And he told me that he has a chiddush. Chiddush means a new insight. What's this chiddush? He says, I just learned in a Zohar that Rabbi Meir Baal HaNes says that a person...

1:12:39will lose all of his money if he's married to a Goyah. Now, at this point, I didn't really keep my cool like I'm keeping now. At this point, I lost my temper. Why? Number one, I don't know who this Rabbi Meir is yet. I don't know who this Rabbi Meir is. I didn't know he was able to revive the dead, and he's from 2,000 years ago, and he was a student of Rabbi Akiva, and he's Kodesh Kodeshim, and I didn't know all that stuff. I just knew some guy named Rabbi Meir is telling me my life is wrong, my wife is wrong, everything is wrong. What does he know about himself? And he's blaming God. What does he have to do with me losing money? So I lost my mind. I said, oh, this Rabbi Meir doesn't know what he's talking about. That's what I said. And Rabbi Fein says, listen, this is what it says. And he starts showing me the text, and I said... what do I do? He says, well, you have a couple of options. One, she can convert. I said, there are conversions? That's how little we knew. I said, people can convert to Judaism? He says, actually, Rabbi Meir comes from converts. Rabbi Meir comes from converts. His rabbi, Rabbi Akiva, also comes from converts. Their rabbis, Shmaya and Avtalyon, were converts themselves.

1:13:55The greatest convert alive. The greatest converts in his time. One of the greatest converts in history. Ruth, Mashiach comes from her. Convert. He says, converts are a fantastic thing in Judaism. So I said to her, honey, you want to convert? She said, sure, what do you have to do? So we started learning, what do you have to do? She said, oh, hold on a second. How do I stop believing what I believe? I said, what do you believe? And she started telling me she believes that some guy died 2000 years ago and he's a nice person. I said, okay, so just stop believing it. She said, you can't just stop believing something. You can't just stop believing in it. So how do you get somebody to stop believing something? The answer is you have to prove to them that what they believe is false. So that's what we started learning. We started learning about Christianity. Little by little, we learned about Christianity and started realizing that Christianity is not only man-made, but it's literally the biggest scam in history. To such an extent that you have over 2.5 billion people today who are 100% idol worshippers without even knowing it, for the most part.

1:15:06They created a religion from nothing. They created a religion by piggybacking over other idol worship, and they're fooling people left and right into believing that you don't have to do anything to go to heaven because some moron died 2,000 years ago. Now, the beautiful part about our Torah is that it's also the best history book ever. So, our sages wrote everything down, documented everything, and we even have the history of the Goyim. We even have the history of what happened back then. And you can find the real, true story about Jesus in our Torah, in the Talmud, in the Gemara. We started learning it, and I started showing all these different things like, "Yeah, maybe this is your opinion, maybe this is his opinion." So I had to find out more, and little by little, I started learning more and more about this. I fell into a debate that Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi put together against a Christian professor, and I thought that this was the greatest debate out of all the things that I watched. This was the greatest debate. I convinced her to watch the first couple of parts, and...

1:16:12but unfortunately, it wasn't enough. Then later on, I found some other things that were interesting, but that wasn't enough. But it got to a point where she realized there's something wrong. There's something wrong with her religion. There's something wrong with our life. There's something wrong with everything. We discovered another video called Torah and Science. And Torah and Science, also by Rabbi Mizrachi, Three parts: We watched part one. We were both fascinated that you could actually prove that God exists scientifically, not just rationally, not just wishful thinking, not just "I hope it works out," but actually prove it literally. It was fascinating to us that you could see this. So then we wanted to watch part two, but part two didn’t work. So we watched part three. Part three fascinated us even more. But at the end of the second video...

1:17:13she got to a different stage than I did. I was fascinated, I was on cloud nine, but she realized something. She realized that we can't stay together. She realized that a Jew and a Gentile are not allowed to be together. And if we stay together, we're both doomed. Because at some point along the line, we heard one of the rabbis say, it was actually Rabbi Mizrachi, that we had a dog. And we liked our dog. And one time I said in passing to my rabbi, "I'm like, you know, I think my dog used to be a human being. Because he has such a great personality." And my rabbi said, "Well, it's possible." I said, "What do you mean it's possible?" He said, "Well, there's something called reincarnation." He started teaching me about reincarnation, where there's a gilgul. Somebody dies, they come back; Hashem tries to give them another opportunity to rectify their sins. But sometimes, if they commit such a grave sin, they come back in a lower form. They were a Jew, they come back as a Gentile. They were a Jew, they come back as a cow, as a dog, as a plant, as a rock—scary stuff. The Arizal talks about it. Ooh, what?

1:18:26You don't want to mess with him. Now, I learned that this is actually possible. I thought it was very interesting. But then I heard Rabbi Mizrachi say something that shocked my life. He says, the Gemara says that if a Jew is intimate, not even married, with a non-Jew, she'll be glued to him like a dog. So I asked my rabbi, what does this mean, she'll be glued to him like a dog? He says, well, he comes back like a dog. So now my wife overheard this. We saw the first couple of videos. She realized, okay, this is real. This is not good. If we stay together, something bad is going to happen to him. So she talked to Hashem. Hashem, I know you're real. I know Judaism is real. I know everything is real. I just don't know if You want me to convert. I don't know if I'm allowed to convert. Even though the rabbi showed me, even though there are pesukim in the Torah, 36 different times showing how much Hashem loves converts to such an extent, it's even more love than a natural-born Jew. That a Jew actually has to love a convert as much as he loves Hashem. The Rambam says all types of wonderful things. But Hashem, I need a sign.

1:19:45I know I'm not allowed to ask You for a sign, but I need a sign. So, if You can give me a sign, good. If not, just kill me because I don't want to come back like a dog. Because I know he's not going to leave me, and I know I'm not going to leave him. So either kill me or give me the sign. Quite a prayer the next morning. She wakes up. I was up all night studying, learning, and I finally found part two of this Torah and Science video. And even though she wasn't exactly in the greatest mood I've ever remembered her in, I convinced her to watch part two. In part two of the video, Rav Mizrachi shows something called Torah codes. Torah codes are hidden secrets within the Torah that are not literal, meaning you could read the Torah, And you can get different understandings from different things. What the story says, if you will. What the hidden halacha within it. What's the law within it. What is the principle behind it. But also there's something even more, which is called sod. Different secrets within it. And there are different forms of these secrets. Sometimes because a certain word is spelled a certain way with one less yud, one more yud.

1:21:05uh, one uh aleph no aleph, all types of things. But then there's an additional secret that the Chachamim knew but was only developed in recent history, in the last maybe 50-60 years. One of the big innovators in Torah Codes is Professor Rips, and he discovered many, many secrets that you can see in the Torah that not only showed that the Torah was actually written by God. But also that the Torah has every bit of information that will ever exist from the beginning of the world all the way to the end, including everything that ever happened, whether it be the Holocaust or the pogroms and inquisitions, or Hitler and all of his associates. It could even be today, Donald Trump, this lecture—everything and anything you want—you could actually find in the Torah. You just need to know how to look and what to look for. So, in the Torah, in the book of Devarim, at the end of the book of Devarim, chapter 29, I believe it is, HaKadosh Baruch Hu says to Am Yisrael that because we sinned so much, the punishment is going to be that He's going to send us to the four corners of the world.

1:22:16He's going to send us to the four corners of the world, but in those corners, instead of us doing teshuva initially, we're going to get worse before we get better. Like the Or HaChaim HaKadosh says, that even though we were on the 49th level of Tumah in Mitzrayim, before Mashiach comes, we'll get to the 50th level. Meaning the generation before Mashiach will actually be the worst generation in history, similar to Sodom and Gomorrah. I don't think anybody's going to debate, we're almost there. Now, Rabotai, HaKadosh Baruch Hu says that in these four corners of the world, we're going to get worse. What are we going to do? We're going to start worshipping the god of stone and the god of wood. So, Rav Mizrachi says this is very logical: the god of stone represents Mecca, where the Muslims pray. What do they pray around? This huge square stone. They don't pray to Yerushalayim. they want Yerushalayim, but they don't pray to Yerushalayim. Like Mecca, that's their place. That's the stone. The god of stone, that represents Islam. Wood represents the cross. Jesus, the noef (the womanizer), what did he do? He was hung on a wooden cross.

1:23:34Now, initially we first heard, "This is a nice translation, but what's the proof?" So then he brings the Torah codes. And he says if you look at the pasuk, in chapter 28 actually, you will see that in this actual verse, you will see both the name Jesus, Yeshu, and the name Mecca inside this verse. It's the only place in the entire Torah that you find both of these names in one verse. And even more so, it's inside a verse that talks about them: the god of wood, the god of stone. Now, it mentions several places in the Torah; it mentions the god of wood and the god of stone. But this is the only place that it mentions these two specific names. So for me, I thought it was a very interesting code. I've seen other codes before because I was studying regularly at this point. But for her, that was the sign. That was the sign of all signs. At that moment, she says, I want everything. I want to convert. I'm going to be a Jew. I'm going to be the best Jew I could possibly be. This is it. I said, okay, well, you know, we have to learn more. She said, no, no, just tell me what I need to learn. I want to do everything. So we called Rabbi Ephraim, very, very excited. He says, great, let's talk to the Beit Din. Baruch Hashem, we connected. Which Beit Din? The Beit Din of Queens.

1:24:56we called them, we started talking to them, we met with them several times. Everything went well. We met, we studied, we got letters together. We had already been studying for a few years. Everything worked out really well. Now, the last part is to actually convert. One day, Beit Din says, "Okay, you are going to be ready to convert on such and such date." We are excited as can be. The problem is that according to halacha, if you are a man and you're a woman and you're not married, you're not allowed to live in the same house. So we planned that since we're trying to be kosher here, what are we going to do? We're going to get married on the same day. Same day of conversion, finish the conversion, go to the hotel, get dressed, and get up right away just to make sure that we are as kosher as possible, especially on day one. We didn't even want a wedding. Family said, no, let's have a wedding. Let's delay. I said, no delay. I already made enough sins in my life. Please, I want to start doing good things. I want to start doing good things. It was very hard for me to get to this point. And the reason why was because everything I just told you was the opposite of logic, was the opposite of my life. I was Mr. Wall Street. I was Mr. Money. I was Mr. Smart Guy. I thought I knew everything.

1:26:21Once I started learning Torah, I knew I knew nothing. I would start learning, and I'd fall asleep in five minutes. I'd start keeping a mitzvah, and it would be so difficult for me. Some people tell me it was so difficult for me to do teshuvah. It's so difficult for me to read. It's so difficult for me to do this. It's so difficult for me to do that. Well, let me give you a little bit of peace of mind so I can show you how difficult it was for me, so maybe you could relate. I went to a shiur Torah. The whole day I was ready for the shiur Torah. I was living in the city. I was excited for a shiur Torah. Rabbi Yeshayahu Pinto was giving a shiur Torah. I believe it was Tuesday nights. I was as excited as can be to go to the shiur Torah. Now there's a lot of people coming, Baruch Hashem. I sit down, he comes, he sits down, he starts talking. I find it interesting, I fall asleep. How long? Five minutes. Five minutes was all I could handle. Next week, I say, okay, this time I'm going to sleep a little bit. I'm going to rest. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. I'm going to stay up for five and a half minutes. Couldn't last even five and a half minutes. Next week, six minutes. Next week, six and a half minutes. I just can't stay the whole hour, the whole two hours. I keep falling asleep. So I say, okay, let me just learn from books. Book, one minute. I read the whole page. Finally, I finished a page. I don't remember what I read.

1:27:44I don't know what he's talking about. Who's against who? Who's Abaye? Who's Rava? Who are these people? Why are they arguing? Why can't they just be friends? I don't understand what's going on. Then my rabbi tells me, "Listen, I think you need to start learning Gemara." I said, "Gemara? I don't know anything." He says, "Learn Gemara." I said, "Okay." So he got me a Gemara. It would take me six and a half hours—six and a half hours for one daf, for one page in the Gemara. And by the time I finished the page, I still didn't know 90% of what I read, 90% of what happened. But six and a half hours, that's how hard it was for me. Now, remember I told you that my mom, my messenger, has interesting dreams? One day, when things were really bad, there was a hurricane here. ...and we were in Manhattan, and Manhattan went underwater. So after four days of being in my apartment with no water and no electricity, they told us that we had to evacuate. So we left Manhattan. We went to Staten Island where my parents are, and my business was going to garbage. My friends no longer existed. My health was in the toilet. The only thing I had going for me was Rav Ephraim.

1:29:06started learning with them. I started liking what I was learning, but I was as upset as you can possibly be, and I just broke down. I just started breaking down because my whole life was just collapsing. My mom at that moment told me she had a dream, and I said, "What's the dream?" She said, "In my dream, I saw you. You were just like you, but you were a little boy version of you, and..." you were surrounded by a bunch of beasts, by a bunch of mazikim, by a bunch of creatures that were trying to kill you. And I kept telling you, "Come with me, let's go to the light, come!" And I started crying to her, I said, "Ima, I can't, I can't do it, I can't do it, I just can't do it." And she would start screaming and she's crying in the dream, and I'm crying in the dream, and I'm surrounded by these things, and they want to kill me, and I can't leave. And she's not letting go, and she wants me to come. Eventually, I hold her hand, and she says that the dream ended up good, where we ended up going to this light. Now, when I first heard this dream, it didn't mean anything to me.

1:30:21Once I started learning Gemara, once I started learning interesting things in the Torah, I realized that every single time that a person sins, it's not just a sin that's for naught. It's not a sin that just goes away. It's not a cold, it's not gas, it's not breath. A sin creates something. That something is something that doesn't go away. It's called a mazik. It's called something that you definitely don't want in your life. If you make certain sins, they create one type of mazik. If you make many sins, you create many of them. But there are specific sins, like wasting seed, for example, that create millions of them. Now, why do you have to care about this? The reason why is because this is one of the reasons why people have a hard time doing teshuva. It's not that you're stupid. It's not that you don't understand. It's not that you're incapable. It's not that you weren't brought up religious. It has nothing to do with that. It only has to do with the sins that you have. Once you start doing teshuvah for them, those mitzvot that you do will start destroying those mazikim. And all of a sudden, you're going to start understanding what you read. All of a sudden, you're going to start remembering what you read. All of a sudden, you're going to want to do what you're doing. All of a sudden, you're going to fall in love with HaKadosh Baruch Hu. All of a sudden, you want to be a Jew, you want to put a kippah on, you want to put everything on.

1:31:46You want to be Mordechai HaYehudi with peyos all the way to the ground. Why? Because you got rid of the enemies. So for all of the people who are having a hard time with the books, with the classes, with the CDs, with everything, my only suggestion is this: Continue. Don't let go. You just got to go through the hurdle. You got to go through the hurdle, the tough part. You got to make Torah a permanent part of your day-to-day life. Fifteen minutes a day is how I started. Eventually, I got more. Then it's thirty minutes. Then it's an hour. And so on and so forth. One day, a woman calls us and she tells us that she wants to abort her baby. I said, please come to my house. We'll talk to you. Aborting a baby is not allowed in Judaism. Now she starts talking. I'm thinking that I'm going to convince her with Torah laws and Torah codes and Torah this and Torah that. The woman is not buying it. My wife, God bless her, understands people better than I do sometimes. She says to the woman, "See this. Listen, you're a Jew, we're Jews. You believe in Hashem, we believe in Hashem. Unfortunately, your struggle is that you think that Hashem gave you this mitzvah to have a baby, but He's going to starve the baby. So let's do this. We'll pay for the baby."

1:33:02the baby, and if you're missing any money, we'll pay for the baby. I'm looking at my wife, thinking that we declared bankruptcy last month. We have zero money. Where are you going to pay for this baby? I'm not saying a word, but I'm thinking to myself, I'm looking at my wife and I realize, wait, there's something called bitachon, there's something called confidence. This is how we've been living our life, trying to help different people for different things without any rhyme or reason other than who wants it done. We started a program a month and a half ago to get the kids in our community in Florida to start coming to the shul. How? Convince them with money. We pay them $15 to come. Why? There's no other way to get them to come. Guess what? Two people came, four people came, six people came. On Sunday, we had 25-26 kids, 18-year-olds that we would never meet. Already half of them started doing... Already half of them. Why? They stopped sinning. They started learning. Little by little, Baruch Hashem, you're creating a revolution. There are people in India, in a third-world country, not even talking about where everything is modern and up-to-date, like, you know, the place in Mumbai. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about places that literally, they barely have mail. They just got our CDs today. It took three months to get there, but they got our CDs today because they want to learn Torah.

1:34:28Nigeria told us that they have Jews over there. We sent them a few thousand CDs. Once they got the CDs, they distributed them all in one day. I said, why? It was a few thousand CDs. He says, yeah, we have over a hundred batei knesset. We have over a hundred batei knesset in this town in Nigeria. I said, I didn't even know there are Jews in Nigeria. HaKadosh Baruch Hu is giving everyone an opportunity. Every kehillah. You're in Nigeria, you're in Afghanistan, you're in Saudi Arabia, you're in India, you're in China, you're anywhere. You want to do teshuva, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is going to get to you. First, you start with learning. Second, you stop sinning the big sins. Third, don't give up. Don't give up on HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Don't give up on yourself. And remember, at some point, everybody's time runs out. Who's going to send the Mashiach? Whether it's a personal Mashiach or a national Mashiach, regardless of which one it is, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is going to send them. At some point, you can't do teshuva at that point. But I must say that what does the Gemara at the end of Avodah Zarah 3a say? Once Mashiach comes, no more teshuva, no more converts, no more nothing. So now, when we went to the Beit Din, we knew all this stuff and we wanted to convert as fast as possible. One problem left and then we'll finish and let you guys go home. The problem was I got another infection.

1:35:54I got another infection a few days before it, but I didn't want to call Rabbi Golan and tell him, "Rabbi, I have to postpone." Why? Rabbi Golan is a very busy person. Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Chaim is a very busy person. I'm not going to call him and say, "Listen, we've been waiting all this time to become converts, to become Jews, to become good, and now I have to delay because I happen to have some infection." So I didn't even tell him about it. I just told my wife, "Honey, listen, we're going to go, convert, and then we're going to go to the emergency room." She said, "Good deal." The problem with these infections is that they're not like you, sitting nice and quietly. They double in size every day, sometimes more. By the time we got to the Beit Din, the infection was the size of a melon. I wasn't able to move. I wasn't able to move without pain. The pain was so massive, it's hard for me to explain it to you without giving you another illustration. but I was excited as can be. Why? Because I knew this was the end of the first part of the journey. So we passed the conversion, went to the mikveh, and when she comes out, she says, "Okay, so we're going to the hospital?" I said, "No, we're not. We want to get married." She said, "But you're sick." I said, "Not anymore." She asked, "What do you mean you're not sick anymore?"

1:37:21said, "The pain stopped." She asked, "How did it stop?" I said, "I don't know, but who cares? It stopped. Let's get married. It's a good deal." "Okay, so let's go to the hotel. Let's go to the hotel, get dressed, everything back to the original plan." We go to the hotel, we put some clothes on, or she puts some clothes on. I go to the bathroom, and I said, "Oh, honey, you got to see this." She says, "What?" I open the bathroom, and she sees me full of blood. She says, "You went to the mikveh, you cleaned your neshamah. Apparently, Hashem cleaned mine. He had a different surgery. There was a surgery. There was a surgery. It just wasn't performed in a hospital." Now, some people have a hard time believing this part of the story. I don't really care. I was there. The reality is, Rabotai, that sometimes... will make you see certain things based on your emunah in Him, based on your desire to do His will. If you put your life on the line for Him and you do the supernatural, above and beyond your means, He will do the supernatural for you in return.

1:38:36after we saw this live, we saw a real, literal surgery happen without a doctor. We saw the pain stop immediately—something that doesn't make any sense. You can't explain it in any other way. I can't even sugarcoat it for you guys. Once you see that, you realize that not only is Hashem alive and well, but He cares about everything. He watches everything, and He's here right now, today. sitting, He's here, He's enjoying the shiur with you guys. Why? Because He's been making the whole thing the whole time. He's in your life; He's in everybody's life. All He wants is for us to come back to Him, be His children like we're supposed to be, be good kids. This is the reason why we do Kiruv. This is why we left Wall Street after losing every single penny to the last dollar. We live on tzedakah every single month, but we care less. I live, you come to my house, you think I'm a multi-millionaire. Why? Because we act like we're millionaires, even though we're not. Because we buy what we need. What we need, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. On Shabbat, the table is full. The kids need something, they get it. The wife needs something, she gets it. Who pays for it? How? I have no idea. It's not my business.

1:39:47All I know is that I have to do what He wants me to do, and He's going to take care of the rest. So when we give lectures, it's free. We give CDs; it's free. Everything we do is free. Why? If I tell you it's going to cost money, guess what? 90% of the invitations stop because money is the idol of this generation. Money is like the idol of this generation. Tell people it's going to cost money, and already 90% of the collections get canceled. So he said, let's not let the Yetzer Hara win before we even start. Let's do everything for free, invest in the communities for free, do everything possible for free, so that way we can meet very nice people, and then you realize, you know what? This was priceless. This is what I want you to take home. Take home, understand, you have a responsibility not only for yourself, but also for your community. Continue creating more shiurim, bring more people, get more people back to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, because HaKadosh Baruch Hu has been waiting for us for 3,300 years. ...and time is running out. This will give each one of us enough to do His will, like He wants us to do it, in a very good way, in a very positive way, where all of Israel will do. Questions? Yes...

1:41:22Okay. Okay. But I'm the person that doesn't like to waste time and doesn't like, let's say, I listen to you. I like to go and make sure what you said is true. Do you understand? Same kind of person. Sometimes I was lazy and I didn't do it before, but now I do it every time I listen to a shiur. I went and listened to the shiur of Rabbi Mizrachi and I counted from the first hei to the kuf, I mean to the kuf, 45 letters, not 50 letters. You miscounted. It's the 50th letter. You're miscounting the first hei. Even if I miscounted the first letter, there will be 46 letters. No, no, you're counting the wrong hei. And then in between, and from the kaf to the mem, I counted 49 letters. Right. And I counted different ways, different, and all different, all different. Right.

1:42:46You know, what can you do? What's your advice to me? What can you tell me? Get the right code. That's my advice to you because you're miscalculating the letters. I mean, I counted it a thousand times because I use it in lectures, first of all. And second of all, this was one of the moving codes for my wife. So this is one of the things. I counted the letters. My question is, do you and your wife read through every single letter? Yes. And you counted every single letter? Yes. Can you show me how to do that? Sure, absolutely. Sure, I'll show it to you. I'm trying to look for the code. But yeah, I counted it. It's actually the 50th letter. It's not the 49th, which I made a similar mistake at some point, and I realized that I started from the wrong point. I started forwards instead of backwards, meaning that I started from the wrong word. But I have it in one of my shiurim, even as a visual of it. But either way, I'll show it to you, b'ezrat Hashem. But it's 100% correct. I'll just... We'll go on to the next question if you have another one, while I look for it. And what you said about the name, you're missing the ayin. If you, let's say, you count it, you're missing the ayin. Because the name of... the name of Yosef...

1:44:05No, that's only a recent creation. That's a recent creation of Christians. It's a recent creation of missionaries. It's not in their New Testament. It's not in their old books. This is a recent creation because, in this generation, for the first time in history, the Christians are pretending to be Jews. what are they doing? They created Jewish names; they created Jewish, uh, things that they do. They even opened a yeshiva in Brooklyn. They call it a yeshiva, but it's a yeshiva of Christians, and they dress in black and white, right across the street from a real yeshiva. On top of that, they also started a sect called Messianic Judaism, even though none of the members are actually Jewish. On top of that, they even send different people. They just caught someone actually in Chicago just a few days ago who was originally caught in New York. He ran away from New York, went to Chicago, and was caught in Chicago. A couple, both of them look Chassidish. They look more religious than anybody else in this room. He has nice peyos and a beard. She has a sheitel. She looks like she came from Mount Sinai. Guess what? Neither one of them is even Jewish. They go and infiltrate Jewish communities.

1:45:17order so they can start teaching them about their JC Penney, they can start teaching them about their Jesus. They were caught twice already, the most recent incident being in Chicago. This was in the papers; you could see it. They actually also exposed the organization they're a part of. This Christian organization's mission is to specifically infiltrate religious communities in order to fool people. now, as far as the Christian church, in the past, it was doing us a favor by just killing bodies. We don't want to be killed. But nonetheless, if we have a choice, we'd rather have our bodies killed than our neshama killed. So in the past, when they wanted us to become Christians and we said no, they'd simply kill the people. Today, they're not even trying to kill the people. They're just trying to kill the neshama. How? They're trying to convince the Jews that they're also Jews, and therefore we have common ground. Therefore, we should have the same beliefs, the same place of worship, the same everything else. And then once you're in...

1:46:18they start telling you, "No, Yeshua (Yeshu) is just the creation of the Jews, of the rabbis, the Pharisees. Really, his name is Yeshua, and they just removed him. Just look at Isaiah 53 and look at Daniel chapter 9, and they..." mention all types of vague verses that, for the common person or even a person that's learned but not in this specific subject, will fail miserably to their trap. The reason why they are expert at it and the average Jew is not, is because an average Jew is not going to learn counter-missionary information. The point being is that the real name of Jesus in the Torah that's mentioned is Yeshu. It was added later on; it's not that it was Yeshua and we remove the ayin and therefore we call him Yeshu. No, no, it's Yeshu. His Rabbi was Yeshua ben Perachia. was in a Mishnah, Mishnah Pirkei Avot, the sixth Mishnah. Yehoshua ben Perachia. Yehoshua ben Perachia was his Rabbi who gave him an opportunity to do teshuvah, and he still rejected it. He's also mentioned in Gemara Masechet Sanhedrin, Masechet Avodah Zarah, Masechet Sotah, and even Masechet Shabbat, I believe.

1:47:32he's mentioned in Gittin. Gittin is a place where they talk about how he's in boiling feces. The point is that when the church discovered these things, they forced us to change the name to "a person." Don't mention the name. Why? Because they don't like us burning their god or their faith's god. So even in our Gemara, like if you go by Artscroll, you're not going to see Yeshu. You're not going to see the name. You're going to see "a person" or "someone." You're not going to see a name at all. Why? Because it was censored. But if you look at the original Gemarot, you'll see the actual name. So the stuff that they talk about today on YouTube videos, whether it's Michael Brown, the missionary, or it's the other guy, Yitzhak, or the other, Sid Roth, all of these missionaries, unfortunately, most of them are Jews. Most of them are Jews, most of them are smart, and all of them are evil. They're going to do everything and anything possible to fool you into believing and going to that religion. Why? Going to that religion is the easiest thing in the world you can do. Why do you have to do anything? Who wouldn't want to go? Listen, if you believe in some guy that died 2,000 years ago, you can go to heaven.

1:48:52i want to go. If it was real, I'd go myself. But once you start looking in the book itself, you start realizing the book itself is full of errors. Well, let me tell you something. I come from Christianity. Yes, I come from it. And what you're saying is you're lacking knowledge about that religion and the different ramifications of that religion. Why? Because, yeah, what you're telling about one ramification of Christianity, yes, they say that when you believe in Jesus... Yeah, how many Christians keep Shabbat? Oh, which commandments are the ones they create? Christianity. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, how many Christians keep Shabbat? Oh, which commandments are the ones they create? Well, here's the thing: you are making a mistake. Number one, you have no idea what you're talking about. Number two, you're talking to somebody that does. Why? Number one, you said don’t speak lashon hara against goyim. There’s no din of lashon hara against goyim. I could say whatever I want against Christianity because there’s no lashon hara against goyim. Number two, it’s a mitzvah from the Torah to make fun of idolatry and...

1:50:13Well, here's the thing: you are making a mistake. Number one, you have no idea what you're talking about. Number two, you're talking to somebody that does. Why? Number one, you said don’t speak lashon hara against goyim. There’s no din of lashon hara against goyim. I can say whatever I want against Christianity because there’s no lashon hara against goyim. Number two, it’s a mitzvah from the Torah to make fun of idolatry and... Christianity is 100% idolatry. I can call him Pikachu. I can call him Spider-Man. I can call him Beastman. I can call him whatever I want because it's a mitzvah. I go to heaven for making fun of Christianity and anything associated with idolatry. Three, you came to a Jewish organization, a Jewish community to talk about Christianity. We're not interested at all. For you to say I don't know what I'm talking about is a very big mistake, and the reason why is that I have over a thousand shiurim with several thousand hours that confirm that I do know what I'm talking about. I have a smicha, I have rabbanim, I have a lot of support, and I have thousands upon thousands of people that have changed their lives because I do know what I'm talking about. Now the reality is...

1:51:25the reality is I fight with Christian missionaries much more than you do, and the reason why is because they're trying to kill my people. Instead, they're trying to kill my people. They're trying to destroy our ulama. So, I fight with them every single day. I have a two-and-a-half-hour, two hours and forty-five minutes video that confirms from beginning to end that Christianity is 100% fake. Not something that's not good, not something that's second best, not something that's misunderstood. No, it's 100% man-made falsehood. Now, anyone that's going to... even an ounce of their time defending any part of it is a fool and is wasting their time. So, what I would suggest for you to do is, before you start debating for the wrong side, you should know your side better and you should look at it. I do

1:52:29Again, you're creating laws. Avodah Zarah, I would like to make fun of Avodah Zarah. Avodah Zarah is not just going. Avodah Zarah is idol worship. No, again, you don't know the dinim of Lashon Hara. You go look at the Chafetz Chaim, you go to the dinim of Lashon Hara. Lashon Hara, first and foremost, assumes that you know who I'm talking about. You don't. You don't know who I'm talking about. I didn't mention names. Number two, I'm mentioning something that actually happened in order to help the situation, not in order to insult somebody for the sake of insulting somebody. I didn't have a comedy shtick just to tell you guys jokes about Jews. I'm telling people the truth in order to rebuke the nation, but at the same time, in order to improve the situation.

1:53:31So, to assume a better situation would assume you know my situation. My situation was they knew my situation. Why? The person that wrote the check was my wife. They knew she wasn't Jewish. They spoke to her a million and a half times. They knew I wasn't keeping Shabbat. They came to my office for 15 years. By 15 years, you get to know people really well, especially when they pay your mortgage, your rent, your yeshiva, and everything and anything that you're doing. So, to assume that they didn't know would simply... crazy, so they knew. They knew very well, and both Hashem. They still decided to do what they did. For me to say something, that that's a wrong thing, is a mitzvah from the Torah. Why? When you see something wrong, you're obligated to actually expose it, especially when that something puts the entire nation in danger if this type of behavior continues. everywhere else. We are all in trouble. Why? If all rabbis start worrying about only money, guess what? You could put the religion in the garbage. Because we're not going to have any more Jews. That's what the Chida said. You ever hear of the Chida? A few hundred years ago, he says Judaism declared bankruptcy when rabbis started taking money from rich people and...

1:54:45Why? As soon as a rich person writes a check, sometimes the rabbi has a yetzer hara. What's the yetzer hara? Well, he just wrote a check for a million dollars last year, which means that maybe he's going to write a check for a million dollars this year. So let me wait for the check to clear before I tell him the truth about what I think about how his wife doesn't dress properly. properly. Why do you second guess yourself? Why? Because you're thinking, "Wait, I want to build a big yeshiva. He's the one that has the money. So if I tell him that his wife forgot her dress at home, she forgot her clothes at home, maybe he's not going to give the money." So he starts doing the accounting and says, "You know what? I'm not going to tell him. Let him first give the tzedakah and then I'll tell him after because everything has already happened." But guess what? After it happened, that passion that you have to rebuke, that passion you have to say the truth, is gone. That's why the yetzer hara also has a name called "machar." "Machar" means tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn't tell you not to do the mitzvah; it says do the mitzvah, just do it tomorrow. Do the mitzvah, just do it tomorrow. Tomorrow you're not going to have the same passion as you have today, and that's what the yetzer hara wants. So the key is, you have to understand if something came out of my mouth at any one of my lectures, especially in the last couple of years...

1:55:58was verified, it was researched, it's authenticated, it has a source. I don't just speak freely, and the reason why is because I know at this stage that I don't know anything. That's why every time I mention something, I do my best to quote a source so you can go look at it, you can go find it, and you can confirm it. Now, you did it the wrong way with that specific quote, so I have to show it to you. I'll show it to you. It's not a problem. It's not a problem. It's not a problem to show it to you. It's not a big secret. Any other questions? Yes. Yes, I mean, it's the same thing. Gambling, the wager is gambling. You're not allowed to gamble. Yes. again, even though in every bet there's a rule, every form of gambling has some type of rule. And HaKadosh Baruch Hu says that even though a person agrees to the rules, by the time he loses, something changed. What changed? When he agreed to the rule, the only reason he agreed to the rule is because he assumed he's going to win.

1:57:19So, therefore, he's never going to have to give you the money. He never actually took into account that he's going to lose. Because everybody goes into a gamble thinking, "What? I'm going to win this time. This time I'm going to win, honey. This time I'm going to bet the house, but I'm going to win this. Today I have good luck. Today is this. Today is the day I'm going to win." And then he loses again. And he says, "Okay, next time I'm going to win." the reality is when you agree to those rules, you assume that you're going to win. So after a person loses and he gives the money, he's not giving it willingly because he didn't actually think he's ever going to be in that circumstance. He didn't think he's actually going to have to pay up, right? Now, also, another thing that is said is that when a person gambles, he's no longer considered someone that you could use as an ed (witness). Yeah, someone that's a gambler cannot be used as a witness. Rav Moshe Feinstein says you're allowed to play up to the minimum, which is $1, meaning a prutah. Prutah, $1. And the reason why $1 is because $1, somebody who loses $1 doesn't change their life. It's considered a prutah of the day. It's not recommended, but if you're going to play, then the maximum you're allowed is $1. Right.

1:58:38It's not a shame if somebody wins and doesn't kill themselves within a year. That's what happens to a lot of them. They kill themselves. No, you guys know it's a curse, right? Winning the lotto is a curse. It's not a blessing. Winning the lotto is a curse. You look at statistics; over 90% of them declare bankruptcy within five years. 100% of them declare it as a curse at some point in their life. They commit divorces, all types of murders, all types of... People want to kill themselves after they win the lotto. Initially, it's a blessing, and then it eventually becomes a curse. What does it say? It says in the Torah, "He pays His haters cash to their face to destroy them." So that's why the Chachamim say if you get a lot of money, you don't have to make a big bracha. If you lose money, make a bracha. Why? Because that bracha, Hashem took your money, it's a blessing, because He took the money instead of hitting you, instead of hurting you. The money is damim. But if you got a lot of money, don't make a bracha. Why? Maybe it's a curse. Maybe Hashem is punishing you, where He's telling you He's going to give you a lot of money in order to destroy you. So a person needs to know that it's not always a blessing like we think.

1:59:41But as far as the lotto, as far as everything else, it's a... Okay, I have a book, don't worry. As far as the gambling, the other reason is that they say that you cannot be a valid witness. And the reason why is because even though technically, technically, playing with the dice is not really issur de'oraita. It's rabbinical, but why do you still lose the ability to be an eid to be a valid witness? It is because a witness has to be reliable. Somebody that gambles, even though the rabbi said no, means that he has an obsession with money. And if he has an obsession with money, there's no way we can rely on him to be a valid witness because somebody can bribe him, and since he likes money so much... If he gambles anyway, he'll be bribed anyway, and therefore he cannot be a valid witness. So that's, again, another reason. I can give you about nine or ten reasons why the Torah says you're not allowed to gamble in any way, shape, or form. But also Shlomo HaMelech says if you want to lose all your money, you should gamble. So a lot of interesting things. I'll think about it. I'll give it to you. Next. You have a question? Go ahead.

2:01:04Four, four, four. That's what it is. That's why I keep looking at twenty-eight, twenty-five. Okay, that's what it is. Here we go. That's what it is. I was looking at twenty-nine because it also has it over there. Okay, so chapter four, Deuteronomy chapter four is the pasuk. Thank you very much. It's going to be chapter four, verse twenty-seven. The first word is "v'hifitz" (He will scatter). means that Hashem will scatter. The first letter is "hei," the second letter is "vav," and the third letter is "hei." You count 49 letters, and the 50th letter is "kaf" in the word which means "the people." Then you count 49 letters, and the 50th letter is "mem." Mem in the word Yishma'un. Yishma'un, meaning "they heard." So what is the spelling? Mem, Kaf, Hei. Same exact Vefitz. Vefitz, the first letter in that verse, 27, in chapter 4, verse 27, is the letter Yud.

2:02:08go 50 letters, you go to the word Shama. The word Shama, the word Shin, the letter Shin, that's the, uh, second, the first letter in the word Shama which means "heard." And then again, another 49 letters, the 50th letter in the same word, you have the Vav, Yud, Shin, Vav, Ima Shimo. Where's the Hey? I mean, where is the Aim? Just told you, dying is a recent invention. It's not something that's part of our Torah. It's part of what the Christians added in the last 40-50 years. If you look at the old books of Christianity, not a single time will you find the word Yeshu. That's a recent invention. But in general, and in general, you'll also see that in the Torah, when you find codes, when you find secrets, when you find certain things, they always have the code in a place that's talking about the subject. It's not something random. So, for example, when you want to find out the details that the Torah knows about AIDS

2:03:18The name AIDS, the person who discovered AIDS, the fact that there's never going to be a medicine for AIDS. There's going to be different things that give people more life, but no cure. Or the different doctors that have been pillars within the industry. Or where it comes from. What's that section talk about? Homosexuality and bestiality, which are the two things that started AIDS and, unfortunately, to this day, spread it. same thing goes with the Holocaust. Anytime that you want to find out Torah codes about the Holocaust, you want to find out, let's say, Hitler, the gas chambers, the trains, the trials, all the different things that have to do with the Holocaust—even the name, which means the Holocaust—you find it in a place in the Torah. where Hashem is going to hide His face and Hashem is going to punish us by a nation that's going to be a faraway nation represented by an eagle and all types of interesting things that literally, if you understand what it says, describe Germany a hundred percent

2:04:21So the Torah doesn't just mention codes randomly in different places. It mentions codes exactly where they're supposed to be. I made a mistake as far as quoting it in a different chapter. It's in the same book, just a different chapter. But nonetheless, we, Baruch Hashem, thanks to my dear friend, found the correct chapter within the same book. It's chapter 4, not 29, like I mentioned. Next thing. Yes. All the same thing. What's the difference? Yetzer Hara is the evil inclination within us that convinces you to do something that you're not supposed to do. Look at the girl even though she's not your wife. Eat the food even though it's not kosher. Do the things that HaKadosh Baruch Hu said no. After a person fails to this Yetzer Hara, then the Satan, Mastin Aleih, the Satan goes up to Shamayim, same Malach, goes up to Shamayim and says, Hashem, Hashem, look at what Your son is doing. He's eating a cheeseburger. He's eating a cheeseburger. He tells on you.

2:05:22He tells on you. Why? Because he wants to fulfill the role of what? Malach HaMavet. He says, Hashem, look at what he's doing. He's going against You. So Hashem says, I can't believe my son is going against Me. So then he says, Oh, Hashem, after all, I am Malach HaMavet. Let me kill him. Let me kill him. So he looks like your best friend at first, says, Nah, eat the cheeseburger. Eat the cheeseburger. It's good for you. It has cheese. It's vitamins. Same exact thing. All three of them are the same thing, but three different things. Also, in a different part of the Gemara, I believe it's in Avodah Zarah, it mentions that the Malach HaMavet has seven names according to David HaMelech, Shlomo HaMelech, Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov. Each called him a different name, but then a different Gemara says that he has other names. Names, meaning what are these other names? Why do we care about the names of the Satan, the Malach HaMavet? This is because he has a million and a half different ways that he can fool us into doing the wrong thing by making us think it's a mitzvah. So, for example, somebody came to the Satmar Rebbe and told him, "Kvodo, I have a problem. I have a daughter that needs to get married and

2:06:36But I don't have the money. I need to get $5,000 together to get my daughter married. I don't have any money. What could I do? The Rebbe said, "Don't worry." He put his hand in his pocket, took out $1, and gave it to him. He said... He says, "Thank you, Rebbe. I know this dollar is going to have a blessing. Thank you, Rebbe." He leaves. The next day, the same guy comes, crying hysterically. "Rebbe, I can't believe it. You're never going to—I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm back." The Rebbe said, "What, you didn't get the money?" He goes, "No, no. After I got the dollar, everybody started donating to me. Mamash, your dollar was a blessing." I said, "So you got all the money?" He said, "I got all the money." He says, "Why are you back?" He says, "As soon as I got home, I got the money. I said to my daughter, 'Baruch Hashem, we have the money. We can get you married now.' She says, 'Abba, I'm not getting married.'" you're not getting married she says because this dress that they want me to wear for five dollars i'm not wearing this for five dollars i'm only gonna get married once in my life i want a five thousand dollar dress i want a five thousand dollar dress that's what i want or i'm not getting married so Rebbe what am i gonna do my daughter went crazy she wants a five thousand dollar dress i barely had five thousand dollars to get her married but she wants a five thousand dollar dress or she's not gonna get married what should i do

2:07:45The Rebbe says, "One second." He turns around, opens the bookshelf, opens the safe, takes out $5,000, and gives him the whole amount. He gives him hugs and kisses, saying, "Thank you very much, Rebbe. I love you, I love you, I love you." Now, all of the people here have the same look as the guy sitting next to him, one of his talmidim. He says, "What just happened here? For the wedding, he gave him one dollar. This chutzpan and his daughter come back, they want $5,000, and he gives them the whole amount?" She says, "Rabbi, lamdeni, teach me. What happened here? You know what you could have done with this $5,000? You could have given it to the avreichim, the guys making $500 a month. You could have given them some extra, maybe $600 to 20, 30, 40, 50 avreichim. You could have given it to the yeshiva, maybe get another extension. You could have put it in the kollel. You could have given it to the aniyim, all the poor people. You could have given it to the converts. They don't have anything, miskenim, poor people. You could have done so much with this kvod haRav." Why did you give it to this guy? This chutzpan, this rude person asking $5,000 for a dress. So the Rebbe says to him, the Rebbe says to him, he says, you know, you're right. You're right. The kollel, the avreichim, the yeshiva, the homeless, the poor, the converts, all of those 100% right. And I thought everything you said, I thought the same thing. I said, you're 100% right.

2:09:02he was asking me for the money. I said I could use this money for this and for this and for this and for this. I've used it in so many other ways. But you know why I gave it to him? Because I said to myself, if I really wanted to give it to the converts and the homeless and the poor and the kollel, the yeshiva, and this, how come I didn't think about this mitzvah before? This poor guy came to me. How come I didn't think about this mitzvah before? HaKadosh Baruch Hu presented me with a mitzvah that I'm supposed to do now. So what did that teach me? That taught me that the real mitzvah to do is the one that HaKadosh Baruch Hu sent me, which is to make a bride happy. The other mitzvot, as of now, yetzer hara sent them. The Satan sent those mitzvot. Why? Because he doesn't want to allow me to get this woman to be happy and get married and, Baruch Hashem, bring more Jews to the world. All of a sudden I'm remembering things that are not relevant. If I really wanted to help all those people with this money, I would have already done it. therefore sometimes the Satan even brings you a mitzvah. Why? He wants to get your attention away from the mitzvah you're supposed to do.

2:10:08In general, this is usually a test for bigger people, for people that, Baruch Hashem, are big Talmidei Chachamim and know how to decipher, so on and so forth. But the point is that the Gemara teaches us that Satan has no limitations on which role he's going to play in order to fool you, in order to create some type of distance between you and HaKadosh Baruch Hu, because that's his job, after all. That's his job in the world. But at the same token, the Gemara also says that he was very good friends with tzaddikim. He was very good friends with certain tzaddikim. Why? He loves them. He says, "You're a tzaddik. Good for you. You're also a servant of Hashem. I'm a servant of Hashem. You're a servant of Hashem to publicize Torah; I'm a servant of Hashem to be the pressure to stop it. So if you overcome it, good. I'm happy because that means we're both servants of Hashem. But if you fail, then I'm the only one that's a servant of Hashem, and I have to do my job." He cursed them, and then he came to him. Anything else? Anyone that wants a private meeting, anything specific? And the Chachamim say that that means that the person needs to come up to the Shamayim with a book that he wrote.

2:11:32some Chiddushim that he wrote in this world, B'ezrat Hashem. B'seder, thank you very much for learning with me, Rabotai, Tizku LeMitzvot, Baruch Adonai Le'olam, Amen Ve'Amen. Also, anyone that wants to take on the mitzvah of Tzitzit, anyone that wants to take on a mitzvah, anyone that wants to take on the mitzvah of Kisuy Rosh, real Kisuy Rosh, not the wig, but actually a mitpachat, like a real Jewish woman, I have them for free here. I have them for free, just to be a partner in a mitzvah. So please come, and I'll give it to you. There are some mitpachot we got from Yerushalayim, and Tzitziyot we got from Yerushalayim. God bless you, God bless you, God bless you, God bless you, God bless you, God bless you, God bless you. Oh, I was looking at it the whole time. It's under the sefer.

2:12:34B'ezrat Hashem. B'ezrat Hashem. It's also a full recovery to Shlomo Yosef Ben Husni, I mean, I saw this list before, I just didn't say it out loud. Shlomo Yosef Ben Husni, Refuah Shlemah Rachel Bat Miriam, Refuah Shlemah Tamara Yael Bat Rachel, Tamara Yael Tovah Bat Rachel, L'ilui Nishmat Malkiel HaKohen Ben Yaffa, L'ilui Nishmat Rachamim HaKohen Ben Malka, Zekhut Sarah Bat Ilanora Rivka, Yosef Ben Nina, And also Refuah Shlemah to David Ben Nesriah, Doris Bat Jorah, Levana Bat Sarah, Sarah Bat Levana, Yaakov Ben Shalom, Refuah Shlemah, Refuah Shlemah, Rachamim Ben Tamar, Refuah Shlemah. And all of Am Yisrael, B'ezrat Hashem, Refuah Shlemah, Refuah HaNefesh, Refuah HaGuf, and Teshuvah Shlemah to all Am Yisrael, B'ezrat Hashem. If anybody can...

2:14:01I have the business cards, anybody that wants them, same price. Okay, who's taking on my tzitzit? I'm just gonna have both. Who is going to take on the mitzvah of tzitzit? You have a tzitzit already. Who doesn't have a tzitzit and is going to take on the mitzvah of tzitzit? Where was the one? There was one over here. There was a good customer over here. Okay, so who needs the mitzvah of Kitzur Rosh? Kitzur Rosh for when you want it white or something like that, right? Anybody else need Kitzur Rosh from the back? Kitzur Rosh, Kitzur Rosh, Kitzur Rosh. Anyone who's married? Not if you're not married. If you're not married, there's no need for Kitzur Rosh unless you want to go based on the Rambam. You guys are letting me down. Nobody's taking on Tzitzit because all of you are Tzaddikim already. Why did I come here? I thought I was going to people's houses.

2:15:16Let me know. Okay, so anyway, you guys, anybody want to ask me something? I just want to sit. Let me go sit somewhere. Let me go sit over here. Talk to me, talk to me, I guess. Question. Okay. We know I'm wasting... ...time, so anyway, you guys, anybody want to ask me something? I just want to sit. Let me go sit somewhere. Let me go sit over here. Talk to me, talk to me, I guess. Question. Okay. We know I'm wasting...