Seeing The Miracles Through My Suffering TeShuva Journey (Ahavat Israel Arizona)

0:01Thank you for having me here at Ahavat Yisrael in Arizona for the beautiful Shabbaton that we've had. We've enjoyed each other's company. Hopefully, you've enjoyed my Torah because you haven't thrown any tomatoes at me, and that's good news. Also, thank you to Torah Anytime which helps us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me here at Ahavat Yisrael in Arizona for the beautiful Shabbaton that we've had. We've enjoyed each other's company. Hopefully, you've enjoyed my Torah because you haven't thrown any tomatoes at me, and that's good news. Also, thank you to Torah Anytime, which helps us.

1:12Publicize our shiurei Torah. Anyone that wants to see my shiurim, they can either go to TorahAnytime.com or BezratHashem.org, which is our website. Baruch Hashem, we have a few hundred hours' worth of Torah lessons for anyone that wants to listen. There's more than enough lessons to help anyone do teshuva. There's also some CDs we've sent here. CD number one. It's called "From Wall Street to the Western Wall." And Be'ezrat Hashem, we're coming out with CD number two. Be'ezrat Hashem, over the next month or so, Be'ezrat Hashem, we're still looking to raise enough money for it and come out with it. The first CD was a very big success. We started with 25,000, and they were not printed fast enough. More than enough people wanted them. And Be'ezrat Hashem, a lot of people are still sending us emails about how it has helped their lives. and help them get some meaning. Since we've had several shiurim, today we covered a lot of issues. We talked about children, we talked about emunah, we talked about suffering, but I see a lot of new faces. So in short, before I get into my own story, I want to cover three major points that will make the story much more meaningful. The story is nice.

2:32It's interesting. It's more interesting to other people than it is to me because I lived it. But nonetheless, it's meaningless if you don't believe in the Torah. So there are a few points that will help anybody, even the biggest kofer in the world, believe that the Torah is real. The first point is a rational point. Every single one of us knows that if we were to invent something, whether it be a phone or... a television or anything, if you want to make it marketable, you have to make sure that people know what to do with it. Because if they don't know, then it's useless. So, for example, if I invented the first phone, and no one's ever seen a phone before, and I gave it to you, you may think it's a rock to throw at someone. You may think it's a cup holder. You may think it's a doorstop, you wouldn't know what it is. But if it provided you instructions, then you would know. Then you would pay $800 if it's called an iPhone. So we know that if the creation is smart enough to know that if it creates something, it needs instructions, then obviously the creation's creator has to be smarter than the creation.

3:52The guy that invented the phone is smarter than the phone, even though sometimes we think otherwise. But what's to say that there is a Creator? Just like you know that the phone had to come from somewhere, the desks and tables and chairs had to come from somewhere, the sky had to come from somewhere. And even if someone wants to go with the long shot of insane coincidences and say that they believe in evolution and everything came from a cell that went through the process of mitosis and then meiosis and somehow it created planets, and eventually the planets had water or at least one of them did, called Earth, and it was positioned in the only place that it could exist in the entire galaxy for it to support life. insane coincidences and say that they believe in evolution and everything came from a cell that went through the process of mitosis and then meiosis and somehow it created planets, and eventually the planets had water, or at least one of them did, called Earth, and it was positioned in the only place that it could exist in the entire galaxy for it to support life, and somehow the only place that could support life actually created life, and started with a fish, and the fish became a lizard, started walking on land, and eventually the lizard became a monkey, and the monkey is here speaking to you today. Great. If you want to believe that, you still can't answer the question of where did the first cell come from? Let's say all those coincidences happened. Let's say it all did.

5:16it's a long shot, but let's say that, you know, it's easy for scientists to explain long shots. They just say it happened over a long period of time. So long that no one was there. So there are no witnesses. Coincidentally, all of idol worship is the same thing. There are no witnesses. The only religion in the world that has witnesses is Judaism. But if we put that aside for a second, We still can't answer the question of where did the first cell come from unless there has to be a divine being, unless there has to be a creator of the first cell. Now, obviously, once you know that there's a divine being, there's a creator that created the one cell, then it's very easy to say that obviously the creator of the one cell is smarter than the cell. So if it's already smarter than the one cell, why are you limiting it? To create only one cell. Why can't I create Adam and Chava? I have no idea where they got Eve from Chava, by the way. And then, you go to Noach, and then he destroys it, and then we get to Moshe, and eventually, we get here. So we know that, obviously, having a creator...

6:33is a must. Even the biggest scientists in the world can't answer that question. To say "I don't know" in science, even though it's normal, in Judaism, it's unacceptable unless the Torah specifically tells us that we don't know, which is very, very rare. But then, there's proof. It's proof that it's not just any god, but it's Hashem, the Jewish God. We talked about it earlier today, and we'll cover it very briefly. And then cover two other points and B'ezrat Hashem get to the story. Everyone looks for Hashem, especially when they're struggling, especially when they're having a tough time in life, whether it's through sickness, or parnassah issues, all types of issues. Usually, people remember God when they're having a tough time. And sometimes people ask the off question, to justify their behavior by saying, "Where was God during this and this tough time?" A very famous question is, "Where was God during the Holocaust?" For anyone who wants to know the answer, there are two versions. There are six hours of it that I made shiurim in New York approximately a month ago on Tisha B'Av. Six hours' worth of answers of "Where was God?"

7:52during the Holocaust, or the simple version is He did it. Whichever one you want to have, He did it. If that's enough for you, Baruch Hashem. If you want an explanation why, you have six hours' worth of Shiurim, Be'ezrat Hashem, to watch. Enjoy. They're good Shiurim though. It has nothing to do with me; it's Torah. People ask all the time, "Where is God?" Well, I can give you a simple answer scientifically: just look in the mirror and you'll find Him. In 1983, a scientist by the name of Dr. Rubinstein moved from Argentina to Israel to do molecular biology research, specifically looking into DNA. For anyone that heard the story earlier today, don't kill the story by telling everyone the solution. And he looked at all different types of species. He looked at bats, rats, dogs, cats, sharks, all types of fish, obviously humans, and monkeys. And he discovered something very, very interesting. The basic makeup of the DNA for all human beings, as well as animals and fish, is the same. Two squiggly lines that you've probably seen on the internet somewhere digitally.

9:17to give you a visual of this thing called DNA. So, after doing some research for several years, he asks the computer program some tough questions. The first question is, what happens if I break this DNA? I take the two squiggly lines and I separate them, like the divorce rate in America being 80%. We'll divorce the two lines. The computer says, no. They cannot survive; the subject will explode. Whatever the subject is, whether it's the rat, bat, or human being, they cannot survive if the two squiggly lines are not together. So the next obvious question is, what's keeping them together? So the computer program analyzes the data and says, every several acids, or every so often, there are bonds

10:17that connect the two squiggly lines. And these bonds are made out of sulfur. Okay, so these bonds, these bridges, are very interesting. If you look at the squiggly lines on the internet, you'll see that the squiggly lines also have lines connecting the two sides. So now we know, okay, there's some validity to this. This is very interesting. But then the obvious question is, how often is "every so often"? Is it random? Or is there a pattern? Is there an intelligent design? The computer program responds, and according to Dr. Rubinstein, which you can find on the internet, he just speaks Hebrew, and this was published in Nature magazine approximately 30 years ago. He says that, yes, there is a pattern. It's every tenth acid, and after that, it's every fifth acid,

11:19and after that, it's every sixth, and then after that, it's every fifth. 10, 5, 6, 5, 10, 5, 6, 5, to infinity. It's a repeated pattern in all species. Whether it's a dog, a monkey, or a human being, they all have the same basic foundation of DNA that has this interesting pattern that skips every 10th acid, every 5th acid, every 6th acid, and then 5, and then it goes back to 10 again. If you haven't caught on yet, in Hebrew, each letter has a numerical value. It's called Gematria. 10 equals Yud. 5 equals Hey. 6 equals Vav, and 5 again equals Hey. Spells Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, God's name, in Hebrew, not English. So now we know that this God is from Israel, not from any other book. So now that we know that you only need to look as far as the mirror to find Hashem, because you want to make sure that if you look for Him, you'll find Him. Just like if Picasso or Van Gogh

12:32painted a picture and they want you to buy it for 50 million dollars, they have to sign their name. Hashem wanted to make sure that if you look for Him in this weak generation that we find ourselves in, you also have an easy way to find Him. Through nature. And nature in Hebrew is called HaTeva, the nature, and has also the numerical value for the word God as well. So now that we know that obviously there has to be a Creator, The Creator actually wrote a signature inside each one of you, as well as the food you're eating. Enjoy. But aside from that, He gave you a book. He gave you an instruction set. And He gave you two sets of books. One was originally written, called the Written Torah. And the other one is called the Oral Torah, which was originally transmitted orally. Written Torah is the five books of Moses, and then later on we have additions, which is the Tanakh, 24 books. But the foundation of the Written Torah is the five books of Moses. Now, how do we know that the five books of Moses are from G-d? You don't have to look too far. You see that inside these five books of Moses, you'll find prophecy of the future.

13:55You'll find hidden messages that will tell you what will happen before it actually happens. Whether it's the disaster of the Holocaust that you can find through Parashat Ki Tisa, Parashat Ki Tavo, as well as Parashat Bechukotai. There are interesting codes inside that will show you a preview of what will happen when the nation of Israel sins against Hashem. Or you could actually find Torah codes that specifically name the characters in the story, whether it be Hitler or Mengele, also known as Malach HaMavet, which means "Angel of Death" in Hebrew, concentration camps, gas chambers, and so on. This information didn't exist 3,300 years ago, because Hitler wasn't in the Torah. But Hashem, obviously being divine and knowing the future, the past, and the present—all being the same to Him—wants to make sure again that if you look for them, you'll find them. There's also much other scientific evidence in the Torah, whether it be the things that we talked about earlier today, which we're not going to go over again because it'll take at least two hours, which is the scientific evidence of fish, the kosher fish being the only ones

15:15that have two signs: fins and scales. It's in this week's parasha, Parashat Re'eh. Or it's the other animals that have two signs: the ones that chew their cud and have split hooves. And if you want to know more scientific information, you can either watch Torah and Science by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, or my own version of Torah and Science with just a few other additions that he didn't have in there, which could add to the library of information that he already put in there. You have plenty of information to prove that the Torah is real. But now, how do we know that the Oral Torah is real? We also talked about that earlier. We said that a lot of the details of the Written Torah are in the Oral Torah. But there are two very, very simple proofs. One is rational, and one is prophecy. The rational one, which most idol worshippers do not consider, and most heretics definitely don't consider, is the fact that the Written Torah, if you say that you believe in the Written Torah, you cannot say that you don't believe in the Oral Torah. One cannot go without the other. The reason why is because if it wasn't for the Oral Torah, we wouldn't know how to read the Written Torah.

16:39Because the Oral Torah has several parts. It's not just the Gemara, it's not just the Mishnah, it's not just the Shulchan Aruch, and it's not just the Zohar. There's also another part that's less known, less popular, but we depend on even more than the others. It's called the Codex, or Keter. And this Codex is our vowel system. If you notice, today we took out the Sefer Torah... And anyone that knows how to read the Sefer Torah knows that there's a difference between a Sefer Torah and the one that's a book in front of you. The difference is there's no Nikud. There's no dots and points and exclamation systems. There's no vowelization. In a Sefer Torah, you're not allowed to put those little dots. You're not allowed to put a period mark, a question mark, or any mark. You only have letters. But in the book that you read, your Five Books of Moses, your Chumash, or your Tanach, it's full of dots and letters. What does this mean? In the English language, there's a vowel system, but it's not made out of dots; it's made out of letters. There are five letters: A, E, I, O, U. That's the vowel system, and sometimes Y. Now, a vowel system means that the foundation of every single word has to have at least one of those letters.

17:59No word in the English language can exist without at least one of those letters: either A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. So, let's say we wanted to read the word "Moses." It's a pretty important character in the Torah, right? He's the one that received the Torah and spoke to Hashem face to face. I'd say he's a big deal. But we took out the vowels. So now all we have left is M. You took out the O. So you don't have an 'O' anymore. You have an 'S.' You took out the 'E,' so there's no 'E' anymore. And you have another 'S.' So now, Moses becomes Mss. Wrong person. Wrong gender too. Vowel systems are pretty important. The Nekudot in Hebrew is the vowel system. The only reason we know how to read the Sefer Torah is because we practice from the one that actually has the vowel system. Without it, we wouldn't know one sentence in the entire Torah. So whether it's someone that says, "I believe in just the Written Torah and not the Oral Torah," they call themselves Karaites. There are not many of them, Baruch Hashem, today, but there are still some.

19:18Or they call themselves Christians and they say, or Catholics, and they say, no, no, we believe in the Five Books of Moses and the Tanakh and the Prophets, but we don't believe in the Oral Torah. Well, you can't. You have to believe in the Oral Torah. And once they discover this groundbreaking fact, they have a dilemma. Okay, fine, we believe in this codex. All right, but you say, now you say you believe in the Oral Torah. Now you can't pick which part you believe in. You can't say you believe in the codex but you don't believe in the Gemara. That's a salad. So now we see that, obviously, rationally, it's very easy to believe in the Oral Torah. But then, we have one prophecy that I'll talk about out of the many that there are in the Oral Torah. At the end of Masechet Sotah, page 49, It gives us a prophecy of what will happen at the end of days, the very same end of days that we find ourselves in today. What's going to happen before the Mashiach comes? There are a lot of things that you can read which look like we're reading the newspaper. Mothers-in-law will have battles with their daughters-in-law.

20:37The face of the generation will be the face of the dog, meaning both that we're going to be rude people and that scientifically we'll actually start looking like our dogs, and there's actually proof of that. If anyone wants to see a picture, I'll show you after the shiur. No insult, I used to have a dog too until he died about a year ago. And many, many other interesting facts of what's happening, and when you read it, it looks like you're reading a newspaper. But you can call all of that coincidence. Give me some facts. The Gemara was written a little less than 2,000 years ago. At that time, most of the world that we see today was very different. In the Gemara, Masechet Megillah, we have a story of Yaakov praying to Hashem, saying, "Hashem, I know that my descendants are going to sin in the future. Hashem showed Yaakov the future. But please, even the power that You give Esav, don't give him unlimited power against my descendants. At least put a ring around his nose like You do a bull."

22:05A bull is a very strong animal, very big. But if you put a ring around its nose, it's easier to control. So Chazal says, what does this mean really? And this is what it says: Do not remove his nose ring. refers to Germania, a royal province of Edom. If they would but go forth, they would destroy the entire world. Germania, by the way, is the way you say Germany in Hebrew. And incidentally, this Germania over here also wanted to destroy the world. But how do we know it's the same Germany? Rabbi Chama Bar Chanina said, there are 300 crowned princes of Germania of Edom, and there are 365 chieftains in Rome, and every day one group goes forth to encounter the other group, and one of them is killed, and they would then have the trouble of appointing a new ruler in its stead. When the Gemara was written, Germany didn't exist.

23:35If you look at the U.S. archives, which I did, you find the foundation of Germany approximately 800 years ago, nearly a thousand years after this was written. And the makeup of Germany was exactly 300 barbarian tribes that came together and decided to call themselves Germany. It seems like we're talking about the same one. The Gemara, the Oral Torah, is full of these. All we have to do is read it. All we have to do is find out. And we had a shiur, Baruch Hashem, earlier today. About two hours' worth of scientific proofs, both from the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. And there's one that I did online for anyone that missed it. You can find it, as I said, TorahAnytime.com or BeEzratHashem.org. You can find my shiurim. And BeEzrat Hashem, enjoy them.

24:37In the book of Exodus, Sefer Shemot, Parashat Beshalach, Am Yisrael commits another sin, and Hashem says to Moses, "How long will you refuse to observe My commandments and teachings?" Again, he complains about Am Yisrael not listening to what he said. He gave you some mitzvot, he gave you the Shabbat, and you're not following it. Hashem says, how long is it going to be? Meaning, how much time do you want before I force you to do it? If you look into the prophets, the Prophet Yechezkel, he gives you a few interesting prophecies of what's going to happen at the end of times. He says, for those who don't want to observe 100%, they're 50-50. The time will come when I'll just force you to do it. You will be My nation whether you like it or not. But what if we're stubborn? So I'll tell you a story of someone who was stubborn. In 1990, we moved from Israel to the United States.

26:02I was 10 years old. I grew up in a semi-religious house, went to religious school just to have the Masoret, to have some familiarity with what Judaism was. It's much easier to be Jewish in Israel. You're surrounded by them. But as soon as we landed in the United States, we didn't realize that if you don't go to yeshiva, and you don't stick to Hashem 24 hours a day, It's very, very easy to become a goy. Now, when you're born non-Jewish, there's nothing wrong with not being Jewish. You could be a righteous non-Jew, just like Iyov, and get to a point of having prophecy and even a book of Tanach written about you. And go to Olam HaBa and have an extraordinary eternity. But when you're a Jew, you don't have that kind of option. So we went to public school, started working around the time I was maybe 11 years old, had newspaper routes, then I worked at a shoe store and then clothing stores, helped the family out. We were struggling in the beginning. I learned the value of money, or at least the value that I thought it was. Worked hard in school, was a relatively good student.

27:27But none of it really worked out that easily because when I first came to the U.S., I only knew the first three letters of the alphabet because it was on a cereal box: A, B, C. But after a year, when you're 10 years old, you catch on quickly. So after a year, I passed my ESL test, English as a Second Language test. But the U.S. education system is not comprised of the smartest people in the world. Because as soon as I passed my test, they threw me in special ed. They assumed that just because I passed my English test, and I'm new to the English language, that also means I'm mentally challenged. So I was surrounded by kids that looked like they were 30, and I'm 11. One guy had a beard. I'm not joking, he really had a beard. His name was Antoine. scary as can be. But he liked me. So anyway, I befriended these halfway criminals, and I realized that I didn't want to be there. So I worked really hard, and by the time I got to high school, I was in advanced placement classes, taking college courses, playing football, becoming a student-athlete, on my way to

28:56doing something big in life. I was 17 years old. I went to Binghamton University. I was considered a top student, not the top, but decent average. I went to college, had a nearly perfect GPA, 3.9 GPA. I wanted to be a psychiatrist, a psychologist, until I found out that I had to be in school for another eight years. The problem with school is that most people who go there need to go because they need to learn how to think. That's the point of school. Usually, a teenager doesn't know how to think. They barely left their PlayStation when they were 18 years old. I was already in the work world. I was already working. When I was 17, I was making $100,000 a year selling electronics, hustling, and doing different types of things to make extra money. Being in college and hanging out with a bunch of losers smoking pot all day was not exactly my ideal fun. Okay, once or twice a week, but I wanted to go make money. So, at 18 years old, I decided that college was not for me, and I dropped out. I went back to the work world and went back to selling electronics.

30:20But within a few months, I realized that electronics were also not for me. It's not exactly the most ethical business in the world. Plus, there's a cap. You have to own the store in order to make a lot of money. I didn't want to own the business, so I started looking for something else. So one day, I just picked up and left. After my boss yelled at me—and I'm not exactly one to be yelled at, at least not at that age. Today, I get yelled at all the time; I'm married. No, Baruch Hashem, she doesn't yell at me, but that's a good joke though. So, I left and I ran into an old high school buddy, and he said to me, "Listen, why don't you go into the car business?" I said, "Okay, let's see, set me up a meeting if you know somebody." He set me up a meeting, I go meet some owner of some car lot, and I have a ponytail, I have four earrings, two on each side.

31:22I'm built like a Greek statue because I played football and I used to work out night and day, eating creatine for breakfast. Kind of healthy too, and very, very ambitious. So I go and I meet this owner, and he says, "Oh, come, come in, let's meet." I'm like, "No, no, wait. I don't want to waste your time. Can you just tell me, how much does your top guy make?" And he says to me, "$150,000." I said, "Okay, thank you. I'm not interested." He looked at me twice and he said, "What do you mean you're not interested?" I said, "Well, I'm already working somewhere else and I'm making $100,000. If your top guy makes $150,000, that means he's been working here for at least five years. I'm not waiting five years to make $50,000 more. It doesn't make any sense." This was the mindset of someone naive, someone ambitious. I'm not really sure yet. $150,000 today would be phenomenal. But back then it wasn't.

32:22So I left, and the guy was dumbfounded. And my friend said, okay, listen. If you want, you can go into the business I'm trying to get into. You can become a stockbroker. You can make a lot of money. A lot of the guys that I work for make a lot of money. I said, okay, great. Introduce me. So I go to this office. The parking lot is full of brand new cars. If anybody saw the movie "Boiler Room," which is a... crooked operation of stockbrokers. This looked exactly the same. And I later found out that they were also crooked, just like them. So, I go and see a bunch of young guys. Everybody's in their 20s and 30s. Everyone has a brand-new car. They're wearing $1,000 suits. I said, okay, this is interesting. And I asked the guy, okay, what do you have to do? I know a little bit about the stock markets. I had some money, so I invested in the stock market and got lucky and had one of my stocks actually go up. Hashem was... paving my way to go into this business. I only found out 16 years later why. Hint, it's not the money. So, he tells me, "Listen, you come work for me. You pay your dues, pretty much. You work for me for a while. You pass your test. You do this. You do that. You call prospects. You make 250 bucks a week. 1,000 bucks a month." So, okay, I'll be here tomorrow.

33:43A little bit of a downgrade, about 90%. But it has potential. So I start working, and being ambitious, I realize very quickly that in order for me to be good, I have to be better than everyone else. So I have to start learning what they're doing. So I start reading the Wall Street Journal, I start reading different things on the internet, I start reading magazines, and I get into it. I work for them for about a month, and then I find out that there's some guy coming to the office saying goodbye to everyone. He has suitcases, and he says goodbye, and everyone's hugging him and kissing him, and I have no idea what's going on. Maybe he's going on a long break. A few weeks later, I find out he's going to jail. So, once I find out that he's going to jail, which is about almost two months after I start working for these people, I'm not making any sales; I'm just asking people if they're interested in getting information from this firm. 7:59 in the morning, I'm reading my Wall Street Journal, trying to get familiar with this business. And my boss, Dean, yells at me, saying, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm reading the Wall Street Journal, relax." He says, "You relax, get out of here. Time to work." I said, "Okay. I'll go work somewhere else." And I leave. Again, I don't like when people yell at me.

35:10My friend that got me the job calls me about an hour or two later, says, "Listen, you can come back if you want. He'll take you back." I said, "Thank you very much. I don't want to. I'll find somewhere else." I go work for somebody else, which ends up being in the city. It's a friend of my brother's. We used to play soccer together. And I go start working for this guy. Smaller office. Not crooked like these people at least, but oh Hashem, I find out later on that all of them, almost all of them, go to jail. So Hashem had some mercy on me. So I go to work for this other guy. He's not a crook exactly like they are, but he's not an angel either. He's very vicious when it comes down to actually paying people. So I work for him for free, and I have to earn my way. For the next year and a half, the most amount of money that I make in one month is $1800, but he only pays me $900 because I was on the phone 10 times during the month past eight o'clock in the morning on personal phone calls, so he docks the whole day's pay for that. After that, I decide to quit.

36:32and I go back into making a little bit of money in the electronics business again for a few months until the firm that was a big firm next door heard about me and met me and so on. He said, "Listen, if you want to come work for us, we'll treat you better. We'll do this, we'll do that." So, I said, "Okay, fine. Listen, I'm not willing to work for anyone. I'm willing to be partners with somebody. I'll build, you know, I'll get clients." You develop the clients; I'll do one part of the business, you the other part of the business. But since I don't really have any money, I need you to pay me a draw, meaning that I'll pay you back, or you take it from the commissions we generate. "Okay, how much do you want?" "I need $2,200 a month. It's not exactly a lot of money, especially when you're working 14, 15 hours a day." He said, "Fine, no problem." I come in, I'm all excited. I pass my Series 7 test. I pass my Series 63 test. I already get two licenses, which is like the average in the industry. And I go start working for this guy. After a month passes, I ask him for my paycheck. I got him 14 clients or 11 clients the first month. I got him 11 new clients. I said, okay, we're making some money. This is good. I said, can I have my check? He said, no, no, no. I hold the first check in case you screw me.

37:52Oh, okay. You're one of those. Fine. For me to leave right now, I have to start the whole story again. I just left one place for almost two years. Now I'm going to start another place. Okay, you know what? I'll believe you. I'll buy another month. We'll double down. I work another month. I get 14 clients the second month, which is a lot. So now we have 25 new clients in two months. I ask for my check, and he gives me a check for $81.12. Personal check. I look at it and I ask him, is this lunch money or? He said, no, no, this is your paycheck from last month. I said, no, no, you're missing a few thousand. It's supposed to be $4,400. Even if you want to hold this first check for whatever excuse you made up last month, it's still $2,200. He goes, what are you talking about? I don't remember promising you anything. I said, what do you mean? We had an agreement. He goes, do we have a contract?

38:53So what contract? You gave me your word. You worked for a big company. If we don't have a contract, I don't remember what I said. Okay. If you all remember, every Wednesday, we read a Tehillim. God is the one that takes revenge, and He shows up once in a while. i just didn't think it was for me until later on. Not a month goes by, obviously, I go to the boss of the office and I tell him, listen, this guy robbed me for a few thousand dollars. I'm now finding out more information about him that apparently I'm not the first guy that he did it to. I don't want to work for him anymore or with him or anything. I just want to be independent.

39:55And the owner tells me, he goes, "Well, listen, I have to think about it and I'll get back to you." I said, "Okay, fine." And he comes back and he says, "Why should I let you be independent?" I said, "Well, I work harder than everyone else. Most people show up at nine or ten o'clock in the morning and leave at four. I show up at 6:30 or seven and I leave at midnight." It's a good indication I work hard. Okay, but it's gonna cost you about $4,000 a month to work here. At least, you know, because you have to pay for the secretary, and the office, and the paper, and the other paper, and the phone bill, maybe some paper too, and some other stuff that he could just make up, and it's about $4,000. He says, do you have it? He says, no. He says, where are you gonna get it from? I said, I have no idea.

40:55But I'll get it. I said, okay. He lets me go on my own, which is what it's called in the industry. And just two days later, September 11th happens. When Hashem says He takes revenge, He takes revenge. The guy that paid me $81 was out of the business. Apparently, all of his money was in the stock market. He lost all of it. He left the business. Nice Mussar lesson. Don't short people money; play with their life. So now, I can't work for the next few weeks because I can't go into Manhattan, but eventually they allow me to go back into work, and I find myself in a very peculiar time to build a business. Brokers are leaving the industry, I'm just getting in. Clients are jumping out of windows, I'm looking to get them. Interesting time. But just like there's a tefillat sha'ah, which means a desperate prayer, the business world is also desperate. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Usually, the best businesses in the world start with nothing. The ones that start with a lot of money usually fail, or at least don't succeed as much. I have not much of an option, so I start going to work every day,

42:23But eventually, the money that I saved up runs out. And for the next six months, I have to borrow $1 from a guy named Dimitri so I could buy a donut and coffee, and that was my food for the day. I have to sneak onto the bus, pretending that there's money on the MetroCard, even though there really isn't. And when the guy says, "Oh, there's no money on the MetroCard," I say, "Oh, okay, it's a different one. Let me get it from my bag, and I'll be right back." Then I go to the back of the bus and start praying that he doesn't call me to come back. And it's continued, and a few times they have to throw me out of the bus, rightly so. And that's how I live for the next six months, but I'm too proud to tell my parents I don't have any money. I just know that if I work harder than everyone else, something good is supposed to happen. And that's what I do. Six months into it, struggling and eating a donut is pretty much the food for the day. And having to go through the difficulty of having to borrow a dollar from someone every day. And even if he wants to offer me more, I refuse to take it. And then my luxury was that once a week, I would buy kosher bologna from Kmart or Pathmark. That was my luxury. And that's it. But I refused to work on Shabbos. To this day, I still don't know why. I just know you're not supposed to work on Shabbos. I didn't keep Shabbos. But I didn't work on Shabbos.

43:50Six months into it, I make my first break. After paying this guy his money, I actually keep $5,000. To me, it was all the money in the world. The next month, $10,000. The next month, $12,000. In November of 2002, I make $117,000 for the month. I become the top guy in the office. The next month, I make $50,000, and then after that, it just gets to a point where every month gets bigger than the next. By August of 2003, I make my first million dollars, and I become the number three producing broker in the entire country for this big firm called Raymond James, which has about 5,000 brokers with an average career of 20 years. I'm the new guy. The CEO of the company writes a letter to my branch manager, and he says, who is this guy? And how is he making money when the rest of us are losing?

44:53He says he works really hard. So the CEO asks, does he have insider information? Insider information means you possess illegal information about stocks and that's why they’re working in a down market. I barely even knew what that was. But the branch manager tells me, listen, you know, they’ve got an eye on you. I said, okay, I have to make a decision. I just work hard. But I realized it was time for me to make a decision. I built a nice business. It got to a point where people were making money with me. People started calling me and asking me if they could invest with me as if I'm doing them a favor. Usually, it's me chasing them, not them chasing me. Nice. Nice. I said, okay, I have to make a decision. I'm either going to stay here forever and just work with their rules or leave and start my own company. As a typical Israeli, I leave and start my own company. One of many Reuven companies. I start my own firm. And then the fun really begins. I start hiring a bunch of employees, training over the next several years over 135 different salesmen.

46:13Some of them, all of them come broke. Some of them leave rich. Some just leave. Not everybody makes it, but I train a lot of different people. I hire analysts, I hire brokers, I hire secretaries. And over the next few years, we start building a company. We go from having just an investment firm to investing in fixed income, to investing in insurance, to selling insurance, to starting a hedge fund and all types of fun businesses. And it gets to a point where now, by 2006, I'm not making money, I'm printing it. A bad month is $200,000. The best month that year was $1.6 million. For the month, I just turned 26. Life is good. I also happened to meet a woman who cares about me. Wonderful woman.

47:17drop-dead gorgeous. She lives in Florida. She wants nothing from me except my attention. And she happens to work for me too. Just, she works for a different company. She's my trader. I do trades. I need to buy a million shares of XYZ, I call her. I need to sell, I call her. I need something, I call her too. I have nothing to do, I call her too. In the beginning, for the first eight months or so, it was just a phone relationship. I didn't know what she looked like. She was smart, she was the best in the business, and I swore that she was at least five to six hundred pounds. But then one day, they invited me to a conference and they had her show me around, and I see this tiny little cute girl. "You're the one from the phone?"

48:18All right, so I started becoming nicer. I called the company about a month later, and I told them, oh, by the way, that nice little girl that's helping me, that's my trader, she's the best employee in your company. They said, great. Oh, yeah, you have to give her a 50% raise. And a private office, too. All right. Pull strings. I'm paying for it anyway. What do they care? It's money they're making from me. So anyway, we become very, very friendly, and eventually, we start dating. A couple of years later, in 2006, she has already moved to New York. We build another company together. Life is grand. There's one thing that's a problem, though. She's not Jewish. When Hashem said, "I created the heaven and the earth..."

49:18and everything in between, He also gave us some rules. He told Avraham Avinu, even before we got the Written and the Oral Torah, Avraham, make sure you don't marry anyone from the Canaanite nations. Not allowed. Little by little, this traveled until we got to Mount Sinai where Hashem gave us a little bit more details. In the book of Proverbs, chapter 31, verse 3, it says, "Give not your strength to women, and let your conduct not destroy the protocol of kings." I did a bracha before, so same water.

50:21I think I'm a kofer. In this proverb, Chazal tells us, here we learn about the sin of wasting seed. Wasting seed, unfortunately, is a politically incorrect topic in today's world, even though it's one of the most important for us to know. Why? It's one of three sins that the entire Torah which gets someone, if they do it intentionally, into the seventh chamber of Gehinnom, which never ends. It’s eternal suffering, just like there’s eternal greatness and amazing reward in Olam HaBa. Just as there is eternal greatness and amazing reward in the World to Come, there is also the opposite: severe punishment in Gehinnom. Gehinnom has seven parts. We're not going to go into the details; I don't want to depress you. Each one gets worse than the other, but each one of them ends. The first six end at some point. A thousand years, a million years, a billion years, whatever, but it ends at some point, except chamber seven. It never ends. Very depressing. There are three sins. For anyone who doesn't know, what are those three sins? One of them, as we just discussed, is wasting seed on purpose.

51:51A problem that even yeshiva kids, who send me emails on a daily basis, have, because no one teaches them what it means. Baruch Hashem, we're not politically correct, so we made approximately five hours' worth of shiurim about the topic. It's unfortunately the only shiurim available online that are comprehensive in addressing the topic. There are only two other small shiurim that are available. by two amazing rabbis, Rabbi Ilan Nava and Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, the only other truth tellers that I know of publicly in online shiurim. They each made a short shiur about it, but we wanted to be a little bit more comprehensive, because we have a lot to catch up on. So we made one lecture for an hour, we saw a lot of feedback, a lot of people started doing teshuva, so we said, okay, let's give some more details. So we were invited to New York, and we gave a three and a half hour lecture about it. Anyone that wants to learn about it, you have it available on the very same websites we mentioned earlier today, talking about it. And here, King Solomon, the wisest man of all time, tells us that every time that you're with a woman, you're giving up part of your strength. Obviously, this is referring to every time you're with her intimately. He says, don't give your strength to women. Obviously, he's not telling you not to be with your wife.

53:18What he's telling you is that if you're going to spend too much time with women, you're going to destroy your future. You're not going to be able to be successful in life because even a king has to have a protocol. A king has to have a system. A king has to have control. But now the rest of Chazal tells us something even more interesting. That someone in the Gemara, it says that someone who's with a non-Jew is violating multiple sins. The first one is wasting seed—not good. The second one, this is Masechet Sanhedrin. Oh, so you guys actually want to hear what I say?

54:24The second one is being with a non-Jew. The third one is being with a nidah, which anyone that knows about the issur of being with your wife without her going through family purity, going to the mikveh, knows it's actually a worse sin than being with your own mother. That's how bad. Being graphic, because that's the only way people get the picture. Incest is disgusting to people. Good, so wake people up; maybe they'll go to the mikveh instead. And last but not least, consider it like you've been with a harlot. Why is the non-Jew getting such a rough insult?

55:27Because being not Jewish is fine. You can be part of the righteous among the nations. Like I said earlier today, be like Iyov. No problem. You all have to just follow simple rules. You have the seven Noahide laws. which are all rational and logical. And then you have anything else that makes sense for anyone to keep, like, for example, respecting your parents as part of the Ten Commandments. It's not part of the seven Noahide laws, but they're still obligated to follow it. Why? Because if you don't respect your parents, you're not going to have a civilized civilization. So, anything that makes sense. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of about 50 total rules. Let's try. I can talk louder. Okay, can you hear me? Hear me now? I don't think you can hear me. Tell them, I'll talk louder. Oh, maybe. Ah, okay, there we go. So now, since someone has such an easy layup, as we call it in the sports world,

56:50Lay-up opportunity to go to Olam HaBa. All you have to do is observe a few mitzvot because God said so, not just because it makes sense. And you get Olam HaBa. And you go and ruin it by killing a Jew. And this is why God gets very upset. Because the Jew is not allowed to be with the non-Jew. So now, the non-Jew, whether it's a male or a female, is charged with murder. In Shamayim, they're charged with murder. And murder is one of the seven Noahide laws that they're not allowed to do. Same thing like they're not allowed to do in the Ten Commandments. Because the Jew that's going to be with the non-Jew is cutting himself off from the nation. This is a big deal. Why? Let's think about it. Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov sacrificed their lives in order for Am Yisrael to exist. Eventually, Am Yisrael turns into also the Jewish nation. The only thing that changed is that we received the Torah at Mount Sinai and that's when we became the Jewish people. If Am Yisrael went and got

58:14to Mount Sinai and said, you know what, God? We don't want the Torah. And someone else came along and said, you know what, we're going to get the Torah instead. It's free, we'll take two of them. Then they would be Jewish, and Am Yisrael would not. Why? Because what makes you Jewish is the Torah, not the fact that your mom is Jewish. Your mom being Jewish qualifies you to be Jewish. It doesn't make you Jewish. What's my source? Converts. Converts convert, their parents are not Jewish, but they become Jewish. As a matter of fact, they become so Jewish that they're considered higher than a natural-born Jew. Source, many. One of them is the fact that the special deal that converts get in the Torah is mentioned more than any other mitzvah in the entire Torah, 36 times. On top of that, you all say it in Tefillat Amidah every single day.

59:23In your Amidah prayer, you get to a section where you ask Hashem for a blessing, just like He blessed the sages, the righteous, the tzaddikim, and eventually, it gets to us. But right before us, it says, Gereh Tzedek, righteous converts. So we see that there is a chain of command, a chain of importance. According to Hashem's eyes, the righteous convert is higher than the natural-born Jew. Why? He chose God. The Jew didn't. He was just born that way. So he gets extra credit for it. But if someone chooses to stay non-Jewish, that's fine too. They have Olam Haba if they follow the laws. But if they want the best of both worlds, and they want to be a non-Jew, do fewer mitzvot, but at the same time marry a Jew, be with a Jew, even be intimate with a Jew, then you get the worst of both worlds. You get charged with murder, and you're both in deep trouble. I didn't know this. I knew it wasn't exactly great, but I didn't know it was that bad. If you look at the last three thousand three hundred years, Israel has suffered every single generation. There was not one generation that did not struggle.

1:00:54When the goyim told us to worship idols, we followed the mitzvah: die and not sin. Bow to an idol? No. Kill us instead. And they killed us. Worship a cross? No. Kill us instead. And they killed us. Leave Judaism? No. Kill us instead. And that's what they did. Generation after generation for over 3,300 years died just for you to be Jewish. And you're going to ruin it by ending it. Because as soon as you intermarry, Judaism ends. It ends. So, are you ready that when you go to Shamayim, and Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov and approximately a billion other Jews show up at your trial, and they ask you a question, why'd you end it? What are you going to say? What are you going to say when they ask you why'd you end it? I wasn't sure. I didn't know.

1:02:22That's what I thought. When Hashem tells us in His Torah that He has mercy, most people misunderstand it. And by most, I mean like 99.9%. It's a majority. Most people think that mercy means Hashem just doesn't really care. You can sin, and He'll just let it go. Okay, drive on Shabbat, Hashem understands. The only reason Moshe didn't drive on Shabbat is because he didn't drive on Shabbat because he didn't have a car. "I need to work on Shabbat because Hashem didn't give me enough money." I'm helping them out. People rationalize when you don't keep mitzvot, it's what you could easily rationalize living your life. I did. says I spoke for, oh no, it's 60 minutes, so it's six hours. I said, there's no way I spoke for six hours. Not yet, I still have another five hours left. So, when Hashem says that He has mercy on us, He doesn't mean that He forgets. It means that He's going to give you a chance.

1:03:49And another shot. And another shot. And another shot to wake up. Rav Wasserman was once asked, "Kvod Harav, all of these secular people that are born into, you know, not the most righteous families, are they all going to go to Gehenom?" And Rav Wasserman, who wasn't exactly known as the, you know, one that gives it on the head all the time. He was a man of truth 100%, but the answer was surprising. He said, of course they will. Why would you think otherwise? The students were shocked. They said, what do you mean? Why are all of these secular people going to go to Gehenom? Is there enough room? He said, yes. And the Gemara says that Gehenom continues to grow. Gan Eden is limited. Why Kulam? So we'll just imagine this. You walk around in a desert. There's nothing. And then eventually you just see a huge castle. Knock on the door and the door opens. You see everything is brand new. Food, fresh.

1:05:11served as if it's waiting for you. And there are diamonds right next to it. You just start taking stuff and eating and putting the diamonds in your pocket, and eventually one of the guards catches you and throws you in jail. They bring you in front of the judge, and the judge asks you, "What do you think you were doing?" He goes, "What? I didn't see anybody. I didn't think anyone owned it." So just as you really think it all came from nothing, you get an extra punishment for that. For the nerve of thinking that there's a perfect castle in the middle of the desert with food that's fresh and diamonds right next to it, just waiting for you. That's life. You were born into a perfect world, and to think that you came from nothing and that there's no point is an additional sin by itself. So, Hashem had mercy on me, and He gave me a few wake-up calls, but I refused to listen. All of a sudden, in 2006, despite making money, I started having some problems in my life. Business wasn't going as smoothly as it was supposed to, but I just said, okay, it's just a trend. We were going straight up for the last several years. It's bound to happen.

1:06:37Some friends weren't exactly so friendly and said, "Oh, we'll replace them. We'll buy new ones." You happen to have a lot of friends when you have money, by the way. They just come with it. So, I didn't get the signs. Hashem says, "Okay, when I wrote, 'for a stubborn nation,' you were included." Now I gotta show you who's the boss. November 18th, 2006, the same year that I made millions and millions of dollars, my top year, I decided to go have an elective surgery. A surgery that I didn't actually have to have. It was an annoying problem that bothered me once a year for the last 10 years called hemorrhoids. Two-thirds of the human population have it. Don't worry, you won't go through the same experience, b'ezrat Hashem.

1:07:39But I went to have the surgery because the doctor told me, "Listen buddy, it's not a big deal. I've been doing these surgeries for 16 years. I'm considered an expert, one of the top doctors in it. I do four or five surgeries a day. It's like a factory." I said, "Okay, I don't really care about all of that. I just want to know how long am I going to be out of work? Because for me, it's $3,000 an hour. Being out a whole day, it's a lot of money. A week is even more." He said, "No, it's not a big deal. You just come in on Wednesday. You're back to work on Monday." I said, "Oh, okay." He said, "It's like a long weekend." All right, let's do it. I go to the surgery. I wake up a different person. The person that came into the surgery was 99% healthy. The person that woke up was 100% sick. screaming my lungs out from pain because I feel that someone is taking a knife and cutting my body over and over and over again and it won't stop. They start giving me more morphine and discover that since I never took a drug in my life, because I actually like my brain, my body is rejecting it. Morphine doesn't work, so they give me more.

1:08:58and more, and I keep screaming. The only things I can recognize are my wife and my mom. The only thing I can get out of my mouth other than screaming is "kill me, please." No one wanted to listen. Eventually, after a while, They give me the maximum amount of morphine legally allowed. They said that to the average person, it would be 10% of it, and the amount that they gave me would kill several people. Eventually, it calms me down. I calmed down. I said, oh, good. I know what Gehinnom looks like. I calmed down. For some strange reason, they decided to release me from the hospital. said, "Listen, you're fine. We don't know what that hiccup was, but you look fine now. Go home." Mistake number two. On the way home, we go pick up some shawarma. I remember that shawarma sandwich like it was yesterday. That shawarma sandwich has garnered some serious fame, I tell you, over the last couple of years. So I get a shawarma sandwich.

1:10:17If anyone wants to sponsor me, I could tell them what shawarma place it was. I could even tell them I'm from Arizona. How would they know? So, I get a shawarma. We eat at the house. I tell everyone, thank you for coming. It was a very eventful day. I'm going to sleep. Good night. I wake up exactly 45 minutes later with worse screams than I had before. The war fiend wore out, and I'm in a worse situation. Only this time, it doesn't stop for 62 days. Now, what happens once you can't sleep for more than 15 minutes in a row for a long period of time is you start hallucinating, start seeing things. And then, slowly but surely, you start dying. So, my liver started failing, and I started urinating blood. If that wasn't enough, blood started coming out of my eyes, my ears started getting infected. And I started slowly dying. And screaming all along. for a long period of time is you start hallucinating, start seeing things. And then, slowly but surely, you start dying. So, my liver started failing, and I started urinating blood. If that wasn't enough, blood started coming out of my eyes, my ears started getting infected. And I started slowly dying, and screaming all along.

1:11:32I would take somewhere between 75 to 120 painkillers a day so I could sleep that 15 minutes. The doctors were not even able to prescribe me that many, so I had some friends in interesting places get me the rest. You gotta do what you gotta do. The doctors weren't able to do anything other than torture me a little more. Every time I would go there, they would do these checks that would make things hurt a lot more. At one point, I actually told my wife, "He's probably dying." Well, as Hashem would have it, that was just a wake-up call. After 62 days, things started calming down. I only had to take 20 painkillers a day now. But I was able to walk. To go from here to, let's say, the end of the shul would take about 45 minutes instead of 30 seconds for a normal person. But for me, it was a miracle. I wasn't in that much pain. It was instead of a level 50, it was like a level 8. It's good. For me, it was Gan Eden. Little by little, I would get back to work.

1:12:52I was in a lot of pain, but things started getting better. Still, no teshuva. I just thought that I got another shot. This guy in Heaven was upset at something, so he got his anger out. Now I'm back. Well, apparently, I didn't get the message. So, nine months later, I wake up with pain in the back of my leg. thinking that I pulled a muscle while I was sleeping. I have no idea how. So it'll probably go away by tomorrow. It doesn't go away. Actually, the pain extends, becomes bigger. I have to go to the emergency room because I can't move. And the doctors do some interesting tests. And they said, "Yes, you have an internal infection called an abscess in between two muscles in a very, very weird place. And if you were here just two hours later, it would explode and you would die on the spot." Emergency surgery. Now I'm in the Intensive Care Unit next to people that are dying for the next two weeks. This one is much worse than the first.

1:14:13Now they have the IV full of morphine 24 hours a day, and I just keep pressing the button. I think I got some exercise. Eventually, I'm released from the hospital with this new, interesting surgery. My wife has to help me with this wound because, when you have an abscess, the healing is even more interesting than the surgery. because they have to allow the infection to get out of your body, they can't sew it up. As a matter of fact, you have to keep reopening it every few hours. That was her job. My job was just to scream. I didn't get the message though. No teshuva. Six months later, Another pain, different area, not connected, back to the hospital, intensive care unit, next to a bunch of people that are dying, some of them are actually dying. We're comparing screams. Mine was sometimes louder. Intensive care unit, surgery, the whole story all over again. Back out, back to business, three months later, again.

1:15:35and then it's every month. Every month. A good month is five weeks. It gets to a point where I have to go to a doctor every single week, and I struggle with 24 hours a day worth of pain for the next seven years. Eventually, my body deteriorates. It's not just the area where I have the infection; it gets to a point where it's from my neck all the way to the bottom of my feet. I'm always in pain. A couple of years after the original surgery, maybe three years after the original surgery, I wake up, and my feet hurt. By the next day, they've doubled in size. By the next day, the rest of my leg has doubled in size. i go to Cornell University to ask them what is happening with my body. They told me, maybe it's the heat. I said, maybe you should go back to school. They have no diagnosis, as usual. I go back home and eventually get to a point where I can't walk.

1:16:57So now I ask you a question. How much is $20 million worth when you can't work, you can't run, you can't function, you can't think, and you're always in pain? So, if I didn't get the message yet, Hashem says, okay. It's what the prophet said. God says, Mine is the silver, Mine is the gold. It's all Mine. You start treating it like it's yours, I'll take that too. So He starts taking money. All of it. It was a miracle making that much money when I was very, very young. It was a bigger miracle that I lost all of it in much less time. So I start losing money; my friends become enemies. The guys that I hired to start running my company start stealing from me. The companies that I'm dealing with, all of a sudden, start changing the rules, and everything that could go wrong goes wrong. My investments that have been working out for years and years in a row, in good and bad markets, all of a sudden, I become the stupidest guy on Wall Street. Everything that I pick goes wrong.

1:18:24i pick for it to go up, it goes down. i pick for it to go down, it goes up. the funny thing is that with experience, you actually get better at the job, not worse. so even if i intentionally tried to lose the money, i still wouldn't do as bad. everything that could go wrong goes wrong. my health continues to deteriorate, and i get to a point where i just want to die. And the only reason that's keeping me alive is this cute little girl that's been sticking around for the last few years that happens not to be Jewish. Some people ask me, "Hey, don't you want Jewish kids?" I said, "Sure, why not?" She said, "Well, why don't you tell her to convert?" I said, "Well, I'm not keeping it. Why should I tell her to do it?" I'm not a hypocrite. I said, "Yeah, why don't you find a better girl?" He said, "You go find me one better than this. You go find me one that sees her husband suffer 24 hours a day, lose everything, and everyone becomes his enemy, and is happy and excited to say good morning. Makes him feel like a king. Go find me one like this. Go find me one that's going to stick around through hell with a smile."

1:19:51They usually leave after that. So, I justified it in my own way. But despite how wonderful she was, despite how happy I was with her, I was still going through hell, and she was watching it. Something had changed. I started getting to a point where I started feeling bad for her. I said, you know what? Maybe if I die, she'll at least go on with her life. Find someone she doesn't have to watch screaming and yelling and crying all day. And I got to a point of desperation where I started planning. When they say that Hashem is merciful, they say that He not only gives you the wake-up call to give you a shot so you don't have to go to that place we were talking about before, but also means that He's never gonna give you a test that you can't pass. I got to that point. So as I start to think and think and think and what I'm gonna do, one day I go to visit my parents for Friday night dinner. We do a kiddush. but also means that He's never going to give you a test that you can't pass. I got to that point. So as I start to think and think and think about what I'm going to do, one day I go to visit my parents for Friday night dinner. We do Kiddush.

1:21:18I go into serious pain in the middle of dinner. It's very, very disturbing to see people's faces looking at me. I know what I'm feeling, but it's even worse to see how they're feeling watching me. So I leave in frustration. And I go home and I start thinking, I can't do this anymore. I start thinking, what am I gonna do? By Monday, I'm starting to think, okay, it's time. Let's figure a plan out. But you know what? These two special women in my life, my mom and my wife, maybe at least I should be extra nice to them before I go. So I called my mom for the first time in years, even though I used to see her once or twice a month, and sometimes a little less. Towards the end, it was a lot less. I was becoming more and more antisocial. It's time. Let's figure a plan out. But you know what? These two special women in my life, my mom and my wife, maybe at least I should be extra nice to them before I go. So I called my mom for the first time in years, even though I used to see her once or twice a month, and sometimes a little less. Towards the end, it was a lot less. I was becoming more and more antisocial.

1:22:18I said, you know what, let's call my mom. And she answers the phone, hysterical, crying, saying, talk to him, talk to him. Apparently, I’ve gone into the middle of a conversation with her and someone else. And I say, who? Efraim, talk to him. I said, who’s Efraim Bechlag? He's your cousin. Now, let's give you a little bit of a background on Efraim. When I left Israel, Efraim was a baby. Meaning that for the last 20-something years that I was here already at that point, I didn't know he existed. He's my mother's brother's son, so my cousin. But I didn't know he existed. He's a little younger than I am. Or a lot younger than I am. And I had two different lives.

1:23:19But Efraim grew up to become a very, very big talmid chacham at a very, very young age. Before he was 20 years old, he had already finished the Shas four times—two times Yerushalmi and two times Bavli—because it was some type of competition in his mind. By the time I met him, he had already published six sefarim for himself and maybe another eight or nine for other people, including dayanim. You could say he's a special soul. B'ezrat Hashem, he will be one of Gedolei Yisrael one day. But again, none of that information is helpful for me when I don't know it. So my mom saw that her son is dying, is in pain, and she got to a point of desperation. She has what every Jewish mother has, which is a phone book full of rabbis' phone numbers. And she starts calling rabbis from all over the world, hoping whoever answers the phone can give our poor son, our dying son, a blessing. But today, no one answers the phone. She calls all over the US—no answer. She calls Israel—no answer. She calls different places for almost two hours, and no one answers. Eventually, after two hours of calling phone number after phone number,

1:24:42Someone in Israel answers. And she asks for Rabbi so-and-so. And the woman says in Hebrew, "I'm sorry, you called the wrong phone number. There's no such Rabbi." So what do you do after you've called for two hours and finally reached a soul, only to find out you called the wrong phone number? Well, if you're my mother, you start crying. And that's what she did. She started hysterically crying and breaking down to this stranger on the phone. When Avraham Avinu was three years old, he finally came out of the cave that his father was hiding him in, from Nimrod. And the reason why he was hiding him is because if he didn't, Nimrod would kill him. After three years, he finally comes out, and he sees the sun for the first time. And he thinks that's God. But then he sees the sun go down, and the moon comes up. He says, oh, that's God. And he prays to the moon and the sun all night, all day to the sun until the moon comes up, and he realizes he made a mistake, so he starts doing teshuva, and he starts praying to the moon.

1:25:44and he sees the sun for the first time, and he thinks that's God. But then he sees the sun go down, and the moon comes up. He says, oh, that's God. And he prays to the moon and the sun all night, all day to the sun until the moon comes up, and he realizes he made a mistake, so he starts doing teshuva, and he starts praying to the moon. And then eventually the sun comes back up, and he realizes he's been praying to the wrong god. Eventually, Chazal say this: the owner of the castle peeked at him and told him, "I'm the owner." And that's when Avraham began to become Avraham. He was looking for God, and just like God says to us in chapter 4 of Deuteronomy, Sefer Devarim, "If you look for Me, you will find Me, if you look for Me with all of your heart and all of your soul." Avraham, at the age of 3, did something that most people who are still in their 60s and 70s haven't done: he actually looked for God, and he found Him.

1:27:12I got to that point too because I lost all hope. I realized that I went to over 50 different doctors and doctors don't have my medicine. All they have is painkillers and excuses and big bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars they're gonna charge me. But people would tell me, "Why don't you go to more doctors?" I said, "Because I tried over 50 and they're the best in the world. I actually had money to pay them and it didn't work. I became an experiment." and an actual study where they started injecting ozone into my veins. Maybe they could purify my blood. I also started taking steroids, took vitamins through an IV, acupuncture, everything and anything you could possibly imagine. When you have money and a lot of pain, you become creative. It didn't work. I lost all hope.

1:28:15So then the owner of the castle peeked and showed me who was boss. When my mom called this wrong phone number in Israel, and she started crying when the woman told her it's the wrong phone number, the woman says, "Doris?" which is my mom's name. My mom is shocked. She says, "Who are you? How do you know my name?" She says, "Well, I'm your niece." She goes, "What niece?" She says, "Pnina." She says, "How did I get to you? I don't even have your phone number. We've never spoken on the phone before." And as a side note, they didn't even like each other until after this story. And Pnina says, "I don't know, but if you got to me, apparently Hashem has a reason." Pnina happens to be in the most religious part of my entire family. And Pnina says, "Why are you crying?" And she says, "Well, my son is dying. I need to talk to a rabbi. I need to talk to someone." She says, "Well, if you're looking for a rabbi, why don't you talk to my brother?"

1:29:43Fine. He also lives next door to Rabbi Yosef. I can help. He says, "Yeah, you want to talk to me? Of course, you're the aunt from America." So my mom immediately calls Rabbi Ephraim. He's obviously in a kollel, but he finds out that my mom called, and he calls her right back. And my mom starts talking to Ephraim and crying her eyes out. And Ephraim is very, very wise. And he says, "Does he speak Hebrew?" And she says, "Yes, he speaks a little Hebrew." So he asks, "Why can't I just talk to him?" She responds, "No, he won't talk to you. He doesn't talk to anybody. He barely talks to us, maybe once a month." And at that very moment that she said "he won't talk to you," that's when I called her.

1:30:45And that's why she answered, "Talk to him, talk to him. He can help you." Who? Ephraim. Who's this Ephraim Bechlan? Why is he making you cry? She goes, "He's your cousin, just talk to him." I said, "Okay, I'll talk to anybody, just stop crying." It's unbearable for a son to see his mom cry. So Ephraim calls me. He sounds like a nice guy. And I tell him one of my problems. He's like, "Oh, I'll tell you a story." He tells me the story of Yehuda and Tamar. Something that a first grader in yeshiva knows. Apparently, I didn't know the details of it. Because why do you think Hashem did it? Why do you think Hashem let Yehuda... sleep with Tamar in such an unusual way, thinking that she's a prostitute, her having to pretend she's a prostitute in the first place, and at the end of all of it, make the Mashiach come from there. It's a pretty good question, not for nothing. I can understand, he's righteous, she's righteous, they got married, fine. But the fact that his two sons were wicked, which, by the way, was for wasting seed,

1:32:08This is actually one of the major sources from which we learn that wasting seed is not only disgusting to Hashem for Jews and Gentiles, but both get punished for it. It's not just for Jews. Because at the time Er and Onan were alive, there was no Torah yet. Meaning we didn’t have the written laws that we have today. So, make two sons die, and the third one is too young to marry. Then she waits and waits and waits and realizes eventually that Judah is not intending to marry her. She has a prophecy that the Mashiach is going to come from him, and she wants a piece. A righteous woman pretends to be not righteous, fools him into sleeping with her, and then, when it's found out just a few months later that she's pregnant, The people of the town say that she's desecrating your name, Yehuda. He was the equivalent of a king. She didn't wait. She apparently slept with another man. And Yehuda says, burn her. That was the punishment.

1:33:30And she says, okay, fine, but right before you burn me, I just would like to say one word to Yehuda. And Yehuda comes and, being polite, listens to this, what he thinks is a zonah, what he thinks is a sinner, her plea. And she doesn't plead. She doesn't ask for her life. Instead, she says, do you know who these belong to? She shows him his ring, she shows him his staff, and she shows him that he has a choice. A choice that we learn from. She tells him that you have an option. You can either say that, yes, these are yours, and you're about to kill me for something you did, which is embarrassing for a king or anyone for that matter. Or, you could deny it and I could just burn.

1:34:32and I won't tell anyone else. Because I'd rather burn than embarrass you in public. And this is where David HaMelech gets his source when he says, it's better to burn than embarrass someone else in public. Because someone who embarrasses somebody else in public loses his share in Olam HaBa. So he tells me this story and I find it very fascinating. I tell him, why did God do it? Because just like Hashem has His own chair, He gave the Satan his chair too and He had to fool him in order for him not to disturb this whole story. Because Hashem also wrote a promise that as soon as the Mashiach comes, one of the major missions is going to be to kill the Satan. Eliminate the Yetzer Hara. So obviously, it's against the Yetzer Hara's interest for the Mashiach to come. So he tries to get in the way in every way possible. So if you look at the story of the lineage of the Mashiach, it always comes from a strange place. It starts with the incest between Lot and his daughters, and then you have what they thought was prostitution from Yehuda and Tamar, and then you have Rut,

1:35:57The convert that really didn't have much of a reason to convert other than the fact that she loves God. Because she wasn't getting anything else for it. And then you have Bat Sheva and King David, and a bunch of interesting stories in between. So we see that this strange way of how the Mashiach is going to come was from the beginning. So I find this story very, very interesting, like I'm sure some of you do. Well, I hope at least you do. And we continue talking for about an hour and 40 minutes. I ask him a question, and he gives me an answer. But he doesn't give me an answer like you ask me a question, I give you an answer. He gives me a source. I ask him a question, and he makes me feel good about it by saying, oh, yes, that's such a good question. So-and-so rabbi asked the same question 850 years ago in this book, on that page, in this paragraph. The first thing I was thinking to myself was, how does he know the page number? I didn't know that that's how Talmidei Chachamim think. So I'm like, okay, fine. Of course, it's a good question. I asked it.

1:37:13What do you think? So I ask another question. He's like, oh, what a good question. This rabbi asked this question 350 years ago on this page, this number, this paragraph. So he knows two books by heart. I just keep asking questions now. And he keeps answering the questions with a page number and a book and a rabbi, and he makes me feel great about it that I asked the same question that some gadol asked, and I didn't even know the guy existed. So he makes you feel good about it too. So I'm like, wow. I'm smarter than I thought. So we talked for an hour and forty minutes, with a lot of interesting questions, and the conversation ends. The next week, on Thursday, at four o'clock, I get a call from Ephraim. I start coming up with questions I didn't even know I had. He gives me the answers, and we talk for three hours. Next Thursday, at four o'clock, He calls me at four, we have a conversation, we talk for five hours. Next Thursday, four o'clock, same time, same place, we talk for seven hours. And every single week, an average conversation between five to seven hours with no break. Only questions, only answers; once in a while, we go to the bathroom. But aside from that, my world is shut off.

1:38:39And the biggest fan of it all is the very same lady that we've been talking about the whole night. When four o'clock comes, my phone is taken away from business. No one can get to me. No one even knows where I am because my guard outside my door refuses to let anyone in. She sees me happy on Thursday. The rest of the week's terrible. And every time I finish the call, I start teaching her everything I know. I start writing stuff down, start filling up these notebooks with more and more information; we start getting answers. Now, when you've been looking for answers your whole life, getting them is a real high. I start asking questions I didn't even know I had. And for the next nine months, despite the suffering, despite the pain, despite losing money, I start getting answers and I stop caring. And for the next nine months, I find God. I find the answers to questions I didn't know I had. Later on, I asked Ephraim, "How'd you know all the answers?" Despite the suffering, despite the pain, despite losing money, I start getting answers and I stop caring. And for the next nine months, I find God. I find the answers to questions I didn't know I had. Later on, I asked Ephraim, "How'd you know all the answers?"

1:40:05And he tells me something surprising. He says, "I didn't. I never asked the questions you asked." I said, "Okay, so that just makes it weird. How did you know the answers?" He says, "In the Torah world, we call it help from Heaven. What I would do right before our call is I would pray for Hashem to give me the answers for questions I didn't know existed, because I never asked them." You asked the question, Hashem gave me the answer. Therefore, we both learned. And that's why until this day, when I tell him, "Do you remember when you taught me this and that?" he goes, "No, I don't remember. I remember we studied together." So I started learning, and I started teaching my wife. And little by little, we realized that, Houston, we have a problem. One day, Rabbi Ephraim calls me and he says, "I found a chidush." A chidush is like a new insight. And I would get very excited about his chidushim. It's like, you know, in the Zohar it says that anyone who is intermarried is going to lose his health and his money. I said, "Who said that?" He said, "It's Rabbi Meir."

1:41:33I'm like, ah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't know me. He didn't know about me before he wrote that. I start arguing. I don't even have a clue who Rabbi Meir is. I get so upset. Who does he think he is writing this stuff? Later I would find out how much of a peanut I am next to this Rabbi Meir. Funny thing is that it wasn't a chiddush at all. and you don't need to go to the Zohar to find it. It's in every single book of the Torah—Book of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, everything. Every single book of the Torah has it. Every single book ever talking about marriage in general talks about it. Every single halakha book that talks about marriage talks about it. It's the foundation of Judaism, just like Shabbat. As the Sages say that if someone found a patent, in a way, a system, a fluke, where they found a way to keep 612 mitzvot out of 613. It's not possible because we're not all Kohanim, we're not all women, and we don't have the Beit HaMikdash, and we don't all live in Eretz Yisrael. But let's say you were able to find a way to keep all 612 mitzvot, and you're missing one. And the one just happens to be Shabbat. Chazal say,

1:43:01So not me, so don't take it personally. 612 are worthless. It's like you did nothing if you don't keep Shabbat. You can make every single sin and still do teshuva and still be considered Jewish. But with Shabbat, until you do teshuva, your Judaism is on suspension. You're considered like a gentile that's not righteous. You consider it like a goy that's not righteous. There's a righteous one that has Olam HaBa that we talked about all night, that goes to Olam HaBa and is great and is like Iyov. There's a prophet that has a book out of the 24 books of the Tanach written about him. And then there's the not so much. There's Haman. There's Hitler. There's those people. Well, they were idol worshippers. According to the Torah, according to the Rambam, according to the Shulchan Aruch in seven places, according to the Zohar, according to the Gemara, according to the Torah on every single page that it talks about intermarriage, a Jew that violates Shabbat, in Parashat Ki Tisa, it says, they get death upon death, and they're cut off from the nation. First death means they cut their life short, second death means that they lose their share of the World to Come,

1:44:26And being cut off from the nation means the obvious, which means they're no longer considered part of Am Yisrael; they're considered not Jewish. This is for Shabbat, which I didn't know. And many people don't know. Now I found out. And I also found out that this intermarriage stuff is a big deal too. So I figured, you know what, I can't, now that I'm going to start keeping it, start wearing tzitzit. Start keeping Shabbat. Start learning Torah. Start becoming obsessed with Torah. The interesting part of the Torah is the more Torah you learn, the more you start to hate business. In Parashat Yitro, we learn something very valuable from one of the most important converts in history. His name was Yitro. Yitro. He gives a suggestion to Moshe Rabbeinu, the greatest prophet that ever lived, the only one that ever spoke to God face to face, not physically obviously, but face to face, meaning that he spoke to Him openly while being awake. Yitro comes up with an idea that Hashem gives him. He gets siyata dishmaya to get an idea that's relatively logical, but Hashem wants him to have it.

1:45:49He wants him to have the credit because of the mesirat nefesh, the self-sacrifice that he did by losing all of his money, his friends, his family, and everything in between just because he heard about the truth. That's why the parasha begins with the word "Vayishma." He heard about the God of Israel, and that was enough. He didn't have to see proofs like today's generation. He heard. and he left idol worship. He heard and he left his job, which was being the Pope, very rich. He heard and he left all of his friends. And he finally gets to Mount Sinai and he gives Moshe Rabbeinu an interesting idea. He says, listen, you should build a judicial system with a chain of command. You can't do it all yourself. You should have certain people under you that deal with the people. There's big cases, small cases, mediocre cases, and so on and so forth. And what are the qualities of these people? Interestingly enough, it's also a quality of somebody that wants to be a talmid chacham. He says this: They have to be

1:47:12Men of accomplishment, which means that they not only have a good foundation of Torah and are ambitious, but they also have yirat shamayim, fear of Heaven. Because if you're learning Torah and you have no yirat shamayim, then you're not learning Torah; you're learning a history book. And if you have Torah but no yirat shamayim, then your Torah is considered to'evah to Hashem, an abomination. Men of truth, Meaning that the truth is above everything, even when it's not politically correct, even when it's not very popular, and even when no one wants to hear it. Hashem said it, we say it. And last but not least, people despise money. Why despise money? Because if they despise money, you can't buy them.

1:48:12the truth is more valuable. So I started learning Torah and started seeing more and more that I am starting to despise money. And then I found out that the only way to wake my wife up is by telling her that there's something wrong with our religion. But the reality of it is, being that I'm not a hypocrite, I can't really do that, because I don't really know if there is or there isn't. I just make fun of it. I would call it the remix. They took our book and remixed it into something else, like Puff Daddy did with music. I thought it's the same. So I said, okay, well, you know, you can't really tell somebody to stop believing something. It's not an Advil; you can't just take a pill.

1:49:12So I have to find if there's something wrong with it. So I started learning about Christianity. I started watching debates. I started watching Rabbi Tovia Singer. A few other rabbis. A few other books. I started becoming obsessed. I started finding everything and anything that could be possibly wrong with that religion. And every time I looked, there was something more. It got to a point where every single page had something wrong with it. There's constant contradictions. If it's supposed to be the second book, then that means that it has to agree with the first book. The first book says, the Torah, that Yaakov came down to Mitzrayim with 70 people in no less than three places in the Torah. The New Testament says 75. Where did the extra five people come from? First book says where the Ma'arat HaMachpelah is, the King of Machpelah is. And if you don't believe what the Torah says, you can just go there, because it's still there. The New Testament has the wrong address. God forgot. And I continue to find foolish mistakes like this. And eventually, I watch a debate by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi.

1:50:32And for the first time ever, I see that there's not only something wrong with it. It's fake. It's not about being wrong. Wrong is you went inside the wrong bathroom. You mistakenly went into the women's bathroom instead of the men's bathroom by mistake. You weren't paying attention. Happens. That's wrong. Fake is you went off a cliff instead of the bathroom. And that's what Christianity is. Only they've been fooled for 2,000 years, even the wrong people. And about 2 billion people believe it. So now, I wasn't looking to show her there's something wrong. Now I was looking to save her life. Just like she did mine. Now it became pikuach nefesh. And I started praying and crying to Hashem every single day. And I told Him that it doesn't matter if it takes me another seven years, I'm not leaving until she leaves it. I'm not leaving until she sees it. Then she can make a choice. It's not about her converting anymore. It's just about her saving her life. I tried to show her the debate. She watches the first part of the debate. The debate is in three parts.

1:51:59She watches the first debate, the first part of the debate, and the conclusion is the rabbi is arrogant and the priest is a moron. After about a week of convincing, I make her watch part two. The rabbi is still arrogant and the professor/priest is still a moron. She doesn't like either one of them. But she does know there's something wrong. Okay, okay, there are interesting questions here. Let me look into it. I got some signs of life. So now I become obsessed at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 o'clock in the morning, non-stop looking for proofs, looking for anything I could possibly find. And my life turns into hell. I never had one fight with my wife for all the years that we were together. At that point, I think we were together for several years, maybe eight years. All of a sudden, we're fighting about nothing. And I can't let it go. I have to find the truth. She loves Judaism. She just doesn't think that conversion is an option. It's either you're born Jewish or not. And little by little, she starts doing her own research. She discovers things that I couldn't even find myself.

1:53:29And then she gets to a point where she says, “Okay, I need a sign. I need something. I see that it's allowed to convert. It's actually a big merit. I see that the Torah, the Oral Torah, is real. The Written Torah is real. This is all wonderful. You’re still in pain, by the way. Our business is still going downhill.” But I know what's real and what's not, but I still need something that I can hold on to. So, as you would have it, You know, we start reading this book that I made a shiur about earlier today, Science Comes of Age. At that point, it was called The Coming Revolution by Rabbi Zamir Cohen. It shows a lot of Torah proofs. Very interesting book. We start reading it on Shabbat. Read it out loud to each other. I recommend it to everyone to do. Read a couple of pages to each other out loud. It's very, very, you know, just invigorating to see Hashem in His own creation.

1:54:32And reading and learning out loud and learning with your spouse is the best thing you could possibly do for each other, even more than intimacy. So we start doing this, and we start looking for more Torah and science stuff. And one day, Rabbi YouTube shows me a video called "Torah and Science" by some rabbi that sounds familiar called Rabbi Mizrachi. And this one also has three parts. And I tell my wife, "Listen, this looks interesting, you want to watch?" "Oh, that arrogant guy again." By the way, she's his biggest fan today. So we watch part one. Our minds are blown. video called "Torah and Science" by some rabbi that sounds familiar called Rabbi Mizrachi. And this one also has three parts. And I tell my wife, "Listen, this looks interesting, you want to watch?" "Oh, that arrogant guy again." By the way, she's his biggest fan today. So we watch part one. Our minds are blown. Everything changed. Something clicked for both of us. It's amazing. Maybe it's still early, maybe one o'clock in the morning. It's okay, let's watch part two. Press part two. Part two doesn't work. Now I have a little bit of a scratch. I have to do things in order, like I'm the guy that they wrote the preface for in a book.

1:55:54Like the guy saying thank you to his wife and to the publisher and all the names in the beginning and in the end of the book that no one ever reads, I read it. It's for me. So to go from part one to part three was like, it's like a sacrifice. But I saw she's so into it, okay, part two is not working, let's just watch part three. She goes, really, you can do that? I said, for you, anything, baby. So, watch part three. Part three is even better than part one. It's amazing. Our minds are blown. But now we're in a dilemma. Anyone that ever converted will tell you that they went through something similar. The point that they find out that there's something wrong with their preexisting belief system is the most difficult time of their life. Because now, you don't just go from believing something to believing something else. It's a two-step process. First, you go from believing something to realizing you're wrong, which means you now have nothing. You go from something to nothing.

1:57:20and before you get to step two, which is to replace it with something, whether it's for a moment, an hour, a week, a month, or even a lifetime, you feel like death because you have nothing. You regret that you got to this point because you were better off believing something fake than believing nothing. Because at least you had hope. After part three, that's where she got. So that night, I find out later on, she had a different kind of prayer than most of us do. She prayed to Hashem, the same Hashem we believe in, and the same Hashem she always believed in. Just in the past, she had a middleman. She believed in this Hashem, and she said, okay, Hashem, I got it, but I need a sign, I need something, and generally, you're not allowed to look for signs. But she was desperate, and she said, "Hashem, I know You're real. But I need to know that You want me to convert. Or just kill me. Because I can't stay with him. Now I know that. And I know he won't leave me. And I'm definitely not going to be responsible for him to go to Gehinnom for me. So just kill me instead."

1:58:49Or give me a sign. Well, apparently, she has some serious merits upstairs. Because when she woke up the next morning, she wasn't exactly in the best mood in the world after such a prayer. I was up all night looking for part two. Somewhere around 8:30 in the morning, I found part two working. So Nani, forget, let's not go to work, forget work, let's just watch part two. And she has like a Tisha B'Av mood, you know, she's not exactly happy. So she goes, you know what, fine, let's just watch part two. And then the owner of the castle peeked and showed us who's boss. If you remember Parashat Va'etchanan, in chapter 4, Book of Deuteronomy, Sefer Devarim, Hashem tells us so much in this parasha, someone can live a whole lifetime and not finish it. But here Rabbi Mesrach shows us something very special. He introduces us to something that I heard about and saw a little bit of, but she didn't. He introduces us to something called Torah codes.

2:00:14Torah codes are hidden messages within the Torah that you have to use mathematical calculations to figure out. In order for you to see that it's a code, it's actually by design; it cannot just be random. For example, if you look for the word Hitler, may his name be erased, is what that means. You're going to look for five letters. Just a hypothetical example, you're going to look for H, then I, then T, then L, then E, then R. But obviously, there's no character in the Torah named that name. But you're going to look for that name using Torah codes by looking for equal mathematical skips of letters between each letter, meaning that at the H, and then let's say 50 letters, and then the I, and then another 50 letters, and then another T, and another 50 letters, and so on and so forth. It has to be the same skip between each letter because that shows that it's not random. If it's 15 and 12 and 13, then you can make up any word, and it just becomes Sodom and Gomorrah. You can make up anything.

2:01:25But if it's not random, if it's just an equal skip, then you have something. If it's a smaller skip, the more you see it's by design. Because if it's, let's say, 12,931 letters, it's not as interesting as 50, especially when you know that the Torah has 304,805 letters. And what makes it even more interesting is if you find that word, in a paragraph that has to do with the word, then you've got something. If you find other words in the same paragraph as the other word, in a paragraph that talks about those words, then you see it's by design. So, for example, if you look for all of the words that have to do with the Holocaust, the most traumatizing, but yet, a memory that all of us can connect to one way or another. You look for all the words that have to do with it, whether it's Hitler, or the other angels of death that assisted him, or the gas chambers, or all the disasters that happened to us, you will find all of them. Every single one of those words in one of two parashot, mainly in parashat Ki Tavo. The very same parasha that talks about the punishment that Am Yisrael will get

2:02:51for not following Hashem, the very same parasha that mentions that this nation from far away will have a symbol of an eagle. By the way, the Nazis and the Romans both had this. Yeah, but they haven't turned into the Nazis yet. That's in the end of days discussion we have next week. But nonetheless, you see that all of these words, you find them in the same place. Now in this paragraph, in chapter 4, it says this. I'll read it in Hebrew and then in English. Translation.

2:03:52This is what Hashem is telling us after we've sinned. This is what's going to happen. Hashem will scatter you amongst the people, and you will be left few in number among the nations where Hashem will lead you. So, part one of the punishment is being spread amongst the four corners of the world. If you've noticed, there are Jews everywhere. This is part of the reason. There, you will serve gods, the handiwork of man. So we go from bad to worse. We've sinned, He scatters us, and over there we get worse; we start idol worshiping. But these specific idols, He gives us an indication of what they look like. There you will serve gods, the handiwork of man, of wood and stone, which do not see and do not hear and do not eat and do not smell. Now, there are three major or four major religions, if you want to call it, in the world today. Obviously, you have Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. Now, stone, what's it connected to? Islam. Their place of worship, the number one place, is not the Jerusalem they keep fighting us about because they pray opposite of Jerusalem.

2:05:14Where are they praying towards? They're praying towards a place called Mecca. In the middle of Mecca, there's a huge square stone that they all pray to. Shem's calling it the handiwork of man, a god of stone. Christianity and Catholicism both come from the New Testament, symbolized by the god of wood. What's wood in Christianity? The cross. So, this is a nice coincidence, you could call it. two major religions being represented by a verse. You could say it's something else too, until you get the Torah codes. Rabbi Mizrahi, in part two of Torah and Science, says, out of the entire Torah, 304,805 letters, when you look for two names that represent these two religions, This is the only verse you can find them in. When you go to the word "vayafetz," which means scatter, you get the letter "Hey," which is the second letter of the word. You count 50 letters, you get to the word "etchem," which means you. And then you count 50 letters, you get to the word "yishme'un," which means to hear.

2:06:43spelling the word Mecca. You go backwards, you look for something to do with Christianity. Same word, vayafetz, you get the yud. 50 letters, You get the Shin in Shama, and 50 more letters, you go to the same ending word, Yishmaon, you get the Vav, spelling Yeshu, yimach shemo v'zichro, the very same character who's been misleading people in some way or another for the last 2,000 years. And I've seen Torah codes before this; I've seen Torah codes that have to do with the Rambam, Torah codes that have to do with AIDS, and monkeys, and all types of things, but this I never saw. To me, it was very cool. For her, It was silent. For her, it was everything. For her, it was siyata di'shmaya. For her, it was the answer she's been looking for and praying for. When Hashem says, "When you look for Me with all of your heart and all of your soul, you'll find Me," for her, she found Him. And on the spot, she took on every single mitzvah we have in the Torah. Everything. Everything. Whatever we knew, she did. We didn't know everything, but whatever we knew, we did.

2:07:59And the conversion went very quickly because we'd already been learning for a couple of years by that time. We started learning specifically for the conversion. All types of miracles started happening. And then, more interesting things happened. The day of the chuppah, we made sure that it was the same day as the conversion. Because we already wanted to get out of the whole sin situation, we wanted to make sure that as soon as she's actually converted, we're allowed to be together. So we wanted to make sure it was the same day. There was only one problem. That very same day was a problematic day for me, because two days before that, I got one of my infections. And this one hurt. Really, really badly. So I never told this to anyone. But I'll tell you guys today, you sound nice. So the pain got worse and worse, but I'm just so excited about this conversion happening in a couple of days, I don't even care. Just give me more painkillers, and I'll just get through it somehow. I just told the honey, most likely, instead of going to the wedding and the chuppah that my family's setting up in three days, by the way, because we didn't actually plan on having a whole wedding or anything,

2:09:29Instead of going to, like, a party or ceremony or anything, most likely you're going to have to take me to the emergency room. She goes, no problem, honey. We've been there before. So we go in front of the beit din. One of the dayanim is late by an hour and a half, so instead of it being a five-minute questionnaire, it ends up being an hour and a half worth of questions. Baruch Hashem, she knows every answer. We've been studying very seriously for some time. If there was ever any doubt, this eliminated it. And then they say, okay, she passes. Go to the mikveh, which is a very spiritual process, which anyone that hasn't gone through it, you gotta do it. Funny thing about converts is that a convert that goes through a lot of struggle to actually convert, once they feel what happens physically, not just mentally. Physically, after you convert, if it's a real conversion, you'll want to do it again, but you can't. You actually feel something physically, it's unbelievable. But the owner of the store wanted to show me, his boss, he wanted to show me, okay, you have some part to do with it, so let me show you something. So, as I'm waiting for her to finish the mikveh,

2:10:53I'm thinking about, okay, which road should I take to the emergency room? I don't know exactly when she dipped into the mikveh. All I know is that at some point my pain stopped. It just stopped. She comes out. I'm excited. She's excited. We go into the car. I forget about the pain. We call Robert Frank. He's excited, we're excited, we're all crying. I'm like, ah, let's go to the hotel where we're supposed to get dressed and celebrate. And I go to the hotel, and I want to change my clothes. I take off my clothes and see that my entire body is full of blood. The infection blew up on its own and healed. If you look for me, you'll find me. That's what God said, so I took Him at His word. And from that point on, things started getting better. Little by little, my health started getting much better. The pain stopped. Money didn't stop getting lost. It got worse and worse, actually. Until I got to a point where I didn't really care and

2:12:22Eventually, I realized that the Torah is the only thing I want. I still had a little bit of a business left. We decided to move away. We moved to Florida. I decided to do shiur Torah organized. In the beginning, I was just doing it on Shabbat for a few people in the Knesset. After we moved to Florida, I decided to start doing a shiur in my house. And after the first lecture, it was just me and one guy. Nisan. After the first lecture, I found out that my dad was in the hospital. He had pneumonia that he was ignoring for a month and a half, thinking it would just go away like a cold. So he goes to the emergency room and he says, "Listen, I heard you're doing the shiur Torah. Can you record it and send it to me?" I said, "Sure, Abba, I'll record it. Why not? You know, let's make Abba happy." So I take my iPad and I record myself giving a shiur Torah. This time I had three people: Nisan, Tomer, and Daniel. Today, Daniel is in a kollel full-time. He still wasn't even keeping Shabbat at the time. So we have the shiur. We record it. Now I have to send it to Abba.

2:13:45How do you send a YouTube video? How do you send a video? I tried emailing it. The file was too big. Text, obviously, is even worse. So I came up with an idea. Okay, let's put it on YouTube and send him a link. So I put it on YouTube and sent him a link. He liked it. He was happy. But then a few days later, I noticed that other people actually watched this video other than my dad. And that's how YouTube started. And I started giving shiur Torah. I continued working for a little while until Hashem said, okay, your teshuvah is serious, you're teaching people Torah. I don't want anything to distract you. So this money thing you have left, I'm going to take that too. So at that time, we obviously lost 95% of what we had already. Had a few hundred thousand dollars left. Had a small fund. On Tuesday morning, I had a few hundred thousand left. At 9:30 in the morning, at 9:35, I had zero. Tuesday, by the way, happens to be the day of my shiur. But at this time, I already know who's Boss.

2:15:07So at 9:36, I say, "Hashem natan, Hashem lakach, yehi shem Hashem mevorach." Baruch Hashem, I had the zechut to understand what Iyov said. God gave, God took, may His name be blessed. I shut off the computer and got ready for my shiur Torah. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Living on a miracle every month. Nothing's missing. Any questions? Yes, we have one child and one on the way.