Shiur Torah #76 Okay You Left Wall Street For Torah, But WHY Do KIRUV?? (JACLA Los Angeles)

0:00Hashem, Hashem, Na'aseh V'Natzliach. Shiur Torah. Baruch Hashem. We're here at Jekyll. Thank you for having me, Ari. You know, I wanted to cover a lot of different things. We don't have that much time, but I guess we'll breeze through some of my personal story, what got me here. You know, most people know the first part of the story, or at least the people that know me know the first part of the story, which is what got me to leave Wall Street. But most people don't truly understand what got me to do this. You know, leaving Wall Street is one thing, but leaving the business world and going from a business where you can make millions to, in essence, in so many words, working for free, when you don't have any more money, is not a usual thing. So, we'll go over some of that and then we'll go from there. And if you have any questions along the way, by all means, I'll try to leave some time at the end. So, to start off, my story begins, you know, we came to the United States from Israel when I was 10 years old. The first thing that my dad told us, when we were mature enough to understand what the world was about, is that you can make money in two ways. You can make it the legitimate way and you can make it the not legitimate way. The legitimate way,

1:21We'll take you more time, but you'll survive longer in a non-legitimate way. You'll make a lot of money really quickly, but you won't survive. So we always chose the legitimate way. I worked really hard. During high school, I had a few jobs. I delivered newspapers. I worked at clothing stores. What else? I fixed computers, sold computers, and pretty much did everything and anything we could do to make money while still going to school and helping the family. So when I was 18 years old... I left college after a year, and I decided, even though I was a good student, I was an honor student and had a 3.9 GPA, that it was a waste of time because most kids were just hanging out and partying. For the most part, I was already used to making money. So for me, I didn't necessarily need the help to know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to go into the business world. I just had no clue how to get there. For most people, college is good if they don't know what they want to do, especially at 18 years old. Again, I had a head start, starting work at 10 years old.

2:32So, at 18 years old, I had a couple of different jobs, and eventually, somebody told me about the stock market business. In those days, you didn't necessarily need to be a Harvard graduate to get into the industry. So, I got into the business, worked for a couple of different places just to get an idea of what it is, and eventually went to a company called Raymond James. After getting messed around for a little while, I decided it's time for me to... start my own book of business, and hopefully, things will work out. I was a hard worker, and at that time in my life, I knew that the only way for me to catch up to all these older men was to outwork them. Because each guy had been in the business for 15 years, 20 years, or 30 years. How is this 20-year-old kid going to reach their experience? So I figured, okay, if they work 8 hours a day, I can work 17 or 18. And in no time, I'll catch up. That was kind of a simple theory, but in practice, it's a little more difficult. But that's what I did. When you're a young kid, you don't really have any responsibilities. I was already living on my own, but I didn't have a wife and kids and so on. So that's what I did. I worked really hard. But when I first started building my book, my client base, it was an interesting time. September 11th had just happened. So it wasn't necessarily an ideal time to get clients because most people thought the world was going to end.

4:03Shortly after, I got to a point where I was $35 away from being homeless because I had just started my business, started working for this company, but there was no salary or anything like that. So I, and I was too proud to tell Abba and Ima that I didn't have any money. So I, you know, went through some serious struggle, borrowed a dollar from this guy, Dimitri, every single day just to eat a donut and coffee, and just put my head down and worked. Early 2002, finally, around March or so, I struggled for a few months and really went through, I guess, some difficult mental battles, Finally made $1,000, which to me was all the money in the world. A month later, I made $5,000. A month later, I made another $7,000. And things started flowing in. By November of 2002, I made $117,000 in one month. And then after that, everything changed. One of the positions that we invested in worked out really well. And clients started flowing in. Obviously, I didn't really connect all of this to HaKadosh Baruch Hu at the time.

5:21I connected it to my genius ability to pick stocks, Nextel. Nextel was $4; it went to $20. And everybody, the market's down, I think it was 26% that year, and we were up 70% or 80%. So when you're up and the market's down, you're a genius. But everything that we touched turned to gold. Nextel, then Nextel Partners, then Priceline. The list went on, and every stock we would pick just worked out. It didn't matter what the market was doing. And I got to a point where I was just printing money. It went from struggling to make $5,000 a month to a bad month being $100,000 to $200,000 a month. I left Raymond James in 2003 as the third-largest producing broker in the country for them. I started my own firm, and again, the money just continued flowing in. Making a few million dollars a year, and young, and very, very ambitious, but I didn't actually have any direction as far as the ultimate purpose, just the direction as far as making money. I thought that God brought me to this world. I believed in God, and I actually did teshuvah the first time when I was 17. I kept Shabbat for about a year and a half, but then, you know, I stopped learning. I stopped...

6:42So little by little, you go off and off and off, further and further from Hashem, further and further from the basics. And once I started making some money, I realized that maybe that's why Hashem brought me to this world, to make money so I could donate a lot. Because I like donating. I don't really care for money that much, I just like making it. I like the challenge. And a lot of the money that I had, I would give to people in need, family, friends, charities, and so on. Instant analysis is Ron Ruven. He's an independent trader, president of Ruven Enterprises. And Ron, we were hoping you'd come in because you had some interesting analysis on this whole Howard Stern versus Oprah situation. But let's just start with XM or Sirius. Once that subscription runs out, they're not renewing it. So some of these subscriber growth numbers could be pretty pie in the sky. Well, that's proven by the churn rate. And the churn rate is the number that indicates the loss of customers. Their churn rate was only 1.5%. If you look at similar industries that need subscribers, like cell phones, for example, the average churn rate is over 4.5%. This industry only has 1.5% for Sirius and a little bit over that for XM.

7:51You did a breakdown of the, you compared the cost of Oprah and Howard Stern, and you did it a little differently than most people, but what did you find? Explain it to us. Well, the thing is, though, is that Wall Street has made every analyst have their own proprietary way of analyzing things, which is very complicated for the individual investor to understand. These cash flow analyses, the P/E ratios, everything that the average investor out there, whether they have money or not, can't understand. We did it the simple way. You know, Howard Stern has approximately a four-hour show just on one of his stations, not including the second one, per day, five days a week, which is about 1,040 hours a year. He's getting paid $100 million a year for him and his crew, which is about $96,000 an hour. Granted, it's a lot of money. Okay? It's obviously a lot of money, but because of his track record in the past, because he's already brought in at least a million subscribers, that pays for it. Now, Oprah, on the other hand, is getting paid $55 million for three years, which is about $18.3 million a year. Okay? Now, she's only going to do a 30-minute show per week.

8:56That's it. I don't really think that anybody's going to subscribe to just, you know, a little bit extra if they're a big fanatic of Oprah, just for that extra 30 minutes. And when you do the math, 30 minutes a week is 26 hours a year, which is about $705,000 an hour. If she was spending just as much time on XM as Howard Stern is, then her contract would be worth about $3.7 billion. okay, now this is not to say that the contract is a bad contract. It's going to give them, obviously, a lot of publicity, but the reality of it is, it's to see that the Howard Stern contract technically is not as expensive as some people may pretend. Very quickly, as things continue to progress, you know, my personality is, you know, when you're young, your personality continues to develop, and I realized that I'm one of these people that needs to bring justice to the world, at least that's what I thought. I despise dishonesty. I... I can't stand people that are fake. And in the money world, there's an overwhelming supply of it. So, when I would see things on Wall Street happening, I would say something. And that's not usually the best idea when you're a small company. So, for example, one of the things that led to a lot of problems, baruch Hashem, is I saw that the

10:20head of FINRA, the head regulatory body for the brokerage business, was leaving after the crisis and going to the SEC. That's fine. People change jobs. The only problem was that her pay package, her parachute, was $15 million. Now, for all these years, FINRA told us that they are not a government body. They're owned by the firms. Now, if you're owned by the firms, then that means that I should decide. I should vote on whether I want to give this former CEO who screwed up everything $15 million to leave. Now, if you're not a government body and you're owned by us, you should give us a vote. If you are a government body, then how come you're making so much more money than the President of the United States? He makes $400,000. So I wrote an article about this. And just asking that clear question, which was very logical, wasn't a very good idea because from the minute I wrote that article, I went on their radar and they pretty much spent the next several years trying to torture me. So if you have a big company like Goldman Sachs, they always have somebody from the regulator in their office, but usually it's one audit at a time, two audits at a time. I had six audits at a time. Six simultaneous audits for a 10-15-man firm.

11:49with 10 assistants. We never did anything wrong. We didn't sell any private deals. We didn't do any IPOs. We just did clean business. We never stole any money. We never churned. There was never anything wrong. No one sued us. There was nothing to look for. But when you have regulators sitting on your head every single day, it makes it very difficult to work in general. It's like going to a bar and you're surrounded by cops. Naturally, you're not going to want to drink. So this was one of the beginnings of the tests. And again, business was fine. I was making money. But little by little, problems started happening. But I wouldn't notice the signs. A little bit before, this article that I wrote and other articles that I wrote were relatively controversial, because if it wasn't controversial, I wasn't interested in it. whether it was calling investors and gold fools because they're valuing it based on something that doesn't exist, or people that are fans of mergers and stock splits, different things, and I would usually have a unique way of looking at things. Nonetheless, I saw that things were getting a little bit more difficult, but didn't pay attention that all of it was coming from Hashem. I started losing a little bit of money

13:13which is usually a sign that Hashem is giving you one of these final warnings before He starts affecting you in a harder way. In the Gemara, it says that money is damim, money is blood, which means that when someone loses a lot of money, it's a replacement of their life. So anytime you lose a lot of money, you should actually thank God. At the time, obviously, I wasn't thankful. So... Started losing some money, some friends turned into enemies, but things kept going. At the end of 2006, I had an elective surgery. Pretty much a surgery I didn't really need to have, that I could choose not to have and it really wouldn't change my life, but I decided that I wanted to perfect everything, including my own body, and I said, okay, you know what, how much does it cost? Oh, it's a few thousand dollars, fine. How many days out of work do I have? He says, "Probably you'll be uncomfortable." That's how doctors call it, uncomfortable. They don't call it pain. No doctor in the world ever tells you you're going to have pain. So you're going to be uncomfortable. It's going to be a little discomfort for the next couple of days, but you'll be back to work on Monday. I said, "All right, a couple of days vacation is not the worst thing in the world." But that didn't work out. I woke up from the surgery. I started screaming and screaming and screaming. And the drugs they gave me didn't work. And since I had never taken drugs in my life...

14:40I didn't know what should work, what impact I'm supposed to have or not. All I knew is that I felt like someone was taking a knife and cutting my body open over and over again. And it just wouldn't stop. So I asked my wife to kill me, and she didn't listen. I asked my mom to do the same. She also didn't listen. And eventually, the amount of morphine they gave me, they said, was the most amount legally allowed. And eventually, it calmed me down. And they released me the same day, which was foolish. And I went home and I ate a sandwich. And I told everybody, "Okay, the hell is over. Baruch Hashem." I'm going to sleep. I woke up 45 minutes later and I started screaming again, worse than when I was in the hospital. Only this time, I didn't stop for 62 days. For 62 days, the longest consecutive sleep that I got was 15 minutes. When that happens, you start dying. Your body starts failing. So you start peeing blood, blood comes out of your eyes, infections, hell. After a couple of months, life started becoming somewhat normal, which means that I was peeing all the time, but not to that level of pain. So I only needed to get about 20 or 25 painkillers in my system, and I was perfectly normal. And to go from here to, let's say, the end of the room would take me somewhere in the neighborhood of about a half hour, 35 minutes. So I was, instead of,

16:06a young 20-something-year-old guy, I was walking like this and saying, "Ow," every single moment. But for me, it was perfect because the 62 days I had weren't exactly pleasant. So I thought things were going to get better. And Hashem sent me this interesting screw-up that happened, I thought, medically. Again, I still didn't blame Hashem yet. I just... figured that the doctor screwed up and I had all the money in the world, so I could fix it. Nine months later, I had a complication. I had an infection with something completely unrelated to it that was worse than the first surgery. In this case, I was in the intensive care unit for 10 days, pretty much surrounded by a bunch of people that were dying. Three months later, another surgery. Four months later, another surgery. And it just continued over and over again for the next seven years. The next seven years, I went to over 50 doctors of every type of practice, whether it’s holistic or traditional, just to figure out what happened. Just diagnose it. Don’t fix it. You can’t fix it. I’ll give you a million dollars if you can fix it. But just tell me what happened.

17:27I got to a point where some extreme, you know, big professionals that were in the medical world for, you know, 20, 25 years, wouldn't even want to touch me. They were just telling me, "Listen, I can't see you because I'm afraid I'm going to make it worse." And my body continued failing. I got to a point where I couldn't walk for a little while. I walked with a cane for about a year. I was in pain 24 hours a day from my neck down all the way to the bottom of my feet. My legs doubled in size. They also, the first diagnosis regarding my legs doubling in size was, "Maybe it's the heat." That wasn't the best diagnosis. So again, all this time, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this hole. But at the same time, I'm still trying to run this business. Hi, Ron. Nice to meet you and welcome to our show. Thank you. I would like you to introduce yourself first.

18:35I am Ron Reuven, just a regular person like everyone else, but I try to do things a little bit differently. I've been in the financial services business for 12 years now. My main focus has been in the investment world, from doing financial investments in the stock markets to fixed income, and life insurance. About a year ago, we started doing international insurance for international organizations, governments, as well as individuals in the US and abroad. And some of the things that I try to do are to distinguish ourselves from some of the larger firms. So we've built a pretty unique firm that has the wherewithal and capabilities of the big firms that you hear about all the time, but without the nonsense that you have to deal with sometimes trying to run this business. Only now, I have many, many more enemies. If you notice in the business world, when you're strong, you have a lot of friends. When you're weak, somehow it connects to enemies. So now, the regulators continued torturing me, but again, they never found anything because there was nothing to find, but they still wasted a lot of my time. To this day, even though I've been out of the business for a while, they still try to ask me questions and just waste my life. The people that I made rich, who used to work for me,

20:04Suddenly, they wanted to sue me. So it was an interesting time. And I got to a point where, at one point, I didn't really want to be in this world. The only reason I stayed, and I say this all the time and remind myself, is for only two people: one, my wife, and the second one, my mother. Even though my father is amazing, my brothers are amazing, everyone is amazing, the amount of tears those two women shed because of me, I don't think anyone in history has done more for anyone else. And I knew that, yeah, I could leave this world, but it would ruin their lives. So I kind of felt bad. So I continued battling it. And, you know, when you're sick and you're in pain 24 hours a day, the pain, you never necessarily get used to it. But you just learn how to live with it. The mental battle is the worst one. Especially when the only thing you thought you had is slowly but surely disappearing. Money. I had tons of it. And slowly but surely, a million here, half a million there, a guy that was supposed to do a deal with me to give me five million ended up taking half a million dollars from me. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. I used to turn dust into gold. Now the gold and platinum were turning into something worse than dust. Everything would just go wrong. And again, for a while, I just thought it was bad luck. I thought the tide would change and never truly connected it to Hashem.

21:37Eventually, I said, you know what, okay, maybe I'll spend some of my time doing other things. So I continued working, but I started going to shiurei Torah. I went to Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto in New York. He used to have a yeshiva over there, so I would go there every Tuesday night. The problem was that five minutes later, I'd fall asleep. One of the things that I learned later on is that in the beginning, when you first start learning Torah The Torah is very bitter. It's very hard to learn Torah in the beginning. And that's because of all the sins you've made, that have built some type of shell, a klipah around you, that makes it very difficult for the truth to actually come in. So in the beginning, it was very, very difficult for me to learn anything. But because I was a student, and I've studied a lot in my life, both on my own and in schools, I knew that there had to be a way, so I forced myself to stay up, by bringing a notebook and writing down every single thing he says. But again, it was only once a week, and you know, little by little you get a little stronger, you start keeping a few things here and there, and start caring a little bit. Say that there's a God, but again, when you're dealing with pain 24 hours a day, you're going to surgeries every other month, it's kind of hard to stick with it unless you're doing it on a regular basis. Eventually, things got a little better, then they got a little worse,

23:05And then the miracle happened. Right at the time that it got the worst, right at the time that I was pretty much over the whole concept of sticking around just for my wife and my mom, I decided that, you know what, maybe it's time to be nice to everyone so I could at least leave this world on a good note. So I tried being more in touch than I used to be, and one day... I call my mom, and she picks up the phone, hysterical, and she keeps telling me, talk to him, talk to him. I said, who? She says, Ephraim. Who's Ephraim? She says, please talk to him, he can help you. And I have no idea what she's talking about because she's already in the middle of the story, and I'm just getting into this conversation. So who is this Ephraim? My mom knew that I was in bad shape that day, as every mother knows her son better than most. people do. And she started calling rabbis around the world trying to get a blessing for her sick son. But that day, when she was going through her little phone book and calling rabbis from everywhere, no one would answer. Eventually, she reached a phone number in Israel after about an hour or an hour and a half of dialing. She spoke in Hebrew and asked for a certain rabbi. The woman on the other side of the phone said that it's the wrong phone number. There's no such rabbi in this location.

24:35And that was too much for my mom to handle, so she broke down. She started crying to this strange lady on the phone. And then the lady says, Dolis? Which is my mom's name. And my mom obviously is in shock. She goes, who are you? How do you know my name? And she goes, well, I'm your niece, but I have no idea how you reached me because we've never spoken on the phone before. And she dialed the wrong phone number in a different country. And she says, well, how did I get to you? And she says, well, I don't know how you got to me, but if you got to me, obviously it's from Hashem, because Penina was part of the religious part of the family. So she told him what happened, my son is sick, I need help, I need a blessing from a rabbi, and so on. He says, well, if you need a blessing, why don't you call my brother Ephraim? He's a big Talmid Chacham, he studies in Jerusalem, you know, he studies with, you know, big rabbis over there, and he also lives next door to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Zecher Tzadik Livracha. He's already written several books in his 20s, considered one of the people that could one day be one of Gedolei Yisrael. Talk to him? So she calls him, he's in the call obviously, and she talks to the wife, and he calls her back. Now when I left Israel... big rabbis over there, and he also lives next door to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Zecher Tzadik Livracha. He's already written several books in his 20s, considered one of the people that could one day be one of Gedolei Yisrael. Talk to him? So she calls him, he's in the kollel obviously, and she talks to the wife, and he calls her back. Now when I left Israel,

26:02Ephraim was a baby, so I never even knew he existed. He starts talking to my mom, and she tells him the story. A few minutes later, he just asks her, he goes to the bottom line, he says, "Well, does he speak Hebrew?" And she says, "Yes." "Can I talk to him?" He says, "No, he's probably never going to talk to you. He doesn't talk to us, barely." And at that very moment, that's when I called my mom. And that's when she was saying, "Talk to him, talk to him," because on the other line was Ephraim. So me not knowing what just happened, I only found this out later on, months later, I said just fine, whoever you want me to talk to, just tell them to call me and I'll talk to them. Just stop crying. So a friend calls me, and I tell him a problem, and he shows me a source in the Torah. I ask him a question, and he gives me the source on the spot. And that was the one main thing that made me, I guess, or at least gave me an excuse to stop being religious after my first run at teshuvah when I was 17, is that I assumed that every rabbi, or at least anyone that called themselves a rabbi, or anyone that's even religious, is supposed to know everything about everything. So if I ask you a question about dinosaurs, and you tell me they don't exist, there's something wrong with your religion, not you.

27:23Or if I ask another one, are there dinosaurs? And they tell me, yes, it's called Taninim HaGdolim. Then one of you guys is lying. And then I would ask other questions, and you would get different answers, because again, the types of questions I was asking were mostly scientific, and most rabbis don't usually learn science in yeshiva. I just didn't know this. So I used it as an excuse to think something's wrong with the religion, something's wrong with the people, and then you hear the stories or see the things, you see people that say they're religious, act even worse than the biggest criminals, and it just gives you an excuse to just not be religious. It gives you an excuse to just disconnect yourself from the Creator. This is what's happening to the world every day. So, when Ephraim started giving me answers, but not only giving me answers and giving them to me on the spot, but giving me sources. And I could open a book, and I would open the book, and he'd show me the exact verse, and it would be anything, whether it was business-related, health-related, science-related, anything. I've never met anybody like him, not before or after. Something extraordinary. He tells me years later that the first nine months of us talking, he would pray a special tefillah before our conversation,

28:43to have the answers. And I said, "What do you mean? You know the answers. Why would you even, what's the big deal?" He goes, "No, you don't understand. I didn't even know your questions. I never asked those questions. I just got the answers." After that first conversation, we spoke for an hour and 40 minutes. A week later, he called me on a Thursday, and we spoke for three hours. A week later, we spoke for about five hours. A week later, we spoke for seven hours. And then every single Thursday ever since, we've spoken every Thursday, and obviously now much more often than just Thursdays, an average of about seven hours worth of Torah. Sometimes less, depending on how busy. But overall, very, very long conversations full of Torah. And I got a lot of my answers. I got a lot of my questions answered. I got everything that I wanted answered. But little by little... Things in the business world were continuing to deteriorate, even though I was starting to keep a few things. Okay, so maybe we'll take on kashrut a little more seriously. Maybe that pizza from the non-kosher store is not exactly good because it has pig in it, but it doesn't say on the menu that it has pig in it. It's just in the cheese. It's one of the ingredients. If you look at, for example, a non-kosher cheese in the supermarket...

30:09Kosher cheese, you'll maybe have five of them, five different kosher cheeses. Non-kosher cheese in a supermarket, you'll probably see 100 or 150 different brands. Why? Why is it that the rabbis are so strict on cheese or they're charging so much money that big companies don't want to pay them? No. It's just that non-kosher cheese is willing to use ingredients that Jews are not willing to use, which come out of the stomachs of pigs or other animals. And When someone's eating pizza at Pizza Hut or Domino's, which seems like it's perfectly fine because it's not meat, not only are they violating the kosher laws, but they're also violating basar bechalav (milk and meat). Also, the sauce, if anyone knows how to cook, usually gets its flavoring because of the meat that it's cooked in. It's not just because the tomatoes are so delicious in one pizzeria next to the other. But this again, I didn't know any of this stuff. No one ever told me. I just figured that if I'm not eating meat outside... I'm keeping kosher. I'm a tzaddik. So I continued learning more and more about these matters, learning more and more about how my entire world and everything that I believed in was just wrong. I did business legitimately. I tried bringing justice to the world, but the only place that I didn't contribute enough time to was my soul. I contributed to everybody else's life except my own.

31:38So I decided to continue learning, and despite everything continuing to deteriorate, for the first time in my life, I actually felt like I had someone with me. I'm not alone. And I actually wanted to live. Pain continued, but it didn't matter as much anymore. Baruch Hashem, later on, as you can see me today, I'm much better today than I was in the past, no contribution by any doctor in the world other than the One above. And as it says in our prayer every morning, it says, "I am Hashem, your doctor." The type of disease that I had was not something for a doctor to fix. It just took me a few years to realize it. So when I found out that if you do His will, He does your will, I said, okay, it's a good deal. Let's start doing it. So as things started to deteriorate, and I lost more and more money, eventually losing the rest, the more bad things happened, or at least seemed bad, the more reason I had to connect to Him. And unfortunately today,

33:07That's the majority of the case in most people that do teshuva. It's usually because something bad happens. Most people that do teshuva, it's not because one day they wake up and say, oh, you know what, I love Hashem. Usually, it's because something bad happens. You have a problem at home, you have a problem with health, you lose money. Something happens. Something has to drive you there. In most cases, not all obviously, but in some cases, it's that. For me, that's what it was. It was losing everything that I thought I had and gaining something I didn't want. which was the illness. But along the way, when things got really, really bad, Hashem delivered on His promise, which is that He's not going to leave us alone. But that answers the first part of the question, which is, why did I leave Wall Street? I left it because eventually it got to the point where even rebuilding, I had no interest in. I lost, and so on, and I could go somewhere and make money and work for some big firm or start my own thing. It's not, you know, once you have the talent or experience, it never goes away. It's not cold. You know, I was on Wall Street for 16 years. I was on television. I had, you know, a decent name. I was on CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN, and all these things, and I was a little mini-celebrity for a small firm. You can use that talent for other things. You know, actually, as a matter of fact, before things got really bad, um,

34:34Friends and family would constantly ask me, why don't you just sell your firm or just go work for Goldman Sachs in one of these big places? And my motto was that I'd rather die fighting for my dream than live somebody else's. And that was my mentality. Still is. It's just that it's a different business. So when the situation came up, which is, you know, do you want to rebuild? Do you want to start something else? I already got to a point where I became addicted to this stuff. I became addicted to Torah. Spending any time doing anything else became painful. And it's not necessarily that this should be the case for everyone. I mean, people should live a normal life and work regular jobs, but still connect God to it somehow. Do something with God in mind before you do a business deal. Ask yourself, what does God think about what I'm doing? Am I mistreating this person? Am I doing honest business? Because that's the first question they ask us once we get up there. How did you conduct your business? They don't ask you, "How did you conduct yourself in the synagogue?" Because in the synagogue, it's very easy to pretend to be righteous. In the business world, most people, that's when they act like they are. A guy that's not honest, he's going to act like he's honest in the synagogue and dishonest in business because that's where he makes money. So,

35:58they think for us to do is to live normal lives, but still ask ourselves before we do anything, what does God think? Have you got your mind? Develop it. It takes time. For me, I know that God gave me the ability to speak. For many years, I thought that He gave me the ability to speak so I could become the next Bill Gates. Later on, I realized that the story is somewhat interesting, and I have an interesting way of looking at things, and maybe I can teach. not making any money out of doing it, but nonetheless, it still pays the bills somehow. But getting to the point of leaving became easier and easier because rebuilding was just completely out of the question. As far as doing this, as far as getting to the point of actually contributing something to Am Yisrael and doing Zikui HaRabim, that has more to do with Torah than it does with money.

36:59Actually, it has nothing to do with money, because money doesn't make any sense. So, I'll go over a few things with you guys that are more Torah-related, so you get an understanding that it's still the same mentality, still the same investment mentality, just a different investment. Everyone knows the saying from the sages that the one who leads others to do... benefits more than the one who actually does it. Someone who leads someone else to do a mitzvah benefits more in shamayim than the one who actually does the mitzvah. So, for example, if you're doing tefillin for yourself, obviously it's a big mitzvah; it's one of the covenants. If you tell your friend, family, or a stranger to do tefillin and they do it, you actually get an even bigger benefit than he does. It's even bigger than you doing your own tefillin. Obviously, you have to do your own tefillin because you can't be a hypocrite, as the Torah hates hypocrites. But you actually get a bigger benefit from him doing tefillin or anything because of you than even from yourself. One of the things that kiruv people understand, or at least one of the driving reasons that they do it, is because of this. It's because they know that obviously Am Yisrael needs it.

38:25But at the same time, it's a very, very good investment. Now, in a Gemara, there was a rabbi by the name of Rabbi Chiya. Rabbi Chiya reached such a level that the sages say that he's the only one in history, including everyone from the beginning of the world to the end of the world, the only one in history that after he passed, was able to, obviously, communicate with them somehow. But he was the only one that was able to roam around any one of the chambers or worlds of heaven. You know, usually when people go to Olam HaBa, if they want to go to a different section, there are angels that take them to different places. Rabbi Chiya could just roam around freely anywhere he wanted. The Gemara says, why? Because he spent his time doing zikui haRabim, doing kiruv. where he would go, instead of learning Torah and getting even bigger in Torah than he was, he would go to different places, different, you know, areas and villages, looking for people that are completely ignorant, children that are completely ignorant, children that no one's willing to teach, people that are completely clueless, and he would teach them Torah. He would actually go through a whole process where he would actually write a Sefer Torah, and then he would teach them Chumash, and then he would teach the older ones Mishnah.

39:49To make sure that, regardless of what wars the nation of Israel goes through, regardless of what disasters the world faces, there's always going to be a Jew somewhere who knows Torah. Now, his Rabbi was Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the sages say that if anyone deserved to be the Mashiach, he did. Not only was he a giant tzaddik and chacham, but the only reason why we have Gemara today is because of him. You know, for many years we weren't allowed to write the Oral Torah. We got it at Har Sinai. We weren't allowed to write the Torah. But he realized that we were slowly but surely deteriorating through the generations, and that we had to make a decree to write it. So he decided to write the Mishnah. And from there, we wrote the Gemara. This is the cornerstone of the Oral Torah, which is pretty much where we know all the mitzvot. People that don't believe, for example, in the Oral Torah, which is commonly viewed as a bunch of rabbis arguing, which is what I used to think. It's like, why would I want to learn this Gemara? It's just a bunch of rabbis arguing. Why would I care? First of all, I didn't realize what they're arguing about. It's not arguing about whether you should keep Shabbat or not keep Shabbat. It's about perfecting how to do it.

41:16It's not about whether you should do Kriyat Shema or not do Kriyat Shema. It's about what exact time you should do it. And they spent pages and pages arguing about 15 minutes. They cared so much about Hashem and serving Him that they would literally debate for years in some cases for 15 minutes. So, when you're thinking it's yes or no, obviously it's very easy to be misled. But the easiest example for me to believe in the Oral Torah, and that apparently the goyim and the non-religious don't know, is that without the Oral Torah, there wouldn't be Torah, period. Because if you went to Beit Knesset, you see the scroll, the scroll doesn't have nikud. The scroll is not allowed to have the dots. Those dots are like the vowel system in English, the equivalent of the vowel system. So, for example, every word, And the English language has one of these letters, A-E-I-O-U, and sometimes Y. In order for you to be able to read any word, it has to have one of those letters. So if I said "Moses," but I removed the vowels, then it would become "Mss." It's a completely different word. Nikud, those dots, are the vowel system in Hebrew. The scroll is not allowed to have them. So that's why every time you go to Beit Knesset and they open a scroll, you see that there are no vowels. So how do we know how to read it?

42:40That is a critical part of the Oral Torah, called the Codex in English, or Keter. This means that without this Keter, without this Codex, we wouldn't know even one sentence. Forget about knowing the story, knowing the mitzvot, knowing the secrets, the prophecy, the number of stars in the universe that we already knew 3,000 years ago, the fact that the sun was in a shell that we only discovered in the last few decades. the fact that Germany and the whole Holocaust were already prophesied 2,000 years ago in Masechet Megillah. We already know about all this. Masechet Megillah, page, I believe, six, already says that Germany is going to take over the world and is going to try to destroy it. And it actually says Germany. It doesn't use some code name that you could translate as Germany. For anyone who doesn't know, Germany didn't exist 2,000 years ago. If you look at the U.S. archives... Germany was created as a combination of 300 barbaric nations, barbarian nations, that came together and tried to join power about 800 years ago, and later on called themselves Germany. So at the time this Gemara that no one wants to believe in was written, Germany didn't exist. When you don't know any of this stuff, it's easy to say, "Oh no, it's just a bunch of rabbis arguing." And

44:07Over and over again, there's an endless amount of prophecy and knowledge that's not human. There's no way that a human could have known that the sun is in a shell. There's no way that a human could have known that the number of stars in the universe is 1,064,340, and then 12 zeros after it. Because even today, we don't use such numbers. It's 10 to the 18th power. There's no way a human could know that. There's no way that a human could know the exact amount of time the minimum amount of time that the moon would take to rotate around the Earth, which is 29.5 days. There are also a few other numbers, like 5367 or something like that. It's five different digits or six different digits, which again, we only discovered recently. And over and over again, the Gemara is full of this stuff. The Oral Torah is full of this information. Rebbe is the one who put this

45:07in a format ready for us. So obviously, if his generation is saying that he should be the Mashiach, and today we only know anything about anything because of what he started, the Mishnah, and later on the Gemara, he's a big deal, right? Rebbe says, after he saw Rabbi Chiya, which was actually his... his student, if I'm not mistaken, either his student or his cousin, I believe it was his student. Yeah, it was his student. That his student is getting to such a high level that he became very jealous and he started chasing people, looking for people to help them do teshuvah. He says, the level that Rabbi Chiya is getting to is surpassing mine. Surpassed him already. Why?

46:08Because the level that, the amount of reward that someone who helps somebody do teshuvah is, is extraordinary. And what source did he use? He used Jeremiah 15:19. Jeremiah 15:19 says, "Lachem ko amar Hashem, ki tashuv v'ashivecha lefanai, ta'amod; v'im totzi yakar mi'zolel, k'pi tiheyeh." Therefore, thus said Hashem, if you repent, I will bring you back, let you stand before Me. Meaning if you do teshuvah, I'll always accept you. Everyone is able to do teshuvah, it doesn't matter what you did. Obviously, there are certain sins that you can repent for in this world, and there are certain sins you can't repent for in this world, like chillul Hashem. But nonetheless, teshuvah is available for all. Hashem created the concept of teshuvah before He created the world, because He knew that we wouldn't survive without it.

47:11So if you want to do teshuvah, you can. Don't ever think that it's too late. But further, it says, if you bring forth an honorable person from a glutton, meaning if you help somebody do teshuvah, then you will be like My own mouth. What does it mean, then you will be like My own mouth? Rashi says, This means that the Kiruv person, whoever is helping somebody do teshuvah, like Rabbi Mizrachi, or Rabbi Zamir Cohen, Rabbi Eliezer Berland, there's a few really, really good rabbis out there that are truly working and spending the last 20 or so years saving souls. Rashi says that, "like My mouth you will be," means that this Kiruv person would not only deliver the word of Hashem,

48:12but can actually override Hashem's decrees. Hashem is saying that if you're actually helping My children, not only will I take care of your children, but if I decree something, for example, someone to die, or someone to lose money, or someone to get sick, or some type of trouble in the world, and that kiruv person truly prays for it and wants Hashem to change it, his prayer will count more than anyone else. In Masechet Avot, Rabbi Natan, it says that anyone who returns one Jewish soul is as if he created him. It’s not just a common thing that we know; anyone who returns a Jewish soul has bought himself the next world. It’s like if you chase a Jew to make him do teshuvah over 70 years, your life was worth it. your life, you bought yourself the next world. Here, he's saying it's even higher. He's saying it's as if you were God Himself and created that person. And where does he get it? It's the same source, which is from this Jeremiah. The Midrash on Mizmor and Tehillim 116. So, Hashem says to the tzaddikim

49:42again, this particular verse says, I am the Creator of the worlds and bring back the dead, and you are the same. So much so that the Zohar says that if Jews actually knew the magnitude of making someone do teshuva, They would run around in the streets like crazy people just looking for someone to help them do teshuva. They would leave everything and just look for someone to help do teshuva. In the book of Daniel, it's a very, very interesting story in general, but in the book of Daniel, in verse 12:3,

50:43Think ever since the whole lashon hara battle that happened a few months ago or a month or so ago, I am trying extra to use sources because people always look for something wrong. I don't want anyone to think that I'm actually making this up or translating it as I feel. It's not that I want to translate it this way; I'm not that smart. No, yes, it's actually here. I'll show it to you. I actually brought it. Masechet Megillah. Masechet Megillah. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. I didn't get a Jewish education, so what's... No, no, it's perfect. We'll show it to you here. This is what it says. What is the Masechet Megillah? Megillah, meaning it's one of the tractates of the Gemara, of the Oral Torah. Of the Talmud? This is the Talmud. Gemara is another name for the Talmud. It's synonymous. And this one is on page 6. It's talking about, in essence, a story of how Jacob is praying to Hashem. And I'll read you the language. It says, Jacob said before the Holy One, blessed is He, "Master of the Universe, do not grant Esav, the wicked, the desire of his heart. Do not remove..."

52:12his nose ring. So this is one of the verses in the Torah, which is Esav is, in essence, Edom. He's the nation that's been trying to destroy Am Yisrael forever. And he says, even though I know that you're going to use Edom to punish the Jews when they're not righteous and to pretty much also as one of Your tools, Do not grant Esav the wicked the desire of his heart, meaning don't give him full power. Treat him like a bull that has a nose ring. Why a bull that has a nose ring? Because a bull, as strong as he is, if you pull the nose ring that he has, he can't do anything about it. You can control the bull by the nose ring. So this refers to, so here it continues to say, this verse that they're quoting from the Torah, what is it actually saying? What is it referring to? What bull? Why do we care about a bull? So they're saying here in the Gemara, this refers to Germania, a royal province of Edom. Germania in Hebrew means Germany. Who, if they would but go forth, would destroy the entire world. Seventy years ago they tried to do that, didn't they? And Rabbi Chana bar Chanina... They tried to save Europe. Seventy. Seventy.

53:32And Rabbi Chana bar Chanina said, he continues this, so how do we know it's the same Germany? You can just say Germania, it's a coincidence. Maybe there was a town named Germania 2,000 years ago. How do we know it's the same one? Rabbi Chana gives us more details about this Germany. He says, this Germany, this Germania, there are 300 crown princes in 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 his stead. If you remember, I just told you, the U.S. archives told us what is the foundation, or if you go even to Germany's history. You can look it up yourself as far as the history of Germany. Where do they start? And you'll see that Germany started from exactly 300 barbaric nations.

54:35300 princes, like it's mentioning. There are a lot of Germans in the world. You could testify to this stuff. It's not something I'm making up. But even more than that, the reason why they lost power wasn't necessarily just because the U.S. decided to jump into battle. It was because they also had leadership problems. As a matter of fact... if it wasn't for a bad decision by England to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler to avoid war, there would have never been a Second World War. Because we found out from the trials later on, from the Germans themselves, who said that the day you called Hitler to make peace and give Czechoslovakia, pretty much giving almost half of Czechoslovakia to us,

55:35the other leaders of Germany were discussing when we should kill Hitler because he's causing us so much trouble. But obviously, after you gave them pretty much exactly what they wanted, he went to even higher power than he had before, and that's it. So we see that this is again another example of, if Hashem wants something to happen, it will happen in so many words. But nonetheless, again, this is just one of the many sources that you have as far as the stars go. is in Masechet Berachot; it's another tractate of the Gemara. I can show you all the sources for all of them afterward. In the book of Daniel, it says, in verse 12:3, "The wise will shine like the radiance of the firmament, and those who teach righteousness to the multitude will shine like the stars forever and ever." So, in essence, the people that learn Torah, which is... He calls, Hashem is calling wise. They're, you know, going to shine like the sky. They're going to have radiance. They're going to have, you know, a good place to be after this world. But those that teach righteousness to the multitudes, meaning to the general public, not to the wise, those that do kiruv, those that help people do teshuva, will shine like the stars. So,

57:02One of the Midrashim, called Sifrei, in Parashat Ekev, Piska Mem Zayin, says, why is it comparing the sky to the stars? What's the comparison between the sky and the stars? Just like the stars are much higher than the sky, that's the people that are making people do teshuva, in comparison to somebody that's just learning Torah. Further, it also says that the highest level of of Gemilut Chassadim is to do Kiruv. What's Gemilut Chassadim? If anyone wants to learn a little bit about the end of times, the Messianic times, the sages say that there are only two things that are going to save us. Our money is not going to save us. Our brain is not going to save us. Our friends and family are not going to save us. Only two things are going to save us at the end of times: Torah and Gemilut Chassadim. Torah is obviously learning Torah and putting it into our life. not just being a scholar that knows a lot of things but does nothing. And Gemilut Chassadim means kindness, but kindness that requires effort. You know, there's Tzedakah and there's Chesed. Tzedakah is just giving someone money. Someone needs money, you just give them money. Kindness means that you're not only giving them money, or sometimes don't give them money, but you give your time, which is more important. So instead of going out there and telling a guy, "Listen, by the way, you should listen to so-and-so rabbi,"

58:30I think he's good, you actually give the guy the disc, or you give him the link. Make his life easier by doing part of the work for him. Or instead of, let's say, for example, telling the guy directions, actually take him there. That's kindness. So the highest level of kindness is kiruv. The highest level of kindness is actually helping somebody do teshuva. There's a point to all this at the end, by the way. And as far as Another thing that is relevant, really relevant to our times, especially in the last couple of months, is that there are a lot of people today in the Jewish world who feel the need to, I guess, call out justice—their own version of justice—and make comments or videos against rabbis. ...especially ones that are actually helping Jews and are telling people the truth that is not very common. Most rabbis don't have the comfort—I don't really want to say the desire, but the comfort—to tell people the full truth of what the Torah says. Because the full truth is not all rosy. It's not all fun. You know, it's nice to hear about Moshe, it's nice to hear about Yaakov, it's nice to hear about the 12 Shevatim. It's not nice to hear that if you're not keeping Shabbat, you're not considered Jewish.

59:56It's not nice to hear that someone who died and whose family members are not keeping Shabbat, if they say Kaddish for him, it actually makes the situation worse rather than better. It's not nice. It's not politically correct. No one really wants to say it. And there are very few who do. And there are many people who use their time, instead of trying to become better and trying to get closer to Hashem, to go against those very few people who are actually saying the truth. So, before anyone decides to write negative comments about anybody else or make blogs and all of this other stuff, they should know that even though these Kiruv people are stars that look very, very small from afar, the Midrash is also explaining that they only look small, but in reality, they're very, very, very big, and in so many words, not worthy to mess around with, because someone that goes against someone that's doing Kiruv, is in essence turning himself into a Machti Rabbi, which is the opposite of Kiruv. Instead of helping people do mitzvot, you're actually helping people do sins. And someone who's helping people do sins has no share in the World to Come and a lot of other interesting punishments that we're not going to get into. One time, there was a Kiruv person that came to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Zecher Tzadik Livracha,

1:01:24to visit him. Rabbi Ovadia was known to not only be a huge Talmid Chacham, a Dayan, pretty much the Gadol HaDor, well, not pretty much, but the Gadol HaDor, and loved by all. Rabbi Ovadia loved Am Yisrael like no other, and He paid special attention to anyone. Any Jew, whether he knew him or didn't know him, whether he was across the world or right next to him, he would pay special attention to people. But he was also very, very precise with his time, because he had to dedicate enough time to Torah. So one time, a Kiruv person came to him about a half hour before they were doing Mincha. So he sat with him and started talking to him, and then his assistant came to him and said, "Listen, you know, it's a few minutes away, we have hundreds of people waiting at the Beit Knesset." for you to pray. He just ignored him, which was unlike the rabbi. Ten more minutes. It's two o'clock, which is when they start praying. He's still not coming. 2:10, 2:15, 2:20. And each time somebody comes, he's completely ignoring them. At 2:20, he had to respond finally to his assistant, telling him, "Listen, according to the Torah,"

1:02:40This person that's helping, he never said who the person is, so I don't know who it is. But whoever this person was that was in front of him doing kiruv, he says he's one of the stars. Which means he's worth more than the rest of the people that are waiting, so let them wait. Because he cares enough about the children of Israel, the children of Hashem himself, he deserves special treatment. It says that each of the righteous, in the next world, gets 310 worlds. The good that we receive in the next world is not really comprehensible for us. We understand good here. Unfortunately, most of the things that we think are good are usually not good. Whether it's women, sex, money, or a lot of other things. Most people don't usually use those things, or power, for good. They can be used for good. Money can be used for good and

1:03:46A woman can be cherished as a wife, and a man can be honored as a husband, and so on and so forth. Everything can be used for good. The Internet can be used for good, or it can be the worst place on earth. Somebody told me that the Internet, when it originally became public, was based on pornography sites. I'm not really sure if that's true or not, but they said that the original websites that became public were just pornography sites. Again, I don't know if that's true or not. I can't really quote it, but the fact that it's even a story... is enough to say what the mindset is of our generation. Obviously, there's a lot of good you can do. The only reason why anyone in the world, in California or anywhere else, knows that I exist is because of the Internet. So you can use things for good, but unfortunately, there's a lot of bad out there. But the good that the sages are telling us that is promised to a righteous person is 310 worlds. In Judaism, each one of the letters that we have has a numerical value. So Aleph has one, Bet has two, and so on and so forth. It's called Gematria. The numerical value of Zikui HaRabim, which means benefiting the public or doing Kiruv, is 310. Same thing as the 310 worlds. has a numerical value. So Alef has one, Bet has two, and so on and so forth. It's called Gematria. The numerical value of Zikui HaRabim, which means benefiting the public or doing Kiruv, is 310. Same thing as the 310 worlds.

1:05:21It also says in Proverbs 8:21, where Hashem is promising us these 310 worlds. This is what it says: "I have what to bequeath to those who love Me, and I shall fill their storehouses." I have what to bequeath; bequeath in essence in Hebrew is called "yesh." And "yesh," the numerical value of "yesh" is 310. So again, from all of this, we learn a little bit about the significance of Zikui HaRabim. So on one hand, why am I even telling you all of this? It's not necessarily for me to toot my own horn, because it's not exactly like I'm a Gadol HaDor or anything. But first of all, it's to understand that the mentality is still the same. It's still an investment mentality. It's just a bit of an investment. why is it relevant to you or anyone that's watching, is because everyone could be a Mezakeh HaRabim, just in different ways. You don't have to be a Darshan, you don't have to be someone that speaks to be a Mezakeh HaRabim, to do Kiruv. If you can't speak, if you have money, contribute money. Buy a few of these discs of people that are actually doing it, and give it to someone that's not keeping anything. Or even if someone is keeping, perhaps not enough. If you don't have money,

1:06:47A lot of this stuff is available for free. Get a link on the internet of a good drasha, of a good lecture, and send it to a friend or a family member. Hey, by the way, look, this "Torah and Science" by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi is life-changing. It's four hours; you can cut it into three parts, but it will change your life. This "Life After Death" movie that he made is also amazing. This near-death experience that Rabbi Alon Anava made is also amazing. You send people a link on YouTube, they watch it. If they do something about it after learning the truth, it changes their entire life. And all of what I said is if you just save one person, which means that the 310 is just for one person. Each person that you save is an endless amount of benefit, both in this world and the next. On my end, I see the benefits every single day, mainly because I see myself physically, I see myself mentally. And obviously, I'm living a life where somehow the bills are being paid. I haven't worked in over a year. I can't tell you that I have millions in the bank. I don't have anything in the bank, but somehow the bills are being paid. Happy? All the money in the world that I had is not even worth an hour of today. Not even an hour. The best thing that ever happened to me is that entire disaster that I thought was a disaster. Health-wise? Listen, I'm near perfect.

1:08:13especially if I compare myself to where I was. Yes, of course, here and there there are a few things, but overall, the fact that I can speak in front of you today is a miracle of its own. So I know it works. I'm the example. Some people have different stories. Some people died and came back to life. Some people just woke up by seeing something. Different people have different stories. My story is more comprised of a combination of millions of dollars, a medical mystery, a disaster, and a bunch of miracles after it. Every single person will have their own story. And like I said, every single person can take advantage of the one main thing that will get us saved at the end of days that we find ourselves in. Anti-Semitism is not exactly shrinking. If anything, it's the worst it's been since World War II.

1:09:13We find ourselves in a place where World War III began. It's just quiet. You know, a lot of people don't really want to believe it. They don't really want to believe that we're in a big war right now. But you don't really need to look too far. Just pay attention to the details. You see that everyone is saying this whole big deal that's happening in Syria is about ISIS. Fine, if you want to believe the media, that's fine. I just don't understand why Russia brought 200 atomic bombs to fight ISIS. Before they brought the army, before they brought the tanks, before they brought the planes, before they brought anything, they sent a ship with 200 atomic bombs. For what? If it was just to keep America out, then it means it's not necessarily just about ISIS. And if it was just to keep America out, they wouldn't bring another submarine about a month ago that has even more than the first one. If it was just to keep America out, why is China getting involved?

1:10:14Why is North Korea also getting involved? The world is heating up, as you can see. The point I'm trying to make is that we don't really know exactly what's happening based on the limited amount of news that we have. What we do know is that the world is heating up. We're only 30 seconds away from somebody stupid pressing a button. Everyone wants to fight all of a sudden. And at the top of every headline, is the fact that Jews are trying to defend themselves from terrorists, but somehow the Jews are wrong. Somehow Israel is too aggressive when they're killing a terrorist that just tried to kill a bunch of people. Somehow there's something wrong with this. Everything is upside down. Everyone wants to fight, and it fits the bill. It fits exactly what the Gemara says. At the end of Masechet Sotah, the last page of Masechet Sotah, which is one of the tractates in the Gemara, tells you what's going to happen at the end of times. And when you read that page, page 49, it's like reading the newspaper. People's faces, people will, there will be hyperinflation; the price of things will be drastically higher. You know, if you noticed, milk, when I came to this country 26 years ago, was about a dollar. Today, if people were still making $5 an hour, they wouldn't be able to afford it. Even people that are making minimum wage can't afford it.

1:11:39There's a problem. It's not just here. It's everywhere. The only country in the world that has gasoline at normal prices is the United States. The rest of the world is paying $10 a gallon. You know, you have the animosity towards the leaders of the generation. The faces of men will look like the faces of dogs. There's actually scientific proof of it. See, I actually have a picture on my phone if anybody wants to see. They compare dog owners to their dogs. there is an unusual resemblance. It also means that people will be very rude. And countless other things that are mentioned in the sources that are not just general like the ones I mentioned to you. Things that are very, very specific to our generation. The point I'm trying to make is that everything seems like it fits. Also, according to the prophecies, even if we weren't one of this, even if we don't want to agree with everything I just said. It still says we don't really have that much time. At the end of days, it says the Mashiach will come before Shabbat. But it didn't mean like literally a day of the week. It meant that each one of the thousand years is considered one day. One day for Hashem is the equivalent of a thousand years according to the Midrash and also Tehillim (Psalms). So the Jewish calendar says we're at

1:13:055,776. So 5,000 means that we've completed five days. The 776 means that it's three-quarters of the sixth day. If you do the math, every hour is approximately 41 years, which means that right now it's about 6:15 Friday night. The average Shabbat comes in around now, around 6:30. 645, the point I'm trying to make is that Shabbat doesn't come in at 10 o'clock at night. We don't have 100 years. We don't have 200 years. And according to the Torah, it says that Moshiach will come before Shabbat. You're not supposed to necessarily put an exact time on it, and I'm not telling you it's going to happen today, tomorrow, or even next week, or even five years from now. But either way, you see that things are happening. The world is changing. Even the prophecies of an enormous amount of converts is actually happening. There's actually a very interesting story that I know firsthand. There is a, I guess you'd call them a tribe, but it's really a country in Africa, where their king found the truth of Judaism and decided to convert. The next person in line in the royal family also converted to Judaism. They actually met with Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.

1:14:32The king met with him, and when Rabbi Moshe Feinstein asked him, "Are you a real king?" he said, "What do you mean? Can you kill someone if you wanted to?" Obviously, the guy didn't really know why he would ask him such a question. He said, "Yes, I'm the king. If I wanted to do it, I could kill someone." And Rabbi Moshe Feinstein celebrated and actually recited a prayer. for a very rare event, because today we don't really have real kings. We have politicians; we don't have kings. The point is that this particular king wants to convert his entire nation. There's a machloket about whether he's allowed to forcefully do it or not, because it's not really a normal thing for Judaism. But either way, his country has two to three hundred million people. And they've been calling themselves the tribe of Menashe for years. That's the only reason they converted. Supposedly, they're one of the lost tribes, the tribe of Menashe. So, these 15 million people we're all arguing about, whether they're lefty or righty, religious or non-religious, there's 200 million people just from one place that are interested. And this is just the beginning.

1:15:50So you're seeing this all the time, and I have converts contacting me from all over the world, whether it's Bulgaria, Norway, Africa, Israel, or America, and you're seeing things happening. All I'm saying now is that if we take advantage of some of the things we've learned, that there is a Judge, there is a purpose. And there's a ticket out. There's definitely a ticket out. There's definitely a ticket that guarantees you every reward you could ever imagine. And it doesn't cost much. If anything, it's free. It's a link. It's an email. That's the investment I'm making. B'ezrat Hashem. You and anyone that watched this will join me. Any questions?

1:16:53I should spend some time with you, some quality time. It's opened up. First of all, you're very likable. And I have a lot of guests. And it's you that I really just want to take out and sit down and just talk with. What are your plans after this? Baruch Hashem, I did lecture every day this week. I came here since Thursday, so almost every day we've done a lecture. Any questions? Tomorrow, I don't have one. Saturday night, I'm supposed to have something, but I'm going back to Florida on Sunday. For the rest of tonight, I have nothing planned. Sure, I'll be happy to answer any questions. Sure, you have some questions. You drove all the way from Phoenix to see me, you must have some questions. I have one question. I always read in lectures all around... You have to do a complete teshuva. What does that mean? What does it mean for... Well, actually, this is a very... God bless you for actually asking the question because it reminds me of something that I wanted to mention but I forgot. So the messenger that was sent to me from Phoenix reminded me. There was a... I guess I made a mistake in not explaining this in the past where for some reason...

1:18:19People think that in order to do teshuva, you have to get to the highest level overnight and be on the internet at 4 o'clock in the morning, posting videos and making lectures and studying non-stop, and that's the minimum. Because I have a few people, two people just this week, said, "You know what, listen, I can see myself keeping Shabbat, I can see myself keeping kosher, but I can't be you, man." I'm like, "You don't have to be me. You don't have to do anything. Why would you even compare yourself?" And they actually told me that for some reason or another, the Yetzer Hara convinced them that I am the minimum. Hopefully, I am even the minimum, but the point is that, no, to do teshuva does not require you to do any of this. What it requires you to do is to keep the basics, which is keep Shabbat, keep, you know, putting on tefillin, do tefillin every day, even if you can't stay for the whole prayer and be there for, you know, for an hour, then ten minutes. Ten minutes. is where you can get started. Shabbat, it's not really a big deal. You're taking off work. Even if you sleep all day, it's still better than driving to shul because driving to shul negates the entire thing. As a matter of fact, this is a very, very big problem in America today where, for some reason, some places are telling people that it's okay to drive to shul on Shabbat. This is a pure contradiction to the Torah because, according to the sages in the Shulchan Aruch, it says that someone who doesn't keep Shabbat is considered a goy.

1:19:47considered someone that idol worships. So much so, that if they keep everything, if somehow they found a loophole in the mitzvot, and they found a way to keep 612 mitzvot, you can't, because most of them are not relevant to everyone. Some are relevant to women, some are relevant to men, some are relevant to the Beit HaMikdash, Kohanim, and so on. But somehow you found a way to do 612 mitzvot, but you don't keep Shabbat, it's worthless. So, I don't know why people do this, but the point is that Shabbat has to be part of Teshuva. There's no such thing as Teshuva without Shabbat. Even if you sleep all day, it's still fine. Obviously, it's better if you go to shul, you learn Torah, you have Kiddush, but if you can't do any of those things, at least you have to do that. You have to keep kosher, and you have to learn Torah. If you're married, you have to have Taharat HaMishpacha in the house. There are a few other basic things that are smaller than and easier than even the ones that I mentioned to you. And it's Teshuva. It's not that difficult. The difficult part is sticking with it. And the only way you can stick with it is if you acknowledge that you have a yetzer hara. If you acknowledge that you have a yetzer hara, then you know that the only way to beat it is with learning Torah. Whether you learn Torah five minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, an hour a day, that's going to be up to you. I started with 15 minutes a day. Baruch Hashem, I do more now, but...

1:21:1415 minutes a day was the only thing I could handle. That was the beginning. 15 minutes a day was already up to here. I was like, too much. You know, other than the shiur with my very charismatic cousin. But 15 minutes every day is better than 7 hours one day a week, even though technically 7 hours is more. But 15 minutes feeds your soul every day. Why 15 minutes a day? Why not 7 hours? Because it's like you eat food. If I tell you, listen, instead of eating every day, I'll give you a giant meal for 24 hours a week, you won't survive, right? Same thing with Torah. Your soul won't survive the whole week without making some big sin. So, Hashem sometimes, you know, at Mount Sinai, we were scared when we heard the voice of Hashem. And one of the reasons that Moshe told us is that one of the reasons He's doing this to test us is because if we're scared of Him, it'll stop us from sinning. Which is the reason why one of the most important things, in my opinion, the most important thing that someone needs to work on as far as teshuva, is developing fear of the Almighty, developing yirat shamayim. There's a concept of ahavat Hashem, which is loving Hashem, that is commonly taught today.

1:22:42The problem is that most people don't know what that means. You cannot love Hashem without fearing Him first. It doesn't exist. Meaning that the highest level of fear of Hashem, which is the most commonly mentioned thing in the Torah, love of Hashem is not mentioned many times in the Torah. The highest level of fearing Hashem is just the beginning of loving Him. Which means that most of us don't even have a concept of what it really means to love Hashem. So when people are teaching, you know, listen, love Hashem, love Hashem, love Hashem, and the guy's not even keeping Shabbat yet, it's a little confusing. So as far as teshuvah, teshuvah is not that difficult. It's just developing some type of fear of Hashem. Ask yourself, what does He think before you do whatever it is that you want to do? Before you go on a date, before you do business, before you, you know, learn certain things, before you do anything, ask yourself, what does He think? That's the beginning. And then over time, with Hashem's help, it gets even better.

1:23:45Baruch Adonai le'olam. Amen ve'amen.