Synthesizing Business & Emunah at YPLA Kollel

0:13First of all, thank you very much for having me. Bnei Torah is a very, very special place. You know, anywhere, any place where there's Bnei Torah, people learn Torah, people are doing whatever they can to fulfill the will of Hashem on a daily basis, not on a once-in-a-while basis. It's a special place. It's a mini Beit HaMikdash. So it's Y-P-L-A it's called, right? Y-P-L-A. So first and foremost, may Hashem continue to bless you, give you a lot of hatzlacha. And Ken Yirbu, whoever we have today, b'ezrat Hashem, soon we'll have a hundred times more. All of Am Yisrael will join you. All of Am Yisrael will see what it really means to be a Ben Torah. The Gemara says that the Yetzer Hara has seven names. Seven names. So the question is, why do we care he has seven names? Hashem calls him Ra, then Tzfoni, then Ave, all types of names we have. Why do I care he has seven names? Yetzer Hara, Malach HaMavet, Satan. Okay, great, he has names, seven names, ten names. He has a lot more than seven names. But why does the Gemara in Masechet Sukkah say he has seven names? Why? It's to remind us that the Yetzer Hara, unlike us, he doesn't give up.

1:38give up. We always try—we try to do something, and it doesn't work. If we really want to persevere, we try again. It doesn't work the second time. If we really desire it badly, we try again after the third time. But often, we think, "It's over; I'm moving on to something else." Yeah, but it's your marriage. What can I do? I have to find a wife. Yeah, but your kid—you can't leave them. Hey, listen, I'll find new kids. Yeah, but your career—I'll find a new career. We give up. We give up quickly. Yetzer Hara is like a zvuv on your heart. It's like a fly on your heart. What does it mean, fly on your heart? It doesn't matter how many times you shoo him away, he keeps coming back. We have to learn from the Yetzer Hara. We have to learn the message with nefesh from the Yetzer Hara. Hashem says he comes to you in seven different ways. Meaning, you try to shoo him away this way, he's going to come from another way. You try to shoo him away because you close your eyes, he's going to come to you through a thought. Through a thought, he's going to come through a book, through a movie, through a text message, through something—he's coming. And today, Hashem, there's no place that you look and he's not there already. He's in your phone, he's in the television, he's in the streets, he's in the kollel, he's in the beit knesset.

2:43He's sometimes in the rabbi's head. He's sometimes in your head. He's in the wife's head. He's in the kid's head. He's everywhere. So how are we going to win? How are we going to win the Yetzer Hara when he's fire and we're barely flesh and blood? How are we going to win? I made the Yetzer Hara. He's huge. He's strong. He's smarter than us. He's older than us. There's only one killer. What? Torah tavlin. Torah. Torah is the potion. Torah is the ingredient that can kill him. Now, in the secular world, Yetzer Hara is like an imaginary tale. It's like, oh yeah, it's like a fairy tale. You know, you're on cartoons. Anyone that used to watch TV, like I used to when I was a little kid, used to watch, you know, in the cartoons, they always had like a little angel on this side and an angel on that side. This one was red, this one was white. The red one always said cool stuff, but you're not allowed to do it. The white guy always said stuff that you really don't want to do, but you kind of have to do. He's the good guy, he's the bad guy. See, it's always a cartoon. It's not something real. One time somebody said

3:58The smartest thing that the devil ever did was convince everyone he doesn't exist. Convince everyone he doesn't exist. And the reality is, Rabotai, is that most people do not believe he exists. It's easier to believe in all types of other things in the world. It's easy to believe that the world came from nothing, like these atheists believe, than to believe the yetzer hara exists. Why? Because that means that somebody else inside you is influencing your decisions. You want to go to the shiur, but all of a sudden something happens, and you can't go, and you're saying, no, I can't go because something happens. No, yetzer hara. No, yetzer hara didn't even talk to me. I don't see him. He wasn't there. I can't go today. Why can't you go? Because my wife needs me. Because my school needs me. Because this needs me. Somebody came one time to the Satmar Rebbe. He says to him, I need help. What do you need? I need some money for my daughter to get married. I don't have any money. She wants a fancy wedding. I need some money. He goes, no problem. He takes out

5:11$10 out of his pocket. He gives it to him. Obviously, $10 is not going to pay for the wedding. But the guy says, "Thank you very much. I love you." It moves on. The next day, he comes back. He says, "I need help." The Rebbe asks, "What do you need today?" He responds, "I need money for a dress." The Rebbe inquires, "What happened with the wedding? Did you get money for the wedding?" The man says, "Oh yeah, after I got the $10 from you. You wouldn't believe it. I reached $50,000 for the wedding. Everything in one day. Unbelievable." The Rebbe asks, "So what do you need now? You need a dress?" The man answers, "Yes, because my daughter, I came home, I told her we have the wedding. She says, 'I'm not going to have this fancy schmancy wedding unless you get me a $5,000 dress.'" So the Rebbe says, "Okay, one second." He goes to his safe. He opens the safe. He takes out $5,000. He gives it to him. Hugs, kisses, "Thank you. I love you." He moves. Now the student is watching his Rebbe. He says, "No, this doesn't make any sense. For the wedding, $50,000, you gave him $10?"

6:22The chutzpan had the audacity to come back the next day and ask for more, and what? For a dress. Not for the wedding, not for a house, not for a mortgage, for a dress. And not only do you give him, you give him $5,000. It doesn't make any sense. You know what you could have done with the money, Kvod HaRav? You could have given it to Avreichim. You could have given it to the Kollel. You could have given it to the Kiruv organization. You could have given it to the Almanot, Yetomim. Oh, how many people you could have given it to? How many people could you have helped? Kvod HaRav, you could have benefited from it. Your family, your children. He says, you know what, you're right. Everything you said, I also thought about. The Avreichim, the Kollel, the Kiruv, the Almanot, the Yetomim, all of that. But then I thought to myself, how come I only thought about that now, after I have another mitzvah in front of me, to make a kallah happy? If it came before, then it's a mitzvah. But if now that it came after, I have another mitzvah, that means it's the Satan. It's a mitzvah from the Satan. The Satan wants me to make the mitzvah of the Kollel and the Kiruv and everything else. Now, why? Because I have another mitzvah that right now is more important. Right now, the mitzvah that I have to do is to make the bride happy. If I would have thought about it beforehand, then that's the mitzvah that Hashem wants me to do. But now that it's getting in the way of another mitzvah, the Yetzer Hara gets involved even in your mitzvot. Even with your mitzvot, you need to be careful.

7:48So now, most of my life, none of this information was even remotely a thought. I knew that there was a God, but it was my own version of God. Like most people believe in God, even if they call themselves atheists. It's just that the atheist is telling you, "I have a God that doesn't tell me what to do." An atheist simply tells you he doesn't want anyone to tell him what to do. That's what he wants. That's the belief. So most of my life, I had that version. I wasn't an atheist. I believed in God. I said Shema Yisrael. I did Birkat Hamazon once in a while. But as far as Shabbat, kosher, all these different things, I was on elective. When I can, I can. When I can't, I can't. Most of that time, I couldn't. So we came to the U.S. when I was 10 years old and got into school. I did well in school. We already started working. My father always said that if you want something, you have to go get it yourself. So we already started working very young while going to school. By the time I was 17, 18 years old, I was already making $100,000 a year from sales of electronic stuff and all types of things. But it still wasn't enough for me. Because the Gemara says, you give somebody $100,000, he wants $200,000. You give $200,000, how much does he want? $400,000. And the Gemara says, no one ever dies with even half of what he wants.

9:14Maybe you didn't even get the first half. You didn't even achieve the first half. So I realized I'm making, I'm making, I'm making, but it's not enough. I want more. Okay, how are you going to make more? I'm 17, 18 years old. I went to college. I did well in college. I had almost a perfect GPA. But then I realized that everybody around me is wasting their life. They're interested in partying. I'm interested in making money. The two don't match. So I decided college is not for me. I don't want to be in college for the next seven, eight years. I don't want to be a doctor. I don't want to be a lawyer. I just want to make money. So I left college and I joined Wall Street. I joined a couple of different firms in the beginning, trying to find my way. Unfortunately, when you're trying to find your way, all of the leeches in the business world try to suck the blood out of you as much as they possibly can. That's the real world. They all have a nice smile while they're sucking your blood out. all call themselves your friend, they're helping you, they're doing you a favor, all that stuff. So anyway, I joined Wall Street and started learning about how to make money in the stock market. I had to get clients and so on and so forth. After about three years of paying my dues and working for other people, I finally had the opportunity to become independent within a company.

10:35So I was working for a company called Raymond James, and they told me that the partner that I had, who really wasn't a partner, was a thief. I did all the work, and he took all the money. Then, after two months, when I finally asked for the money, he gave me a check for $81.12. I made a copy of the check, and I kept it as a memory for the rest of my life. I showed it to all the employees that I ever had after that, saying, "This is what I made for the first two months. Don't complain." You're making more than $81. So anyway, after that, I told him, I want to be on my own. I want to be independent. I don't want to have a boss. I don't want to have a partner. I don't want to have anything. I just want to do my own thing. I've already been in the business for three years. Let me be. He's like, listen, that's a nice thought. It's a nice theory. It's a nice ambition. You're young and ambitious. Great, but I still need to make money. So you have to make sure that every single month I have $4,000 in my bank account automatically. He says, do you have the money? I said, no. He said, how are you going to get it? I said, I don't know.

11:37But I'm not going to go somewhere else and start this whole rigmarole again. So let me just figure it out over here. He says, "No problem. What's your intention here?" I said, "To buy you out." Now imagine, I'm 21 years old, and this guy's been in the business for 20 years, and this little kid with the kippah is telling him, "I'm going to buy you out." He found it amusing. He's like, "All right, go ahead. Give the kid a try. As long as this $4,000 shows up every month, it doesn't make a difference if I show up or not, just as long as the $4,000 shows up." The first six months were very difficult. Six months, every single penny that I made went to his account. Nothing went to me. I had to borrow a dollar from this kid Dimitri every day in order to buy 50-cent coffee and 50-cent doughnuts. That was my food for the day. Once in a while, I would spoil myself from my second job and buy some bologna. This is how I lived for six months. Every day, I had to leave the house at around 5 or 5:30 in the morning to get to work by 6:30. read the news, start making phone calls at 8, because that was the earliest you're allowed to do it legally, and call until midnight. No breaks, no fancy-schmancy lunches; I couldn't afford it anyway. 9 to 12 every day. And the only reason I stopped at 12 was because I couldn't call anywhere else in the US; in California, it was 9 o'clock. After 9 o'clock, you're not allowed to call.

13:05finished work at 12, caught the bus at around 1, you know, read some news, prepared for the next day, caught the bus at around 1, got home at around 2, slept for a couple of hours, did the same thing all over again the next day. The rest of the world thought I was insane, but I had a dream. After six months, I finally collected my first $1,000 in my pocket. To me, it was a million bucks. Now, all this time, the only way I'm surviving is because I have a second job. Selling electronics, wheeling and dealing, doing different things on the side so I could afford it because I was already on my own, even though I was young. I was already on my own, had my own apartment, had my own car. I was already on my own. So it wasn't like, "Hey, Abba, Ima, I need money for rent." Nothing like that. Like today's generation, where Abba and Ima provide a little, give people binkies when they're 30 years old, didn't work for me. Sometimes if I had extra money, I'd help out Abba and Ima if it was needed. That's how my generation was. That's our life. That's how we were brought up. This generation, unfortunately, is very different. Thirty-year-olds are still getting binkies. They complain to Abba and Ima because their first car is not a brand new Benz; it's only a brand new Toyota. One time, somebody showed me a video of a kid who...

14:29Got a new car, but it wasn't a new car. It was like a used truck. To show his satisfaction with this truck, his first car, he took a baseball bat and started smashing the car to pieces. "It's not good enough." That's this generation of our time. That's this generation. We're a generation of ungrateful people. We don't understand how difficult it is to make a dollar, how difficult it is to survive, how difficult it is to do everything, and... So sometimes Hashem reminds us. Sometimes it's our own skin, sometimes it's our own parents. But the point is, it's not easy in the world, as you all know already. So after six months, I finally made a thousand bucks. The next month I made five thousand. The next month I made seven. Next month I made about $10,000, then $17,000, and then in November of 2002, which was approximately a year after I became independent, I made $117,000 in a month. So that changed everything. I took about $60,000 or $70,000 and put a down payment on my parents' house so they finally have their own house instead of renting and getting kicked out every year like we did for the first 20 years of being in this country.

15:46We got a house. I put a down payment on renting an apartment in the city. And I bet everything that I was going to continue to succeed. And it worked. I continued working hard. Every month became much bigger: $50,000, $100,000, $150,000, and so on. By August of 2003, another year later, I became the number three producing broker in the entire country for that company, Raymond James, which had about 5,000, maybe 6,000 brokers. The average time frame on the top 25 list had 25 years more in the business than me. Everybody asked, who is this guy? Where did he come from? How long has he been in the business? When they found out I had only been in the business for a few years, they started thinking there was something wrong. The president of the company, which is a public company, a big company, a multi-billion dollar company, called the office. He was like, who is this guy? They said, oh, he works hard. He said, yeah, everybody works hard. How does he make it? Does he have insider information? Is he doing something illegal? It didn't make any sense how this guy is new. He's barely gotten out of his own diapers, and now he's making this money. How does it make any sense? It didn't make any sense to anybody. When he started telling them my schedule, my day, okay, why does he work so much? So I realized at that point that I have to make a decision. I'm either going to be part of the system, or I'm going to create my own.

17:11When you're part of corporate America, when you're part of the corporate world in general, you have to learn how to get along. You have to know that there's a certain system. There's a system in play. You have to just get along with it. If you work for a big company, there's a certain system. You have to get along. I didn't want to get along. I wanted my own system, so I left. I started my own company. I started hiring some people. Within a short period of time, we continued growing. On a bad month, we made $200,000, maybe $250,000, sometimes more. Everything was wonderful when it came to material. I didn't really care for material things, though. I cared for competition. I was never one of those people that bought fancy-schmancy watches and cars and all these different things that people spend their money on. I never did it. I spent my money on a few things. One is helping people because, for whatever reason or another, they didn't have, and I did, so here, have some. Anybody had a problem, they would just come to me and They would start telling me their story. Since my time was very valuable according to my calculations, I told them, "Listen, how much does your problem cost?" They would start to explain, but I would interrupt, "It doesn't make a difference. How much does it cost? Three thousand? Okay." I would write them a check for three thousand and say, "Good luck to you." That's how you solve problems in my world at that time. It didn't make a difference what the problem was. He had a problem; he needed help. Here's the money. What difference does it make? You have a problem; I have the money; solve the problem. Why? Because money, if you look at it the right way, is no different than the hammer you have in your toolbox. If you look at money as anything different than a hammer, you have a problem. It's called idolatry. In the US dollar bill, it says, "In God we trust." In God we trust.

18:39is no different than the hammer you have in your toolbox. If you look at money as anything different than a hammer, you have a problem. It's called idolatry. On the US dollar bill, it says, "In God we trust." In God we trust. The problem is not the sentence. The sentence is right. In God we trust. The problem is not the sentence. What's the problem? Most people think that the God they're talking about is the dollar. That's the problem. If you're chasing the dollar to such an extent that you're willing to sell your soul, that as soon as somebody needs help, you close the door. As soon as some big expense comes, you get nervous. As soon as something unethical comes, you're like, listen, how much money is in it for me? And you actually even consider it. It's called idolatry. You're worshipping the money more than Hashem. Baruch Hashem, that's something I never had a tikkun for. I never had a problem with that. Hashem didn't make me that way. So if somebody had a problem, that's what I used my money for. The second thing is I like to invest. I invest it for other people. I invest it for myself. I was my own biggest client. I invested in the stock market. But most of my money was made by running the company and having clients. Millionaire clients from all over the world.

20:01Materially, everything was wonderful. I found a woman that was extraordinary. She was a genius. She was my trader. She knew my business, so she understood me. I decided this is the woman that I want to marry. There's only one problem: she wasn't Jewish. Other than that, she was perfect. Sometimes you can change that too. But since I wasn't an unethical person, I said, listen, I'm going to make her... People tell me, don't you want to marry a Jew? You're Israeli, you're this, you're that. I said, listen, what am I going to tell her to do stuff I'm not doing? That's a hypocrite. What am I going to tell her to go keep Shabbat? I don't keep Shabbat. Tell her to go eat kosher? I don't eat kosher. I eat kosher when it's convenient. Okay, so I'm not eating pig and I'm not eating cheeseburgers. I'm not that guy. Not Reform, but I eat pizza outside. I eat salad. I'm not in a kosher place. Certain things, look, I tell you, you have to do something I'm not willing to do. If she wants to be Jewish, that's her problem. She has to do it on her own. I'm not gonna tell somebody to do something that I'm not doing. Hypocrite. I'm not. Everything else was perfect.

21:21Hashem says, "My people committed two evils. They've forsaken me, the source of all living water, to dig for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." So, Hashem says to the prophet Yirmiyahu in chapter 2, verse 13, He says, "Am Yisrael made two sins against me." First, they have forsaken Me. Meaning they made a sin—violated Shabbat, ate non-kosher, whatever it is. They did something against Me. That's already bad enough. But there are two problems. Not only did they eat non-kosher, or violate Shabbat, or look at a woman who is not their wife, and so on and so forth. Not only did they do that, but they replaced Me with a broken cistern. Meaning they found a way to justify it.

22:24They found a way to rationalize and make themselves look good doing it. Now listen, you know the reason why Moshe Rabbeinu didn't drive on Shabbat? He didn't have a car. That's why he didn't drive on Shabbat. You know why Moshe Rabbeinu had so much kosher food? Because everybody in Am Yisrael was a ro'eh tzon. Everybody was a shepherd. What was he going to do? He had an inn. He was in the business. That's why he ate kosher. Everybody tries to justify why they were able to do it 3,000 years ago, but today it's impossible. It's a difficult generation and so on and so forth. I'll tell you a story, a real story that happened to me on Shabbat. I come out of the shul and this guy comes to me and says, "Oh, listen, I'm sorry I missed the lectures last week." Okay, fine. I know what happened. He goes, "I have to ask you something." I said, "Okay." He's like, "Yeah, but it's kind of business-related." He's a religious guy. He's a frum guy. A lot of talk business, not a lot of talk business on Shabbat. Not a lot of talk business on Shabbat. Business in reality today, 99% of business is talking. I made $20 million talking.

23:36Talking that's business business is not building. There are only a few people in the world that actually work with their hands. Most business is talking; the owners talk, the salesmen talk. Most of the business conducted in the world is talking. When you talk business on Shabbat, you are violating Shabbat. Don't let anybody fool you. Don't let the yetzer hara come back to you saying, "No, no, he's talking about a mitzvah." What mitzvah is business? No, no, his business gives ma'aser. Yetzer hara convinces us that it's a mitzvah to talk business. So the guy says, oh, yeah, it's business. You know what? For kavod Shabbat, that's what he says to me. For kavod Shabbat, I have to ask you something. I say, okay, kavod Shabbat. Where's kavod Shabbat? He says, listen, the stock market. Do you have experience in the stock? He says, that's not my business on Shabbat. So now I have two options. I can rebuke him, but he's not going to listen anyway because he actually thinks that he's making a mitzvah right now. He's not going to listen to me. He's telling me, "The stock market, I'm trying to invest, but I don't know who to invest with. And this guy says this, and this guy says this, and this guy says this." So rebuking him at that point, this guy is living on a different planet. Rebuking him is not going to work. So I have to work something else. So I said, "Okay. You want an answer?" I said, "Somebody asked the same exact question." He goes, "Really?" I said, "Yes. With the stock market and everything, same thing."

24:53So what's the question? Somebody came to the Chafetz Chaim and said to him, "I need to make more money, so I'm starting a new business." So the Chafetz Chaim answers him, "Why do you want to start a business?" He goes, "No, no, no, I'm starting a new business so I can make more money." He goes, "Okay, so you want to make more money?" He goes, "Yes." So why are you starting a new business? He goes, "No, no, the business is to make more money." "Okay, so you want more money?" "Yes." "So why is the new business?" So he thought that the Chafetz Chaim was not understanding, only he didn't know that the Chafetz Chaim understood better than him. The Chafetz Chaim was trying to tell him, "What makes you think that if you start a new business, you're going to make more money?" Who told you you're going to make more money from this new business? What is it like? It's somebody that has a barrel of wine. He says, I'm only making a thousand dollars a month from this barrel of wine. I need to make more money. So what does he do? He makes another opening to the same barrel. At the end of the month, he still makes a thousand dollars. He says, there's something wrong with the barrel. I have to make another opening. So now he has three openings to the same barrel. At the end of the month, he makes the same thousand dollars. He says, something's wrong with my barrel. I don't know. Do a berachah. Do something. Segulah. Something. He goes, no.

25:59You're trying to make more money from the same barrel, just giving it different openings. The well doesn't change, the well is Shamayim. The Gemara in Masechet Beitzah page 16a, Rosh Hashanah 16b, it says Hashem decides how much money you're gonna make on Rosh Hashanah until Rosh Hashanah. It doesn't make a difference what career you have. It doesn't make a difference if you're a stockbroker or you're some other type of entrepreneur or you're anything else. It makes no difference what you do. I know plenty of millionaires that make money from garbage and plenty of people that are broke selling houses. Naturally, for the goyim, yes, but for Am Yisrael, what you're obligated to do is to believe that Hashem is the one that's providing parnasah. It doesn't make a difference. The Gemara says Hashem decides how much you're going to make. He decides. So the Baal Shem Tov

27:04Wait a minute, if the Gemara says that He decides only on Rosh Hashanah how much I'm going to make, then why does the Mishnah that preceded the Gemara ask or say that He actually judges also every day? If He already decided on Rosh Hashanah, why is He deciding every day? Did He change His mind every day? So, one day, the Baal Shem Tov sees a person who carries water for a living. In those days, it wasn't like today's fountains where you just turn on the tap and water comes to you. You had to physically move the water. So, people were in that business. This man had been carrying heavy water every day for 20 years. The Baal Shem Tov asked him, "How are you?" He replied, "Baruch Hashem, I have a good business. I have a wife, I have children. Everything Baruch Hashem brings me, Baruch Hashem." The next day, nothing much has changed. The weather is still hot. The water is still heavy. The wife is still the same wife and the kids haven't changed. Yes, the Baal Shem Tov asked him, "How are you?" He said, "What a difficult job I have. I don't know why I have this kaparat avonot. This water is so heavy and it's so hot outside, and my kids don't stop screaming. I can't sleep at night, and my wife doesn't stop complaining. She wants a new this and a new that and a new this. It's so difficult." He says, "Baruch Hashem, you give me a chidush."

28:23Because I gave you a chiddush, I'm carrying water for a living for 20 years. What chiddush do I even have in my brain? He goes, no, I've been asking myself, if Hashem already decided on Rosh Hashanah how much parnasah I'm going to make, why does He decide every day also? And you gave me the chiddush. On Rosh Hashanah He decides how much I'm going to make. Every day He decides how I'm going to make it. You can make it from your job, or Hashem, you can make it from an accident. Some guy was fired from a job; he thought that he lost his life savings. The next day, he got into a car accident, and he found out that it was the other guy's fault. Now, the lawyer said, the minimum you're going to get is $10 million. Now, anyone who says, "Wow, good deal," is an idiot. Why? Because you don't know the rest of the story. The guy got into an accident, rabotai, do you really want that kind of parnasah? One time, I said this story, and a guy says, "Wow, it's a good deal." Guy hit by a bus, he gets $15 million. I said, yes, but he lost his ability to walk. He goes, yeah, but at least he has the money. This is the Yetzer Hara at work at full force. It makes us foolish. We think that the money is more important than the ability to walk. Why do we think such a thing? Only people that have never suffered pain think such a thing.

29:42Most people that think that such a living is good is because they never suffered even a fingernail pain. Baruch Hashem, as it says in the beginning of the third chapter of Eicha, I know suffering. I'm an expert in suffering. Because on November 18th of 2006, Hashem gave me a shiur. Decided I'm gonna have elective surgery. I had hemorrhoids. It was bothering me a couple of times a year. I went to a doctor who was an expert in the business for almost 20 years. He told me that this is a problem that two-thirds of the population has. It's not really a big deal. He does two or three surgeries a day. I said, "Okay, fine, this seems simple enough. How much time does it take?" He goes, "No, no, it's no time. You come in the morning, you leave the same day." So I asked, "So I can go back to work?" He replied, "Oh, you're gonna be a little uncomfortable." For a few days, which by the way, anytime a doctor tells you "uncomfortable" means pain. It's just uncomfortable for him to watch you. So he lets you go. Or somebody says, "you're going to feel a little pressure." Pressure means "oh yay." Oy vey means, that's pressure. So anyway, I said, "How long am I going to be out of work? I'm making $3,200 an hour."

31:02$3,200 an hour, a day off of work is a lot of money. He says, listen, you're going to come on Wednesday and go back to work on Monday. I said, okay, it's worth it. I just made a million six the month before. It's a lot of money for a kid. So I said, okay, I can take off a few days. So I took off a day. I went to the hospital. It was in Brooklyn, New York. I went to sleep. And I woke up somebody else. Life changed. I went to sleep perfectly healthy with hemorrhoids that bothered me twice a year. I woke up something completely different. What does it mean, something different? You go to sleep, Baruch Hashem, you say, Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad. Maybe if you do Shema Al HaMitah, you do Tachanun, you do Teshuva before you go to sleep. Because technically, according to Gemara Masechet Berachot, it says that sleep is one-sixtieth of death. So you're supposed to do Teshuva before you die.

32:03And when you wake up in the morning, you say, "Thank you, Hashem." Why? Because You revived the dead. Now, when you wake up in the morning, Baruch Hashem, I'm assuming that everybody wakes up maybe a little tired, but Baruch Hashem, you're not screaming. You're not yelling. See, Baruch Hashem, everything is here: the arms, the legs, if you're married, the wife, if you have kids, the kids. Everybody's there in the same bed. Everything's there on your head. But Baruch Hashem... Say Modeh Ani. I didn't wake up that way. I woke up with pain. Now, I can't really make you feel it. Baruch Hashem, I like you. I'm not going to make you feel it even if I could. But I could give you a visual. You see those hunters, they have these big knives, daggers. Okay, so imagine one of those big daggers connected to an electric outlet and cutting off and over again without an end. That's what I felt all over my entire body, as if somebody was cutting me non-stop, and I’m being electrocuted at the same time. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, begging them to kill me and get me out of my misery. Something went wrong with the surgery. It's been 12 years, almost 13 years, and until this day, no one knows what happened. I went to the best doctors in the world.

33:31they were dumbfounded and dumb too, so there's a reason why the Gemara says the best of doctors goes to Gehenom. I met him so now, so now, or the real reason is because the best of doctors prays for parnasah like the rest of us. When the doctors pray for parnasah, he's also praying for people to be sick. So now I woke up screaming my lungs out to no end. My mom and my wife are there. I'm asking both of them to kill me. They don't want to listen. And they start giving me morphine, more morphine, more morphine, more morphine, more morphine. Eventually, it gets to a point where the doctor in the hospital says, "I'm sorry" to my wife. I'm too busy yelling. She's not talking to me.

34:33So he says to my wife, "I'm sorry ma'am, this is the most amount of morphine we're legally allowed to give to a human being. All other people would have died by now. This is what we usually give to animals, to horses. It's not normal for people. But he's not taking it. His body is rejecting it." So he asked her, "Is he a drug addict?" She goes, "No, he's actually anti-drugs. He's never tried a drug in his life. He's against drugs." Actually helped some of my employees go to rehab and so on. I hated drugs. Anything that affects your brain is terrible for you. There's a reason why the Gemara says that Hashem loves certain people. One type of person He loves is someone that never gets drunk. Why? Because you never let anyone mess with your brain. The yetzer hara is already messing with your brain as it is; now you give it a hint and... People think, oh, no, no, I'm smoking a little weed just for fun, just for fun. It relaxes me. Relax, good luck. Good luck dealing with the yetzer hara after. Starts with marijuana, then it goes somewhere else. No, no, I'm only there. I'm only there for the last couple of years. Eventually, it happens. Everybody, everybody is a crackhead. Starts with marijuana. No one starts with crack on day one.

35:48No one starts as a crackhead. Everybody starts with marijuana. Everybody starts, then it's a pill. Then it's this. Then it's a mushroom. Then it's that. I saw a lot of them. And unfortunately, many of them died. They all started with marijuana. No, it's, "I have a backache." Okay, I have a backache. Take an Advil. No, but there's permission. It's allowed. It's this. Okay, so if you really, really want to use the scientific evidence that shows that there's a medicinal benefit to marijuana, okay, so take the one that doesn't have an effect on your brain. The CBE or CBD or something like that it's called. CBD. Take the CBD. Okay, you want to use the medicinal benefit? Fine, no problem. It's no different than a painkiller. Why do you have to take the one that affects your brain too? There's a reason why Rav Moshe Feinstein says that someone who smokes marijuana is no different than a Ben Sorer U'Moreh. Why? He's electively choosing to remove himself from the obligation of mitzvot. Because once you're considered a shoteh, once you're drunk, once you're high, you can't do mitzvot. You can't go to shul, you can't pray. So if you're doing it on purpose, Hashem

37:04So, my wife tells him he never tried anything. He never did anything. He hates it. He says, "Then I don't know. He should donate his body to science. We have no idea what to do, but this is the most amount of morphine we're allowed to give him legally." Baruch Hashem, Hashem had mercy on me. It finally worked. My body started calming down. Within a short period of time, meaning a few hours, the hospital said, "Okay, listen, I think you're okay. Whatever happened, happened. You're fine. Go home. It's an elective surgery. There's no bed reserved for you." go home. On the way home, we go to pick up some shawarma. We eat the shawarma sandwich at the house. I tell everybody good night. It's been a very interesting day. I got a nice show of what Gehinnom looks like. But I'm thinking it's over. I go to sleep. I wake up 45 minutes later, screaming worse than I did the first time. The only difference is, it doesn't stop this time. 62 days. Not two hours, not three hours, 62 days. 62 days of screaming and yelling. Pain 24 hours a day, the type of pain that you can't even imagine. If you want to imagine it, you should watch my lecture about Gehinnom; it only gives you somewhat of a picture. But the reality is that I thought this was the end. My body started failing, and

38:33my eyes started bleeding. My ears started bleeding. I started urinating blood. My body started dying. No one knows why. Because none of it is related to the surgery. The surgery was for hemorrhoids. It has nothing to do with my eyes, it has nothing to do with my ears, it has nothing to do with urine, it has nothing to do with anything else. In essence, it's supposed to be a superficial surgery. But Hashem runs the world. For those two months, the most amount of consecutive sleep I was able to get was 15 minutes. And that's after taking anywhere from 20 to 50 painkillers. Now, once you go on an extended period of time without sleeping, unless you're David HaMelech, who slept 15 minutes, you start dying. Your body starts failing, your liver starts failing, your heart starts failing, everything starts failing. So, they were telling my wife, my mom, "Listen, he's dying, we have no idea what to do with him, we're sorry." What are they also gonna do? You want help? Call Moshe Rabbeinu. What are you going to do? After two months, Baruch Hashem, things started settling down. My body started coming back to itself to some extent. There was still a lot of pain, but it started becoming somewhat tolerable. By tolerable, I mean I only had to take 25 painkillers a day. I was able to walk, let's say, for example, from here to the door would take about five seconds for a normal human being. For me, it would take about ten minutes.

40:00started going back to work. I started going back to using my brain again. I started going back to regular life, thinking that it's over. Little by little, things started improving. My health started improving. Things started going back to normal. You know, it was just a distant memory. Nine months later, I feel a pain in the back of my leg. By the next day, I can't move. I have to go to the emergency room and Doctors at the emergency room said that I have an infection between two muscles that's so big that it's about to pop, and if it popped, I would die within an hour because it would go into my bloodstream. It's complete poison and extremely dangerous. So, I have to have an emergency surgery, more difficult than the first surgery because the recovery for this one is very interesting. Since it's an infection, the only way to remove it is by leaving the surgery open and reopening it every day. When somebody has a surgery, they cut him up and then they stitch him up, and he heals—the blood clots, he heals over time. But when they cut you up and they leave it open and they reopen it every day, it's a very interesting level of pain.

41:15I had to be in the ICU unit for three weeks next to people who were dying from all types of interesting things. I'm screaming, they're screaming, we're comparing screams. After that, I’m released; I go back to life, recover again, and six months later, another pain on another side, completely unrelated to the first two. i'm back in the hospital. I'm back in the ICU unit. I'm back in surgery, I'm back under the knife, and all these wonderful things that I just told you again. It's a repeat. It's like you read Parashat HaShavua two weeks in a row. After that, six months, it's finished, right? No, three months later, I'm back in the hospital. Have you guys noticed the time is getting shorter between the breaks? After those three months, I'm back in the hospital. After that recovery, next month, and then it becomes every month. Then it gets to a point that I have to be at a doctor or a hospital every single week. All of the infections, all of the surgeries are completely unrelated one to the other. Everyone tried to make a connection, but they couldn't. And then the rest of my body starts to act up. One day, my legs start hurting; the next day, they puff and magically double in size. I'm not able to walk. I go to the hospital.

42:40The best doctor in that hospital told me, maybe it's from the heat. I told him, maybe your brain swelled up from the heat, but legs don't swell up from heat like this. I don't need to be a doctor to know that. He said, I don't have anything else. I said, you should go to school for another 20 years. I didn't tolerate people with stupidity very much, especially when you're in pain. There's not really much patience. So there's nothing they could do for me. I had to go home. And for the next year and a half, I'd walk with a cane. Some young guy from the building that I was working at thought that my cane was a fashion statement, so he got himself a cane, too. He said, "You should feel like me, then walk with a cane." So anyway, this didn't last for a year. Didn't last for two years. Didn't last for three years. Seven years. Seven years of going from doctor to doctor, with 50 different doctors—the best, the worst, and anything in between. Traditional medicine, holistic medicine, steroids like the athletes take—that's $2,000 a shot that you have to take every day. Ozone treatment that makes you feel like you're taking chemotherapy, and...

44:03Three or four times a week, every time you take it, you feel like you're dying for the next couple of hours. All types of treatments were tried—anything. Because now, it's no longer just a pain from the bottom half of the body; now the pain is from my neck down, everything, 24 hours a day. And once in a while, maybe every 45 minutes to an hour, I would get an electric shock at some odd place in my body—my arm, my leg, my chest, my Private parts somewhere, electric shock as if literally I'm connected to the wall. It would be very, very uncomfortable to sit next to me because once in a while I'm sitting next to you and you're talking and I'm talking, and all of a sudden, you start seeing me shake and screaming in pain. So it became very uncomfortable for me to watch your face. I was dealing with the pain; it's uncomfortable having the pain, but it's even more uncomfortable to see your look. So it became my antisocial for obvious reasons. I stopped seeing people and became somewhat of a recluse, especially when I didn't feel well. But eventually, it got to a point where I really didn't want to live much. Seven years of dealing with this with no end in sight. My business went to the toilet; everything that went, you know, in the beginning, I turned dust into gold, at least that's what I thought. Now the gold was turning back into dust.

45:28Market crashed, my business crashed, my friends became enemies, everyone that could steal, stole. The line’s down, so everybody grabs whatever they can. I never cared for money. I like the competition, but I couldn’t even compete anymore. But even more so than ever, I realized that all the money in the world that I had was now completely worthless. Why? It couldn't buy me a cure. It was a guy that was worth north of seven billion dollars before he died. His name was Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was an atheist. He knows God really well now. Now, why did Steve Jobs die? He had seven billion dollars. With seven billion dollars, you should be able to buy two lives. He couldn't buy a new liver.

46:29He couldn't buy a new pancreas. He couldn't buy a new anything. Only Hashem. Only Hashem can provide him. He tried. He got one. It didn't work. The second one failed. He died. The point is, Rabotai, all the money in the world cannot replace Rofeh Kol Basar. It cannot replace Hashem Yitbarach. That's the healer of all. That's the doctor of all. It cannot replace. Now all of you are chasing the dream. everyone else. The question is, what is that dream? If you're chasing money, you're chasing the wrong dream. And the reason why is because you're thinking that money is going to give you something that it can't. You think it's going to give you health; it can't. You think it's going to give you happiness; it can't. Why do we chase money? We chase money because we want something that we don't have, because we think that what we don't have is going to make us happy, and Shlomo HaMelech already told us 3,000 years ago. He had it. He had all the money in the world. He had all the desires, all the things that you could possibly imagine: women, money, power, everything. He says, it's all nonsense. Now, who's going to listen to Shlomo HaMelech 3,000 years later? Everyone has an excuse. The same yetzer hara is telling him, no. In his day, he didn't need it. In his day, there was no need for cars, no need for big houses, no need for this. No, he was the king. He could say the

47:55Well, I'm not Shlomo HaMelech or even a dust under his shoe. But I can tell you that I've met a lot of millionaires. That was my job. My job was to deal with millionaires, in some cases a few billionaires. That was my business. If you weren't a millionaire, there was no conversation. There was no point. I couldn't do business with you. That was my job. I met many of them. And every single one of them, to no end, was miserable. Every single one of them had moments of happiness when they went on vacation, when they bought a new car, when they bought a new house, when they bought a new business, and when they did some deal. They had moments of happiness. Everybody has moments of happiness, even the homeless guy who has nothing. He has moments of happiness too. But it's not happiness, because the moments of happiness that we can consume ourselves with are based on something material. that material pleasure goes away. It goes away a minute later, an hour later, a week later, or a month later. Finished. It's finished at some point. Why is it finished? Because real happiness is a spiritual feeling. You cannot satiate something spiritual with something material.

49:21At least not permanently. Happiness is a spiritual feeling. It's not something you can make somebody happy by giving him the best car in the world. You can't make somebody happy by giving him a new house or money or whatever it is. He can't. I knew this even as a secular person. But I like to chase. But now I can't chase. Now there's a bunch of zebras around me, and I can't even chase them. I... Made me feel like I have no point. I have no happiness from here. I have no happiness from there. I have no happiness. I don't want to live. Now, Hashem also promised us that He's not going to give us a test that we can't pass. So, at that moment, I started thinking all types of crazy thoughts. My mom started calling... Rabbis. So she saw that there was something wrong with him, more than usual. She started calling rabbis, maybe to get a blessing. The typical Sephardic mama and Ashkenazi mom always have a book of different rabbis. Mom, you know the rabbis' names. You know, the Ashkenazi has the rabbis from Ashkenaz, and the Sephardi has the ones from Sepharad. And when it's a lot, we have both. We call anybody. Well, together, when there's problems, we're united. When there's no problems, we call, "No, no, no, I'm only keeping to the Sephardi/Ashkenazi." When there's problems, we call everybody. And...

50:44Who's gonna answer? So she started calling everyone she can. For almost two hours, she's calling the U.S., she's calling Israel. Two hours, no one's answering. So imagine you're desperate, you're crying, you feel like your son's dying. She doesn't know what's going on in my head, but she knows what's going on in my body, at least to some extent, and... ...starts calling. For two hours, no one answers. Finally, someone in Israel answers—a woman in Israel. She answers, "Hello," and my mom says, "I'm looking for Rabbi so-and-so." She goes, "I'm sorry, ma'am, but you have the wrong number." My mom breaks down and starts crying to this strange woman on the phone because she finally got somebody on the phone after two hours, and she got a wrong number in the wrong country and... Hashem shows a person sometimes He's the one running the show. When Avraham Avinu was looking for God, he came out of the cave as a little boy and said, "Maybe God is the sun," but then he saw the sun go down and the moon come up. He said, "Oh, maybe God is the moon," but then he saw it replaced again.

51:56Maybe it's the sky. Maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. And then it says, Hashem peeked in and says, "Hey, I'm the Ba'al HaBayit. You're looking for Me? It's My place. Moshe, you're looking for Me? I'm here." Sometimes Hashem is going to say, "Hey, are you looking for Me? I'm here." Sefer Devarim says, "If you look for Me, you'll find Me, if you look for Me with all of your heart and all of your soul." Hashem knew that we were looking for Him. We didn't know where to look. My mom was looking through phone numbers. Oh, you're looking for me. He made sure we knew how that woman got the wrong phone number in Israel. She says, "Wrong number." My mom starts crying, and then the woman says, "Doris," which is my mom's name. She got scared, like you guys just got scared. "How do you know my name?" she asked. The woman responded, "Well, I'm your niece." Niece? Yeah, I'm your brother's sister, Penina. It's like, how did I get to you? I don't have your phone number. We've never spoken on the phone before. They didn't have each other's phone numbers. The best question is, how does she recognize her voice? There are 8 billion people in the world. I mean, if somebody calls you, even if he's your best friend from 20 years ago, are you going to recognize his voice? Probably not. I was in the phone business. That's what I did. I made phone calls all day to make sales. I don't recognize people's voices all the time.

53:19Unless it's my wife yelling at me, then I recognize that. But the reality is that she recognized her voice because Hashem says, "Hello, I'm running the show." Rabotai, you're looking? I'm here. She says to her, "Why are you crying?" She says, "My son is dying. I'm looking for a rabbi to give him a blessing." She goes, "Why don't you call Rabbi Efraim, my brother? He's a Talmid Chacham. And he also happens to live two buildings down from Rav Ovadia, alav hashalom." When he was still alive, he could connect you to Rabbi Ovadia or something. He'll talk to me? Of course, he'll talk to you. You're Dodo Doris. You're the Aunt Doris from America. Give me the phone number. She calls Rabbi Efraim. Rabbi Efraim is on the call like you guys. He's studying, but he gets the message from his wife. He calls my mom back. My mom starts telling him the story. She starts crying. The whole thing that we do. We cry, we talk, we cry, we talk, and so on. Sometimes we just cry and then we talk. If I'm only asked one question, does he speak Hebrew? Because if I'm going to speak English now, I never knew about him existing when I left Israel. He was a baby, younger than I am. We never talked. I never went back to Israel since we came to the U.S. I didn't know he existed, especially since he's in a completely different corner of the world. He's in a very cold, cold place. It's a shame. I'm in the Tumam. What am I? I'm on Wall Street where there are the Agudath out at the end of Wall Street.

54:47There really is—you go on top of walls. It's Egil HaZahav out there. It's Egil HaZahav on top of Wall Street. There's a building across from my apartment that has a pyramid of Egypt on top of it. The building next to it has on the corners of every building the face of Paro. Now, I didn't see this when I was living on the 35th floor, when it was all in front of me. After we did Teshuvah, your vision starts getting clearer. I'm like, wait a minute, that's Paro. Wait a minute, it's a pyramid. Wait a minute, it's Egel HaZahav. Wait a minute, I'm in Egypt. You don't realize you're in garbage until you're outside. Why does the rat eat garbage? He doesn't realize it's garbage. You start feeding the rat some steaks after a while, he doesn't want the garbage anymore. Why does the guy, sometimes you have public bathrooms, and you have a guy that works in the bathroom. It smells terrible, but he's whistling. He's whistling, he's having a good time, he's having a sandwich. Everything is good, but it smells terrible; you want to die. As soon as you go, you want to do your thing, it smells terrible; you want to die instead. But he's whistling, he's eating a steak sandwich. Why?

56:00He got used to the smell. He doesn't realize it's disgusting. You bring him outside, you have a conversation with him, you go back and say, "Oh, señor, it's terrible." Yeah, why? You went outside for a second, you realized it's disgusting. We do teshuva, you start realizing that the world that we chase is disgusting. The girl that's not allowed to you is disgusting. She's not a bad person, but the acts that she's doing are disgusting. The money that's illegal is disgusting. Money you need, but when it's against Hashem, it's disgusting. Rabban Gamliel says a person should never say, I don't want to eat milk and meat. It's not true. You want to eat milk and meat. should say, "I want to eat milk and meat, but what can I do that my Father in Heaven says no? What can I do? My Father in Heaven said no. I want to eat pig. I want to eat milk and meat. I want to drive on Shabbat. You drive the rest of the week; what's wrong with driving on Shabbat? What all of a sudden is bad? You drove six days a week; it's bad to drive on Shabbat?"

57:18You want to drive on Shabbat. You want to eat milk and meat. You want to steal. You want to do all the bad things. But what can I do that my Father in Heaven said no? That's the truth. The truth is that the Torah is not something to tell you that, no, no, all of a sudden everything is bad. No, it's bad because it's against Hashem. It's not that driving is bad. Driving, you have to drive. You have to go from place to place. Driving is bad when it's against Hashem. Making money is not bad. It's making money against Hashem that's bad. When you sacrifice your Torah to go make money, that's bad. Now, everyone says, no, no, I could work and I could learn at the same time. The reality is it's very difficult. Unless you have serious amdat and a schedule and you're really dedicated to Hashem first, job second. If you think that you could mix it 50-50, you've already failed before you started. If you think that the two have the same value,

58:21You've already failed before you started. And the reason why is because in the beginning, you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I want to make some money. And I'm also going to learn on the side." A lot of people learn a little bit. A lot of people make some money. So I'm going to do a mix of both. The problem is the Yetzer Hara makes you think that that's going to work. That plan is all going to work. As soon as you go to work, they tell you, "Listen, you want a promotion? Yeah, okay, you have to work a little more then." You didn't know this when you got into it. But now you have the Egel HaZahav in front of you. I tell you, listen, you're making X amount of money now. You want to make more. You want to get that house that your wife wants. You want to get married like you want. You want to get this. You want to get that. Okay, we have the opportunity for you. What? Work. Instead of five days a week, work six days a week. Instead of nine to five, work nine to nine. Yeah, but I learn after that. Okay, you can learn. You can have a house. Which one do you want? So now the Yetzer Hara says, "Okay, you know what? Why don't you make this money this year, and next year, and the year after, and then go back to learning?" We've already lost. We've already lost. Why? Because we think for a moment that we're the ones making money. We think for a moment that we need to help Hashem give us money. Hashem already decided on Rosh Hashanah how much you're going to make. It doesn't make a difference that the boss is telling you that if you do this, you're going to get a raise. It makes no difference.

59:43Hishtadlut really is based on your emunah. How much emunah you have determines how much hishtadlut you make. If you have a hundred percent hishtadlut, then you have no emunah. If you have a hundred percent emunah, you have no hishtadlut. So, obviously, there's a balance of the two. The balance is that you have to make a priority list. The number one priority for a Jew is... To be a Jew first, everything else second. Jew first, everything else second. Hashem has a lot of Jewish businessmen, but He has very few Jews—people whose mother is Jewish, halachically they're Jewish, technically and... Plenty of Jewish businessmen. Jews that are kosher, we have very few, unfortunately. Why? Because very few are willing to fulfill the Torah and business at the same time. They choose one or the other, and unfortunately, many of them choose business. So they work on Shabbat, or they do business on Shabbat, or they do business that's not necessarily a kosher type of deal. They sell Hashem out for a few dollars. Eventually, the few dollars become more and more, and the Yetzer Hara grows and grows and grows.

1:00:58Get to a point where it says at the end of parashat Va'etchanan that Hashem pays the wicked cash to their face. He gives them cash to their face. Meaning Hashem decides, as the Rambam says in Hilchot Teshuva, I don't want to do Teshuva. Here's the money. Here's the rule. You've made a few mitzvot. You gave some tzedakah. You did some things, good things in your life. Here's the money for it. I don't want to see you ever again. Worst punishment a person could get in this world, as Hashem decides, I don't want him. This, I was this close from. This, a lot of people are really close to. Why? Because we sell Hashem out for five bucks. If somebody tells you, listen, let's go make a deal now, and you're in the middle of learning, You should know a hundred percent. It's a hundred percent test. He tells you, "Listen, there. You can do some things right now. I'll give you a hundred bucks an hour." You say yes, Hashem says, "Oh, because Torah is only worth a hundred bucks?" Yetzer Hara says, "Oh, it's only worth a hundred? I'll give him 200 tomorrow. He's not even gonna show up." Yetzer Hara has a lot of money. So the first thing is, Rabotai, you have to remember Hashem decided how much money you're gonna make. You don't need to help Him at all. Now, what's the proof?

1:02:19The proof is the rest of the story. The story goes where after everything went haywire, business went to nothing, started losing the millions, started realizing that all the millions and all the things were worthless anyway. My mom calls a strange rabbi, a strange person, wrong number. She says, call Rabbi Efraim. Rabbi Efraim asks only one question. He says, does he speak Hebrew? She says, he speaks Hebrew, but... He's not going to talk to you. He's not going to talk to anybody. At that very moment, I decided to call my mom for the first time in months. Because I started thinking some crazy suicidal thoughts, I figured, let me be nice to my mom before I jump off a roof. So I called my mom, and she's crying because she's on the other line where we're fighting. So I ask her, why are you crying? She goes, talk to him, talk to him. I go, who and why is he making you cry, this person? He said, "Ephraim, talk to Ephraim. He can help you. He's your cousin." I said, "I'll talk to anybody. Just stop crying. Just have him call me. I'll talk to him." Rabbi Ephraim calls me, and immediately I understand that this person is very different from the people that I know. Even the rabbis that used to come to my office every week, two, three times a week to collect tzedakah and all other things, they weren't like this guy. He doesn't care about money. At all. In fact, he hates it.

1:03:44Very few people, I think, exist in the world that actually despise money. He's one of them; he finds it disgusting. The stories of Baalei HaMussar are extraordinary, but I think none of them is as extraordinary about money specifically as this one. The Saba MiSlabodka one time came to a gvir... Taskforce the coffers you wrote. And he says to him, you know, he's on the line. There's a bunch of people, those once-a-year people who would come to this gvir to collect money, and he gives him a sack of money. The Rabbi after him asked for money also, and he gives him a nice wad of money, you know, $10,000. So the Rabbi asks him, he's like, "Listen, I... Why did you give him so much more? Listen, thank you very much for what you gave me. I just really want to know, what do I have to do teshuvah for? Why did you give the Saba Mitzvotka so much more? Is it because you think he's a Talmid Chacham more than me? Is it because he has a yeshiva? I have a yeshiva. Is it because he learned? I learned. What's the reason? He said, listen, you, in the morning, you woke up, you were thinking you were going to come meet me. You respect me, you want me to help you.

1:05:14So you groomed yourself, and you prepared yourself, and you talked to your wife about it, and you, you know, repeated what you're going to say to me, and you look good, and you know, everything is good. Why? Because you want me to help you. Meaning that you respect my money. So when I see you, it reminds me of my money. So I like my money. So you remind me of my money, so I give you some money because I like my money, so I want to keep it. When the Sabba Mislavotka came to me, he was a mess. He had boots, and he had mud on his shoes. He was not too worried about everything else. He just came here and said to me, "Zalman, Zalman, all you have in this world is money. What are we going to do with you? What are we going to do with you, Zalman? All you have in this world is money. You have no mitzvot. You have no Torah. You have nothing else in this world. I don't even know if I can help you." All you have in this world is disgusting money. And he gives me a shiur that all I have is this money. And it really, I'm starting to think, really all I have is this money, this paper. It can't help me at the time of trouble. What can I do with this money? He really reminds me at the time of need, all I really need is Hashem. But all I have instead of Hashem, instead of Torah, instead of mitzvot, I have money.

1:06:36What do I, me, I'm thinking to myself, I need to help myself. I need to save myself. How can I sell myself? Yeah, Rabbi, you take the money, and at least I'm going to start learning Torah. At least I'm going to start doing mitzvot. At least I'm going to do something to save myself. He reminds me of what I need. You remind me of what I have. A person needs to know that when they're chasing, they're chasing, they're chasing, it's good to chase. You have to just chase the right dream, though. If you're learning Torah, you're chasing the right dream. The reason why is because Hashem brought you to the world to be a Jew. Money, parnassah, wife, house, kids, all that other stuff, Hashem has to take care of. Someone that understands that sentence has to get to a level of 100% emunah. Like the Baal Shem Tov. Like all the tzaddikim. Why? Because he says everything is from shamayim except yirat shamayim. Meaning, your parnassah, your wife, your kids, your health, tall, short, good looking, ugly, rich, poor, everything is from shamayim. You have nothing to do with it. Do you have to do with what you got in your mind, whether you're gonna listen to God or not? Even your hishtadlut—how much effort you're gonna exert in whatever it is that you're gonna do in the business world—is based on your emunah. Obviously, we're not the Baal Shem Tov. We're not Rav Ovadia. We're not these people, fine. But you can't be a man either. You can't be Paro either.

1:08:02You learn Torah in order to fulfill it. Okay, you want to work? Work. You have a nine-to-five job? Have a nine-to-five job. But always remember, the only reason you're working is so you can learn Torah. Not you're learning Torah so you can make more money. If you think you learn Torah so you can make more money, you're learning the wrong Torah. Torah is not a lotto ticket. Hashem is not Santa Claus. It doesn't work that way. Anyone that tells you if you learn Torah, you're going to make more money, it's not true. Hashem will decide if you're going to be a millionaire or not. Hashem will decide. There are plenty of people that sell garbage and make millions. There's one guy who started selling junk as dog food. Junk! It started as dog food, and he began making money out of it. He ended up making over a hundred million dollars from dog food. Dog food! I know guys that started a business with a hundred million dollars. They completely broke. Their father had a lot of money, gave them a hundred million dollars to start a business. It's been broke, zero. So the reality is הכל משמים. When I spoke to Efraim, I started realizing this. We spoke for an hour and forty minutes. I'll fast-forward the story a little bit because we're running out of time and...

1:09:27Next week he called me again. We spoke for three hours. I started realizing that my world is really upside down. I'm more interested in what he has to say than the world around me. The next week we spoke for five hours. And then from that point on, every Thursday at four o'clock, we would learn for seven hours straight. Now, the wife that wasn't Jewish became the biggest advocate of my learning Torah in the world. I Thursday at 4 o'clock. She closed my door to my office. She was the bodyguard. She said no one's allowed to talk to him. No one's allowed to do anything. Phone calls have to go to her. Everyone else in the world has to wait until tomorrow. Why? Because he's learning Torah. “Yeah, but you're not even Jewish.” “Yeah, but he needs to be. All the answers that he's ever looked for he's getting. Let him get the answers. The world has to stop on Thursday.” We talk and we learn, and everything I'd learn, I'd teach her. You start fast forwarding, and we started realizing we're in a dilemma. We started observing mitzvot. We started keeping Shabbat. In this world, anyone that doesn't keep Shabbat doesn't realize what they're missing out on. And by keeping Shabbat, I don't mean you sleep all day. Keeping Shabbat means you learn Torah. Keeping Shabbat means it's not just food. People think that Shabbat is only about food. Just go to a restaurant, that's it.

1:10:50Shabbat is not just the food. There's one guy, Yisroel HaChem. He has 200 people. I met him. He's here in California. He has two, three hundred people in his house every week. Two, three hundred people every week. And he asked me, oh, listen, why don't you, you know, come speak at my house? I said, sure, no problem. I'll come speak, no problem. No money, no nothing. I'll come speak to 200 people, sure. He said, "Yeah, but listen, there's a few rules." Excuse me? "Yeah, there's a few rules. You can't tell them mot' tiumat. You can't tell them they can't drive on Shabbat. You can't tell them they can't smoke on Shabbat. You can't tell them this. You can't tell them this. You can't tell them this. And by the way, most of them drive, and most of them smoke, and most of them this, and most of them this. Oh, and by the way, whatever you say, just do it in 15 minutes." Do you think I went? I didn't go. Why? It's a complete waste of time. What do you want me to tell them? A fairy tale? You want me to tell them the story of the Smurfs and Gargamel chasing them? What do you want me to tell them? Power Rangers? What do you want me to tell them if it's not? What do you want me to tell them? They're all driving on Shabbat to your house. You think you're doing a mitzvah? All you have is a restaurant open on Shabbat.

1:12:04He thinks he's doing a mitzvah hosting 200 people that are driving week after week to his house. It's not a mitzvah if you know they're going to continue driving. They're not keeping Shabbat. So I told him, "What kind of mitzvah is this? Why are you doing this?" He goes, "No, if you tell them, they're not gonna come back." I said, "Okay, at least they're going to keep Shabbat. At least they're going to keep Shabbat. These two are going to be Jewish now, but we don't know what it is. The reality is..." People don't understand that our mitzvot are not an option. They're an obligation. When a person goes through the story that I did, he realizes that Hashem will send you different messages. He'll send you a short message like a WhatsApp, a text message. You're not gonna answer, He's gonna send you a call, a letter. You're not gonna answer, He's gonna show up at your house. The message gets stronger. Message was near the end. What I do is I try to save people from getting to that point. When I realized that my world was upside down and I was living the wrong life, we started realizing we have to start doing Teshuva. Little by little, my wife started doing Teshuva. Little by little, we started investigating Christianity, which is what she was born into. By investigating it, we found out the whole thing is fake. It's not that it's second best. It's not that it's for other people.

1:13:29It's 100% idol worship. And you can prove it by just looking at their book, which you shouldn't because it's a complete waste of time. But anyway, anyone that's in the business, that knows what they're doing and knows how to decipher Tumah from Taharah, will see that there's a mistake on literally every single page in their book. A mistake. I'm not talking about a mistake that you have to be a big Talmid Chacham to figure out. A mistake where you just need to know the Five Books of Moses. You know it's a mistake. For example, It says, how many people came down to Egypt with Yaakov Avinu? Seventy. How many does the New Testament say? Seventy-five. Meaning their god forgot how to count. Where's the Ma'arat HaMachpelah today? Where was it before? They always have one, right? They have the wrong address. They put it in the wrong place in their book. Different city. Nablus. Not even close. It's a joke. But the thing is, most people—2 billion people—haven't checked. That's why they believe this nonsense. Wrong address, wrong numbers, wrong calculations. We start realizing there's a mistake. Little by little, we start realizing, okay, we have to do something. Baruch Hashem, we saw the movie by Rabbi Mizrachi, Torah and Science, which was the final thing for her, the final proof for her that she's going to accept Judaism on the spot. She accepted everything.

1:14:55We studied, we learned, we went to the Beit Din. The same day, we had a chuppah and kiddushin. But the most extraordinary part of the tale is that when Hashem says, "I am God, your healer," you say it every day. If you're not in a hurry to run out of the shul, there are a couple of things you say. It also says in the Torah, "I am God, your healer. If you do all of My mitzvot, I won't bring the disease on you because I am God, your healer." Isn't yours a hit after prayer said at least new socks for thee? So, this is in our Torah now. Hashem, like I told you, sometimes He talks to you behind the scenes, sometimes He shows, "I’m here." So, the day of our conversion, what no one knew except her and I, is that I have another infection. It's extremely painful and I had to go to the hospital right after, instead of going to have the chuppah. I had to go to the emergency room. It was probably the biggest infection I ever had, and these infections kept growing and growing until either I had surgery or, God forbid, something worse happened. It's like having a cancer cell that doubles in size every day. So, I had one of those.

1:16:18It was extremely painful, but I was too excited because my wife was now going to become a righteous Jew. Kisui Rosh, Mitpachat, Tzniut, everything, mamash, overnight, unbelievable. Not really overnight, but the point is that we accepted everything. We just, everything we need to know. We're already in it for a couple of years by then. Now all I know is that immediately when she finishes, I need to go to the emergency room and B'ezrat Hashem hopefully survive. We have the test. The Beit Din asks the questions. She passes the test with flying colors. They say, now it's time to go to the mikveh. She goes to the mikveh. My pain stops. Instantly. Now, at this point, I'm so excited about the conversion. I'm not really asking too many questions of why did my pain stop? I don't really care. It stopped. Who's going to complain? But after she comes back, we're so excited. We're like, wow, it's amazing. Wow, Baruch Hashem, Baruch Hashem, Baruch Hashem. picture: we had a Skype session between us and other friends to tell them the good news and so on, and you see this look, literally. There's like, the sun is shining on our faces. It's something unbelievable. I don't know how. Don't ask me for explanations for such things. All you know is what I saw. I could show it to you, and I also know that my pain stopped. Now, as soon as she comes out, she goes, "Okay, so we're going to the hospital." I said, "No, why? Are you okay?" I'm like, "I'm not in pain. If I'm not in pain, I'm not going to the hospital. Let's go, look, have a chuppah right now."

1:17:45We have to be married today. Why? Because we live together. There's no time to waste. She's not going to move to a different apartment. We have to be kosher. If you're going to be kosher, 100%. 99% kosher is 100% treif. 99% truth is 100% lie. We go to the hotel to get dressed, and I go into the shower to change clothes. I take off my clothes and see something unusual. What's unusual? My whole body is full of blood. Full of blood! Apparently, there was a surgery. I just wasn't aware of it. There was a surgery, and I just wasn't aware of it. Surgery happened; the infection is out completely. She's the bakashim of Hashem. Hashem did something. No hospital, no infection, no nothing. And it wasn’t an illusion. It wasn’t something. There’s blood everywhere. Now, if you don’t believe it, it’s your problem. I know what I saw. My wife saw it also because everything was everywhere and...

1:19:04Just like the clothes were full of it. It's just, again, you don't feel it because you have the suit on and everything else to shield you. You don't feel it; you just feel like there's something unusual. You don't really know what's going on. Maybe it's sweat. It's really hot outside. Who knows? The last thing you think is that you're full of blood. You didn't go to war; nobody shot you. So that's what happened. Hashem says, "Ani," I don't know. I'm glad you're here. You want to heal? Do what I said. At that moment, we realized even more so, Hashem runs the show. At that point, we continued becoming more and more religious, dedicating more and more time to Torah, less and less to business. Business became really immaterial to us. We just cared less about it, even though the money continued deteriorating. By the time we got down to only about half a million dollars, which in comparison to what we used to have was nothing,

1:20:05I was already starting to give Shiurei Torah. Started because my rabbi told me, listen, the Gemara in Masechet Avodah Zarah says, if you're learning Torah without an intention to teach it, it's like someone who doesn't have a God. Because you're supposed to learn Torah to emulate Hashem, to learn His Midot. His number one Midah that's obvious is that He gives. So how are you going to take the Torah, the number one thing in all of creation, and not share it? Teach students. You don't have students? Teach your family. You don't have a family? Teach yourself. You have to teach somebody. Torah is not just for you to keep. So you have to share it. I said, "I don't know anything." It was okay. So anything that you don't know and anything you do know, combine it together and teach them that. Whatever you can, teach something. Learn Parashat HaShavua, teach that. Teach something. Basics are what we need in this generation. Parashat HaShavua. You think most people know Parashat HaShavua? They don't know Parashat HaShavua. They learned it when they were young, even I'm talking about frum people. I'm not talking about those who are more secular. Frum people learned Parashat HaShavua when they were six, seven, eight, nine years old. I tell people Parashat HaShavua sometimes with Rashi, and they react like, "Wow, it's a chidush." What chidush? It's Rashi. I haven't gone over it in 15, 20 years. When you learn Torah as a 20, 25, 30, or 35-year-old, it's very different than learning when you were 5, 10, or 15. Your brain is different. You understand things differently.

1:21:27So basics are a necessity. That means that everybody can teach Torah. Everybody, especially you guys that are learning Torah, you don't need to give chidushim. Chidushim is not really for most people in this generation. New insights, the new, you know, thinking you're the new Rashi, new Rambam, new Tosafot, you know, you don't need to be. You just know basic Parashat HaShavua, you know Mussar, you know how to read, you can teach Torah. That's what the generation needs. So we started teaching, Baruch Hashem, we started getting people to keep Shabbat. We started getting people to do teshuvah, and Hashem wanted to make sure that we know what He wants. He says, "Listen, this business you have that's making you a few dollars a month and you have half a million dollars still — it's really a distraction. So I'm gonna take that too." One day at 9:30 in the morning... have my money. I have some clients' money. Everything looks good. By 9:36, some crazy anomaly, which is called a black swan in business terms, happens. Literally, everything is gone. The trade goes wrong, and the value of whatever I had left goes to zero. This, in an almost 20-year career, has never happened to me. It doesn't happen to most people. It happened on that day.

1:22:43But that day happened to be a Tuesday. On Tuesdays, I have my shiur Torah. So at 9:35, I lost all the money that was left. At 9:36, the computer was turned off. At 9:37, I said, "Hashem natan, Hashem lakach, y’hi shem Hashem mevorach" (God gave, God took, may His name be blessed). At 9:38, I started learning Torah because I have to prepare for my shiur. Why? I'm not Moshe Rabbeinu. I'm not even the dust under his foot, but I do know who runs the show. It's Hashem. If Hashem wanted me to have the money, I'll have the money. If He doesn't, that means it's bad for me. If He wanted you to be rich, you'd be rich. You don't need to help Him. What He does want from you is the same thing He wanted for me. He wants you to learn; He wants you to teach. You don't know enough to teach? Focus more on learning. year, two years, three years, have an intention, have a plan to teach somebody. You're scared of talking in public and so on? Me too. But I know that when they paid me in the business world for 20 years to talk in public, I did it. I overcame the fear. Why? Because it was money. For money, we do everything. Hashem says, "I also pay cash. I also pay, just a different level of cash. It's eternal cash."

1:24:06So if we remember where the source of all blessing is, all of a sudden we start overcoming fear. All of a sudden the responsibilities, the obligations, we can start beating them. Because we're playing with the right tools. You boys have Torah. You have eternity. You think that they have anything? When you say every day, who are you referring to? The homeless guy in the street in San Francisco? Does he have a house? No. You're supposed to be referring to the best of them. You're referring to the best of them. If you think it's Trump, then it's Trump. If you think it's whoever it is, it is him. The best of them, the richest of them, the best-looking of them, the best of them, baruch Hashem that I'm not him. Baruch Hashem that I'm not him. Why? I have Torah. Torah is eternity. When the Arabs pray, they pray in the middle of the street. In New York, they pray in the middle of the street every day. They close off the streets for them to pray. They close off the streets. When they pray in the airport, they pray in the street. Everybody thinks this guy's going to blow up the plane. But the reality is he doesn't care what they think, with his little magic carpet in the middle of the street.

1:25:27He's proud. I'm jealous of him. I'm jealous of the Arabs. Why? They're proud. They have falsehood, and they're proud of their falsehood. The Christians, they open a church with 5,000 members on every corner. Yesterday, there was a fair next to my brother's house. There's some church maybe a mile away. People were literally coming out. They had a whole Luna Park, all types of things. I mean, just to show, it probably cost half a million dollars. People are filling in; they have food and this and theatrics. It's like a circus outside their church. To raise money for them? Easy. Why? Every single one of them knows that giving 10%, which they call a tithe, which to us is ma'aser, is the minimum requirement. Now, it doesn't make you a tzaddik; it's the minimum requirement. Why? Because they're proud of their falsehood. They go door to door. "Sir, do you know J.C. Penney? Let us show you. Let us tell you about him." "Yeah, but I'm Jewish." "Okay, so we'll teach you about the Jewish version." They go door to door with their idolatry, with their avodah zarah, caring less if it has a mezuzah or anything else. Why? They're proud of their falsehood. We, rabotai, have the truth. But we behave like we have falsehood.

1:26:51We're ashamed. We're embarrassed. We pray in the airport in the corner, so no one sees. We pray in the corner so no one sees. I don't want to bother them. What bothers them? Why are you bothering them having tefillin on? Somebody asked you what is this? See, this is what the Mashiach is gonna look like. This is what the Mashiach is going to look like—with the beard, the hat, and the tefillin on his head. That's what the Mashiach is going to look like. What do you think he's going to look like? The so-called god you have, the JCPenney, that's the Mashiach? Or do you think it's going to be Muhammad, who kills people for fun? This is what the Mashiach is going to look like—with the tefillin on his head. You could say it in a nicer way, but the point is, Rabotai, be proud. You have to be proud. You're a Jew. You have Torah. You have mitzvot. Stop playing scared. You're the one that has the truth. They pray in the middle of the street, while you barely are willing to go to shul sometimes. You tell people to teach Torah. No, but what if they say they don't like it? Did Hashem say, "Oh, listen, teach only if they like it? Teach only if they're going to listen to you?" Every single one of the prophets gave a message that no one wanted to listen to, including Moshe Rabbeinu. The Gemara in Moed Katan says that Moshe Rabbeinu got to a point where all of Am Yisrael thought that he was stealing their wives.

1:28:10Stealing their wives. Moshe Rabbeinu took them out of Egypt. Everybody's like, "Oh, he's taking our wives." Why? Because Moshe Rabbeinu left his wife because he wanted to be next to Hashem 24/7. Hashem says, "You can't be with your wife and Me at the same time." So Moshe Rabbeinu understood on his own level that he couldn't be with his wife intimately anymore. So everyone says, "Oh, Moshe Rabbeinu, he's left his wife. Why? Because he's going after our wives." Why would they think such a thing? Because the wives are listening to him and not us. When Am Yisrael asked their wives, "Give us your gold so we could make the golden calf," the wives said, "No, I'm keeping my earrings. Go get your own gold." But when Moshe Rabbeinu said, "Give me your jewelry. Give me your mirrors. Give me something for the Tabernacle that we're building," all the women gave. Ah, they give it to our Rabbi, but they're not giving it to us. Maybe he's with them or something. Something's wrong with this. He dealt with this. Moshe Rabbeinu dealt with people not wanting the message. You think you're not gonna deal with it? But that's the point. Every single one of the prophets had to deal with people going against them. That's how you know you have the truth. People are going to go against you. So, I know it's easy to like the material world. I was in it.

1:29:24Money houses, the whole gas behind it, the whole thing around it, all fancy-schmancy. This guy has another house, and he's building an extension to his house. And there's another floor, and there's another car, and there's more jewelry and all these different things. But Shlomo HaMelech already told us it's all nonsense. I'm telling you it's all nonsense. I'm telling you it's the same thing. Why? I lived it. I saw it at the time of need. At the time of need. If you are going to pray for what you have today at the time of need, when you really need someone to listen, when you really need someone to feel, when you really need someone to help, when you really need anything, only Hashem can help you. If you have this Torah, He's going to say, "You asked, I'm here. You asked, I'm here." Why? Because you made My house your house. You made your house My house. I'm there. But if we treat Torah like it's a Harry Potter book, and we just read whenever we like, and we do whenever we like, and we take the business world and the money world and the material world as a priority over our Torah, then Hashem says, "Okay, it's more important. You go look for help over there." Don't sell Hashem short. Because we have many Jewish businessmen, but we have very few Jews. Be the Jew.

1:30:47Business will come to you anyway, and that's why today, despite the fact that we lost all of the money we had, Baruch Hashem, we live much better—without exaggeration—than at any other time in my life. I don't know where the money's coming from; people donate in different ways, at different times, and so on and so forth. But I don't know how much. All I know is that whatever we need, we buy. When I go to the supermarket, we just buy whatever we need. I have no idea how, who, what, when, and where. No clue. All I know is to get whatever we need. I saw my rabbi do it. This is what I do. When I went to Israel, I saw my rabbi shopping for Shabbat. He said, bring a cart. I said, but you already have one. He goes, exactly. Somebody else coming? He goes, yeah, you and Hashem and everybody else. So I said, "Okay, fine, now." He doesn't shop like us. What does he do? He sees something or someone likes something. Instead of taking one or two and maybe looking at the price, he just pours it into the cart. He gets bread with two arms; it's unbelievable. You would think 500 people are showing up. You would think he makes, I don't know, $10,000 or $20,000 a day.

1:31:57I didn't shop like this when I had millions. I'm like, what is he doing? What's going on here? Now I thought this was like a joke, maybe a one-time thing, but I was there for two months. It's every week. And he buys, and he buys, and where does the money come from? We have no idea. So I saw this with my own eyes, and he's filling up his cart, and he finished his cart, so he starts filling up my cart. I said, "No, but I don't want it." He goes, "I do." And he buys, and he buys. And why? It's for Shabbat. Shabbat's coming. Okay. Does he eat on Shabbat? Yeah, he eats. He prepares for Shabbat. So he gets the food, and Shabbat over there is unbelievable. And I'm seeing this. It's like a must-see sight to me. It's unbelievable. And I just see him shopping and shopping and shopping as if there's 500 people, and nobody's showing up except us, my wife and me. And there's two babies. What do we have? Nothing. We barely eat. But Shabbat? Why?

1:32:58Hashem's there. Mamash, Hashem's there. And you feel it. So I see him, and so we go to the cashier. Now I have some money on me. So I'm thinking, okay, he probably makes $500 a month off the kollel. What does he make? The shopping here that we just bought is maybe $1,000. Meaning that the kollel doesn't pay half of what the shopping is. It doesn't make any sense. So I'm thinking, okay, before there's any busha, I'm already starting to grab some credit cards. So he gives the card to the... tell her. It goes through. I have no idea what just happened. We leave. I said, wow, what happened? He goes, oh, you just witnessed a miracle. I said, what miracle? He goes, it went through. He goes, what do you mean it went through? What do you mean it's a miracle? You didn't know you have it? He goes, no. How would I know what I have in the bank? He goes, you think I spend any time looking at my bank? That's emunah, Rabotai. Saw it. I'm trying to do it. I saw it. I'm trying to do this how we live. We don't charge for lectures because we don't want money to get in the way of kodesh. Someone wants to donate, b’havod. You don't want to donate, it doesn't make a difference anyway—Hashem pays the bills. We have a need, we buy it. How? I have no idea. What I'm trying to tell you is you don't need to help us with parnassah; what you need to help is you need to help yourself with some Torah.

1:34:24to learn some more and some more and some more and some more and eventually use it. Utilize it to teach the army side because the army is distant and far away. Teach them, get them over here. Instead of there being 10-20 guys, make there be 200. Show them how beneficial it is to learn from Hashem. Show them how good it is. Why? Because when you have Torah, you have everything. All of a sudden, your brain works the right way. All of a sudden, you understand the reason for your problems. The Torah doesn't solve your problems. It gives you a reason behind them. Problems don't go away. There's no why, though. You know where it's coming from. When someone asks you, "Where was God during the Holocaust?" you tell him, "What do you mean? He was right there pressing the button." That's what it says in Parshat Bechukotai. You do what I say, everything's going to be good: 13 verses of blessings. You don't do good: 48 curses, 48 things of what's going to happen. You see through the verses exactly the description of what happened during the Holocaust.

1:35:29He even says that the enemy will have a symbol of an eagle. The Nazis didn't have power outside of God. It was God Himself pushing the buttons. Same thing with the Egyptians, same thing with the Romans, same thing with everything else. So, what you're doing right now is pikuach nefesh. What you're doing right now to finalize everything we just talked about is pikuach nefesh. Don't think that money is pikuach nefesh. Money is not pikuach nothing. What you're doing right now is pikuach nefesh. You're saving lives. Number one, you save yourself. You save yourself by learning Torah, Parashat HaShavua, Gemara, Tosafot, everything, Shulchan Aruch, and so on and so forth. The Rabbi is teaching you an enormous amount of Torah. Every second you learn, you're saving yourself. Second thing is, you start teaching it to your family, to your friends, to anyone that will listen, and even if they don't want to listen. Why? Because you're saving their life. And when your friend is standing on the train tracks, and the train is coming, at the very least, be a friend. Tell them, "Hey, buddy, get out of the way."

1:36:38train is coming. If he's still driving on Shabbat, if he still thinks he's the one making money, if he still has a safek about who, what, when, and how in regards to creation, you teaching him Torah is saving his life. What you're doing is much more important than any doctor in the world. lawyer in the world, any executive in the world, anything in the world, because you have the truth and you can save people with it. So, b'ezrat Hashem, this gives all of us a little bit of chizuk to start taking our Torah seriously and realize this is where the gold is, this is where the prize is. There's nothing in the world better, not in an illusion, not in theory, not in reality, not anywhere; right here, the best place in the world. And... We start living that way. We start fulfilling Hashem's will. And may Hashem's name be blessed forever and ever. Any questions? Go ahead. Samech price. Ken. Ken. Ken.

1:37:53But at the same time, there is this responsibility. If you teach something wrong, all the sins of the people that you teach are going to be like yours. They are going to be considered as if you did them. So, it's an example. I'm just saying, you know my background, I come from a Conservative kind of background. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I watch these other things, and it's an example. I say, all right, that's what is right, and I teach it like that. and making a sin. And even in the Orthodox world, I understand that you said no to wigs, right? But there are a lot of rabbis that say, oh no, you need to wear a wig. So what I'm saying is, how do you know when you can start teaching? Because this is the thing, I mean, I'm just, I'm afraid of Hashem, you know, that He can say, you are making my sons commit a sin. So that's worse than even, Right, so the answer to that is, first off, reishit chochma yirat Hashem. The beginning of wisdom is fear of Hashem. So having fear of Hashem already is half the battle. So the fact that you're afraid is going to ensure that you're going to double-check everything before you start teaching it. That's number one. The second thing is, don't teach anything you don't know for sure.

1:39:09Unless you know for sure, meaning you could actually look with your eyes and see that the basic commentary says this is what it is — Rashi says this, Rambam says this — in essence, all you're doing is reading it. Only teach if you know for sure. If you don't know for sure, don't say a word. Don't say "I think it should," none of that. The second thing is, use the least amount of your opinion as you possibly can, preferably zero opinion, and... Your opinion is worth zero, just like my opinion is worth zero. All we care about is Hashem's opinion. As soon as we start putting our opinion into the Torah, we ruin it. We ruin it. So use less opinion, more of Hashem's opinion. So there's fear, there's less opinion, there's only doing things that you know for sure. And in regards to anyone that teaches wrong, the reality is it's because they're either not careful or because they don't care. Whatever the case may be, in the Conservative, Reform, and all of those people, they know the truth, they just choose otherwise. Now, b'ezrat Hashem, even they will do teshuva, and whoever doesn't, there's enough room in Gehinom for them too. But the point is, Abotai, is that the reality is

1:40:22that you have an opportunity to learn the Torah in a very simple way. In the old days, you had to travel to a different town to find someone who had a book. You would stay at his house for two or three months until you finished the book and then go home. Today, if you need anything, it's a phone call away, it's a button away, it's a book away. Everything is accessible, so getting the truth is very, very simple. Now, when you're getting books, make sure that the book comes from a kosher publisher. When you have a rabbi, make sure the rabbi is a kosher rabbi. So, there are plenty of ways to verify everything in the world. And just like you would double-check a deal for a million dollars 50 times before you do it, check what you're going to say 50 times before you do it. Because there's a consequence to it, like you said. So if you were going to buy a house, you would double-check, you would do an inspection, you would send somebody for a second opinion, a third opinion, a fourth opinion, a fifth opinion. You double-check an investment. Same thing with Torah. You have something that says, make sure that that's what it says. Double-check with your rabbi. Is this what he means? Is this what it says? Double-check. Once you know for sure that's what it means, that's the pshat, that's the simple meaning, publicize it to the rest of the world. And again, when you limit it and it has no opinion,

1:41:35You're already deducting 90% of the errors that happen. Usually, the errors happen because we use our opinion, because we think our opinion actually matters. We think that our opinion is very valuable, and the reality is that people's opinions are what has ruined the Torah over the last 3,000 years. Korach had an opinion. He had an opinion. He said, "Listen, there's a house full of Sifrei Torah." So that's more valuable than having a mezuzah on the wall. Moshe Rabbeinu says, logically it makes sense, but that's not Hashem's rule. We still have to have a mezuzah. Korach said, I don't agree with it. Yeah, it's your opinion. It's your opinion. Your opinion is irrelevant. So don't use your opinion. Use what Chachamim say, what Hashem said, and you'll stay out of trouble that way. Next question. Question about you sitting here in the battle for seven years and excruciating pain. Yes. Well, I mean, one was a false illusion that it was going to be over. I never thought that it was going to be seven years. When I first started, I thought that this is it. The first two months were over, so I figured, okay, it's gone. I

1:42:48Then, after two years and all of it going, and then three years of going through it, I started realizing, okay, this is not going away. But hopefully, the next surgery—so I always had this false sense of hope that, you know, we're gonna find our solutions. We kept going to different doctors, and we kept trying different things. And, you know, we tried doing different things, tried donating money, doing the segulah, praying here and there, doing different things, putting, in essence, a bandage on a heart attack. Trying to fix it in different ways. But after seven years, I gave up. After seven years, I didn't want to go to doctors anymore. I didn't want to take any medicine anymore that I didn't have to. And I got to a point of being completely hopeless. So, my false sense of hope lasted that long because I kept trying new things. Okay, so the first 30 doctors weren't good. Okay, number 31 is gonna be the one. That's the mashiach.

1:43:49So you go to 31. 31 doesn't work, you go to 32. Yetzer Hara is going to come to you 2,000 times. 2,000 times he's going to come to you to make you sin. Now, if he fails 2,000 times, what does he do? Another 2,000 times. He isn't finished. Yetzer Hara is going to give you a false sense of hope as much as possible. That's why it says, everything is from Hashem, except fear of Hashem. You doing the right thing or the wrong thing, that's in your hands. Everything else is in the hands of Hashem. Yetzer Hara is going to try to make you do the wrong thing constantly. Only you can decide, okay, this is wrong, I shouldn't do it. And that's it, that's teshuva. Teshuva is for all of us. Everybody has to do teshuva to some extent. Some people for Shabbat, some people for Taharat HaMishpacha, some people for their eyes, some people for wasting seed. ...something for a million and a half different things. There's a lot of things we need to do teshuva for. The reality today is that teshuva is not easy at all but it's necessary. Nothing good in the world is easy. Emunah is not easy. Talking about emunah is nice, it's enjoyable, there are good stories. Developing emunah is very difficult, and the reason why is because there are two ways that you need to learn emunah: one is from books or from the rabbis...

1:45:08Enthused from experience, meaning a nightmare experience. That's how you learn emunah. You don't learn emunah purely from books. You could read books from here until the world ends. You're not gonna develop full emunah from books. Emunah is developed through experience. That's why Hashem says to the Prophet, "I am God that teaches you to help you." Let me teach you to help you. What other reason would you teach me? Meaning He's teaching you through these difficult experiences. He's teaching you Emunah. You didn't have a car, and you didn't believe you were going to get a car, and now you have a car. But you had to go through a whole journey to finally get the car. What was the whole journey for? Why didn't Hashem just give you the car right away? Because He wanted you to learn that eventually there's going to be light at the end of the tunnel. Don't lose hope so quickly. When Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel All they had to their name was kash, was straw. They felt bad for themselves. Hashem sent Eliyahu HaNavi. Eliyahu HaNavi shows up as a poor man. He says, "Excuse me, we need some kash. We need some straw. We had a baby. Do you happen to have any straw?" They said, "Oh, straw we have." They have nothing else. All they have is straw. So they give him straw. He has a sack of straw. They give him straw. So the Chachamim asked, if you're already sending Eliyahu HaNavi, why not just send Eliyahu HaNavi with a check for a million dollars?

1:46:33You know that they need. You know that they're poor. They feel bad about themselves. If you already know, give Eliyahu HaNavi. You already sent him. You already went through the whole journey of coming. Send him with a check for a nice cool million or maybe a box full of diamonds or something. Why are you asking for kash? Asking for straw? What kind of Eliyahu HaNavi is this? If Eliyahu HaNavi came with a check, it would only solve the problem temporarily. Because the problem is not the money. Problem is that until that day, we didn't know how to be happy. Until that day, we thought that someone that is an ashir, someone that's rich, has a lot of money. What Hashem was trying to teach Rabbi Akiva is, who's rich? Someone happy with their share. You weren't happy with the straw; now I'll show you somebody that doesn't even have the straw, and I'll remind you that the straw is very valuable. And... That's ashir. That's rich. Be happy with what you have. Be happy with what you have. The only reason why Hashem gave you ambition to want more is not so you can want more money or more houses or more cars. It's to want more Torah.

1:47:45That's the ambition. Ambition is supposed to be used for that. Now again, some people have the bracha, like Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, that Hashem makes them very rich materially. Or Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, that Hashem made them very rich materially. His ma'aseh, like did the math, was worth about a billion two every year. He was very, very rich. But the point is, that's not because they worked. overtime and a second job and a third job, and they didn't see their family for months at a time and had a few careers going. No, it's because they dedicated their life to Torah, and Hashem made the rest of the world around them work, and He wanted them to have money too. Meaning that if Hashem wants you to be rich, it has nothing to do with your job. And I know it's difficult to believe, I know, but that's the point of the story. The point of the story is not just a terrible experience of pain and agony. The point of the story is that despite all the money in the world, it was worthless when it didn't have any beracha. But if you're learning Torah, you're guaranteeing yourself every dollar you have in your pocket has beracha. Once it has beracha, that dollar can extend to be a million.

1:48:5550 bucks. Sometimes people give me fifty dollars for a lecture. I talk for three or four hours, and they give me $50. That $50 can carry me for the entire Shabbat. How? I have no idea. But at the same token, if I go shopping and the cashier says, "Oh sir, it's $450 for one day," the same card works also. How? Hashem runs the world. That's the point of the Torah that you're learning, Rabbotai. Hashem runs the world. Not the job, not Wall Street, not the banks, not the mortgage company. Hashem runs the world. The more we realize that, the easier life becomes. The more successful you become in everything you do. In Torah, in mitzvot, and even in business. Why? Because now, you're going in the right direction. Now you're doing your role, and you're letting Hashem do His role. You're not going into His business. People are trying to help Hashem. They're trying to get a second job, they're trying to work overtime, they're trying to do all this wheeling and dealing to do extra. What is it like? It's like me going into somebody else's business and telling them, "By the way, I don't like the way you're selling stuff. I don't like this, I don't like that." Hey sir, it's not your business, it's my business. Mind your business, get out of my store.

1:50:10We're asking Hashem all these questions. No, I'm trying to help Him with extra jobs and extra time and extra dedication. We're going into His business, and He's trying to tell you, "Hey, get out of My store. This is not your business. Mind your business. Go learn some Mishnayot, go learn some Shulchan Aruch, go learn how to be a Jew first. Then you can talk to Me about how to run My shop. Go learn how to be a Jew, go learn how to do your job." And that's what we have to focus on, Rabotai. We have to learn how to do our job. How do you know you're doing a good job? When you're so excited about it, you're advertising it to the whole world. That's how you know. Because when you love what you do, you can't help yourself. You have to advertise it. When Torah is coming out of your lips non-stop, you're non-stop. Anyone you see, "I listened to this parashah, come, come, come." "I don't know what parashah, I have to have a meeting." "Okay, five minutes." "No, the whole parashah in five minutes." I'll give you something: just when you're oozing, then you know you're doing a good job. Why? Because you're living it. But you're just learning it by yourself. No one knows you're learning. No one even knows you're Jewish because sometimes you can't tell the difference. Sometimes the Muslim, the Jew, everybody looks the same. The guy's embarrassed to put a kippah on. He puts a kippah in his pocket, only when he goes to Shul does he keep it on. Why are you embarrassed? The Muslim's not embarrassed.

1:51:30The Christian's not embarrassed. How come you're embarrassed? So when you're telling people, hey, this is what Hashem said, you're constantly telling people, telling people, your wife, your friend, your this, your that. All you want to talk about is Hashem. People, it's a leitzanut (mockery) to hold the Mishnah and all the different things, instead of talking about the basketball players and the baseball players and the football players and this guy makes this much money and that guy makes that much money, and the politics of this way and Trump should do this and Trump should do that. Who cares what you think about what they should do? Everybody talks about politics like their opinion matters. Do you think Trump is going to stop because, "Oh, Steve said I should fire my Secretary of the Treasury?" Who cares? People spend their whole lives talking about things that have no effect anyway. Oh, I think that the Fed, you know, the Fed chair should increase rates. Who cares what you think anyway? Do you think the Fed chairman is going to say, "Oh yeah, you know what? Steve said I should increase rates. I'm going to increase rates, guys. We're going to have a meeting, emergency meeting. Steve, in the middle of California, said I should increase rates."

1:52:39Why are you even talking about it? What purpose does it serve? Oh yeah, LeBron James just signed a $50 million contract. Is he paying your bills? Why do you care how much money he makes? People that talk about other people's money, it's the lowest form of conversation. Who cares about how much he makes? Why do you care? Is he paying your bills? If you were broke, is he gonna send you a check in the mail? Hey, listen, I'll help you out because you talked about my salary last year. And you watched a few games on ESPN. Who cares how much he makes? These are nonsensical conversations that the yetzer hara puts in your head. Waste time. Waste time. Waste time. Waste time. Waste time. Waste time. Why? Because when you waste time, that means you're not learning Torah. You're not learning Torah, you're not killing the yetzer hara. You're not killing the yetzer hara, he's winning. You have Torah. You have Torah. You know what it means to have Torah? There are 8 billion people in the world. Not really 8 billion, it's like a rounding. It's like 7.92 billion, meaning they round off like 80 million. Which means that the 20 million Jews we know of is not even a rounding error.

1:53:50Not even a rounding error. Okay, now out of the 20 million Jews, only about 3 million keep Shabbat. Unfortunately, only 3 million. Out of the 3 million that keep Shabbat, a relatively small percentage actually know Torah. For those people, Hashem runs the world. You have 8 billion people in the world just filling up space and... 20 million he wants them to do everything they don't always listen. Out of the 20 million, 3 million do some stuff. Out of the 3 million, only a few are superstars. You're in the kollel. You're one of those superstars. The world is created for you, and you're thinking you should talk about LeBron James or Trump or any of these other people that are just filling up space. It's like a guy that has a castle full of diamonds, but he wants to go play with sand and... For what? You have Torah. You're the superstar. You are the superstar. What are you wasting your time talking about these people? Go spread the news. Go recruit other people. Go tell, hey, hey, listen, stop filling up space. Stop filling up space. And that's why the Gemara in Masechet Pesachim says that someone who is an Am Haaretz and doesn't know Torah, really, according to Hashem, shouldn't be allowed to eat meat.

1:55:12Why? The cow is fulfilling its role in the world. He's not. The cow is better than him. He shouldn't be allowed to eat the cow. That's what the Torah says. That's what the Torah says. Someone who doesn't learn Torah should not be allowed to eat meat. We still allow it. But in reality, according to Hashem, he shouldn't be allowed to eat the cow. Why? The cow is better than him. You have to run. You have to write. Do you know what it means? You have to run. You learn to write ten minutes, an hour, two hours—whatever you learn every day, you are part of the few that Hashem runs the world for. If that's not something to celebrate and run in the middle of the street, jumping around, yelling "Yay," what is? What is? You understand? That's what you have to wake up every day and remind yourself. When you say, "Modeh Ani," that's what you're saying. That I'm one of the few that learns Torah non-stop. B'ezrat Hashem, this will give you enough power to continue learning and continue teaching. B'ezrat Hashem, all of you will become big Talmidei Chachamim, great teachers. B'ezrat Hashem, all of you will become big Talmidei Chachamim, great teachers.