What’s The Point Of Life?

0:12Good to be here at Pnei Sephardim. Nice to see some new faces. We'll get some more people to come soon. We always have to look at the clock and then compare it to Israeli time, and we know there's always a little bit of a difference. It's one of the things that any time we work with converts, I tell them, listen, if you come on time, they're going to question your whole life, if you're Jewish or not. So once you become Jewish, you have to show up late. So Baruch Hashem, some of my students listen to me even before the conversion. They listen even before the conversion. During the training, they already start coming late. So Baruch Hashem, we have lots of information, a lot of interesting things in regards to the personal story that some people like to hear. And also, I always like to add some Mussar Haskel that we could learn from in addition to the story itself. But if the Mashalim are a little more interactive, meaning that it's not prepared, so if you have something in the middle of the shiur, don't worry about it. You can raise your hand, and you can ask a question at any time. As long as it has something to do with what we're talking about, no problem. If it doesn't, we can still answer it.

1:27But the key of every shiur is that I want everyone to walk home with something. Leave home, go and get something from the shiur. You're going to get some type of chizuk. Something in your life is going to change. That's the point of every shiur. If somebody comes to a shiur Torah and they leave the same as they came in, they completely wasted their time. Completely wasted their time. And the Rav, whoever the speaker was, is going to be judged that way in Shamayim. And unfortunately today, My Rav told me that we learned this one time, and he said, you know, unfortunately sometimes you have certain speakers that are very popular, and they can get crowds of 500 people, 1,000 people at some events. And it's a big waste. Why? Because sometimes you have 500 people in front of you, and sometimes the shiurim give people the impression that everything is okay, no one needs to change, and the whole shiur is just full of jokes, and it's laughing, and it's funny, which is good for entertainment purposes but not for a shiur Torah. Meaning that a shiur Torah is supposed to do something for you. You're already a diamond, but anyone that knows about diamonds knows that diamonds could always become a little bit better.

2:43If you cut it a little bit more, if it reflects the light a little more, a little more, a little more, it becomes more valuable. So a speaker needs to always know that he's talking to diamonds, but at the same time, these are uncut diamonds. They're not perfect like they're supposed to be. So if Hashem gave him an opportunity to speak to 500 people, to 5 people, to whatever it is, that means that Hashem gave him an agreement that He's going to hold him to it. Which means that after 120, a person comes up to Shamayim, Hashem is going to say, "Listen, in your lifetime, I gave you an opportunity to speak to 500,000 people." All the shiurim, 500 people, 200 people, 50 people, 5 people, this person, that person, all that. After a whole lifetime, you go up to Shamayim, Hashem will say, "Oh, you reached 500,000 people. How many of those 500,000 people did teshuvah? How many of them did anything?" And He's going to start showing the person different things. Oh, see, oh, this one guy, he laid tefillin three times. Okay, good. Chazak u'Baruch. Three times is good, but it's not good for Olam Haba yet. Oh, this guy started eating kosher, but then he stopped three weeks later. This guy, oh, this guy did teshuvah. Okay, so you have one guy, you have two guys, you have three guys. And then they compare it in comparison to the number of zechut that Hashem gave you. Hashem gave you 500,000 people.

4:05and you have one person who did teshuvah and the other 499,999, nothing changed. So they're going to evaluate, okay, why didn't they change? Well, let's review every shiur. They review every shiur. It's like, look, in this shiur you told them that "Kol Yisrael yesh lahem chelek leOlam Haba," which is from the Mishnah. So you told everybody that everything's okay. So why should anybody change? They came to the shiur feeling okay. They left the shiur feeling okay. In fact, they felt even better about themselves because you called everybody Tzadik. Ay Tzadik, Hay Tzadik, Tzadika, everybody Tzadik, Tzadik, Tzadik. Even though she forgot to wear clothes, even though he doesn't even have a kippah that he owns himself, he borrows from the Beit Knesset every time. But everybody felt they were a Tzadik; they came in, everybody left as a Tzadik. That's why no one changed. So in Shamayim, they judged the speaker accordingly. meaning that Hashem gave you an opportunity. He gave you a lot, and He also gave you the responsibility. And if a person doesn't take advantage of that responsibility, there are several places in the Gemara that talk about it. Gemara, Masechet Avodah Zarah, Masechet Shabbat, Masechet Sanhedrin, a few places talk about the same thing. It talks about the mitzvah,

5:24You must rebuke your people. And the Gemara says, if he has the ability, if Hashem gives him the blessing, where his crowd is his family. His family. And he doesn't rebuke his family. He doesn't tell them the truth. He doesn't tell them to stop driving on Shabbat. He doesn't tell them that modesty is not a minhag. It's halacha. He doesn't tell them that kosher is inside the house and outside the house. Not just whenever you feel like it. He doesn't tell them. So he just lets everybody decide for themselves. And Shamayim will say, "Oh, you didn't tell them. You knew the truth. You didn't tell them. Everybody's din that's in the family, anyone that doesn't do teshuva, their din is on you also." So now, poor guy, he thinks he kept mitzvot, everything is good. He went to Beit Knesset. He put on tefillin, he goes up to Shamayim, and they call him mechalel Shabbat. They call him like he ate treif. They call him all these different things. He says, why? He says, because you had an opportunity to tell your brother, tell your sister, tell your son, tell your wife. You had an opportunity to tell them. We put them in your life. They were in your house. You didn't tell them. How are they going to know? Gemara continues and says, what about if he has an opportunity to influence a whole kehillah?

6:42He's a rabbi of a Beit Knesset. So, I'm a big yes, but the Beit Knesset has a hundred, two hundred people. The Gemara says if he doesn't tell them the din, all 200 people's sins are on him. They also get punished, but him also. Now he has the din of 200 people. He goes up to Shamayim, and he has the consequence of what happened to 200 different families and... What if he's gadol hador? What if he's the biggest rabbi as he's a famous speaker, he gets a thousand people a week? A thousand people a day? Some people are so well known they can get three or four lectures a week, each lecture with 500 people. What about that guy? They say even if he has been given the opportunity to speak to the entire world, he's so well known that he's speaking to the entire world, and he doesn’t tell them the truth and... Then the din of the entire world goes on him. Meaning that if a person is going to choose this profession, if you will, to teach people Torah, to tell people what Hashem said, he has to think about it twice. Why? Because it's not worth it. It's not worth it to do this if you're going to sugarcoat everything. And unfortunately, today, this is what we have all...

8:03a standard in many places, and many, you know, people are very confused about what's the purpose of life. Why should I live? Why should I do teshuva? Why should I stay on the derech? Why should I not get off the derech today, and so on and so forth. Why should I do all of this stuff? This is the biggest confusion of the generation. People simply have no idea why they should even live and... Today, I got a story of a poor 27-year-old girl. I think she was Jewish. I'm just not sure. The only reason why I think she was Jewish is because she says that one of her favorite foods was Bamba. Americans usually don't eat Bamba. But she was a very accomplished... dietitian of some kind. As you know, in New York, she had an apartment in Manhattan, and she was doing extremely well for herself. She was traveling constantly all over the world, trying every treif that she could possibly find, but highlighting it for people to follow this diet plan so they could look good and look like a celebrity. She lived what most people consider the life and

9:15Young, beautiful, lots of money, travel at will. What else do you want in life? Well, last night she decided to commit suicide. And she wrote a note. What is the summary of the whole note? There's no point to life. That's the note. I wish I would have met her two days ago. Two days ago I would have met her. An hour before, I would give her 500 points to life. 500 points to life that she never heard of in her life. Because if she would have heard one of them, she wouldn't have killed herself. But she lived 27 years in this world. She got everything everybody wants. What does everybody want? Everybody wants money, everyone wants to look good, everyone wants fame and fortune, and all the materialism of the world. Everyone wants to be in Hollywood. She had it. She said there's no point. She decided to hang herself.

10:16How many celebrities kill themselves on a yearly basis? The people that everybody looks up to. Every year they have these events like the Oscars and all types of award shows, and so on, and they usually have a ceremonial filming towards the end of all the ones who died during that year. And every year, a few of the people who died, they didn't die of natural causes. He died on purpose. Why would the person that everybody looks up to, the one that has all the money, has all the fame, has all the fortune, looks beautiful, has everything, why would such a person kill themselves? The reason is, Rabotai HaYekarim, is because for the most part, most people in the world, and by most I mean the overwhelming majority of people, something like 99.9%, of the world simply do not know what the point of life is. Now, they think they know it, and they try to go after it like I used to think I knew it and went after it. But when I arrived at the wrong address or I arrived at the right address but it was wrong, you start losing the value of life. You start realizing, "I got what I wanted, but now what?"

11:41This is what the Torah HaKedoshah is supposed to teach us. Now, there are many people who learn Torah, but they still don't know what the point of life is. And sometimes that's because they learn Torah superficially. They learn Torah like, unfortunately, they learn Torah theoretically, to do things, you know, to keep a few mitzvot, to tell a few nice stories. When it comes to do you believe that Hashem runs the world to such an extent? That He's responsible for every single thing in your life, including whether the chair you're sitting on right now is going to break, whether the light is going to continue working for the next couple of hours, or whether the check that somebody gave you today — he's a multi-millionaire, and he gave you a check for $50 — whether it's going to clear or not, He's deciding that. Now, surprisingly, there was an organization that came out with research about a year and a half ago called Nishma Research, and they said that only 51% of religious Modern Orthodox Jews believe this. Meaning that half of the religious Jews today that are Modern Orthodox believe that Hashem actually runs the world to such an extent.

13:03that He makes sure that everything and anything in your life works. The check clears, your vision works, your bank works, your employees, everything works—meaning Hashgacha Pratit. He's monitoring everything. Only 51% believe this. Rabbeinu Bachya says, a person that does not believe in Hashgacha Pratit is worse than an idol worshiper. Why? An idol worshiper, even though he's guaranteed Gehenom, he doesn't insult God to the same extent. Why? Because even the idol worshiper has a limit of how many idols he worships. He worships two gods, three gods, four gods. It's limited. He's not worshipping anything. He just worships. He has a limit. The elephant, the cow, and the mouse. Okay? So you decide he has three gods. Wrong, but still it's three. The guy that doesn't believe, the woman who doesn't believe in Hashgacha Pratit, have an unlimited amount of gods. Why? The customer came in, he's now God. Why? Because I have to give this customer everything, all of me, to make sure that I get the money.

14:20Because you think that the whole thing is only going to happen if you're good at what you do and if you're going to convince them. Meaning, now you're starting to worship the customer. Then you go to the bank, you want to apply for a loan. Guess what? The loan guy, that guy that makes $35,000 a year but acts like he makes $35 million, the guy that's going to decide whether you're going to get the loan or not, he became God now. Why? Because you're so worried when you're about to meet him. You wear a tie all of a sudden, and a jacket, and you start talking appropriately. Yes, yes, we have a very good business. And it's, how many employees do you have? We don't have employees yet. Where's your office? We don't have an office yet. But listen, let me, we have a very good idea. And you're so worried when you're talking to him. Why? Because this guy is like, you feel, he's going to decide whether you get the death penalty or not. If he gives you the loan, you get the deed of life. No loan? He became God. A person that does not believe in Hashgachah Pratit literally makes every single encounter they have in their life into God. Rabbeinu Bachya says this is not only horrible; it's a constant insult to Hashem. It's worse than the idol worshiper. So, Torah HaKedoshah is supposed to teach us not just the halachot, not just the laws, but also that Hashem...

15:43...here with us running every single little thing that happens in our life. Sometimes, the message that we get from different people is not clear. It's not clear why because sometimes you have somebody that is going to tell you different things that will confuse you, or you don't ask the right questions. So, it's very, very important for everybody to always ask the right questions and always look for the answer if you didn't get the answer you want, and... It didn't make sense. For example, I asked, 20-something years ago, I asked the Rabbi, "Do they have dinosaurs in the Torah?" And he told me, "No." I used this as an excuse to not listen to anything else the Torah says. I didn't know the rest of what the Torah said. I just knew that if the Torah doesn't have dinosaurs, there's something wrong with it. That was one of my excuses. It started a domino effect of excuses for why I shouldn't listen to everything else. If it doesn't have dinosaurs, something's wrong with it. Why? I saw dinosaurs in the museum. I saw dinosaurs on TV. I saw dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the movie. It looks real. Maybe one of them was real. Who knows? So in my teenage mind, I was like, if there's no dinosaurs in the Torah, there must be something wrong.

17:01The reality is there are dinosaurs. But the point is that a person needs to know that sometimes you can ask people certain questions, and they may not know the answer. If you didn't get the answer that you want, you have to go look further. You have to look deeper. And this is what we talked a little bit about last night. Now, this was one of my biggest problems for most of my life: I had a lot of questions. A lot of questions. I like to think. I like to for the meaning of things, and I like to get to some level of conclusion. So when I went to different religious figures that I knew, whether it was at the Beit Knesset or I would meet somebody, or they would come to my office and I would ask once in a while a question, they would give me an answer or they gave me something that didn't make any sense with no explanation and no source. This fed the fuel of my Yetzer Hara and When I decided to listen to my rabbi's advice, which was to become a speaker and teach Torah, I decided that no matter what, I need to know everything that the average person is going to ask. Everything that the average person is going to ask, which are the same questions that I asked, I...

18:15without sugarcoating it, without being afraid of whether they can handle it or not. The reason why is because a person can live their life for 20, 30, 40, or 50 years without ever really having a purpose. So I started my journey by coming to the United States when I was 10 years old. This was about 30 years ago, and in Israel, we were considered, I guess, equivalent to Modern Orthodox. We went to a semi-religious school where we kept our words each seat, but there were boys and girls, like it's very common today, in the same school even if they're teenagers, and aside from that, again, we learned a lot of secular studies also. Aside from that, again, we learned a lot of secular studies also. Not everybody was exactly as religious as you're supposed to be according to halacha, but this is how we grew up, and we were very modern. So, we came here, and it didn't take too much to break. When you've already made a few leniencies, you already played with the gray area one too many times. You get used to the gray area.

19:29Now, if you ask any thief, any person that's ever stolen a lot of money, did you intend to steal all that money? 99 out of 100 times, no. White-collar crimes. I'm not talking about people that are murderers. I'm talking about white-collar crimes. People that cook the books in a big company. You know, they cheat on their earnings. They cheat on their financials in order to inflate their stock. They didn't start out that way. They didn't start out with the intention of cheating. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times. I studied this. Why did they do it? They did it because they said, "Listen, when I started the company, everything was going well, but in order to get the loan, in order to get the loan to improve, I had to cheat a little bit." The gray area by telling the banker that we are making 10 million dollars in revenues, even though we're only making one. Why? Because I was expecting 10 million. I was expecting 10 million, so I wrote what I was expecting instead of what I was actually doing. Why? Because if I told him what I was actually doing, he'd lend me five dollars, but if I told him what I'm expecting, he'd lend me a million. And...

20:35understands a big difference. It's a little gray area. What does he care? I know I'm confident; I know I'm gonna make the money, and you see it worked out. The guy played with the gray area; he lied. We'd love to shake it, to hug the Torah says, but he didn't. Not only didn't he go away from it, he did it, and what ended up happening is it worked out. It actually worked out. The deal worked out. He made a little bit of money. Now the company is worth more money, little by little he's... few more loans, a few more deals, and with every deal, the line—the red line—goes a little further. Why? Because if my little lie, my gray area lie on the original application, if I didn't do it, I wouldn't be here today. He justifies it: I wouldn't be here today if I didn't lie originally for that million-dollar deal; there would be no 100 million dollar company. So he justifies: "So now I want to get another $100 million deal. So I have to do the same thing." So he tells the next company, the investment bankers, the brokers, all the different companies, "Like, listen, yeah, we're going to make $500 million this year. We're going to make $500 million this year." And they say, "Oh, we're going to value based on this $500 million." And he's thinking to himself, "There's no way in the world we're going to make $500 million this year."

21:51just that they're thinking I'm gonna make $500 million in profit. What they don't understand is I meant $500 million in revenues, in sales. But I didn't say it; I said we're gonna make $500 million. It's their problem that they understood $500 million in profits. I didn't tell them $500 million in profits; I said we're gonna make $500 million. He knows they understood $500 million in profits. And he knows he meant $500 million in revenues. But he says, this is a gray area. It's their problem. They misunderstood me. It's their problem. Why? It's a gray area. You misunderstood. You should have asked the question. The line just went a little further. The year passed. Hey, where's the $500 million in profits? No, I didn't mean $500 million in profits. You don't understand me. I meant $500 million in sales, you silly guy. No, come on. Don't be so silly. We're only a three-year-old company. He wants to make $500 million in profits. Come on, stop joking around. The guy's joking around. The guy feels like he wants to bury himself. Why? He valued the company when he made an investment, something else. But he's stuck now. He can't get his money back. Now, another step. He starts cheating on certain things. He knows that there are certain laws.

23:11us where there are certain things, certain write-offs. There are certain ways that you can deduct things from expenses. There are certain things you can do with the books. You can start calculating your inventory as if you sold it. You can start calculating inventory you don't even have yet, and so on and so forth. Little by little, the guy starts creating a kitchen... his accounting department, he's cooking the books, and eventually, they realize, like many companies, one day they announce, "We're sorry, we overstated earnings for the last 10 years. In reality, we don't have 10 billion dollars in the bank; we actually have 100 million dollars in the bank, and we have 10 billion dollars in debt. If anybody wants to buy the debt, we have that." And what ends up happening, the stock crashes to nothing, a few people go to jail, and everybody loses their money. Because there's no time to sell the stock. The stock goes down 99% before the stock even opens. And then there are the lawsuits and so on, but they say to the guy, what happened? I didn't intend for it to get this big. I just started one way; it got a little bigger and bigger, a little more, a little more. Over time, people were expecting me to win. I couldn't disappoint them.

24:29And he justifies this. So, when a person starts breaking some of the laws that are big laws in Torah, whether it's Shabbat, or it's Taharat HaMishpacha, or it's Kashrut, or it's even Limud Torah, Rabbi Yochanan said, anyone who doesn't make Eitim LaTorah, anyone who doesn't make time to learn Torah each day, not going to be resurrected with the dead. Why? Why should he? He doesn't even know how to live a kosher life. If he doesn't learn Torah every day, he doesn't have to learn 24 hours a day, but he just has to make time to learn Torah every day. Rabbi Yochanan says if you don't make that time, you have a serious problem in your mind. Why? Eventually, this resurrection of the dead—you want to be brought back, right? How? So, when a person starts playing with the gray area, he says, "Listen..." Technically, this is not the worst thing in the world. It's like a little sin. It's not a big sin. He starts evaluating the sins like you evaluate stocks. It's like a small sin. This is a big sin. This is a sin. What ends up happening is the line gets further and further. The line gets further and further. The little sins become bigger sins. The bigger sins become even bigger sins. And little by little, he becomes completely secular, but he still pretends to be religious. Why? Because he still has the kippah.

25:51He still goes to the Beit Knesset on Shabbat, and he feels religious. In reality though, as soon as he finishes the Beit Knesset, he goes home, he plays with his phone. Sometimes he even watches TV. Sometimes he'll even drive to Beit Knesset and feel perfectly fine. I remember when I lived in Boca Raton, I would say they had at least 100 to 150 cars. 100 to 150 cars driving to Beit Knesset on Shabbat. They had a whole parking lot for them. That whole separate parking. They didn't want to have the parking lot right next to the Beit Knesset. So they have a lot next to the Beit Knesset. Meaning it's like you could throw a rock right over this little thing. That's where the other parking lot was. So we don't see it because there are trees. We pretend it's not there. We pretend there aren't 200 cars there. And 200 cars, you see people coming out with a big kippah, with a nice tallit bag. And you say, this is a talmid chacham. I know you're not going to come because you're... And he goes inside the Porsche. Oh, not to me, come, he can't count for a minyan. Why? He's driving on Shabbat. We think he started this way. No, it's breaking one law and then a little one, a little one, and you make that so. When we came to the United States, we were already weak and...

27:10What ended up happening is that as soon as we found out that the schools in America are very expensive, even back in those days, we figured that it's an American educational system. Let's join the American educational system. We didn't know that as soon as you join public school, you become a goy automatically. And that's what happened. My three brothers all went to public school. My youngest brother was still a baby, just two years old. But the rest of them went to public school, and literally overnight, all of the mitzvot we learned our whole life went right into the garbage. The only time during the year we had a reminder that the mitzvot even exist is on Friday, when we have kiddush. So we say Shalom Aleichem. After we finish Shalom Aleichem, we turn on the TV and... You finish Shalom Aleichem. Thank you. Why? The malachim, they came to say Shalom Aleichem. Yeah, somebody comes to your house and they're going to say Shalom Aleichem. Say Shalom Aleichem. So they come and they sit down with you, watch the TV. You don't think about it. You just go, Shalom Aleichem. The angels came. Come, watch TV. We're watching Oprah. Watching Transformers. Come, come. Good one, good one. Let's watch TV together.

28:30As you get a little older, as you say Shalom Aleichem, you sanctify the yayin, then you sanctify the car, go to the movies, go to the club. So what ends up happening is that it didn't start this way, but it ended this way. And you go through life little by little, making that line. Within a short period of time, my brothers and I became pretty much full-blown goyim, where simply mitzvot were just a certain reminder that you're a Jew. If somebody asks you where you're from, you say Israel. you know, which by default means you're Jewish most of the time. And you know, you have the chagim, you know, on Rosh Hashanah, you eat some apples with some dvash and some other strange food that no one really likes. But you feel like you have to do it. On Pesach, you eat matzah with chocolate and you're jealous of everybody else who's eating ice cream because in those days there wasn't kosher ice cream. Everything was chametz. A lot of things have changed in the last 30 years, and...

29:31And then on Yom Kippur, you fast and torture yourself. How? By sleeping for 22 out of the 25 hours. You sleep for 22 hours, then you go to Beit Knesset for Ne'ila. And then you ask everybody during the prayer, instead of praying, you ask everybody, who donated? Who donated? Did Sammy donate $20,000 this year? Because last year it was $20,000. Did he donate $20,000 this year? Oh, no, no. This year he did better. He did $25,000. Tzaddik. Tzaddik. What? Tzaddik. $25,000 this year? What? Tzaddik, this guy. He drove to Beit Knesset on Yom Kippur. Tzaddik. Tzaddik. Why? Because it all becomes the whole Shulchan Aruch. The book of laws of Torah becomes a minhag. That's why it's like a little bit of a joke among religious people to say, if Shabbat was a minhag, everybody would keep it. It's a reality. The minhagim we know, halachot we don't know so much. This was our life. And we had many rabbis come to the community, come to the synagogues, come to the house, a couple of shiurim here and there,

30:3817 years old, I had a break from college, or 18 years old, at a break from college. During that time, somebody motivated my dad to convince me to go to a yeshiva for a couple of weeks instead of wasting my life doing nothing during the spring break. I said, "Okay, no problem." I went, I liked it, and I decided to do teshuva. Problem is, teshuva is not just putting on a tzitzit, a mitpachat, eating some kosher, and you're finished. Teshuva requires learning every day. If you don't learn every day, it's not going to last. So I did teshuva, and I started wearing tzitzit, but no kippah. I was scared of the kippah. Tzitzit was easier for me because no one could see it. I wore tzitzit, and I started laying tefillin, and I would listen to a few shiurim here and there on cassette tapes. You guys know what cassette tapes are? You guys ever see a cassette tape? I have to know what I'm dealing with here; you guys are old enough to be my kids. So now, I saw that, you know, I started listening to some shiurim, little by little.

31:58The shiurim started becoming less and less on my playlist. Music was more interesting. Studying in college was more interesting. I was interested in becoming a psychiatrist, so I learned a lot of psychology. I was a good student. And little by little... Started making leniencies for myself. Why? Because I didn't have a rabbi. And the shiurim were less frequent. Eventually, I stopped altogether. So, I always felt weird. I was the only guy in college; I came like a baal teshuvah. First semester, I was Mr. Party Boy. Second semester, I'm Mr. Baal Teshuvah. I'm wearing tzitzit. I keep Shabbat. So how do you keep Shabbat in college? You simply go to sleep. Why? Because there's nothing to do. There's nothing to do. So one rabbi would have a kiddush. You go to the kiddush. You hang out there for an hour and a half. Get some free food. And then you go back to your room. You have nothing to do because everybody else goes to parties. You go to your room, and you're just looking at the walls, waiting to get tired enough. So you figure, okay, let's do something. What can I do? Oh, you know what? Next week, I'm going to do something better. Next week, I'm going to get a nice case of beer. It helps me sleep. So next week, that was it. I went to the kiddush, I said shalom aleichem, I went home, nice case of beer, and that was Shabbat.

33:12But I saw all my friends. They had a couple of beers with me, and they went out, and I felt miserable the whole Shabbat. So then I said, okay, you know what? I have to have somebody with me. So I'd have, you know, a friend here and there come visit for a little while. How long can this last? It lasted exactly as long as it took me to find somebody that I liked. And as soon as I found somebody that I liked, everything went into the garbage. Why? Why? You make one leniency, then another leniency, then another leniency, and all of a sudden, you're acting like husband and wife before you're husband and wife. All of a sudden, the fact that she's not Jewish doesn't really matter. All of a sudden, the Shabbat that you were keeping for the last few months, like, you know what? I'll just keep it once I get married. You start giving yourself a to-do list. You put Shabbat on a to-do list. I'll do it later on. I'm too young now. I still gotta have fun. And now, I fell off after keeping it for about a year and a half or so. I fell off completely, and it took me a long time. ...a long time to realize this was a mistake in my life. The reason why it took me a while to realize it was a mistake was because I went into business. After working for a few people for a couple of years, I started becoming independent within a company. As soon as I became independent, I realized that I'm very different from everybody else.

34:37They like a schedule. They like to come to work at 9 and leave at 5. I don't have a schedule. I have ambition. What's my ambition? I want to become a millionaire as soon as possible. So they want to go to work at 9 and leave at 5. Good for them. I'm going to come to work as soon as I wake up. So I'll get to work at 6:30 in the morning. The only reason it was 6:30 or 7 is because it took me an hour and a half to get to work. I'll work until I simply can't move, which is somewhere around 12 or 1 o'clock in the morning. So you work from 7 o'clock in the morning until about 1 o'clock in the morning? You have a pretty good schedule. You travel three hours a day to go to work. If it's good traffic, only two hours. You sleep for a couple of hours and do it all over again the next day. That was my schedule. After doing this for a little while, things started working out by November of 2002. broke a company record and the president of the company I was working at, which was a big firm called Raymond James, sent me this letter. He sent me a letter telling me congratulations on your record production, and he sent me a nice letter. This letter meant everything in the world to me. Why? Because somebody recognized how great I was and

35:56Because now I have a purpose. What's the purpose? To be great. I made more money than everybody else. I made a ton of money. Great. They have 5,000 people in the firm. This little 22-year-old kid just made more money than everybody else. The president of the company, which is a public company, sent me a personal, handwritten letter. Wow, six-figure month. Have a purpose next month. Let me earn a little bit more next month. I made a little bit more; by August of the next year, they sent a company-wide list of the top 25 producers in the entire country, and I was on the list. That's me. And I showed it to all my clients. Why? Because I was on the list. I was number three, and 23-year-old kid is on the list of top 25 brokers in the entire country as far as production. Not because they liked me, but because of how much money I was making. They liked me, that's why I was making so much money. But nonetheless, they liked my money too. So now at this point that I'm on this list, I agree that I'm great. They say I'm great, I agree. So I say, "I'm so great, I'm too great to be here. I gotta start on my own. I'm gonna open up my own company." And that's what I do.

37:13At that point, once I open up my own firm, the money continues to grow. It gets to a point where every month, even in a bad month, I'm making $200,000 to $300,000. A good month could be over half a million, maybe even a million. Throughout the years, I dealt with a lot of people, and I had two types of people in my life: my clients and my employees. There were no friends, nothing in between. Why? to have friends. It's time to deal with certain people. You could be friendly. You could be nice to people. But my job was to be great. My job was to help as many people as I possibly could. So the clients, I helped the rich people become richer. That was my job. They were rich, and they wanted to become richer. Why? Because that's their purpose in life. Someone that has, the Gemara says, a person that wants a hundred, you give him a hundred, now he wants two hundred. You give him two hundred, he wants four hundred. You give him four hundred, he wants eight hundred. Why? That's the way he was created. He's never happy with his share. As the Gemara in Masechet Sukkah says, no person in the world ever died with even half of what he wanted. Because he wasn't happy with his share.

38:29So now the person that I'm dealing with is the customer, and this customer wants more. I ask him, how much do you have in the market? He says, I have a million, I have two million, I have three million. I said, okay, what's your intention? What are you looking for? He said, more. That's what he wants. He wants more. That's why they would deal with me. They want to make 20% more, 30% more, 50% more every year. Because whatever they have is not enough. This is why people that are on the Forbes 500 list, who have more money than they can spend even in several generations, still go to work every day—not necessarily their day job. They're not cleaning bathrooms, but they still do deals. The guy from Amazon, who was worth a hundred billion dollars before he divorced his wife like a fool, still goes to work every day to try to make more money. Warren Buffett, that's, you know, it's literally a stone's throw away from the cemetery. He's 90 years old already. He still goes to work every day. Bill Gates, who already made more than enough of a fortune 20 years ago, still goes to work every day. It's not the same work they did 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but they're still working to make more. Why? Because when you have the ability, you have money, the money has to do something because you feel like it has a life. It's become part of you.

39:50The money has become part of you, and if it doesn't do anything, then you feel like there's no point to your life. So you can say, wait, there's a lot of fun things to do in life. Okay, so name them. Oh, you want to go on vacation? They went on vacation. Now what? Go on another vacation. Okay, you go on another vacation. Now what? Go on another vacation. Go on another vacation. Your whole life is a vacation. Now what? Read a book. Read a book. Read two books. Read ten books. Read 150 books. Now what? Get married. Got married. Had kids. Now what? What else is there? What else is this life supposed to be? What else do you do? Eat. Eat every food that moves and doesn't move. What else do you want? What else is there to do in life? Eventually, you get to the point where it's like, okay, something has to be the purpose. It can't be marriage because I got married and divorced five times, the guy says. I got married and divorced. I'm an expert in getting married and an even bigger expert in getting divorced. The rabbi, he goes to the rabbi, yeah, I get married, but the rabbi gives him a business card. Why? He says, listen, when you get divorced, call me.

40:51He gets divorced, call me, he has more money for the divorce. He's an expert in getting married, an expert in getting divorced. So he got married, he got divorced; it can't be the purpose of life. Kids—he has kids with every woman he ever saw. It's not the purpose of life. Money—he has more money than he can count. Food—does anybody really think that the purpose of life is food? That means you're a cow. So what is the purpose of life then? What's the point? What am I doing here? So the guy that has money is convinced that's the purpose. To make more. Why? Could I do more? What else can you possibly do? I don't know. I'll tell you when I get there. So he starts donating to different organizations to make himself feel good. And he'll put his name on the building, and he'll donate a synagogue, and he'll donate to a cancer center. And he'll help a few homeless guys, and he'll help a few people that are miserable, and so on and so forth. And he feels like this is good. But then he commits suicide. Why? Because it wasn't enough. He still didn't get to be happy.

41:56he still has to go and constantly make this money do something in hopes that eventually someone will tell him the answer to what's the point of life? This was the journey that I was on, and I believed that I was gonna be 93 years old, still at my desk making deals, buying buildings, selling buildings, buying companies, selling companies, firing people, and hiring people. I thought that was the point of life. I had the opportunity to rub elbows with some very, very wealthy people and some very miserable people, both. Usually, the miserable ones were sometimes rich, but sometimes they worked for me too. And in essence, you get to meet a lot of different people. The guys that worked with me for a long time, as far as the clients, you become friends with them. You do deals, but then you start socializing a little bit. You start realizing, wow, they have much worse problems than me. And they have all this money. One guy, I remember this guy, Turlap, started a dog food company, made a fortune.

43:05already died years ago, but during the years we did business, we made a lot of money together. The poor guy Turlap gave his business to his two sons, and instead of being grateful, one of his sons decided that his father was an enemy. Everything the kid has is from his father. He didn't work a day for it and he became CEO overnight, but in reality, he didn't earn the job. But he decided that his father, since his father had an argument with his wife, was the enemy. He didn't want to talk to his father for years until he died. So if that's the purpose of life, if this kid is the purpose of life, your life just lost its purpose. So you get to see that some of the money problems that these rich people have, Problems that the poor people don't realize that they have—if they knew it, they wouldn't want to be rich. Nobody would want to be rich once you see what kind of problems they have. Money is never going to solve all your problems. It's only going to let you arrive at your problems with a limo. That's all it's going to do. It's a tool. So I learned a lot from my clients about life, and I would teach my employees, the ones that wanted to get rich quick. They wanted to get rich overnight. Now, you can't get rich overnight legally.

44:23So they always constantly would ask me a different question, the same question 500 different times about how they can cheat their clients. And every time they would get the door slammed in their face because I'm not a thief. So every day I said, just go to work and eventually you'll be successful. Oh, but we can't, they're doing it at the other firm. I said, yes, you'll see eventually they're all gonna go to jail. Eventually, all those other people went to jail. There was one guy, this thief, who worked on Wall Street up the street from us. He stole 14 employees from me in one week. Why? He convinced all of them that they were all going to become millionaires in a year by doing what he said, and so on and so forth. He literally built a monstrous firm in one year. He had maybe 300-400 people in one year, what people don't build in a lifetime. 300-400 people in a huge boardroom, very impressive. He was on TV every other day, and it was a very impressive figure. Until the SEC showed up and said, "You're all under arrest." Why? You can't win them all. Eventually, they figure out you're a thief.

45:30So, the young guys that wanted to get rich quick sometimes would leave, sometimes would stick around. Many of them had different problems. Sometimes they had drug problems. Sometimes they had marriage problems and different problems. So, you try to be a counselor for them. But the advice that I would give to them is the same advice that I would follow myself, which is the purpose of life is to be successful. You know, get a wife, get a kid, whatever it is that you want to do with your personal life. But in essence, if you're going to actually work, just be successful at it, whatever it is that you're doing. And then you can do other stuff in life. Whatever, you want to donate a building, donate a building. That was the point to life. The point of life is to make money and go do something with it. This is as far from the truth as possible. Anyone that thinks that the point of their life is to have a wife, a husband, get a few kids, make a bunch of money, and die this way, if you think that's the point of why God created the heaven and the earth, you're sadly mistaken. You sadly have no purpose to that life. Why?

46:34Hashem says in the Torah, "Mine is the money, mine is the gold." Meaning all the money that we say, "It's my money." He says, "What are you talking about? It's my money. It's my money. I'm just lending it to you during the time that you're alive. You're just playing with my money. It's like, you know, it's like somebody lets his kid play. You know, he has a little bit of cash in his pocket and he leaves it on the table and his little three-year-old decides to play with it because it's toys for him." If the father is a normal person, he's not going to yell at the three-year-old. He's going to let him play with it because, for him, it's fun. So the kid feels like it's his toy now—this $100 bill, this $20 bill, this single, this couple of coins. He feels like it's his money for the time being. That's us. Hashem gives us a little bit of money that we feel like is ours. But Hashem says, it's mine. It's my money. So a person thinks that this money is their life, that it's their purpose. They wake up later on in their life realizing that it was all a mistake. Sometimes it's too late because they don't have enough of a spine to look for a new purpose. Like this 27-year-old girl who decided that she has money, she has fame, she has everything that everybody else wants.

47:51she's not happy; therefore, there cannot be any purpose to the world, and she decides to commit suicide. Many people are just like her sometimes. The signs that Hashem is giving us, we ignore. And that's what I was doing. So I was making money. I was doing everything I wanted to do but still never really happy. Why? Because I was constantly looking for something else. I to fix this hole that's inside. Okay, I got the money now. In May of 2006, I made $1.6 million for the month, plenty enough money to justify going on vacation for a month. So in June, I decided to go to Las Vegas for five weeks. I'm still making money from there, just working off of, you know, I don't have to be in an actual office, still working but on vacation. During the day, I'm working and during the night, I'm playing in the casino in the World Series of Poker and different poker tournaments. Poker became my new fix, my stimulant, my new game. Why? Because it's a mental game and it's fun to beat other people, and I figured that this is...

49:07Maybe this is my purpose, to become the best poker player in the world. So I played with the best of them, and I beat some of them. I wanted to become professional, but then I realized that my biggest leverage was the fact that I wasn't scared of losing because I had a real business, while everybody else was scared of losing because that was their business—the poker table was their business and... I played for a little while. I played for a few years. I did pretty well, but in general continued to work. So after I came back from this vacation in 2006, I decided, okay, so poker is not the purpose. I could continue playing, but it's definitely not the purpose. Maybe I should just feel better, take care of my health. So I started eating a little bit better, started treating myself a little bit better, my body a little bit better, and... And then one day I decided, you know what, let me have surgery for this thing that annoys me once or twice a year. I went to the doctor, and the doctor said, "Listen, you know what, you can have this surgery. It's an elective surgery. I mean, you don't actually have to have it. It's not a heart condition. But you can have it. It's a simple surgery. You have the surgery in the morning. It's a short surgery. You leave the same day. You don't stay in the hospital. We send you home, and you feel uncomfortable."

50:28for a few days, which in medical terms means you're in a lot of pain. And you go back to work in a few days. He said, how much time am I going to be away from work? He says, maximum three days. You're going to feel uncomfortable for a few days. Discomfort, they call it. Discomfort. It's discomfort. Why do they call it discomfort? Anybody know? Because it's uncomfortable for them to look at, so they send you home. I had the surgery on a Wednesday morning and I woke up from the surgery with a different body. My body went into the surgery relatively healthy and woke up from the surgery very, very sick. Something happened during the surgery where they cut some type of nerve. They did something to my body where I went through such trauma that... The nerves would not stop, meaning the pain did not stop when I woke up from the surgery. I was screaming my lungs out, telling them to stop cutting me. They told me, "We're not cutting you; the surgery is finished." But I kept screaming my lungs out because I felt as if they were cutting me over and over again, everywhere in my body—not just where the surgery was. I just felt like they were cutting me over and over again.

51:50And they're starting to say, something went wrong, obviously. Let's give him some morphine. So they gave me some morphine. Now, since I never did drugs in my life, no one knew how I would react to them. Well, apparently, it didn't react. I got morphine; nothing happened. So they had to give me more because I continued to scream and ask my wife to kill me, ask my mom to kill me, ask the doctors to kill me, but they didn't want to kill me, so they had to give me more morphine instead. More morphine—guess what? It didn't work. continue to scream. I'm continuing to yell. I'm continuing to cry out for my life. More morphine, more morphine. Eventually, they told my wife, "We gave him the most amount of morphine legally allowed. If it doesn't work at this point, there's nothing we can do." But Hashem, Hashem had mercy on me, and it actually worked; my body calmed down, and I thought that I saw hell and something that I learned just a little bit about ten years before that, and I figured, okay, it's over. It's finished. There was some type of mishap, but it's done. What gave me the confidence that it's done? They assured me that I'm perfectly fine to go home. I

53:00So he said, "Listen, we don't really know what happened, but you're fine now, right? You can walk, everything's good, right? Yeah, go home. It was an elective surgery. You didn't even have to be here. Go home, relax." So I felt so happy; this nightmare is behind me. Everybody who overcomes a nightmare feels happy. I go home; we pick up a few sandwiches on the way home. We eat, we laugh about it. Thank you very much, everybody, for coming. I go to sleep, thinking that the worst is behind me, not realizing that the worst is ahead of me. I wake up 45 minutes later with worse pain than I originally had in the hospital. But this time it doesn't stop for 62 days. For 62 days, my body continues to be in pain 24 hours a day, with no break other than the 15 minutes that I would get because I burned my body by going into boiling water. You know the type of water that you boil tea in? That's what I would be in. And why? Because that's what I would have to do to numb my entire body with different pain. Once you have different, you know, there are two types of pain. Two types of pain. So you have a headache and you have something that's much worse than that. So I prefer the headache. And this would give me about 15 minutes of peace. After those 15 minutes, I would immediately pass out. 15 minutes later, I would wake up with massive pain again, as if I just had the surgery all over again.

54:25Little by little, this led me to not be able to sleep for those two months, which meant that my body started failing. The urine turned to blood, the eyes turned to blood, and the holes that were supposed to contain things started doing the opposite. Little by little, the doctor said, "He's dying. We just don't know why. We have no idea why." Went to different doctors, NYU, and all types of fancy-schmancy names. No one understood what this had to do with my surgery. After those two months, the body started calming down to the point where 20 painkillers were enough for the day. During those two months, 100 weren't enough. But now 20 painkillers were enough; I would take them two at a time. just to numb the pain for a couple of hours. And then every couple of hours, I'd take another couple of painkillers in order to get back to life. I went back to life somewhat. Nine months later, I feel a pain in my leg.

55:34The next day, I'm in the emergency room. They tell me I have an internal infection called an abscess that's in between two muscles, at a point of exploding. If it explodes and I don't do something about it immediately, it would go into my bloodstream, and I would die within an hour. We have an emergency surgery, but the surgery for this type of thing is much worse than the first surgery. Why? For this one, they actually get you to stay in the hospital because you have to be tied to the morphine 24 hours a day. You can't be without morphine. They give you a little button that every opportunity you get, you press it. Because the pain is simply impossible. It's impossible, it's intolerable. So they just give you a little button and you feel like you have an atomic bomb, but for yourself. You're hoping the thing blows you up because you can't handle the pain. But once the pain goes away for the next half hour, hour or so, you're happy anyway. And this goes on for the next few weeks. After a few weeks of this adventure, go back home, go back to life, try to go back to the office. Six months later, another pain, another abscess, another infection, back in the hospital, emergency surgery, another hospital visit for another couple of weeks. Three months later, another surgery, another abscess, another nightmare. And this is not in the same area.

57:01Keeps happening in different parts of the body, which is the problem. Why? You can't diagnose a problem, you have no idea why it's happening. Usually, if you have a recurring problem, that means there's some deep-rooted issue. Meaning, okay, so let's say, for example, somebody has something on their arm, and they have surgery, they fix it, whatever it is, they have some growth. And it comes back, they say, oh, that means in the previous surgery, we didn't take it out. We didn't take out the whole thing, we left something behind. So they have another surgery. And if it comes back again, it's like, oh, there's something wrong here. If we can't mess up over and over, they have another surgery, but if it keeps coming back, that means that the problem is somewhere else. I love you again. Rav Avigdor Miller said that one time he went to a doctor and he told him, "Listen, I have a little bit of pain from this infection that I have." The doctor says, "Let me see your infection," and he showed him a red mark. Red mark on his arm. He says, "Okay, take off all your clothes, I need to check you." He goes, "No, no, no, I just have this infection." He goes, "Take off all your clothes, I need to check your whole body." Strange. He checks the whole thing. After he checks, he goes, "Oh, you're fine." "What do you mean I'm fine? You just gave me a heart attack, told me to check my whole body." He said, "Yeah, I had to check your whole body." "Why? Why?"

58:20It's because that black dot either means you have a very serious condition, or it just means you have a small infection. Small infection, go to the secretary, she'll give you a prescription, get some antibiotics, in two days it's gone. Serious problem, that problem there's no cure for. So I had to check the whole body to see if there are other black dots like this, and to check your heart to see if it's connected to the heart. It's not, it's just a small superficial infection, just get some antibiotics, you're good. Sometimes a person can have a small little mark, a small little thing, a small little issue, and he doesn't take care of it, it becomes a bigger problem. Same thing with our life. Sometimes there's a small issue with the marriage. The wife feels like you're not paying attention to her. All you have to do is pay a little attention to her. All you have to do is take a break on Shabbat, stop thinking about business, stop thinking about everything else, put the phone down, put this down, and just pay attention to her, just on Shabbat and it's fine. But you don't. Why? You're busy with the guys, you're busy with this, you're busy with that. So now, the problem grows.

59:20The problem grows now. She not only feels like you're not paying attention to her, now she feels like you don't even love her. Now, here's the problem. See, a guy doesn't necessarily need to feel loved all the time. He doesn't have that need, that desire. He just needs to feel loved sometimes. Just enough that when he needs it, he wants to know somebody's there. A woman needs it all the time. She needs to know that she's loved. You don't necessarily need to say it every five seconds, but she needs to know in the back of her mind, "My husband loves me." Why? Because the minute she feels the husband doesn't love her, there's no purpose to being married anymore. There's no point. If he doesn't love me, what's the point? It started with not paying attention, but now it grows that, oh, not only is he not paying attention, he doesn't pay attention to me because he doesn't love me. If he doesn't love me, I have to find somebody that does. Why do you think there are so many people cheating? Why do you think there are so many people cheating? Guys, sometimes they cheat because of desire, but very rarely because they're looking for love. Usually, it's because of desire. Women, on the other hand, 90% of the time cheat because they're looking for love, not because of desire. They don't have the same desires as men. They have them, but it's not the same thing as men. They're looking for love. Why? Because at home, they didn't get it.

1:00:35Husband's too busy playing cards with his friends. Husband's too busy, you know, going to the game, watching the Super Bowl or some other ball game. He's watching everything else except his wife. So what happens? So she's like, oh, you're watching this. I'm looking for a guy that's watching me. It started with a small problem, a small little mark, a little scratch. But now it grew to a potential cancer. And sometimes that cancer is incurable. So the problem with my issues was that my... The problem was incurable simply because they didn't know what the problem was. It kept reappearing in different parts of the body. They saw no connection; they thought it was a fistula, which meant that all of them were connected. They checked it a million and a half times, which is a very, very fun thing to do for them, and they never found any connection. My life continues to get worse because I'm in pain all the time, and now, as you noticed, the time gets shorter between surgeries to the point where it gets to a point where I'm having a surgery of some kind every month. Then I'm starting to go to different doctors. I went to over 50 different doctors of all kinds, the best ones and the worst ones. I sent my files to the best doctors in the world at the Mayo Clinic, at Cleveland Clinic, every clinic you want—the real ones, the fake ones, in different countries.

1:01:55started taking all types of things, steroids like the athletes take, HGH, which is $1,500 a shot. Much, much more affordable when you have the money, much less affordable when you don't have the money. Started taking steroids; all they did was ruin my body even worse, and I'm constantly looking to cure this disease. Every doctor gives me a little bit of hope within the first few minutes, and as soon as he reads my file, which continues to grow and eventually gets to a point of being three feet, I get to a point where the doctor, within a few minutes, tells me he can't help me. Some of them reject me; they don't even want to see me. They simply don't want to see you. "I can't help somebody like you. Can't help; this is too much. I have no idea what's wrong with you." Telling you, people that were in a business for 25, 30 years, their job was to cure people, simply don't want to talk to you. Why? Because you're hurting their ego. Until now, they felt they were able to cure everything—until they saw you. This continues for the next seven years. Life becomes a disaster. Business goes into the tubes.

1:03:09The market crashes at the same time. Every deal that I did that used to turn from nothing into something is now turning from something back into nothing. The people that I groomed to become power brokers, some of them became very successful, but they just decided to take that success elsewhere. And instead of helping, they stole as much as they could possibly get because when the lion on top is wounded, that's the opportunity to take control. Everything starts to turn upside down. The customers who were very friendly to me say, "Listen, we can be friends, but business? We can't do anymore. Why? You're not in the office. You're in a hospital constantly. You can't answer the phone. You can't do business. The deals are going bad. We're losing money. I'm losing. I used to be able to do hundred-million-dollar deals. Hundred-million-dollar deals meaning I'd make a few phone calls, and at the end of those few phone calls, buy a hundred million dollars of Nextel by a hundred million dollars of Ivanhoe mines, by a hundred million dollars worth of Sirius Satellite, by a hundred million dollars worth of whatever you want, and a few at a time did a few billion dollars worth of transactions. Big money. Now I'm fighting for life. Now I'm hoping that maybe I could get just a few million dollars. I can just pay the bills. The money that I had invested, my own money—I was my own biggest client. I'm losing money even faster than my own clients.

1:04:40So now as my world turns upside down, I don't feel as great as I used to feel. But I'm still ambitious and I'm still fighting because that's me. I'm a fighter. You don't give up. But after you deal with pain 24 hours a day and the health that you thought you had is taken away from you, then the money that you thought you had is taken away from you and all you really have is problems. And all the people that you thought were friendly are not really so friendly. You start losing your point of living and I started to do an accounting of what I actually had. And this is what I had: I had my wife, who is the most wonderful, extraordinary person on earth and... Then the money that you thought you had is taken away from you, and all you really have are problems. And all the people that you thought were friendly are not really so friendly. You start losing your point of living, and I started to do an accounting of what I actually had. And this is what I had: I had my wife, who is the most wonderful, extraordinary person on earth and... Every day she gave me a reason to live. Why? She made it seem like the cure is around the corner and the purpose is there, you just haven't found it yet. And despite the fact that she wasn't Jewish, she wanted me to become religious. She wanted me to become a religious Jew. On holidays, she would tell me, "Listen, I think you should stay home for Pesach. You shouldn't go to work."

1:05:58I'll work. I'll do whatever you need to do. You sit home. I bought you a Tanakh. She bought me a Tanakh. She said, "Read it." I said, "Why?" She said, "Oh, it's your history. It's Hashem. It's God. Read about them. Maybe it's going to give you a solution to these problems." I said, "You realize this is, I'm Jewish." She said, "Yeah. Perfect. Become, keep mitzvot. Keep your Torah." She bought me my first Tanakh. I found this a little unusual. I stayed home for Pesach and I read the Tanakh that she bought me. It's very interesting but didn't change anything. Why? Because when you first learn Torah, you learn it superficially, which means that it's not sweet like it is after you've learned it for a while. You learn it like you learn a book, and it's interesting and maybe a little bit mentally stimulating, but you still don't understand 90% of what it says. you don't really get the point of why anybody else in the world sits here and looks at this book or other books like it—the Mishnah, all of our holy books, all of our Oral Torah. How could you sit there for 15 hours looking at this book? You can't even imagine yourself that way. Why? Because you looked at the book. I read a lot of books in my life before. I read lots of books. I had a huge library of books that I read.

1:07:22Secular books, all types of topics—philosophical books, medical books, scientific books. I read lots of stuff. This was just another book. Why? Because reading it superficially without really understanding what's going on. So I read it; it's interesting. I'm not changing my life because Hashem created Adam, and the snake enticed him to sin, and eventually, Hashem gets really, really annoyed and destroys the whole world—the generation of Noah. Okay, nice people. Listen, good for you. Not you survived. What does that have to do with me? Moshe Rabbeinu sounds like a superhero to me. It's Baruch Hashem. Wow, I wish I was like him. I wish I knew him. But what does that have to do with me? You read it the first time, you have no idea what's... Okay, it's great. Now what? So I read it a little bit. Nothing changed. But as my health continued to deteriorate, I started losing my purpose. Because now my dream... Becoming this dealmaker, this powerful person that can do a lot of good things, that can donate even more money than I was already donating, and so on, that became more and more of an imaginary dream, not a real dream. Why? Because what I've accumulated until this point is now running out the window faster than it came in and

1:08:44And my ability to continue doing more became impossible. Why? Because it wasn't even to work. You know, I'd work for a couple of months, then go to the hospital. I'd work for a couple of months, then go to the hospital. I'd work for a couple of months, then go to the hospital. Constantly. I was just constantly with doctors. Every week I was with a doctor. At one point, I was with doctors every week. I became part of a study. They wanted to do experiments on my body. They wanted to figure out, like, oh, listen, at least maybe you could donate your body to science. And that's what I did. They started doing experiments on me. I said, listen, the regular doctors can't figure it out. Maybe the experiment will figure it out. I had a toothache one time, and the guy, you know, I went to the dentist, and he tried to give me Novocaine, and it didn't work. So he gave me more, and it didn't work. And he thought he kept missing the nerve, and he wasn't missing the nerve. It just didn't work. Eventually, the doctor said, listen, I think you should donate your skull to science. At least it can help somebody. body doesn’t work. Eventually, it works, but in some unusual amounts sometimes, and sometimes it works in a small amount. It's not like it just has a high tolerance. Sometimes, one grain of sugar could change the whole body; other times, a gallon of sugar won't do anything. Very strange. My mom found out she has the same problem. She had surgery on her teeth to replace them, but she found out a little bit too late.

1:10:09It's almost impossible to numb her face, so she felt every single pin, every single thing that happened. Already after the fact, shemirahim. My brother also has a little bit, so we have... well, I think we're a little bit like aliens. People say, "What are you? Sephardic? Ashkenazi?" No, alien. We're a new tradition. So now, rabotai, we have an interesting journey. But this journey, I'm thinking, maybe I'm going to end this journey. I can't take it anymore. There's no point to life. So I start thinking, you know what? There's no answers. There's no point. And I got to a point where I became literally suicidal. I didn't want to die, but there's no cure. That's when Hashem, you know, decided that I've reached my end. Hashem promised us that He's never going to give us a test we can't handle, which means that as soon as we get to a breaking point, that's when Hashem gets involved. He doesn't want us to break, but sometimes it's necessary for us to break in order for us to look up, because our ego is always in the way. We always think that we're able to solve our own problems, and...

1:11:22you have financial problems, you figure I'll get two jobs instead of one job. One job doesn't pay the bills, so I'll work two jobs to pay the bills. You look for a wife, and you figure, you know what, I can't find a wife. You know what, maybe I'll just date three girls at a time. One of them must be right. So you start dating, and you have three different lives. Each one of these girls thinks you're her husband. She thinks, oh, I'm going to marry him. He's a Joey. Joey's my best. He's my buddy. He's my best. He's my husband. He's my future husband. Why? Because he buys her presents every week. She doesn't realize he also buys the other girl presents every week, and the other girl presents every week. Because he figures that one of them is going to be the one. He wants to help God give him a zivug. So he figures, Hashem, I'm giving You three choices. Anyone you want. So, we limit Hashem. We limit Hashem, and therefore we make foolish choices by overdoing it. People call it hishtadlut. It's not hishtadlut. Hishtadlut means you made the minimum amount of effort that's required just to make it look realistic. What we do is an obsession to help Hashem do His job.

1:12:32And sometimes we don't believe that Hashem is going to provide us parnassah to an extent that some people are not willing to have more kids until they have more money. So you have many people, every week I get calls like this. Every week I get messages like this. "Oh, my wife doesn't want to have any more kids." Why not? "Because I don't make enough money. I'm only making $70,000 a year. I'm only making $50,000 a year. I'm only making $100,000 a year. I'm only making whatever I'm making. And it's not enough. It's barely enough to pay for the two or three kids that we have." ...a dog. So we figured that if we're gonna get another kid, we’d probably have to get rid of the dog. We like the dog. It's like another son to us. So she figured that until I get my raise, that's when we'll have a kid. So they decided to keep the dog and not have the kid. Why? Because they figured that they have to have money before they do things. They don't realize that each kid comes with parnassah, and... And the Torah tells us that if a person simply looks at the first book of the Torah, looks at Sefer Bereishit, he sees that Hashem commanded us to have children. Commanded us to try to have children. It's the first commandment. It's the first thing that Hashem told Adam HaRishon: "Pru u'Rvu."

1:13:50Which means that this is in the interest of Hashem. Hashem wants us to multiply. He wants us to bring children into the world. He doesn't want us to waste seed. He doesn't want us to be by ourselves for our whole life. He wants us to bring children into the world. More people do more mitzvot, honor Him more, serve Him more, fulfill the purpose of the world. We think, "Listen, yeah, I know that's what God wants, but I don't have the money, so I figured that when He gives me the money, I'll do what He wants." Meaning that if a person thinks about it, in essence, what are they saying? They're saying that Hashem wants you to have kids, but He's going to let them starve to death. He told you to do something, but He didn't give you the ability to do it. He wants you to go, you know, build a family, but you don't have the tools to do it, which is complete nonsense. This makes Hashem into an evil God, if you really think about it. So, When a person has hishtadlut, when he's trying to make an effort to do certain things, he has to know that there's a certain amount that he's responsible for, and there's a certain amount that Hashem is responsible for. The more emunah and bitachon that you have, the less you do. The less emunah and bitachon that you have, the more you do. If your emunah and bitachon is at 10%, you're going to work 90%. If your emunah and bitachon is at 90%, you only have to work 10%. But with the rest of the time, obviously, you're doing different things. You're learning and so on.

1:15:17So we figured that we tried everything possible, and it wasn't working. Hashem promised that as soon as I break, as soon as a person breaks and gets to that limit, He's going to show Himself in different ways. He showed Himself in many different ways, but I was ignoring Him. One day I get a phone call from my mom, and she tells me, please talk to him, talk to him. And I say, who? She says, talk to Ephraim. I said, who is this Ephraim? She says, it's your cousin. Why do I need to talk to him, and why did he make her cry? Because she was crying on the phone. She said, "Just talk to him, please. He could help you." I said, "If it's going to stop you from crying, just have him call me. I'll talk to whoever you want." Now, Ephraim called me, and I didn't even know who he was. But I knew he was my cousin from Israel, though we had never met. Immediately, when we started talking, we hit it off. He started telling me some interesting stories about Yud-Gimmel Tammuz, and he read the Torah in a different way than I did years ago. He read it with commentary. i read it literally. I read the Torah. It said, Hashem created the world, the heaven, and the earth. That's what i read. He had it differently. Why? He had commentary. He told me, what does that actually mean behind the scenes? So i read, there was a story. But then he started telling me the commentary by the sages about why this happened and why that happened. And i started realizing, wow, there's more than meets the eye.

1:16:43There's a lot more in the Torah than I ever imagined. And I started realizing that he has the answers that I've been looking for my whole life. So I started asking him questions. We had a conversation for an hour and 40 minutes, and he started giving me some answers. I ran to my wife after the call. I told her I found him. She said, who? I said, I found the guy that has the answers. She said, "Who is it?" I said, "It's a find." She goes, "Who's a find?" I said, "It's my cousin." She goes, "Keep talking to him." I said, "I don't know his phone number." She goes, "How could you not get it?" I said, "I don't know. He called me." So now we're waiting the whole week. We're just hoping, oh, he's hoping he's going to call again. The next week, Thursday, 4 o'clock, he calls again. I'm as excited as can be. Why? I get to ask questions. Were there dinosaurs in the Torah? Are there aliens? What's the point of life? Why am I sick? Why am I not healthy? Why is this? Why is that? And so on and so forth. Where's the stock market going? Maybe he knows that too. You figure he knows all these other questions, might as well. And the best part about asking him questions is that he's not giving you his opinion. He's giving you Chazal's opinion.

1:17:59giving you God's opinion and he's telling you exactly where you could find it yourself. You have a question? Sure, somebody else asked this question. Who? He tells you who asked this question. Great, so what did he ask? Wait, what did he answer? He says, look at this book, this page. I don't have the book. Okay, so I'll tell you. You don't have it? He doesn't make you feel bad. Oh, you don't have the book? Okay, I'll tell you what it says in the book. He gives you a page number just in case you remember and want to look for it later on. As if you know what to do, if somebody gave you the book, you would even know where to go. Why? Because, by the way, in Torah they don't have numbers; they have letters. So he started telling me, you know, on page Shin Gimel, it says. I said, who? Page who? Shin Gimel? I said, yeah, you said letters. Isn't that page supposed to be a number? You're saying letters? He goes Yeah, it's a Gematria and Shin stands for 300 and Gimel stands for three. So it's page 303. Oh, okay, so he said, "Shin Gimel Amud Bet." I said, "Wait, hold on a second. You just said Shin Gimel. What's this Amud Bet? Where does this Bet come from?" He goes, "Oh, the pages in Judaism and our Torah, it's not the same thing like secular books where every page is just a number. Each page is a real page, meaning back and forth."

1:19:23The front is Aleph, the back is Bet. So Shin Gimel Bet means 303, backside. You need to be a scientist just to figure out the pages. You want me to know all this stuff? So now he starts telling me Shin, Gimel, Shin this, Tav this, Resh, Gimel this. He starts talking in code. Every time I realized very quickly I have no idea what I'm doing. All of what I thought I knew, immediately I realized I knew nothing in comparison to everybody else. I know I'm Mr. Genius; in comparison to him, the good news is he doesn't see it that way. He thinks we're equal. He thinks we're equal. He's like, oh yeah, I remember in Gemara, Masechet Shabbat. I said, no, what's Gemara? Oh, no, Gemara is Shabbat, page this, and he makes you feel good about it. He knows I don't know, but he doesn't make you think that he knows you don't know. He makes you feel good about yourself. So I realize this is a special person. I don't know anything. So I could be one of two things. I could be an egotistical moron and pretend like I know and just say, yes, yes, yes, sure, of course, yeah, of course, yeah. Who doesn't know this?

1:20:44Who doesn't know this? Noach, of course, Noach should have prayed more for the people. Wow, Avraham, Avraham Tzaddik, of course, Avraham. You pretend like you know. Or you can go back to being a kindergarten child with no shame whatsoever to ask every single question a million times until you get an answer that you understand. Until this day, years later, this is how we learn. If I don't understand, I ask the question again. He gives another explanation. If I still don't understand, I ask the question again in a different way to clarify what I don't understand, and he explains it again in a different way. But I'm not like the Gemara; there was a student who had to ask every question 400 times. I'm not 400 times; most things I understand the first time, but sometimes it takes a few times. And... this is one of the things that was a secret to learning: killing your ego. All that you know is meaningless; you have to ask questions in order to get knowledge. Most people

1:21:58Don't have that. Most people simply want to pretend like they know. And sometimes I meet people and I start talking to them, and they start nodding the whole time. "Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know." So that conversation usually ends very quickly. Why? If they know everything, what’s the point of the conversation? If you want to learn Torah, immediately you have to act like a baby. You don't know anything. Even if you heard it before, by the way, you should know, for ethical reasons, our sages teach us that even if somebody tells you a story that you heard, you shouldn't interrupt them and tell them, "I know this story." Let them finish the story and pretend like it's the first time you ever heard it. For two reasons. Number one, them teaching you the story is helping them. So why are you going to ruin it for them? If they figure that maybe you never heard the story, they prepared the story, they finally give you the story, and you tell them, "No, no, I heard it," after three words. The guy's like, "Ah, everybody knows everything I know, so I might as well stop teaching." The second reason is, you know your version of the story. Maybe there's something that he's going to tell you that you never heard before. So don't assume you know the whole story back and forth like you think you do. Maybe there's something you don't know. There's another facet of the story that you never heard before that he's going to tell you now.

1:23:12So you should never, ever interrupt anyone giving you divrei Torah. Other things you can, you know, if somebody wants to give you the menu again after you read it, you don't have to listen to the whole menu all over again. We're talking about divrei Torah. So I realized very quickly I didn't really know very much, and I was going to ask every question. Every question that I could, anything I didn't understand, literally from "What does this word mean?" Even though I was born in Israel, I only got a fourth-grade education. You know, we left Israel when I was in fourth grade. So it's been a long time. I didn't go to yeshiva, I didn't study sifrei kodesh. In so many words, I didn't speak Hebrew for 25 years. So even the fourth-grade education that I had was not really so, I didn't remember all of it. So a lot of times you would say certain words and say, what does that mean? What does this word mean? Like I was learning Hebrew all over again. Started looking at the Siddur and I said, "I have no idea what I'm saying. I could make the sounds like 90% of people, but I have no idea what I'm saying." So he bought me a nice Siddur that has something called translation. So I would read the Siddur, make the sounds in Hebrew, but the translation was right under the words. I would know exactly what each word means as I would pray and...

1:24:37I would learn Hebrew again, all over again. Now, since I had some basic knowledge, this helped. But nonetheless, in the beginning, it was a nightmare. Because he had a mission. I just didn't know it. His mission was to teach me Hebrew as if I never left Israel. So he'd say, "Okay, come on, so read what it says in the pasuk." I said, you read it. He goes, no, no, come on, you have it. You have it in front of you. So I would open the book. I would open a Tanach. I would open a Chumash. And I would start reading like I'm in first grade. And he would have all the patience in the world to wait for me to finish the sentence. And I feel as embarrassed as can be. Why? I'm not 12 years old. And I'm reading like I am, though. Or 6 years old. But he has the patience, and he's waiting, and little by little I'm thinking, why do you have me read? It's embarrassing for me. He goes, no, no, continue reading, continue reading. Little by little, I wasn't reading that way anymore. The point is, Rabotai, that since I saw that this special person had the answers I needed, I didn't mind dealing with a little bit of embarrassment. I didn't mind dealing with a little bit of toil. I didn't mind shutting down my office every Thursday at 4 o'clock,

1:25:54Because Rabbi Efraim is calling. And as soon as Rabbi Efraim calls, the world might as well blow up. It doesn't make a difference to me. My wife becomes my bouncer. She blocks the door. No one's allowed to come in. She goes, yeah, yeah, but we're looking for something. I said, look somewhere else. He's studying with Rabbi Efraim. He's studying with Rabbi Efraim. How long is it going to be? An hour, two hours? She goes, maybe seven hours. They start looking at it. What do you mean seven hours? What do they do for seven hours? They learn Torah. He learns Torah. Yaron's learning Torah. Should I talk about the same person? Wall Street Yaron is learning Torah for seven hours. Wall Street Yaron is learning Torah for seven hours. After doing this for a little while, I started keeping mitzvot. I started realizing that I have a problem in my life: the fact that my wife is not Jewish. But again, you can't stop making somebody believe something. So I had to find out. What's the truth? Is Christianity true? Is Judaism the truth? Which meant that I had to study both subjects now. Very quickly, I realized that Christianity is complete nonsense. I honestly don't understand how 2 billion people believe this shtuyot. But this was easy for me to figure out. Why? It wasn't spoon-fed to me for 30 years.

1:27:16For me, I was looking from the outside. From the outside, you could always see the problems. If you're the one that's fixing the house, it's very hard for you to see that there's a little scratch over there and a tiny one over there. And the light bulb is missing over there. Why? Because you're close to it, so you're not going to pay attention to the small details. But one of your friends comes for the first time, and he sees all the chesronot, all of the missing parts. He goes, "By the way, you know there's a scratch over there, right? And the light bulb is missing." And all of a sudden, he sees everything clearly. It's very annoying, by the way. But aside from that, it's like, how did you see all that? I'm here the whole week. I didn't see the light bulb was missing. He says, "I'm an expert." It's not because he's an expert. It's because he's coming from a different perspective. I came from a different perspective. I came from the outside. From the outside, it is very, very clear to me to see that it's a man-made religion, full of mistakes, full of complete nonsense, contradictions, and so on. But still, you can't make somebody else just agree with you. They have to see it. Just because you see it doesn't mean that they're going to see it. And that's the mistake that a lot of people make when they do teshuvah and...

1:28:24They think that just because they got the spark in their head, and they see that Hashem is real and no one can convince them otherwise, that doesn't mean that their wife or husband sees the same thing. Even if you show them the same paper, "Here, honey, look, it says over here this," it doesn't change anything for them. Why? Because what's going to spark for you, what's going to make you spark, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make them spark either. And that's why when people ask me, "What would I do to get my spouse or my children or somebody to jump on the bandwagon? What can I teach them?" I say, teach them to learn every day. Teach them a shiur every day. Give them a shiur. Give them a five-minute clip, a ten-minute clip. You give them a three-hour clip, they're not going to watch it. Give them a five-minute clip. Give them a ten-minute Torah clip. And don't do it yourself. Have somebody else do it. Give the rabbi the job to do it. Don't do it yourself. Why? Because most likely, they're not going to accept your teachings. You're new at it, so they don't really respect it from you. But if they learn it from somebody else, it's much more likely to work because it's an outside perspective. So, send them a clip, a video of this shiur that's five minutes long, that motivated you. Send it to them every day. Five minutes from this rabbi, five minutes from that rabbi. See what works.

1:29:45Little by little, they're going to want more. Why? Because once you feed them something every day, eventually, they're going to press click. Eventually, they're going to start liking it and eventually, they're going to want more. That's the only way. If you try to just bet everything on one thing, you're taking a very big risk. The reason why is because if it doesn't work and... And you bet everything on it, not only are they gonna lose hope that they're hopeless, you're gonna lose hope that they're hopeless. And that could lead to divorce. So many times when one person did teshuvah, and they think that the same thing that caused them to do teshuvah is gonna cause their spouse to do teshuvah, or their kids to do teshuvah, they're mistaken. Usually, it's gonna be something else. So since you don't know what that something else is, give them a little bit of everything. Give them a little bit of Torah and science. Give them a little bit of Mussar. Give them a little bit of Parashat HaShavua. You know, have somebody guide you on what to send them. And every day, give them a little bit. Get them used to receiving Torah every day and hope that they actually press play or read a little bit a few times a week. That's what you should pray for every day.

1:30:57So, as I was learning more and more, I started teaching my wife more and more. She liked everything I was learning. I liked everything I was learning. Everything was great. The only problem was that we were both born to different religions. And we were both under the belief that if you're born this way, you're born this way. I asked my rabbi, and he said, no, there are many people that are considered some of the most righteous people in history that started as goyim. Every Chumash that has commentary... Depends on Onkelos, why he's the original commentator before Rashi. Onkelos was next in line to become the Caesar. He was next in line to become the Caesar, and he found the emet. He found the truth, realized it's complete. Everything that he learned up to that point is complete nonsense. The Torah is emet. These slaves, these poor Jewish people, they have the truth. I want to join them. But it's a big decision. So what did he do? The Gemara Masechet Gittin says that Onkelos did a seance. And he brought three. In those days, it was very easy actually to do a seance. But it's not allowed, by the way. He did a seance and he brought three neshamot. He brought his uncle Titus. He brought, or great-great-uncle Titus. He brought Bil'am. And he brought Jesus, who we also call "Yeshu."

1:32:25Now, he brought all three of them and he asked them, where are you? They say, we're in a different world. He asks, what does it look like in this world? Who's the leader over there? Who are the important ones there? They say, Am Yisrael. Am Yisrael is the most important here. He says, but here they're not important. They respond, yes, the world is upside down. This world that you're living in, it's a world of lies, complete nonsense. In the real world, Am Yisrael are the leaders. He says, well, what about you? What happened to you? And they tell him, oh, each one tells him about the punishment that they're in. Titus, because he desecrated the Beit HaMikdash, and he thought that Hashem cannot beat him, he told people, listen, when I die, take my ashes and split them all over the ocean. All over the ocean, so Hashem, if He ever wants to take revenge against me, He can't, because I'm all over the place. So Titus said to him, he goes, "Yo, I was wrong. Why? Because now Hashem, every day, has malachim collect all the dust of my ashes from all over the sea, put me back together, and then burn me all over again, and split me all over again, and then do it all over again. Over and over again, that's my punishment." Then he asked Bilam, "Bilam, who's the leader over there?" He says, "Am Yisrael is the leader."

1:33:47He says, "So should I convert?" He says, "No, it's too hard for you. You come from royalty." Same thing Titus told him, "You come from royalty. You can't hang with the Jews. They're too much. They have a Torah, too many laws. It's too much. Why don't you just live as a goy, kill a bunch of Jews, because at least you'll enjoy one world. And then after that, when you come to the next world, you'll join us and suffer." Why are you telling them, not me? They're burning me in a different way. Shame on him because his wife was a donkey. They are burning him and all the seed that he wasted. Then he asked Yeshu, "No, where are you?" JCPenney? No, he's not in JCPenney. He actually went to Macy's. No, he says, "Damn, no, the leaders are in Israel, and you should convert." You should convert. He says, "Where are you?" He goes, "Oh, me? They're burning me in feces." He goes, "Why are they doing this to you? You told me to convert. Obviously, you were born a Jew. So how come they burn you over there?" He says, "Because I went against the Torah. I went against the rabbis. When you go against the rabbis, it's like going against the Torah itself. It's like going against Hashem. My punishment is eternally to be in a tzohar otachat. Tzohar otachat got mussar from neshamot."

1:35:03Decided to convert and give up becoming the next Caesar because I gave up becoming the next king. Another very famous convert is from the family of Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva, who is always all over the Gemara, comes from converts. The Bnei Avraham. Both of them lived in a generation of the Tannaim. But even before them, there were the Zugot. Zugot is several generations before them. There were Shemaaya and Avtalyon. Shemaaya and Avtalyon were the heads of Am Yisrael. One was the head as the prince, the Nasi. And one was the head of the Sanhedrin. Both of them were converts themselves. And they were the rabbis of Hillel. Hillel is akin. So you see that many, many important people throughout our Torah were converts. And then we found out there's actually a parasha in the Torah, Parashat Yitro, not Parashat Matan Torah. The parasha in which we receive the Torah is named after a convert by the name of Yitro. One of the most important people that ever lived in history is Yitro. And the Torah, which is the climax of the entire Torah...

1:36:20It's not called parashat Matan Torah. It's called parashat Yitro. Why? Because we all have mussar to learn from Yitro. What mussar? Vayishma Yitro. Yitro didn't need too much convincing. His whole life he worshipped different idols, not because he was some crazy person. He was constantly looking for the truth. As soon as he saw one idol was fake, he left it, threw it in the garbage, didn't try even a second time. Started something else. Didn't work out, left it, threw it in the garbage, started something else. Over and over and over again. As soon as he heard about Am Yisrael and what Hashem did for them, that was enough. That was enough for him to leave his job, leave everything, and go to Har Sinai and become a Jew. To simply listen to one shiur and become a real Jew. That's what we're supposed to hear, supposed to listen to. One time you get the truth, somebody tells you, "Elokai is this." Don't ask too many questions. Tamim tihiyeh im Hashem. So now, it always, one of the most critical people that ever lived, another one is the Mashiach. Mashiach hasn't come yet, but he's coming soon. Mashiach comes from a convert, Ruth. Ruth the Moabite. Ruth the Moabite.

1:37:37Also a convert. So we learned this. We said, oh, so conversion is possible. But again, what do we do with, what's the process of conversion? So we thought, maybe we'll do conversion online. We're busy people. We have a business. We have this. So we looked, and conversion's online. They say, Rabbi Stacey Jones. I said, Rabbi Stacey? Sounds kind of weird. I never knew that a rabbi is a woman. Rabbi Stacey does conversions online. All you have to do is send $150 and you're converted. I said, this sounds more like a dog certificate. You know, dog certificates, you don't even have to show the dog. You just ask for the certificate, and they send you the certificate in the mail. It's conversion, Reform conversion, same thing. Stacey can convert you online. She doesn't even have to know you. So we realized this is nonsense. Okay, so what do we have to do? We have to convert other ways. So we start making some phone calls. We asked Rabbi Ephraim. He actually introduces us to Rabbi Daniel Asor, who is a famous counter-missionary rabbi and used to be a missionary himself. We talked to him, and he tells us, "No, listen, if you are in New York, talk to this beit din in New York. They'll help you out. Tell them I gave you the information."

1:38:59And they'll help you. So we got the information. We called the beit din. We met with the beit din. They told us all the different things that we need to study, all the different things that we need to do. We went back to Rabbi Ephraim. We said, we need to know all of this stuff. He said, okay, let's start studying for this. Now we've already been studying with Rabbi Ephraim for a couple of years now. So now we're studying, we're studying, we're studying. And again, even before all of this happened, we had to make sure that this is all gonna go through. The problem is that part of the requirement is that you have to say that you don't believe in anything you believed in before. That's the problem. Why? I didn't have a pre-existing belief. My pre-existing belief was nonsense. My pre-existing belief was that pretty much that God is there, He runs the world, but when it comes to me, I can just do whatever I want because I'm a nice person. I believe God created the world, but maybe He went on vacation, maybe He has other problems to deal with. For me, it was relatively easy. For my wife, it was very different. Why? Because she was spoon-fed some nonsense her whole life, and you can't just undo it. So, we had to learn about Christianity to figure out if there were mistakes, if there was some way to disprove it, prove it, whatever it was at some point.

1:40:16We found a debate by Rabbi Tovia Singer. I watched a bunch of them. I loved them. I learned a lot from them. But when I brought them to my wife, she said that she couldn't connect to it. And even though somebody could be a fantastic speaker and very knowledgeable, it doesn't mean that you'll connect to them. Sometimes your neshamah requires something else. Some people love the things that I say, and some people can't stand it. Doesn't mean that what I see is wrong. It just simply means that some people just don't connect to it. Now I had to look for somebody else. We asked Rav Ephraim a bunch of questions. He gave us the answers, but it's still insufficient. We needed more. Eventually, we came across Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi. He had a debate with a Christian professor. I watched it. I was enamored. It was unbelievable. I brought this to my wife. She didn't connect to it. She didn't connect to it. This didn't work. So now I'm running out of options. By the way, I'm still sick. The business is still going downhill. But at this point, it doesn't really matter anymore. Why? I have a new mission in life. The new mission is to save her neshama (soul). Why? Because at this point, I realized that Christianity is not a second best. Christianity is outright fake idolatry.

1:41:37It's just idolatry. So, at this point, I know it's idolatry, but she doesn't. She still believes in something. It's like every Christian, by the way, believes in a different religion. No two Christians have the same belief. So, she had her own version of Christianity. She believed that maybe this Jesus guy was a nice person. That's it. She didn't believe he was God. She didn't believe he was the son of God. She never believed that stuff. She didn't believe in the whole New Testament. She just believed he was like a nice person. But if you went against him and you don't believe in him, then you're doomed because that's what they teach you. So how do you undo it? Now you have to show that even this is nonsense. By investigating enough about Christianity, I realized this very quickly, but I had to convince her. I can't convince her because I'm not the vessel. The vessel has to be somebody else. Eventually, I find another video called Torah and Science by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi again. We watched Torah and Science, the first part. Both of us are flabbergasted. It's unbelievable. New proofs that we never heard of—scientific proofs of God. Both of us are amazed. Then we watch another part. We're both amazed again.

1:42:52But at this point, my wife says, "Listen, it's amazing. I know the Torah is true, but I still need a sign. I still need something that's like God telling me this is what He wants me to do." The next day, we watched the third part of this video, which was really part two, and she gets her sign. What's our sign? We get to a verse in the book of Devarim where Hashem tells us that after we get to the end of days we're going to sin against Him by going and worshiping other foreign gods. The god of stone and the god of wood. Now, stone obviously represents Mecca where all the Muslims are. Wood represents the cross where all the Christians pray to. So, this sounds good, but maybe it's a coincidence. But through this Torah and Science video, which is in all those bags, for anybody who wants to take one of the bags, it's free. There are a bunch of CDs in it. And one of the DVDs is a copy of Torah and Science. Now, here he shows us that not only is this verse

1:44:00very interesting and very similar to being a representation of modern day's biggest religions, but he also shows that Torah codes actually show that the names Jesus and Mecca both appear through Torah codes inside this verse. It's the only place in the entire Torah they appear, which is inside the verse that talks about them. So when a person looks at this with an unbiased eye, meaning he's not looking for his own answer, he's looking for an answer. It's not like one of these people that put the target on the, like Christians, what they do is they draw the target and then they draw the circle around it, wherever the target is. No, no, he is looking for the actual answer. If you're unbiased, this is as clear as day. For me, it was, for her, even more so. At that moment, she says, "I want everything. This was more than enough. I realized that Christianity is complete idolatry, it's complete nonsense." That's it. We have to learn everything and do everything. At that moment, the conversion process sped up drastically, and again, a new mission in life, or the mission in life transformed again. Now, we're not only learning that we didn't just meet God, now we want to do what He said. So now they tell us, listen, once she converts, you know that you have to get married. You have to get married all over again. You have to have a chuppah and kiddushin.

1:45:28Okay, great. So can we have, like, uh, when it's the same day? Same day. So, the same day, but throughout the story, there are constantly new miracles happening. My health starts deteriorating and then improving, deteriorating and then improving. We're constantly getting tested left and right, but we stay strong, little by little. We overcome this, we finish the conversion, finish the marriage, decide to go to Eretz Yisrael for a little while, go spend some time with Rabbi Ephraim, we have the Sheva Brachot there, learn some more over there for a little while, then decide to come back here, but with a plan to get out of here, get out of New York, and start a new life somewhere else. But moving is not so easy. I still have the business going, even though the business has gone down by 99%. There's still something left. There was enough left that even 99% still didn't kill the whole thing. Still enough money that we still have, you know, at that point, maybe somewhere close to a million dollars left of our own money and a little bit more of clients' money. So we're still okay, relatively speaking. I felt poor because there was so much more before that, but I wish I had it today.

1:46:50Anyway, we figured, okay, let's let things go. I continue to learn. Once in a while, people ask me questions. I answer the questions from what I learn. I don't really know very much, but whatever I learn, it happens to be what people ask me about. Hashem gives me knowledge, and what I learn is exactly what people want to know. And my rabbi tells me that, listen, you have to start spreading this information. You have to start teaching. I said, teaching who? He says, teaching people. I said, I don't know anything. He says, no, no, don't teach anything. Just teach what you know. Don't teach everything. Teach whatever you know. You learned something this week, teach that. So anytime I would go to beit knesset, they would tell me, listen, why don't you say something at seudah shlishit? So I'd start talking at seudah shlishit for five minutes, ten minutes, and I saw it's affecting people. They like it. They like the story. They like this. They like that. I said, I liked it. But still, I never in my wildest dreams thought I was ever going to leave the Wall Street world and join this world. This wasn't even a joke. Eventually, we decided to leave New York and move to Florida. We originally lived in Boca Raton. And shortly after I moved, I decided to start a weekly shiur in my house.

1:48:02First year was with one person, me and this guy named Nissan. I told Nissan, "Here's the deal: I'll tell you what God said, you do whatever you want. But at least somebody's gonna tell you." He said, "Okay, no problem." So, the first shiur we had, we talked, and he liked it. Oh, gosh. Second shiur, we had three people: two people in front of me and one guy on the phone because he couldn't make it. One of them was this guy named Danny who became a Rabbi, Nissan, and this other guy named Tomer. Tomer was on the phone. And then eventually he actually showed up to the shiur. So, on the second shiur, I tell him, "Listen, by the way, you know there's a halakha and a Rambam, chiddush." "What chiddush?" "This is a Rambam in Hilkhot Shabbat, the last halakha in chapter 30, says the following." that someone who violates Shabbat is considered 100% an idol worshiper. Now, if somebody is considered an idol worshiper, obviously you can't count them in a minyan. Meaning that if you go to a Beit Knesset and there's only 10 people, that's a minyan. But one of them, you know, drives on Shabbat.

1:49:23You can't count them as one of the ten for the minyan. Why? Because the halacha says that he's considered an idol worshiper. So Nisan looks at me funny. He goes, wait, wait, what do you mean if he drives to shul? I said, if a guy drives to shul on Shabbat, that means he's violating Shabbat. And at that point, halacha calls him an idol worshiper. He says, I've been driving to shul for 25 years. Nobody ever told me this. He said, "Are you sure?" I said, "Yeah, it's also in Shulchan Aruch." He says, "Wait, what's the Shulchan Aruch? What is it, a menu?" I said, "No, no, Shulchan Aruch is the halacha, it's all halachot. So there are a few other sources in Shulchan Aruch. You have it in Shulchan Aruch, Even HaEzer, Seder HaGet, Se'if Tet. It says, HaKol K'sherim Liktov Get, Chutz Mi, Cheresh, Shoteh, Vekatan, Ve'eved, Ve'ovdei Kochavim, VeYisrael Mumar, O Mechalel Shabbat BeFarhesya." says that anyone can write a get, a kosher get, except if they're a cheresh (deaf), or a shoteh (crazy person), or a katan (minor), or an eved (slave), or an oved kochavim (idol worshiper), or a Yisrael mumar (heretic), or a mechalel Shabbat b'farhesya (one who publicly desecrates Shabbat).

1:50:44It says in another place, Shulchan Aruch. It says, where else? It says, Shulchan Aruch. It says, if somebody loses something, if a Jew loses something, you have to return it. If you have a sign, you find a wallet. The wallet has an ID. You find it. You see an ID. You have to return this to the Jew. But then the halacha says something different. Halacha says, you have to return something that you lost, that has the signs, that you know who it belongs to, to a Jew, even if he's a rasha, even if he eats non-kosher food because he just feels like it. But if he eats non-kosher just to make everybody angry, to make God angry, he is considered like an apikores, like a heretic. And heretics, or idol worshipers, or a mechalel Shabbat,

1:51:59Considered going, which you're not obligated to give them. It's not allowed to even return what they have. Why? Because their deen is like a goy. Their deen is like another regular goy. A goy that's actually an idol worshiper, you're not allowed to return his stuff. A regular righteous goy, you should return his stuff because you can do kiddush Hashem. But if he's an idol worshiper, you're not allowed to return his stuff if you found it. says the same thing. Says a Jew that's a heretic, to even worship idols or to violate Shabbat Even if he's not violating the biblical sins, even if he's violating the rabbinical sins, but it's in public, people know that he's playing with his phone. Playing with his phone is a rabbinical sin; it's not a biblical sin. But he's violating the rabbinical sin, and everybody knows. He is considered ke'akum. What's akum? Oved kochavim u'mazalot. He's like somebody that worships the stars, worships idols, and so on.

1:53:22And it says it in other places all over the Shulchan Aruch. There are seven places, I believe, in the Shulchan Aruch. There are countless places in the Gemara. It's all over the Rambam. It's all over the Zohar. It's twelve places in the Torah. It's all over the place. So Nisan just got the shock of his life. Why? Because Nisan has been driving to shul for 25 years. Clockwork, he goes every day to shul. He puts on tefillin, puts on tzitzit, puts on everything. On Shabbat, just to note, no tefillin. Since he lives a little bit far, he drives. It's only a 15-minute drive, and on Shabbat, there is a nice parking lot right next to the shul. It's convenient, and everybody knows he drives. Why? Because he drives some of the people there with him. Some people he takes home and so on and so forth. It's not like it's a secret. Everybody knows. The rabbi knows, the kehillah knows, everybody knows. Why? Because there are 200 other cars in the parking lot. He's not the only one. Nissan's not the only driver in the shul that nobody knew. And he's not hiding. This was, in his eyes, 100% allowed. Now he got a shock of his life. He says, what do I do? I said, well, the first thing is to stop driving. He goes, yeah, but how am I going to go to shul? I said, don't go to shul.

1:54:41What am I gonna pray? I said, pray at home. There's Ten Commandments. One of the commandments is to keep Shabbat. There's no commandment to go to shul. There's no commandment. You want to go to shul? Live closer. And he decides to keep Shabbat. This gave me a lot of motivation. Why? Because I see that this stuff that I don't really know very much, but what I know is actually helping other people. So it must be that other people also don't know. Little by little, we decide to spread this information. We put it on YouTube. We put it all over the internet. A lot of siyata dishmaya. Some people find out about the shiur from different places. They start asking me to come to New York, come to Los Angeles, come to different places. And we go to different places. We start this weekly shiur. Little by little, the little bit of money that I had left becomes even less. The million dollars becomes 250,000. But $250,000 is still plenty of money. The only thing that's going well is that the shiurim are attracting more people. It goes from one person to three people, to 10 people, to 15 people, to 20 people. Then somebody says lashon hara about me, so it goes back to one person, to five people, to 10 people, to 20 people. And then some other rabbi says lashon hara about me, so it goes back to one person, to 10 people, to five people, to 10 people. I've rebuilt the shiur about 20 times by now. Why? Because what happens is, I get them to do teshuva.

1:56:05That's my job. People do teshuva. They come to shiur, they listen to halacha, they listen to actual, real emet. They do teshuva. What do they do when they do teshuva? They go to the Beit Knesset. They go to the Beit Knesset, and they keep saying, you know, Rabbi Yaron says this, and Rabbi Yaron says that, and Rabbi Yaron says this. And everything Rabbi Yaron says, it's the opposite of what you're saying. So what does the Rabbi do? "No, no, don't listen to Rabbi Yaron. He doesn't know what he's talking about." "Yeah, but he said halacha, he said Shulchan Aruch, he said Zohar, he said Tanach, he said sources." "No, no, no. He doesn't know. He's new, he's new, he's new. He doesn't know. He doesn't know." They can now since they see him much more often than me. They see him seven days a week. They see me maybe once. What happened eventually? He influenced them; they stopped coming to the shiur. So I sent him to the shul, and they stopped going to the shul, and little by little, they become koferim again. Sometimes they actually stay strong once in a while and... The key is that you still have to continue. You still have to do what you have to do because there are many people all over the internet. Hashem created the internet to make a lot of mitzvot and make a lot of sins. You have a choice. You could press a button and get Olam HaBa.

1:57:13By pressing a button. Why? Because you take, you listen to a shiur Torah, you get motivated, you send the shiur Torah to somebody else. That somebody else can be motivated to do teshuva and send it to somebody else. He does teshuva, sends it to somebody else. He does teshuva, next thing you know, you have 20 avreichim under your belt. Twenty people are ba'alei teshuva because you watched one shiur and decided to share it. On the other hand, you could not press the button. Instead, press a button that goes to some site that you're not even allowed to think about. And a person can lose an olam. It's very easy to lose an olam. So when I realized that you could actually get people to simply change without much effort, all you got to do is tell them the truth. That's it. All you got to tell them is this. It's right over here. You want to argue? Argue with God. It's here. No problem. God's willing to argue with you if you want one-on-one. You just have to go up there though. You can't blame me. I'm just reading. I was reading what he said. You have a problem with God, you have a problem with halakha, you have a problem with Chazal, and so on and so forth. And now, little by little, people start realizing that a lot of the suffering that they have is because of themselves, because of their own actions. And that's why the Gemara in Masechet Shabbat says, אין מיתה בלא חטא ואין ייסורים בלא עוון.

1:58:33that there is no death that comes to the world without some type of chet, some type of transgression, and there's no suffering without sin. So now, a chet is an unintentional sin, and an avon is an intentional sin. So here we see that it's very unusual. A chet that's unintentional leads to death, whereas an intentional sin leads to suffering. You would think it's the opposite. You would think an intentional sin should lead to death, and unintentional should lead to suffering. No. Death is an easy solution. When a person does an intentional sin, Hashem wants to give him suffering. Why? Because if He gives you death, there's no fixing you. There's no fixing. Why? A person that does intentional sins, he goes to Gehinnom, he goes to a place he can't come out of. whereas if it's unintentional, it's a different story. Different story, different level of magnitude.

1:59:37You start teaching people that all of the suffering they have in their life, all the suffering that I had in my life, there had to be a reason for it. You start evaluating what you were doing, what you believed, and you compare it to what Hashem said. And you start saying, oh wait, that I didn't do, that I didn't do, that I did, and that's not good to do. And you start realizing, wow, I have a lot of X's, I have a lot of negatives on my list. Now you don't know which one in particular caused the sickness. You don't know which one in particular caused the money loss. You don't know which one in particular caused the divorce or caused the child to die or caused the partner to die or caused something else. You don't really know what caused what. You just know you weren't okay with Hashem. It's very easy, very easy to look at the list and think, no, no, it's not relevant because you don't feel like doing it. But if you look at it with unbiased eyes, and you look at it honestly, you start seeing, you know what? This is what I need to do. Even the stuff that I'm doing, I'm not doing it like I'm supposed to. And then you start thinking, I gotta do something about it. I gotta fix it. I can't fix everything all at once. I gotta do something. So little by little, this is what we did. We started fixing. And one of the things that helped me fix is helping other people fix.

2:01:01So, aside from giving lectures, I started sending packages to people, sending people different information that I read, that I listened to, that motivated me, and hopefully motivates them too. And for years already, I've been sending out CDs of Rabbi Mizrachi, Rabbi Reuven, Rabbi Zamir Cohen, and other rabbis that I'm familiar with, that I thought were very good. Shoei money internet, we started a page on Facebook, and so on and so forth. Little by little, this kiruv became an actual organization that today we call Beit HaShem. It's a non-profit organization, and all we do all day, 24 hours a day, is kiruv. Today both of them. It's more than just me. We have Rabbi Ephraim. We have some of him in Yerushalayim that learn. We have some people that we help study every month. Oh, I said it's a real organization that does a lot. One of the things we do is we fight Christianity because Christianity today is more dangerous than it's ever been before. In the past, Christianity simply was a one-way highway: if you didn't become a Christian, they'd simply kill you. That's it.

2:02:06Today, they're not threatening to kill anybody. They're not threatening to kill anybody. Why? Because they pretend to be just like you. They tell you, no, I'm Jewish too. I just believe in Yoshke. We're Jews also. We just believe in Yoshke also. We believe in JC Penny. And they make you feel like it's okay to delve in a little bit. And before you know it, you're two feet in, you don't even realize it. They're doing it in a very, very blunt way, in your face. There are several organizations that are very, very dangerous because they're actually getting people to buy into this avodah zarah. And we're losing at least a couple of hundred Jews every week just in Israel alone. In America, probably three times that, probably three times that, are converting to Christianity, are becoming idol worshipers and This is mainly because of a few things. Number one, we're an ignorant generation. We don't know anything. So when somebody tells you, "Have you ever heard of the suffering servant?"

2:03:09like, "Oh, sounds like a really righteous person." It's like, "Yeah, this is the Forbidden Chapter in the Prophets called Isaiah 53." And the guy never even read the Tanach, never read the Chumash, never read Parsha, never read anything. He just knows a few superficial stories. Despite the fact that he has a kippah, it doesn't mean much. A kippah is a piece of cloth on your head. It doesn't mean you're a learned person. And they mentioned to him Isaiah 53, Daniel 9, and all other types of things that are very vague. And they start describing something to him. It's like, oh, this person sounds like a really nice person, a really good person, a really righteous person. And they convince him to commit himself to something that he doesn't actually believe. Why? Because he's ignorant. it's much easier to convince an ignorant person than a knowledgeable person. That is the foundation of Christianity from day one. You look even at the whole New Testament. Who are the original students? Who are the original members of Christianity? A bunch of illiterate morons. Those are the original guys. Why? It's much easier to convince somebody who doesn't know anything. And that's what they're doing every day. We're an ignorant generation. The second reason is,

2:04:20Because even the ones that want to learn, they learn things that are not impactful. They learn things that are not necessarily always relevant to their day-to-day life. They learn things that make them feel that they're okay regardless of what they do, which is not true. Half of the Torah talks about consequences of not doing what Hashem said. We have a few parashiyot in the Torah that say some really horrible things. If anyone would just simply read them, they would immediately do teshuva. Because what Hashem said, He's serious about. We may not take it seriously, but He's serious. And what He said is not going away. He didn't, like, change His mind at some other point. So, with that being said, even people who come to a shiur, they come to the shiur and they listen, they learn about halachot of Beit HaMikdash. It's very nice to learn halachot of Beit HaMikdash, but we don't have Beit HaMikdash right now. What's that going to do for my life? How is that going to help my marriage? How is that going to get me close to HaKadosh Baruch Hu?

2:05:21So this is a problem. A lot of the shiurim are just simply not relevant to a lot of people. They're not learning day-to-day mussar. All of this is what, b'ezrat Hashem, we are trying to fix. What we're trying to do is, number one, we're trying to make the ignorant knowledgeable by telling you exactly what it says in the book, telling you the opinions of the sages, telling you what Hashem says, His opinion. No sugarcoating. I don't really care what you can handle and what you can't handle. It's not for me to judge. I'm not a prophet or a son of a prophet. People that tell you, "No, I didn't tell you the whole thing because I wasn't sure if you could handle the truth." What makes you think that you can handle it and I can't? Well, you're better than me. Your Jewish neshama is better than my Jewish neshama? What? God wrote the Torah just for you and me? He excluded? I have like a kid version of the Torah. What, I have like a special education version of the Torah? You have the AP, Advanced Placement Torah? I have special education? What? Parashat Bereishit, look what it says. Parashat Noach, look what it says. Hashem says, when we didn't do what He said, He punished us horribly. Says it in the Torah. Why, you don't want to teach me that?

2:06:37Don't decide for me what I can handle, what I can't handle. That's the first thing. I don't know and I don't care what you can or can't handle. I'm going to tell you what it says. Why? Because I know that Hashem knows what He's doing. If He wrote it in the Torah, that means you need to know it. Second thing is, spreading that information everywhere for free. Why? Because money is a big yetzer hara for people. Big yetzer hara for people. So, You want to donate? You're more than welcome to. You don't want to donate? I'll donate to you. Here, there's about $5,000 worth of stuff in those bags. I wish somebody would actually take them. Why? Because that's Torah knowledge. That's actually an investment in the community. Somebody wants? You don't want? What can I do? When I bring a horse to water, you can't make him drink. The most important thing is to teach you things that are actually relevant to your life. And we'll finish with this story. One time, two kids, two little kids in Russia, both homeless, both yetomim (orphans), their parents died. Both were walking around the streets, homeless and miserable, but what could they do?

2:07:49Russian guys saw these two kids, Shema Torah and mitzvot, which was very rare in those days, especially in the days of the Yevsektsiya. The maxim was to become communists in those days. Their number one job was to kill religious Jews in every way, shape, or form. Either kill them physically or kill them spiritually, whatever they could do to kill them. They hated God more than anything else in the world. To fight a religious Jew in the old country was very difficult. They found one, and this... Russian guys saw these two kids. Their shoes were like slippers, but they weren't really slippers. What made them look like slippers? They both had open mouths. Both had open mouths and you could see the toes. Both had holes in their pants that made you think they were shorts, even though it's freezing outside. Both had clothes from the earliest century. Both were looking at an apple, but they couldn't buy it because they didn't have a penny to their name. So a Jewish neshamah sees two little poor kids. What does he do? He wants to help them. He says, "Where are your parents?" They respond, "We don't have parents." "You don't have any money?" "No, we don't have any money." "Come, I'll buy you the apple." He buys them an apple. He buys each of them an apple. He asks, "Where do you live?" They reply, "We don't have a house." He says, "Come with me. I'll take care of you. I'll take care of you on one condition." "What?" "You learn Torah. Do you want to learn Torah?" "Yes. We'll learn anything. Feed us. Give us a house. Learn Torah. Why not?"

2:09:18Okay, that's the deal. You learn Torah, everything's good. What's your name? I am Arale. Arale. Arale. You know your mom, you know your dad? Don't know. Okay. What about you? I am Yankele. Arale, Yankele. Okay. Arale, Yankele, you're now with me. So he took care of them, sent them to learn a little bit of Torah. Little by little, you know, he'd feed them, he'd teach this, that, and the other thing. They went to yeshiva, they learned, and eventually, they both grew up, got married, and went to America. One day, somebody comes to this old man, this old Russian man, now he's old. He starts talking to him, he says, "Listen, we have some people that we need to raise some money for." To do some kiruv, teach some people Torah. You can help maybe? He goes, oh yeah, well, I've been doing this my whole life, helping people learn Torah. Oh yeah? Who? He goes, no, I have kids, a couple of kids. I don't know where they are now, but I know there were a couple of kids that I raised for many years. I raised them for many years, and they're in America now.

2:10:42Says, "Well, what's their names? I'm from America. What's their names?" Because one is Ari Le Kotler and one is Yankile Kamenetsky. He says, "What? You mean Rav Aharon Kotler, the Rosh Yeshiva of Lakewood, who built all of Lakewood, the most religious community in America and in the world, with 5,000 students? You mean Rav Kamenetsky, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, Gadol HaDor?" Son is good though. Also, you raise them. I don't know these people, you say. I really don't know them. That's what I know. I really don't know them. I really don't know them. They became Gedolei HaDor in America for what? Just a little bit of kiruv, a little bit of care and... Somebody going out of their traditional stuff that they're doing and decides, "You know what? Let me do something for somebody else. Even if I don't see a direct benefit out of it, who knows what could be?" Maybe the next CD you give or the next person you bring to Yeshiva could be the next up-and-coming tzaddik.

2:11:51Maybe the next person could be the Steipler Gaon. Maybe it could be Rabbi Aharon Kotler. Who knows what it could be? The point is that if each one of us takes the initiative to do some type of kiruv, some type of care for Am Yisrael, you could change the world. Any questions? I think after I shut off the camera, there's going to be a lot of questions. But usually, when I ask if there are any questions, nobody has any questions. But the zechut of mitzvot, thank you for learning with me. Hopefully, next time there will be a little bit more people. But this shiur will be on the internet tomorrow night. Tomorrow, we have a shiur in Aventura. It's a different shiur altogether. It's our series about Mussar Pirkei Avot. It's in the Breslov Center. Breslov Center in Aventura. It's about 15-20 minutes from here, which I know for Florida people, it is a lot of time, but it's really not. You know, in New York, just to go to work is an hour and a half each way. So when I say 15 minutes, to me, it's like going to the store. But I know for Florida people, 15 minutes is far. It's like far. So don't worry, the car can reach there. You can actually go. You go on a highway, you get off at exit 16, you make a left, you make a left again, you make a right, and you're there. Is that the same? Oh, I don't, I don't love, I'm in vermin.

2:13:05Thank you for watching.