The Trust Factor
A daily lesson that focuses on achieving unparalleled success in life using ancient wisdom in modern times.
We will be discussing critical concepts as they are laid out in the book Sha'ar Habitachon - The Gate of Trust. Written 1000 years ago, the author reminds us of the values and wisdom that have allowed humanity to thrive throughout history.
The concept of trusting in a higher power that exists purely for our benefit, puts us in the drivers seat with absolute confidence to achieve greatness.
Eliminate: Fear, Hatred, Anxiety, Depression, Jealousy, Greed...forever!
* Note that some terminology will be in the original Hebrew or Aramaic which I will always follow with the English translation.
The Trust Factor
Episode 25 - When Failures Become Your Greatest Blessings
Have you ever wondered why miraculous events seem to happen to everyone but you? The truth might surprise you—these divine moments are constantly occurring in your life, but you simply might not be "dialed in" to recognize them.
Like an old radio that requires precise tuning to eliminate static and receive a clear signal, our spiritual awareness needs fine-tuning to perceive the divine messages constantly being transmitted our way. When we're caught up in daily chaos or focused solely on logical explanations, we miss the extraordinary amid the ordinary. The difference between those who experience miracles and those who don't isn't luck—it's awareness.
This episode explores the concept of being spiritually tuned in through powerful personal stories and practical guidance. We examine why it's so challenging to recognize divine intervention while we're experiencing it, and how reflection and hindsight often reveal what we missed in the moment. Most profoundly, we discover how divine justice differs from human justice—while courts punish wrongdoing, genuine repentance in our spiritual life can transform punishment into reward. Our failures, when approached with sincere regret and commitment to change, become not just learning opportunities but catalysts for growth and divine connection. As we conclude the Passover season, what better time to consider how we might better tune our spiritual antennas to receive the messages meant specifically for us?
What divine messages might you have missed recently? Take a moment today to reflect on recent "coincidences" in your life—they might be more meaningful than you realized. Share your stories with us, and join us Monday for another remarkable personal account of recognizing God's hand in unexpected circumstances.
Happy Friday everybody. We're coming into the final homestretch of Passover. I hope you had a spectacular holiday. We are going to pick this up again on Monday.
Speaker 1:Now, stories that we've been sharing are very important and I know from personal experience that when I hear firsthand accounts of people's experiences, of stories that are amazing or miraculous or what other people would consider spectacularly coincidental. Yet we know much better than that and people share these stories Some of them are so hard to believe because they're so outlandish, they're so far-fetched. You think how is that actually possible? And then you hear it from the horse's mouth. Once in a while you get an experience where you speak to somebody who shares with you their personal accounting of what happened to them and it blows your mind because now you realize it's coming from the horse's mouth. This is not a story told in third person. This is not a story that's so far removed from you. You have no idea who the individual is. The person is sometimes standing right in front of you and the story happened to them. I have such a story. You know.
Speaker 1:A lot of people think you don't have these stories. Why don't they happen to me? How come they happen to everybody else? I can assure you they happen to you. You know what the difference is. You're not dialed in. We talked about that. You need to be tuned in, otherwise what ends up happening? The story goes right over your head or it goes into the coincidence pile yeah, and then you completely forget about it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you have to rummage through history and review and analyze the situation and then you recognize his hand and you say wait a second, whoa, whoa, whoa In. There was a spectacular message. How did I miss it? So I shared with you my story recently. I have another equally no, even more, much more spectacular story that happened to me recently. I shouldn't say recently. It was about eight years ago. It was with the birth of my youngest daughter. I will share that story with you guys on Monday, god willing. It's a spectacular story. It's one that took me a while to understand it. My wife figured out the depth and the awesomeness of the story right away. For me it took years and I had to reflect on it. I had to think back and put myself in third person and pretend that I'm hearing the story from somebody else, because when it happens to you, you're in the thick of it. You don't recognize it because you're in it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that's very difficult, like, look at this whole concept of COVID, right, we were all in the thick of craziness and mayhem and something that hadn't happened to humanity ever. I mean, the last thing was 100 years ago and that wasn't anywhere remotely close to the pandemic that we dealt with and the shutting down of businesses and closing down world business. It was unbelievable and unprecedented. And the measures that we put in place to be able to deal with each other and where they came from, whether you believed in them or not. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is we were in the mayhem, we were in an event that they're going to be talking about for generations to come, but none of us sit here and dwell on it and think about it and are in awe and share crazy stories about it. It's gone. We move on right Because we were the participants, we were the players.
Speaker 1:So it's very hard to step back and look with a bird's eye view and assess your life and see the miracles that are happening around you. See what's going on. See the hand of God working in your life is very difficult sometimes. You have to reflect. You have a hindsight so you can go back with your hindsight and you can now better analyze the situation and take out the important message that came from it. Again, I have that story. I will share it with you guys, hopefully on Monday Now, in order remember to receive the message. Even if you're looking in hindsight, even if you've got 2020, you still need to be dialed in, and I use the analogy of an antenna and a radio and being dialed in.
Speaker 1:Some of this generation has absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. I'm talking to the older generation over here. Back in my day, there used to be a radio that had knobs on it, two knobs, one for volume, one for tuning in, and there was a search bar across the middle and you had to dial in with the right knob into the right station, and 90% of what you were scrolling through was just static, it's all. It was pure static. And once in a while you hear a little blip and you go oh, I just passed it. So what would you do? You'd reverse. You'd go back the other direction and try and tune it in again. Oh, you went too far, right. Then you dial back the other way. Now we're talking like literally millimeters.
Speaker 1:You're barely turning that knob just to be able not just to dial in but to be able to dial into the point where you get absolute clarity because you could be dialed in. You could have the station but you could be off by a fraction of a millimeter and what happens? The signal is not clear. You're getting a message but there's still static over there. You could still make out the message right, but it's not ideal. It doesn't make you feel good. How do you get to feel good about the message You've got to dial in perfectly. When you dial in perfectly, it cancels out all the noise and you get a clear signal. Your antennas have been dialed in perfectly. That's the same thing over here. You need to dial in.
Speaker 1:I gave you guys an example from my own personal life of how I wasn't dialed in when I needed to be dialed in. That is sometimes a challenge, even if we know that we need to be dialed in and we do dial in. It's a question of timing. When do you dial in? Do you dial in when things are hitting the roof? Do you dial in when the stuff is upside down and you're in the middle of chaos and mayhem and everything's falling apart around you? Is that when you're dialing in Because that is the best time to dial in, or are you dialing in long after? When you have hindsight? The first is obviously better. It's better for you because that's what reduces your anxiety and your stress and your worry and all these difficulties that come along with lacking faith in God and not having any trust. So the best time to dial in and make sure you're on a crystal clear station is when you're going through what you're going through. But that's okay, cause even if you've missed it, like I did, we're human right and I've been working on myself for 20 years we're human. We're going to make mistakes. That's how we're programmed. So if you've made that mistake and you haven't dialed in properly and you allowed yourself to get dragged through the mud a little bit, fine, no big deal.
Speaker 1:Pick up and review your life. That's why we said before you got to take a day out of the week. You got to take time out of every single day, ideally and review and analyze your life. What happened today, what happened today, what was good, what was bad, especially when you have a particularly difficult day today. Then stop at the end of the day and reflect, or the next morning on the way in to work, reflect in the car and think about what did I miss? What's the message? Was I tuned in or not? Yeah, this whole concept is not all or none. It's not you get it all the first time or you're a failure. There is no such thing as failure if you've learned from the experience. The only time you will fail is when you haven't learned from it, and we're all very guilty of that.
Speaker 1:Like we said yesterday, right, the definition of insanity is repeating the same process and expecting a different result. Right, a different outcome. That's the definition of insanity. We do it. We do it because we're not perfect. We're far from perfect. We're human. We were created that way. So we're going to make mistakes. But there is a gift. There is a gift that was given to us. It's just like all the other commandments that I told you about. Seemingly, when we look at them from a distance, we think well, they must be for our creator's benefit. Somehow he lacks without us doing these commandments, which is ridiculous. Right, they're only for our benefit. So he gives you the opportunity to fail, why?
Speaker 1:Let me give you an example. You go, you're driving a car and you get pulled over on the highway and you get a ticket for speeding. You're doing 30 kilometers over the speed limit and you have a thousand dollar ticket. You now have to pay and you got to go to court. So you get to court and you stand in front of the judge and you really feel bad and you plead with the judge and you say, judge, I really feel bad. I don't normally drive that way. There's no, you know, I don't have a driving history that indicates that I'm a dangerous or a fast driver. I normally drive the speed limit or mildly, marginally above it. You know, this was an exception. I had a heavy foot, I wasn't paying attention, whatever it was, and you really feel bad about it. Obviously you don't want to pay the $1,000, but that's secondary. You feel bad that you were doing something that you shouldn't have done. You were behaving in a dangerous fashion. Okay, we're all guilty of it.
Speaker 1:What happens if the judge is kind, he lowers your fine a little bit and he gives you a little bit of time to pay, but you're still on the hook. You still got to pay, you still got to suffer the consequence. What happens with God? How does God handle that situation? How does the ultimate judge of the entire world, he who created you and who loves you like a father, not like the judge who doesn't know you and is coming to do his job. But this is your father. He's running the courthouse and now you're going to stand before him and you're going to plead your case. I made a mistake, I shouldn't have done what I did, and I feel bad about it. I really feel bad about it. Right? Which, by the way, is critically important.
Speaker 1:There has to be a concept of regret. There has to be a sense of regret. Now, that regret can't be one that holds you down. It can't be one that limits you and stops you from bouncing back and moving forward. That would be counterproductive. The regret that you have to have has to be enough just to get you to really contemplate what you did, really feel bad about it and really put efforts in place to stop doing it again. Right?
Speaker 1:So if you go to the court of justice, going to come in there with a fight and you're going to try and defend yourself when you know full well that you're guilty, then there's no point in even starting. It's a non-starter. But if you've admitted, you've accepted responsibility and you feel bad and you put mechanisms in place and you commit to not doing it again. What happens with that $1,000? It's very easy. God says not only do you not have a thousand dollar, fine, but I'm going to give you a thousand dollars. That's what it's like. You walk out of court with a thousand dollars, thousand dollars more than you went in with. How's that possible? What's the concept over here? And the concept is and we'll leave it with this that he wants you to come back, he wants you to quit.
Speaker 1:He knows you're doing something destructive and he sees that by virtue of you doing the destructive thing, you came to ask for forgiveness. In other words, had you not done the destructive thing, you would have never come to him. Had you not behaved badly, you would have not come to him. If you not recognized it, you would have continued to do it. So he sees you. Number one, that you acknowledge that it was bad behavior. Number two, it made you feel bad enough to come back and ask for forgiveness. And when you do, he says bravo, bravo was actually a good thing that you drove 30 kilometers over the speed limit. Why? Because now you came back, now you recognize that you did something wrong. It took that to get you there, but it happened, and so now you can be grateful.
Speaker 1:And there are many stories throughout Jewish history, even in the Torah, that demonstrate how people who were ill-intended ill-intended ended up getting reward for their intent, because it ended up being a good thing At the end of the day. We don't know what the calculation is. All we know is that we have to make our effort and if you recognize something is wrong and you've made an effort to repent, made an effort to stop repeating the destructive behavior, that's all it takes Doesn't mean that if you fail again, you're not going to get back up. On the contrary, we're designed to fail. We are created faulty. We will fail, and that's okay. Why? Because we just said, if it's that failure that brings you to recognize that you were behaving badly and that you have to put mechanisms in place to improve your life, then it wasn't a failure, it was a learning lesson and it was a success and you get rewarded for it. That's today's class, my friends. We'll pick up on Monday. I hope you have a wonderful Shabbat and a spectacular end to your Pesach holiday.
