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 141 - Finding My Way Back: A Journey from Secular Judaism to Torah Life
Have you ever had a single moment completely redirect your life's trajectory? That's exactly what happened to me twenty years ago when—after repeatedly ignoring links from a persistent friend—I finally clicked on a video of Rabbi Mizrahi speaking about Torah. Those reluctant five minutes transformed into hours, then years of learning that completely changed my family's destiny.
My journey from secular Judaism to Torah observance reveals how spiritual awakening requires perfect alignment: the right message from the right messenger at precisely the right time. But even with these elements in place, divine grace must remove our spiritual blindfolds. Growing up in a traditional Moroccan home where we observed customs without understanding their deeper meaning, I had everything society values—family, home, financial success—yet something profound was missing until that fateful Sunday when everything changed.
The cornerstone of Judaism is gratitude—hoda'ah—which means both giving testimony and expressing thankfulness. It's literally encoded in our identity as Jews. This gratitude extends to those who guide us toward truth, like Rabbi Mizrahi, whose impact rippled through my entire family, with my son spending years in yeshiva and my daughter attending seminary in Israel. When spiritual teachers help people return to Torah observance, they perform perhaps the greatest mitzvah, enabling others to extract every possible drop of meaning from existence while creating positive change that extends from this world into the next.
What appears as free choice is actually quite limited—our primary decision is whether to embrace a godly life or not. The beauty of influencing others toward Torah is that every mitzvah they perform—and those performed by everyone they subsequently influence—accrues to your spiritual account eternally. This creates an ever-expanding legacy that continues long after your earthly journey concludes. Are you ready to discover how embracing Torah can transform not just your life but generations to come?
Morning everybody. Welcome to the Trust Factor, the podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine, age-old teachings Shavua Tov. I wish you guys all a wonderful week. I hope you had an amazing Shabbat. I certainly did, and I recognize that a lot of people just joined our group online, the WhatsApp chat group, and I want to thank my rabbi, rabbi Mizrahi, for posting a link to this podcast on his WhatsApp group.
Speaker 0:I think it's probably apropos to spend a few minutes talking about my genesis, my own foray into religion. I haven't really talked about it much, I maybe dabbled in it a little bit, but given that Rabbi Mizrahi, who is my rabbi, who is the rabbi who I credit with literally saving my life Not that I was in a bad place, god forbid. I wasn't. Thank God, things were great. 20 years ago I was a young man of 30, had a young family. My son had just come into the world, my daughter, I think, was maybe even an infant, but about that time I was a secular Jew. My whole life growing up I was a secular Jew, raised in a house with Moroccan traditional parents. We did Shabbat dinners and then we went out. We went to shul on the high holidays, only on the high holidays and we counted the pages to see when it was over, when we could sit down because we've been standing for too long, did not enjoy the process, didn't know why I was there. But life was good Married, had a beautiful home, cars in the driveway, money in the bank, successful business. Things were going well. No reason for me to look elsewhere.
Speaker 0:But we all have that friend, that one friend who's a religious Jew or more observant than you or loves his spirituality, and they're constantly sending you clips, constantly sending you links to some video or some podcast. That happened, I had one of those friends and he kept sending me video after video and I kept deleting them because I didn't have time for them and I really didn't have any interest in them. So I just kept passing them over until one Sunday where I found myself in the house by myself, about to go to work and I got another message from this individual. It was a link, a Facebook link to a video recording of a lecture given by Rabbi Mizrahi, and I opened up this lecture and I figured, okay, I've got some time, I'm not in a rush, I'm going to give it five minutes, see what he keeps sending me. And I opened it up and I start listening and I see this rabbi who reminds me of a family member, an Israeli family member with a very thick accent. Even worse, he reminded me of my teachers when I was in grade school, growing up in Hebrew school, and they brought these teachers in from Israel and they all had very thick, heavy accents and I thought, oh, what did I get into here?
Speaker 0:Now, maybe five minutes is generous, but that five minutes, my friends, turned into hours. I couldn't pull myself away from the computer and those hours turned into days and weeks and months and years. And there was no looking back, my friends. There was no looking back. The stars had aligned.
Speaker 0:What does that mean? When it comes to this concept? Number one, you have to have the right message. When it comes to Judaism and religiosity, you have to have the right message from the right messenger at the right time. Those three things have to align.
Speaker 0:And, most importantly, number one importance is that God has to decree that you are worthy of having your blindfold removed and apparently I was worthy of it. Now, everybody gets a shot at this throughout life. God gives us shots to be able to remove our blindfold, but oftentimes we're not interested and we move right past it because life, secularism, is pulling at us and we're too busy, preoccupied, being distracted by the rest of life that we have no interest or time for these things, just like I was. But Rabbi Mizrahi was my messenger. The timing was right and the message was perfect and God allowed it to happen. Since then, my friends, I've been learning, thank God, a lot of Torah and I've been teaching a lot of Torah, and my children have been learning and growing. My son has spent years in yeshiva. My daughter just went to seminary in Israel for the first year. Thank God, we live a torah life and the reason we live a torah life is because of rabbi mizrahi. So credit where credit is due is very, very important.
Speaker 0:Gratitude we've said many times in this podcast is the cornerstone of judaism. It's in our name, yahudim word of Yehudi is hoda'ah. Hoda'ah means two things. Number one, to give testimony Lehodot, I give testimony, I confirm, I'm a witness and lehodot is to give thanks, to be grateful for the things that happen around us. My friends, that's who we are. It's in our DNA. If you know somebody who isn't grateful, then you might want to go back and check their DNA. But the reality is, if you're a son of Abraham, isaac and Jacob, it is programmed into your genes. So I want to thank Rabbi Mizrahi for sharing the link. I want to welcome everybody who's come over from that side to be able to enjoy from this podcast and share it far and wide.
Speaker 0:Although my approach is very similar to Rabbi Mizrahi's no coincidence there I basically fed off of him for more than a decade. A lot of it comes from the teaching and the learning that I've had the merit to do in Rabbi Mizrahi's merit for the last 20 years, and you guys all know how this works, right? What the rabbi does in terms of making Baalei Tshuva, in terms of teaching people what's important and bringing them back into the fold, is the number one mitzvah that anybody could really do. Because we've said that God by definition lacks nothing. God by definition lacks nothing. God by definition is perfect, right.
Speaker 0:But we all know of this concept and we talked about it not long ago free choice, that we think we have free choice to be able to do good or bad, right or wrong, and I've addressed this recently. We don't have free choice. We have very little choice and the choice that we have is not free. The choice that we have is to do good or bad, right or wrong, to live a godly life or, god forbid not. That's the choice we have. Everything else, my friends, is chosen for us. This we have to choose, and when you choose, whether you choose yes or no, good or bad, there is a consequence, there is an outcome to your choice. So it's not free. That choice of good or bad, right or wrong, is whether or not to live a godly life.
Speaker 0:So what Rabbi Mizrahi does, and what he should continue to be able to do until 120 years, god willing he and his family commit themselves to making more and more Baalei Tshuva, to bringing people back into the fold. He has a special way of doing it. He's very successful at it. He is a brilliant man with a lot of wisdom and somebody who can be leaned on, but really his knack is in speaking to the soul of individuals, and that's kind of what I'm trying to replicate in his merit, and everything that I do is in his merit. Anyways, it all started by him and it will continue to grow, god willing, by him.
Speaker 0:All of the Torah that we teach, all of the Baalei Tshuva that we make, all the people whose lives we save by teaching them how to live a good life, how to overcome the stress and anxiety of this world, how to conquer your fears in this world, how to reap all the benefits from this life, how to squeeze out, like we wring out from a towel. You want to wring out every last drop of that moisture so that the towel remains perfectly dry. How do you wring out every last drop? The only way to do it, my friends, is to incorporate godliness, torah and mitzvot in your life. That is it and the more people that we can get to in this life.
Speaker 0:Number one you lead a spectacular life in this world. In this world, you are changing the very nature of the individuals that you will interact with and they will change the people around them. You are making this world a better place. By making Baalei Tshuva, by making people come back into the fold and learn Torah and live a godly life, you are definitionally making this world a much better place to live in for you and your children and all of the generations that will come after you. That's number one. That's in this world, but in the next world, my friends, the reward is eternal and it is ever-growing. It is constantly expanding exponentially. Because every individual that you have influenced to live that lifestyle you benefit, you merit from their mitzvahs, everything that they do that is in the name of Torah and mitzvot. It goes to your account as well. Them and the people that they impact For generations.
Speaker 0:It gets carried on and on and we know that once we've left this world, once we're in the next world, our time for doing mitzvot are done. We don't have any opportunity anymore. That's the challenge. The difficulty with death is not the dying part, because we know that the world that awaits us was created by the same loving God that created this world, the same God that loves us and wants the best for us. He's the God that created this world and the next world. So the dying isn't the difficult part. What's the difficult part? That we no longer have the ability to become the best versions of us to do mitzvot in this world. That is the tragedy.
Speaker 0:However, if you have left behind the legacy of making people ba'alei tshuvan, teaching people the sweetness of a life of Torah and mitzvot, and they make those positive changes in their families in your merit because of something that you taught them. Changes in their families in your merit because of something that you taught them. No-transcript, it goes straight to your account for eternity. That is what elevates you in the next world. There's nothing else. You can't do it yourself. It is only your legacy that you've left behind that gives you the ability to continue to lift and lift.
Speaker 0:My friends, I want to reiterate my appreciation, my gratitude, not just for sharing the link, but in general my gratitude to Rabbi Mizrahi for changing my life and my wife's life and my children's lives and my extended family's lives and my community's lives, because every time you make a Baal Tshuva, it affects so many people. I have immense gratitude. Hakarat Tov, thank you for everything that he continues to do and, god willing, he should be able to continue to make Baal Tshuva until 120 in complete health and success. My friends, that wraps it up for today.
Speaker 0:Tomorrow we're back into the book talking about a similar concept, talking about how it is that we impact people and don't lose hope. We don't get into a state of despair when we feel the pushback, because it's not easy when people push back on us, because they're fighting us, because they've been living a secular life for so long and it's not easy for them to make the change. So, instead of making a change and recognizing that they're the problem, they try and push it onto us to make us the problem. How does somebody who has trust in God deal with that situation? We'll talk about this tomorrow. Have an amazing rest of your weekend and.
