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 166 - What if freedom is the discipline to say no?
The calendar’s most joyful reset is a masterclass in starting over. As we close the Torah and open it anew, we talk candidly about what a real fresh start looks like when the world keeps shouting for our attention. We share why renewal lands differently when you’re rooted in a community that holds you to your highest values and celebrates your growth with song, study, and shared meals.
From there, we wrestle with a provocative claim: there are no coincidences. Your moments as purposeful changes how you act—turning delays into lessons, detours into callings, and gratitude into a daily muscle. We connect this mindset to the deeper balance between body and soul, arguing for a life that enjoys the physical without letting it take the wheel. Pleasure has a place; purpose sets the pace.
We also pull back the curtain on the media economy that rewards outrage over truth. When clicks become currency, many voices trade conviction for controversy. Our antidote is simple and demanding: practise chosen limits, curate your inputs, and build habits—Shabbat time, study, prayer, and presence—that don’t fit into a swipe. At the core, we come back to two pillars carried in the word Yehudi: truth and gratitude. Call reality by its name. Say thank you with your whole heart. Together, they form a compass sturdy enough to guide you through headlines and habits alike.
If you’re ready to begin again with intention, find a local orthodox community, open the text, and step into the dance of renewal. Subscribe for more honest conversations, share this with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review with one practice you’re choosing this week.
Until next time, have a spectacular day!
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Trust Factor, the podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Home stretch, my friends. Home stretch are these beautiful, beautiful holidays that we get to enjoy with our friends, family, and community. If you don't know what I'm talking about, now is your time to figure it out. If you don't have a community to connect to and enjoy and grow with during these times of these spectacular high holidays, then it's time because right now we are about to get into the last days of reading the entire Torah and we're gonna start it all over again. So you want to talk about fresh starts, you want to talk about getting another chance. This is it. It encapsulates this whole concept of renewal during the time of Simchatorah. During a time when, there's no coincidence, this the hostages are being freed, God willing, from Gaza after two years in captivity. They could have been freed on a random Wednesday four or five, six weeks ago. They could have been freed on a random Tuesday six months ago. It could have happened at any other time of the year, but it's not. It's happening on the eve of Simcha Torah, which translates as the joy of Torah, the happiness of Torah. Do you understand? There's no coincidences in this world. There are none. If somebody tries to convince you of that worse, if you still believe after having listened for so long that there is this concept of coincidence in this world, then you've missed the mark, my friends. You've missed it, and you've got to go back and learn it again. There is no such thing. That is a fabricated idea. It doesn't exist in Judaism. There is no such thing as coincidence. Everything is perfectly and finely orchestrated by the master of the world. And so now is your time to connect back. If you don't have that community, find it. Find one. Thank God if you live in a first world country in any Western democracy, you will find them everywhere you look. Find a community of orthodox Jews and connect back to them. And I stress the word orthodox. Find a community of orthodox Jews. They will welcome you and they will honor you and they will respect you and they will bring you into the fold and help you to grow and become the best version of you. And there's no better time to do that than right now at Simcha Torah. Because after this, we start the Torah from Bereshit, from the beginning, from day one. We start all over again. We read the spectacular, spectacular, the only divine book on planet Earth that was written by the finger of God and given to us. We restart it again this coming week. So jump on as fast as you can, my friends. Don't delay because we don't know what tomorrow brings. We left off talking about the idea that we are not meant, or it is very difficult for us, to be able to disconnect from the material realm the way that certain few sages do, certain few what's called Gidoleador, the leaders of the generation are capable of detachment from this world. This is not Buddhism, and generally speaking, we don't try to disconnect from the physicality, and that's not what it's about. Even the leaders of the generation are immersed in phys in the physical world. It's just that their immersion in it and their experience interactions with it are very different than ours. Theirs are for a distinct purpose, and that purpose is always to be able to understand the material and physical realm in a way that most of humanity does not, so that they can advise us on how to properly engage with it. And our job is to get pleasure from it. That's it. God created this world, it's a form of pleasure. There are so many pleasures in this world. Obviously, it's not an idea to partake of all of it all the time, every time. That's called gluttony. That's not what it's meant to be. We're supposed to enjoy from this world in a balanced and reasonable way. You're supposed to be able to live a balanced life. Now, if you have a preference of where to skew that balance to, I would suggest that that needs to be skewed towards spirituality and minimize the physicality because the physicality is a means to an end. In other words, yes, it's good, but it's good only temporary and in this world. It will serve its purpose, but it always comes to an end. It always has limitations and it's in the name, right? Material. This world is measurable and weighable. If you're going to invest excess energies and time, make it into a world that is limitless. The next world, make it into your emotional and spiritual well-being. That's where most of our energies should be focused, my friends. There is no downside to building your spiritual life. There is plenty of potential downside in only investing in your physical life. If the physicality takes over, that's where you have a problem. Generally speaking, us humans were created with an ashama, with a soul and a body. One is physical, one is spiritual, and they're always at odds with each other. It's always a battle. That, my friends, is what causes a lot of our stress and anxiety. Is that we know what we would like to do, we know what we should be doing, but we also know what our desires, what our inclinations pull us towards. It's immediate gratification. And talk about a generation right now where we are all about click and receive. You know, if your internet speed is not fast enough these days, people lose their minds. They they will buy a house based on where the internet signal, the Wi-Fi, is the strongest, so that they have the least amount of wait time between when they click and when the page loads. People have no patience these days. Not only is there a sense of entitlement, but it needs to be immediate. No delay. Because if there's a delay, they lose interest. And we're lit there's no wonder we're living in a world of ADD and ADHD. People cannot focus for more than a few seconds at a time. It's a scary concept, my friends. Focus your energy on developing your spiritual health, your emotional health, knowing that you could put down those vices. You know, people think that you're free when you can do whatever you want, that a slave is free to do absolutely whatever they want any time of day without being told no. And that, my friends, is a fallacy. It's not true. Somebody who is really free is somebody who is allowed to put limitations on what they are being told they should be doing. From anybody else, doesn't have to be a boss. It can be society, it can be any external force that tells you what they think you should be doing, what is important and what's not, and that is allowed to trump what you know and feel to be true and right, then my friends, you are a slave to that system. It doesn't matter, it could be your cell phone, it could be the fact that you cannot put down your cell phone, that you're always looking to read the news, you're always trying to stay connected. There are no coincidences in this world, my friends. If you think about it, we are driven by information. But the problem is that the information is not good for us, especially given the people who are behind the source of the information. It's not healthy for us. Nine out of ten stories are negative, they're designed to bring you down because they only want to sell clicks, they want to earn eyeballs, they want to get people tuning in, which drives traffic, which drives advertisers, which drives their bottom line. So they will say and do almost anything. And the same applies on social media. You know, my friends, you see people out there posting things. That's why we see influencers who are normally pro-Israel and understand Jewish values and their whole lives grew up appreciating and loving Jewish values, and yet at the drop of a hat, suddenly they flip the script, suddenly they're anti-Israel, suddenly they're obviously rabid anti-Semites. Overnight, somebody clearly flipped a switch. You know what that switch was? Dollars and cents, my friends. Dollars and cents, the desire for people to check in. They realize that if they just say the truth, it's boring. If they just say what's real and what we all know to be real and good and true, it's boring because we already get it. So how do they get the clicks? Be controversial, be a contrarian, go against the flow. If everybody knows that Jewish values were the ones that built human society today, including our court systems and including our social systems, it all dates back to the Torah. That's what the world was built on. They want to call it Judeo-Christian values, fine. But the original was Jewish values, and it was built on that. And they knew that growing up, they understood this concept and they loved it and appreciated it. And all of them would choose to live next door to a Jew all day long. But suddenly they flip one day, and it happens to be in the middle of a war that was waged against Israel, and suddenly they flip the script so quickly and so easily. And I'm talking about big names, and you know what I'm talking about. And the answer is only one thing: it's their desire for money, it's advertisement at its worst, my friends. It is media and influencers at their worst. Do not follow the trend. Always rise above, always be better, be true to yourself and be true to the truth. Because remember, a Jew is a Yehudi. A Jew is a mode. The root word of Yehudi is Hoda'a lehodot, which means two things. Number one, to confirm the truth when you see it, to call it out, call out the lies when you see it, and give testimony to the truth. That's mode, and mode is also to be grateful. Somebody does something for you, you acknowledge it with gratitude. That is the trick to success in this life. Those two things. You take truth and gratitude, and you put that together, my friends, and you have a utopia in this world. Wraps it up for today, my friends. Tomorrow is going to be Erev Khag. It's going to be the beginning of Shminy Tseret. It's going to be a podcast in the morning, and then we'll have two days off and back again on Thursday. I hope you have an amazing day. We'll chat again tomorrow.
