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 180 - When You Trust In God, You Give More And Fear Less
What if the way you hold money is the clearest mirror of how you hold trust? We open with a preview of our interview with Mark Halpern, a trusted adviser to families of wealth, and then dive into a frank exploration of generosity, fear, and the spiritual purpose of resources. The thesis is simple and demanding: when trust in God is real, giving isn’t risky, it’s rational. When fear leads, we raise our “needs” until they crush us—multiple payments, endless upgrades, and the gnawing dread that we can’t keep up.
We unpack the mindset shift from hoarding to helping, reframing money as a tool to heal real problems rather than a buffer against imagined disasters. Drawing on the call of Lech Lecha, we translate “go for you” into a practical challenge: leave the comfort that keeps you small and choose growth that stretches your spirit. Like a crustacean shedding its shell, growth requires vulnerability; safety feels good, but it suffocates. We tackle the familiarity trap—why people stay in limiting patterns, even painful ones—and how one brave step can reset your internal compass toward purpose and service.
Finally, we talk about cleansing the inputs that shape your character. Guarding your speech isn’t prudish; it’s powerful. The same mouth that asks for blessing should not pour out contempt. When we lift our language, we lift our thoughts, and the rest of life follows. If you’ve felt stuck—financially, spiritually, or emotionally—this conversation offers a clear path: trust more, give more, clean up your inputs, and step out of the familiar into growth. Subscribe, share with someone who needs this reminder, and leave a review with one commitment you’re making this week toward a cleaner, braver, more generous life.
Until next time, have a spectacular day!
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Trust Factor, the podcast that guarantees success when you implement its divine age-old teachings. Tomorrow is the second of our interview series. Mark Halpern, a friend, a very important community member, somebody I've known for a very long time, and who my family is very close with. We are going to sit down and hash it out because if there's anybody who knows how to talk about a lot of the subject matter that we're talking about here, is Mark. He deals with a lot of people who have amassed a lot of wealth over the years and he advises them on how and where to place their finances in order to plan for a future. We're talking about planning for our next world, and that's really what we need to do in this world. And so Mark has the ability to be able to connect the two in a way that few people do. So I'm looking forward to that. I hope you guys are as well. I want to finish up the fourth difference over here between somebody who has trust in God and somebody who doesn't. And we said we summarized it as being it's easier for somebody when they have excess funds who have worked on themselves and worked on their trust with their creator to recognize that this is an opportunity. They've been given funds that have a distinct purpose. Now you have to figure out is that purpose me or is that purpose bigger than me? Most of us have failed in that we've been influenced by secular society to believe that it is all for you. Hoard it. Keep as much of it as you can. Don't part with any of it. And if you're parting with it, you're a fool. If somebody's taken your money, you've been scammed, you've been had, you've been hacked, not good, shame on you. That's the secular approach. Whereas the godly approach is the exact opposite. I've been given an opportunity over here to change the world, to make somebody else's life that much better. And it doesn't have to be that you take them from poverty to richness, but to be able to ease their burden just a little bit, to be able to remind them that there are people in the world who care about them and who are doing God's work, inspiring them to do the same thing, to get on their feet and to move forward and to grow and to earn and achieve, and then do the very same thing and pay it forward. That's a godly life, my friends. That's the one that we should all be aspiring to. He says over here something very interesting. He says that David Amelech, King David, said, Betakh Bashem Vasetov. Trust in God and do good. This is the Chafitzheim, by the way. This isn't Sharabita Khon. The Khafitzheim says, Betach Bashem Vasetov was something that King David said. What does that mean? Trust in God and do good. Clearly, there is a connection between trusting in your creator and doing good. One who lacks trust, one who doesn't know or doesn't have faith that their income is going to come to them, that they are not going to miss a meal, that everything is going to continue to be provided for them the same way that it has been for the last 30, 40, 50, 60 years? If somebody doesn't have that knowledge and that trust, it becomes almost impossible for that person to part with their money. But what if I don't have a meal tomorrow? What if I can't afford my child's tuition tomorrow? What if I can't afford my car payment or my multiple car payments? What if I can't afford my house payments or my multiple house payments? What if I can't afford to go away four or five times a year on my vacations? What if I can't afford to pay the yacht? What if I can't afford to pay all of these luxuries that I've amassed for myself because, as I said the other day, we're living outside, well, outside of our means? That individual makes it very difficult on themselves to have trust in their creator because they've created a situation where their financial demands are much greater than their earning. How are you ever going to give a dollar away? How are you ever going to worry about somebody else? You can't. You're just out there amassing and amassing and amassing in order to be able to take care of your basic needs, because your basic needs far exceed what they actually should be. That's somebody who doesn't have trust in God. That's somebody who trusts in themselves. Somebody who trusts in their creator does the exact opposite. Recognizes that money is a tool, recognizes that money has been given to them on a regular basis, every day, for their entire existence, and it's not about to stop. And what is more important than worrying about whether or not the money is going to start or stop coming is making sure that other people are benefiting from it, that we are plugged into that system that we talked about yesterday about give and take. A system where we're not just taking from this world, but we're putting back into it. You know, yesterday I was listening to YY Jacobs and a wonderful ra uh rabbi, a chabad rabbi. And he was talking about this week's Torah portion, which is Lechlecha. Torah, the parsha of the week is called Lechlecha. Very interesting. People have talked about almost every time, every year, this Parsha comes around. The subject matter is almost always about those two words. Lechlecha. What does that mean? It means translated perfectly, it means go for you or go to you. Hard to understand on its face. And so a lot of the commentaries just focus on those two words. And I heard something beautiful about it. I heard many beautiful things about it yesterday, actually. What I heard was from YY Jacobson that Lechlecha are the first two words that God says as an introduction, as an opening to the first Jew in the world, Abraham, Avram Avinu. He was the father of Judaism. And here comes the opening scene. This is the one that's going to set the stage for eternity. This is the first communication between the father and a son, between Hashem and his beloved son Avraham, the father of the Jewish nation. And what does he say? Leave. Get up and go. Leave the place that you're in right now. Where? The country, the home, the birthplace. Leave these places and go. Where? We're not going to tell you where to go. Without getting into a whole dissertation on it, the takeaway that I that I got from this was twofold. Number one, lechlicha means get up and go. Leave your comfort zone. If you're stagnating right now, which most of us do for most of our lives, if you're stagnating, if you're not on a path of growth, then you are not doing what you're supposed to be doing. We were put in this world to grow. Go or grow for you. It's for you. It's not for anybody else. When you go, when you move forward, when you put one foot in front of the other, when you are on a path of growth to be able to improve your life, it is for you. When you improve the lives of people around you, it is for you. Everything that you do when you're in a growth mode is strictly and exclusively for your benefit. You think you're benefiting other people. It's not true. The only one who's benefiting from it is you. The other people, while it may seem to you like they're benefiting from it, you are a conduit. It is not you. You are just doing God's work. So, really, at the end of the day, you're double dipping. You're making the world a better place, you're doing God's work, and you're benefiting from both of those, my friends. And your life improves. That's one of the ideas of Lechlicha. Do not stagnate. Leave your comfortable, familiar surroundings. It was Rabbi Dr. Tworsky, if I'm not mistaken, that said that a uh a lobster, I believe it is, or a crab, one of these crustaceans, as they grow, they have to shed off their skin, their shell. They have to leave the confines of the shell because it becomes restrictive. It doesn't allow them to be able to grow. They can't breathe. It's difficult for them. They have to shed off and leave the comfort of their hard shell, that protective coating that saves them from the predators in the ocean. They need to leave that to be able to grow. Bottom line, we cannot stagnate. We cannot be comfortable in this familiarity of our father's home, of our birthplace, of the place that we've called home for so many years. In other words, the familiar. That is a big challenge for so many people. By the way, just as an aside, if you know people who've suffered from depression, a lot of the problem, and the reason they can't get out of it, is because of the familiarity. They are familiar with that environment. As negative as it may be, they are familiar with it. And because it's familiar, it's safe. And they refuse to leave their safe place. It's a real problem, my friends. That's what stops them from getting out of their depression. You don't have to be depressed. Lechlecha means get out of your safe space and start growing. Fear nothing, trust in God and grow. And the other thing I want to leave you with is that there's a suggestion among the commentaries that lechah is actually a derivative of lichluch. If you speak Hebrew, you know lichluch means dirt, filth, uncleanliness. What are we being taught over here? Lechlecha means get away from the filth. Get away from the dirt. Get away from the negative things in this world. And there are so many of them. We're living in a society, you guys know this. I know it. I've worked very hard to build a household where my children watch their mouths, where they watch the way that they speak, that they don't curse. We've never cursed in front of our children. Our children have never cursed in front of us. I've never cursed in front of my parents. It's important because it's the same mouth that you use to pray to your creator. It's the same mouth that you use to ask for goodness from your creator to say, I'm doing your work. And then you go and you talk and you sound like a truck driver. You sound like somebody who just got out of a out of a ghetto somewhere. We have to be very careful with how we speak. We are representatives of our creator. If we're living a godly life, we need to present as though we're living a godly life. And somebody who speaks that way demonstrates that they are in the dirt, that they are they have not risen above the dirt. Look around, my friends. Today, if you're living in this society online, every other word is a curse word. If you're watching television, every other word is a curse word. If you're looking even at billboards, today it's all people who are sacrificing their morality in order to get clicks and views. That's the lichluch, that's the dirt, that's the filth. If we're gonna grow, if we're gonna lachha, if we're gonna go and grow, then the first thing we need to do is abandon and get away from the dirt and the filth. My friends, let that be our mission. The fact that this week is that parshalcha, that means that this week is an auspicious time. There's extra help in the world to be able to assist us to number one, pick up and grow, leave our comfort zone, and get into the place that forces us to be better, to be good, to face challenges and conquer them. And in doing so, we will get away from all the negative, dirty, filthy things that have been slowing us down and keeping us in the gutters. We want out. Now's the time to do it. Have an amazing day, my friends. Looking forward to tomorrow.
