Episode 24 - If The Doorbell Rings Twice, That’s Not UPS, It’s Providence

What if real freedom isn’t getting your way, but owning the bill that follows every choice? Today we pull powerful lines from The Garden of Emuna and turn them into a practical roadmap: how trust sharpens your judgment, how “mitzvah breeds mitzvah,” and why discipline might be the most tender form of care. Instead of chasing ease, we learn to read friction as feedback—gentle taps turning into louder knocks—so we can pivot early and avoid the spiral where one compromise invites the next.

We dig into the nature of reward and why some outcomes can’t be measured on a spreadsheet. When an action mirrors a divine command, its principle stacks beyond this world, while the dividends show up here as the next chance to do good. That shift reframes interruptions—doorbells, asks, needs—as invitations, not burdens. Close the door and the silence grows; open it and life trusts you with more. Along the way, we dismantle the myth that a smooth life equals success. If challenges persist, it may be a sign you’re still being coached, still being loved enough to be corrected.

Presence becomes the tool that makes all of this possible. When we strip away noise—think Shabbat or a truly unplugged vacation—the real self appears: attentive, generous, and grounded. We talk tactics to make that state daily and repeatable: build simple systems that default toward kindness, put frictions between you and impulsive harm, and create cues that help you notice the small hints before they become crises. By the end, trust feels less like a lofty ideal and more like a workflow for a saner, truer life—choose well, accept the next opportunity, and let goodness compound.

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Transcript

Framing The Week With Trust

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello and welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. Happy Sunday. Welcome and thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. It's going to be an amazing week, my friends. Doesn't matter where you are. If you enter the week knowing that it's going to be an amazing week, then it is sure to be in it. It doesn't matter what happens, especially now that you've got this perspective. You've got so much gold, so much amazing perspective that most people don't have 1% of.

Why This Book Feels Like Dynamite

SPEAKER_00 0:53

You know, I pick up this book, The Garden of Imuna, which we're reading through right now by Ravshal Marush, and I think to myself, similar to what I was doing in season one, when we were reading The Gate of Trust, I pick up the book and I think to myself, and I make a little prayer, and I think, please let it be easy. Let there be content there for me to grow on. I don't want to read, I don't want to have to read too much forward in order to come up with a little bit of content. Now, sometimes, admittedly, that had to happen in season one. After all, I was reading from an 850-year-old manuscript, a book that was written a long time ago. So some of the things didn't necessarily pertain to modern days. I had to make it fit, which wasn't that difficult, but it required a little bit more thought. In this book, guys, it's crazy. On every page, in every paragraph, there is dynamite. I could literally give you over one paragraph and shut down the podcast for eternity. It's not necessary. If you internalize the depth of the message in just one of these paragraphs, you don't have to listen anymore. You become a perfect being. That just shows you how difficult it is. Hundreds and hundreds of pages, books and books and books over generations have been written, and yet we still have a hard time grasping these concepts. Work on yourself, my friends, because when you grasp them, the easier you make it for yourself to grasp these ideas and make them a part of who you are, the quicker your life becomes easier, more fulfilled. Here's how it goes. Listen to this.

Freedom, Choice, And Consequences

SPEAKER_00 2:25

A person without a Muna, without faith, thinks that he is his own boss. Free to do whatever he wants when he wants. Now, in general, yeah, you are. You're free to do whatever you want, to do whatever you want, whenever you want. The key word there, however, that needs to be quantified or clarified is free. While you might refer to it as being free in the loose sense of the word, that you're free to do whatever you want. Yeah, you can pick up and do whatever you want today. But every single action that you take and every single choice that you make has with it a consequence, either a good one or a bad one. That means that it's not free. Yeah, you're free to make the choice, but the result is not free. The consequences are not free. They come with some form of payment or reward. If you choose bad, you have to pay. It costs you, comes out of your pocket. One way or another, my friend, you're paying for that choice. It could be right away, it could be in 15 minutes, it could be in 15 years, it could be in 15 lifetimes, but you're gonna pay for it, my friend. Nothing goes unaccounted for.

Infinite Rewards And Where They Land

SPEAKER_00 3:38

At the same time, if something that you did was good and true, then you have immense reward, spiritual reward that comes from an eternal plane, that comes from a place of infinite capabilities, which means that the reward in and of itself is infinite in nature. It can't be quantified in this world. It's important probably at this point to remind you that if you can't quantify the reward that you're going to receive for your action, because your action comes as a result of a spiritual divine source. In other words, you're taking actions to do the mitzvahs that are in the Torah, which are a divine document. Therefore, the reward that you will get is divine in nature and therefore infinitely greater than anything you can imagine or weigh or measure in this world. So then how do you get the reward? Because clearly he can't give it to you in this life. You can't get a metaphysical reward in a physical world. It doesn't work. So those rewards, by and large, the principle of those rewards remain and wait for us until we get to the next world. And that's not a cop out. It's not a comp out. I'll tell you why. Because there are many ways to benefit from the dividends, so to speak, of those rewards, for the pieces that fall off, as it were, of that main reward, there are ways to benefit from them in this world. Also, our sages tell us that there is one reward that you get in this world which is greater than all those rewards that you get in the next

Mitzvah Breeds Mitzvah, Or Not

SPEAKER_00 5:06

world. What is it? It's the ability to be rewarded again. What do I mean? It says mitzvah goret mitzvah. A mitzvah toes behind it another mitzvah. What does that mean? It means if I answered my door and somebody came and put their hand out looking for charity and I gave them charity, in a few days from now that doorbell will ring again. And it will be another individual asking for charity, which means I now have the opportunity to do that very same good again. A lot of people look at it with negative eyes and they think, uh oh, I should have never given that first individual a few days ago. Now look. Now I became the guy. Everybody's coming to me for money. And you don't realize you've got it backwards. The bonus, the gift that you've been given is the ability to give this individual charity, to help another individual. That money, my friends, we've established many times, not just in season two, but in season one. It comes no matter what. It's guaranteed. All you need to do is get up off the couch and go to work. And the money will come. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, it doesn't matter on the state of the economy. Nothing matters when it comes to the money that was predetermined for you every single year. It's an opportunity to be able to show your creator, look at what I'm doing with the money that you gave me. I'm safeguarding it and I'm using it for the things that you told me to do. Mitzvah, gorerit, mitzvah, a mitzvah pulls behind it another mitzvah. But at the same time, there's a caveat you have to be careful because it says the same thing about an avera, about a sin. Avera, gorerit, avera. A sin toes behind it, another sin. If you slam the door on that individual, you know what will happen in a few days from now? Nothing. No doorbell, no knock on the door, nobody's coming to ask for money because you blew that chance, you blew the opportunity. And so the opportunity rarely appears again. That's the whole idea. Yeah, you'll get tested. You might get tested by different people in other circumstances. But if you blow that opportunity enough, you ain't gonna get it again. That's the challenging part, is to be aware that these are opportunities, they're diamonds that you need to grab onto as soon as they appear. He says, see, that was just a line. But most people gloss over that sentence and think, okay, that was nice. What's next? Stop and think about it. Take it to another level. And he's about to address that also.

Loving Discipline And Wake-Up Calls

SPEAKER_00 7:29

His life is full of suffering, for the creator doesn't let him have his own way. God is a loving father. He doesn't want you to do bad things. We see our kids. If they're engaged in things that are destructive, we don't want them to do it. So we will do everything we can, including calling the police on a child who's gone into a life of crime. A parent will turn their child in to the penal system and to the judicial system. Why? Because they don't want their child getting into more trouble. It's the same idea. This is a great favor from the creator, for it gives a person repeated opportunities to get close to the creator, which is the ultimate good. And it says, woe is the person whom the creator no longer reprimands. If your parent no longer cares about you, then he stops disciplining you. Then your mother stops caring about you. And there is nothing worse, as we've said just last week, there is nothing worse for a child than a parent who refuses to parent the child. Parenting, the definition of it, means to discipline and to educate and to point them in the right direction and to provide them with all the things that they need in order to thrive and do good and bring goodness to this world. If your parent has given up on their duty of being a parent, whether because they failed or because you failed and they've given up on you, it is the biggest punishment in the world. When God no longer gives you these tribulations, when life is too good, it's too easy, be careful. There are stories in the Gemara of rabbis, of great sages who used to go out, I think it was after 30 days of not having any difficulties. And these are old individuals who would go out into the streets and lift rocks, boulders off the side of the street, clear them off the road, just to give themselves, just to break a sweat, just to make life that day a little bit more difficult for them, because they're thinking to themselves, something is wrong. God's forgotten about me. Where is my father in heaven? You know, there must be something that I've done in a previous life. There must be something that I need to account for. Now we don't have to go to that extreme, but recognize that if everything is smooth and easy and you've got no challenges in your life, then you think to yourself, wait a second, what's going on over here? And the converse is true. The more challenges you have, the more you should stop to recognize that God is sending you a message. He gave you love taps, and those love taps turn into smacks and they turn into punches, and now he's banging you around. It's time to wake up, my child. You're going in the wrong direction. You're making bad decisions. Stop. Course correct before it's too late. Let's finish with this.

The Wise Notice Hints, Fools Need Force

SPEAKER_00 10:06

A wise person pays attention to details. A little hint from the creator is sufficient to stimulate his thinking and prod him into action. Yet a fool doesn't wake up unless he is coerced. Furthermore, the fool doesn't admit fault and frequently continues in his spiritual slumber, even after he begins to suffer. I could spend a year just talking about that paragraph, guys. We're talking about two or three sentences. I could spend a lifetime just talking about that paragraph. It encapsulates everything good in this world. It is the recipe for success. If you recognize what the book is telling you over here, you don't need any more information. If you put mechanisms in place to activate whatever abilities you have to make sure that you don't go in these negative ways and that you do go in the positive ways, as I just listed, life is great. A wise person pays attention to details. What does that mean? That means be present. That means be here and now. Nobody is present today. Everybody is everywhere except for here and now. Everybody is thinking about a million different things all day long, preoccupying themselves with so many things that they simply can't be present. They can't be present for their job, they can't be present for their spouses, they can't be present for their children. Life is passing by. You know when you get present? I'll tell you when you get present. When you go on vacation with your family, when you go to an all-inclusive resort where all the cooking is done for you and your housekeeping is done for you, and there's no work to think about, and it's just you with your children, similar to um nudge nudge, wink, wink, similar to Shabbat. Similar, because there's still some preparation you need to do before Shabbat. But on Shabbat, there is no preparation. You're not allowed to prepare on Shabbat. Similar idea, my friends, when you don't have those responsibilities, when you can shut the world out, do you know what emerges? You in your present form. You being here and now, you can engage with your children. The real you can engage with your children and with your spouse and with your parents and with your family and with your community. The real you, the diamond inside that has been covered with layers and layers of dust and dirt and grime all week long. When Shabbat comes around or when you're

Presence, Shabbat, And The Real You

SPEAKER_00 12:23

on a vacation somewhere, the real you emerges. And that's why everybody has so much fun. That's why everybody enjoys it so much. Why? Because they never get to see that part of you. They never get to engage in that part of you unless they're on vacation. I have news for you. Vacation comes every single week, at least one day a week. And you don't even have to wait for Shabbat. The key is to work on yourself every single day, to be able to continuously be in a state of presence. We're not done with this paragraph, my friends. This paragraph unlocks the secrets of the world. Just like on every single page, and just a quick reminder: I'm giving out these books, my friends. So click, comment, share, do something with these episodes, my friends, because a book could be coming your way. Have an amazing week. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast.

Ongoing Work And Listener Invitation

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Thanks for listening to the