Episode 45 - Why Even 20% Faith Still Counts And How To Keep Going

Ever been told that 99% faith is the same as none and felt your hard work dismissed? We take that tension head‑on and unpack a clearer truth: keep aiming for complete trust in the Creator while honouring every step you’ve already taken. From building your Emuna muscle in a world wired for secular assumptions to celebrating the grit it takes to shift even 15%, we share why effort and intent matter and how small wins stack into lasting change.

We walk through a practical lens for spiritual growth: you can know that everything comes from God and still react like it doesn’t. That gap is human. The work is closing it—slowly, consistently—until your reflexes align with your values. Along the way, we explore the Torah’s view that trying earns credit, even when life blocks the outcome, and why that perspective builds resilience. We also break down Emuna as a crisis tool rather than a slogan: trusting that every event is guided for your ultimate good calms panic, opens better choices, and turns adversity into instruction.

Gratitude takes centre stage as the engine that moves belief into action. We share a listener story and our own experience of how thanking the Creator for both the sweet and the bitter reorients the heart and keeps you moving when motivation dips. Using the parent‑child frame, we show why following the “manual” invites support: when you act on what you’ve been taught, help shows up. No one is expected to be perfect; we were built to grow. And growth, when paired with gratitude, makes life sweeter, steadier, and more purposeful.

If this conversation sparked something in you, subscribe, share it with a friend who could use it, and leave a review with the moment that hit home most—we’d love to hear your takeaway.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Claim On Emuna

Valuing Partial Progress

Torah Versus Secular Conditioning

Striving For Complete Trust

Reward For Effort And Intent

Emuna As The Way Through Hardship

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its Divine Age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. I hope you're enjoying. We've said effectively that 99% Amuna is, in effect, 100% lack of Amuna, since everything comes from the Creator. I want to clarify that it doesn't mean that as you're building your Amuna muscle, your relationship with your creator, that your successes are worthless. Because that's what the implication might come across as. That if you've gone from zero to 10 or 15 or 20% Amuna and your creator, that is tremendous. It's nothing to be downplayed. You've invested time and energy, you've taken all of the secular teachings that you were brought up with because we're all raised in a world of secularism. We're surrounded by it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unless you're living in some insular community in Maya Sha'arim or some tiny block in Thornhill. But even then, if you're living in a tiny block, you're working, you're interacting, you're dealing with secular governments. You have no choice but to deal with secularism on some scale. And these teachings that I'm giving over, that are Torah precepts, in most cases they run opposite of what the government tries to push upon us. And they've been doing that to us from a very young age. So now you're taking all of these new teachings, however old you are, 20, 40, 60. You've spent decades running around thinking that everything is the opposite of what it actually is. And now I'm coming to tell you that the Torah is the true way. And that is the way that you should be following, and it flies in the face of everything that you've learned. Very difficult. And yet, you've still managed to eke out 15, 20% turnaround. And however long it took you, you deserve a big pat on the back. You're working on your immuna muscle. It's tremendous. Most people are intellectually lazy. They're entitled and lazy and selfish, and all they want is this world to cater to them. That's the majority of humanity, my friends. I don't know whether or not you've recognized that, but I'm here to tell you that's humanity. There's very few people in this world who are here for selfless reasons, who are operating outside of themselves, who are willing to do the heavy lifting and don't mind doing it. Are problem solvers, fix things, not create problems. Most of the world is busy creating problems. The point I'm making is I don't want to minimize the success that you've had. What is meant effectively when they say that 99% immuna is, in effect, 100% lack of amuna, is that we have to constantly strive to get to the point where we are at 100% amuna, where we recognize that absolutely everything comes from the creator. We may not respond in that fashion is a very big difference. Let me clarify this on two fronts because it's very important. We may know in our hearts that God runs the world and everything is done according to his divine perfection. We may know that. We may have that in our hearts and in our heads, but we don't operate as such. Our actions and our choices tell a different story, but that's okay because that just reflects on our imperfection. The same way somebody who tries to keep Torah and mitzvahs is going to get all the credit for the Torah and mitzvahs that they learn and do, even if they don't do all of them. You don't get credit only when you've achieved 100%. That's not the way it works. In Torah, even your effort, even if you don't come out successful, even if you try to do a mitzvah, you wanted to go to shul, you got up early to go pray with a minion, and you got ready and prepared yourself earlier than you normally would, and you figured out where you're gonna go, which shul, how far it is, how long the divening is, what time you're gonna get to work. It's all planned out. You get into your car, you go to start the car and it doesn't start, and now you can't get to shul on time. You're gonna miss it because your car doesn't start and you have no alternative way to get there. You, my friend, get the reward for having gone to synagogue to pray with a minion. You understand? That's how it works. Because you are on the way, you made all the plans, and there was something outside of your control that came in and stopped you. You have full credit. So if that's the case, how much more so when you've actually achieved 10, 15, 20, 30% success in building your immuna muscle? It's tremendous. The message is that we should be striving for 100% immuna, but even more than that, that we have to recognize in our hearts and in our heads that God runs this world and that everything, not almost everything, but everything, is in his hands. Whether or not we respond that way in every situation, different story. We have to work on ourselves to get to that point for our own benefit, because if you succeed, then you win. If you recognize that God runs the world and everything is good for your good and perfect, every situation, every challenge that arises, then obviously you stand to benefit from it. Okay, I hope I put a pin in that and cleared it up because I don't want people to think that your efforts are pointless. They are not. Everything that you do, even the intent, earns you reward. When a person relies on the amuna, on the understanding that everything that the creator does is for his best, he or she will see the most trying situations in life make a complete turnaround for the better. Amuna is therefore the best way out of any difficulty. It's so true. You're in a jam, a physical jam, an emotional jam. The easiest and most effective way to get out of it is to have Amuna that everything is perfect. It flips the fantasy that's in front of you on its head and turns it into reality and gives you peace of mind. No one is perfect, nobody's expecting perfection. We were created flawed. We know this, and he knows that. So nobody expects you to be perfect. Everyone becomes spiritually tainted or impure from time to time just by the sheer virtue of being alive. You're going to make mistakes because we're not perfect. And therefore, our nishama, our souls, become tainted. Maybe a person deserves some level of suffering, but if that person believes that the creator does everything for his best and thanks him for everything, good and bad, better or worse, he or she will most likely be spared the most severe judgments. Why? Why is that the case? It's an easy one. If my father is telling me to do something and my father is financing me, my father is supporting me in life, and he tells me these are the ways that you're supposed to operate if you want to succeed and if you want my support. If I go against him, then guess what? He retracts. His support isn't there, certainly not to the extent that it could be. A father would likely never abandon his child. However, if that child does the father's will and is constantly concerned with making sure that he's following his father's instruction because he knows that his father loves him, and his father sees that at the first sign of trouble, the son automatically reverts to what the father taught him, which is a real way of solving his problems, and the father has pride. And the father says, Look, this kid's doing what I told him to do. Now I need to do everything I can to make sure that he's successful. Why? Because I told him to do that. It's the same idea. God says, I told you how to operate, I gave you the manual. And now if you're following the manual, I have to make sure that your actions are successful. I need to make sure that I'm there to support you. And that's what happens. If you have a Muna, and if when you're faced with those challenges, you turn to him, then you can be assured that you're going to get divine help. And there's no better assistance in the world than that which comes from the divine, because he lacks nothing. Indeed, a person who tries his best to walk in the way of Amuna and to do the creator's will, even if he slips up every once in a while and has not yet perfected himself, just like we said a few minutes ago. If he'd only cling to the Amuna that everything is for the best, he'd surely live a sweet, sweet life. It's so true, guys. This is not theory. This book over here, my friends, is not theory. This is practice. This is real life experience by some of the greatest people in the world. It's a compilation of those experiences over generations, firsthand, mine included, and it's crystallized in this book. It's all captured here. So this isn't theory, guys. And if you don't know it, the only way to figure it out is to try. Listen to this. After one of my lectures, a young man approached me and confessed that he still falls prey to temptation and commits transgressions. Who doesn't? All right. The idea is that you work on yourself. And when you fix yourself in a certain area of your life where you have an evil inclination towards one thing or another, then that inclination goes away. You don't fault to temptation in that department. But we spend a lifetime trying to fix that, because there are many departments in our life that need improvement. He told me that he came to my lecture after he heard one of my CDs about gratitude and the immunos, that everything is for the best. And by virtue of the fact that this young man actually began thanking the creator for everything, his life turned around for the better, even though he's still far from perfect. He therefore wanted to meet me and to hear me in person. It's the same thing that happened to me. You know what that is? It's called gratitude. Somebody who recognizes that they've just won a massive landfall from an individual who gave over spectacular ideas that are life-altering, the natural tendency is to want to reciprocate. I did that with my rabbi. Remember when my rabbi, Rabbi Mizrachi, should live to 120. When he opened my eyes, when he saved my life with this information, the very same information that I acted upon, one of the first things that I did was reach out to him. Never met him before. Called him on the phone. I needed to thank him. And what else did I do? I brought him into Toronto for lecture after lecture after lecture. Thank God there were many amazing years where we would pack synagogues, two, three, four lectures a day, each one two, three hours long, making a massive impact, hearing amazing stories from individuals coming to hear this rabbi who saved their lives also. That's called hakarata tov, that's called appreciation, acknowledging the good and the true that just happened. That's what this kid over here did with this rabbi. That's what I did, and that's what everybody needs to do. Because when you recognize something tremendous has happened, that somebody did something good for you, even if it's just imparting wisdom, then you have to acknowledge it and you have to be grateful. That gratitude will also lead you to action. If you're not grateful, if something inside you doesn't stir up where you want to be able to reciprocate to that individual for the good that they've given you, and I'm talking also about your creator here, then the odds of you getting up and taking action are slim to none. The only time you will get up to take action is when you are stirred by emotion and a powerful emotion. And one of those emotions, one of the most powerful, is gratitude. When you recognize the goodness that came from another individual and you benefited from it, your natural human tendency is to be grateful. And that, my friends, is no coincidence that gratitude is also one of the secret ingredients to living a very successful life. Have an amazing day, my friend. 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. Thanks for listening.