The Money Conflict: Why Financial Success Doesn't Contradict Serving Hashem | Yosef Yitzchok Chababo #012

00:00 Speaker 1 Money. One word that’s an inseparable part of our lives here in this material world. That’s exactly why I invited Yosef Yitzchak Hababo, the Chabad finance professional, into the studio to talk about the friction and complexity that sometimes come with it. We had a fascinating conversation. When we talk about education, we often talk about how we educate a student or a child, but much of it is self-education: how I relate to this thing. Ultimately, that affects me and comes out in the way I act. In short, it’s worth listening. I’m Meir Wishnefsky, and you’re listening to On Chabad Education. Yosef Yitzchak Hababo, the Chabad finance professional, welcome.

00:37 Speaker 2 Glad to be here. [unclear]

00:39 Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely. We’ve been talking about this for a while, and first of all, thank you so much for coming.

00:44 Speaker 2 We’re recording this in the middle of bein hazmanim.

00:46 Speaker 1 Yes, so the timing worked out perfectly, and I really appreciate your time. It’s important to me to start by saying that we’re not going to talk about where to invest, how much to invest, or when to invest. That’s not really the subject. I want to talk specifically about this encounter: our educational, Chassidic, Jewish encounter with money in our lives—as people, as parents who earn a living for their families, as people in the world who deal with material things. This meeting between money and materiality, and the place where I’m a Jew, I’m a chossid, and I want to educate my children—that’s an encounter where there can be a lot of confusion and other things. That’s the subject I’d like us to explore.

01:26 Speaker 2 Yes.

01:27 Speaker 1 So I think we’ll start with a little background. Tell us how you got into finance.

01:32 Speaker 2 Yes. Thirteen years ago, in Teves 5773, I started working in this field. I began with mortgage consulting, and with Hashem’s help it expanded into financial and economic consulting, and all sorts of things involving percentages. All the subjects people don’t like—percentages give people a headache. How did I get into it? It’s interesting. Forty-three years ago, my parents were a young couple living in Be’er Sheva, where they were on shlichus, and they bought an investment apartment. The apartment cost six thousand dollars, and they took out a five-thousand-dollar mortgage. They didn’t live in that apartment; they lived somewhere else and rented it to students. If it helps to compare it to today’s figures, the rent was around a hundred dollars a month. The mortgage payment was, I think, a hundred and ten dollars a month. Back then, as you know, until 2008, all real estate in Israel—and STaM, mezuzos, many other things too, whether rented or purchased—was priced in dollars. In 2008, there was a major change in the dollar-shekel exchange rate, so people in Israel switched to shekels; everyone switched to shekels. So after almost ten years, in 5750, they were living in Kiryat Malachi, in Mottel Kozliner’s dormitory. I was born there. It was a dormitory building with many, many apartments, and my parents lived in one of them. My mother was the housemother, and my father was a counselor. About a hundred months had passed since they took out the mortgage, and they said, “Wait. If we’re paying a hundred dollars, a hundred and ten dollars, every month, then over a hundred months we’ve already paid back eleven thousand dollars. We borrowed five thousand dollars, so we’ve already paid it twice over. Where do things stand?” They went to the bank—back then you had to

03:12 Speaker 2 go to the bank—and asked the clerk, “How long until the end of these wonders?” as the prophet Daniel asked. So the clerk said, “You still have to pay...” She checked and checked on the computer they had back then. “Another nineteen thousand dollars.” “What? We borrowed five thousand dollars. How can we still owe more than that?” It turned out that the mortgage was linked to the price index, and inflation rates in the eighties were very, very high. I grew up with that story, and I said, “Okay, one day I’m going to understand this Chinese that the banks operate in.” So I studied a little from time to time. I have to give credit to Rabbi Menachem Bloy, of blessed memory, who passed away two months ago. He was my math teacher when I was a child, and when I was a bochur, he kept encouraging me. He saw that I was interested in the laws of sanctifying the new month and things like that, and he encouraged me to study this. In 5773, thirteen years ago, I actually began working in the field. Since then I’ve had the privilege of—

03:58 Speaker 1 After kvutzah? After—

03:59 Speaker 2 Right after kvutzah. I came back to Israel a few weeks after Cheshvan. Everyone comes back in Cheshvan; in 5773, I came back around Chanukah. There was a round of fighting in the south right then. Those who remember, Aharon Safra was killed—a neighbor in Nachlas Har Chabad who was a relative of ours. And then, in Teves, I started working with mortgages, thirteen and a half years ago. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of helping a little over a thousand families with financial matters: preparing to buy a home, savings, investments. Over the years I studied the subject, earned a degree in economics and business administration from the Open University, and completed many, many certification programs, courses, and professional training programs. I still study every year. That’s the financial-knowledge side. And as Jews who try to be chassidim, we have to make this connection—a connection that isn’t obvious—between the side that’s so mathematical and material, and a G-dly, soulful, spiritual way of looking at things. Just today, by Divine Providence, during bein hazmanim, a few minutes before davening, I saw that I wouldn’t manage to study Chassidus or anything else. So I opened the colorful Divrei Elokus booklet. By Divine Providence, it had a farbrengen of the Rebbe from 5735. The Rebbe spoke there about an important chossid, Reb Binyamin Kletzker, one of the Alter Rebbe’s chassidim. He was a very great chossid and also a major merchant. The Rebbe said that, of course, he did the calculations—and there’s a story that he traded in timber, and at the end he would make his summary.

05:24 Speaker 3 Yes, the summary of all the accounts.

05:25 Speaker 2 How much came in, how much went out, suppliers, commissions, taxes, and so on. And then at the bottom he would write, “Conclusion: the bottom line”—that’s what we’d call it today—“There is nothing besides Him.” And the Rebbe says at the farbrengen that, of course, he calculated everything correctly; otherwise it wouldn’t be an accounting. Yes, you really have to calculate the suppliers and everything else. But it was clear to him that, ultimately, Hakadosh Boruch Hu is everywhere. Well, who are we compared to Binyamin Kletzker? But this is the generation, the seventh generation, the generation of the Geulah, so we’ll work with what we have.

05:55 Speaker 3 That’s actually what I wanted to ask. We spoke about this a little beforehand: the Rebbe addressed livelihood and finances a great deal, in so many sichos, letters, and instructions to individuals. Because you work in this area, you’ve probably come across some of it. What approach have you learned or seen from the Rebbe toward all these matters of livelihood, which involve so much emunah, bitachon, and things like that?

06:19 Speaker 2 Yes, I’ll answer that, but first there’s something important I want to say.

06:22 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

06:23 Speaker 2 Often, we come across an instruction from the Rebbe, or a letter or a sicha, and understand it in a certain way. Why? Because we’re in a certain frame of mind, and we interpret it accordingly. It doesn’t matter whether that leads us to a more lenient or a stricter interpretation. My advice is to consult a mashpia: sit down with him and show him, “This is the letter I received. I understood it to mean that I need to leave my job and go on shlichus,” or “I understood that I should give a fifth of my income,” or “I understood that...” and so on. Then hear what the mashpia says.

06:52 Speaker 3 Yes.

06:52 Speaker 2 That’s one thing.

06:53 Speaker 3 A person is partial to himself.

06:54 Speaker 2 Yes, a person is partial to himself—and that can go both ways.

06:55 Speaker 3 Yes.

06:56 Speaker 2 Right now, in the one-chapter-a-day study cycle, we’re learning the laws of sanctifying the new month. It says there that a king and a Kohen Gadol cannot serve on the court that decides whether to add a month to the year. Why? A king hires an army for twelve months. If a month is added to the year, he has a vested interest: he gains another month. He hires them for a year, so if it’s a thirteen-month year, he’s gained a month. And what about the Kohen Gadol? He immerses on Yom Kippur. Tishrei falls at the transition between summer and winter, around October, and he’ll want it to be—

07:24 Speaker 3 As much in the summer as possible.

07:25 Speaker 2 As far back as possible, yes, toward, uh, September, when Yom Kippur fell, because he immerses five times. The Rambam writes that. Now, wait—what happens if he comes before a beis din and argues in favor of the other side, as he sees it? That’s no good either, because a person is biased where he himself is concerned, and that can go either way. Sometimes he wants to distance himself from sin, to distance himself from failure, and then he pulls much too far in the wrong direction.

07:45 Speaker 3 The wrong direction. Strong point.

07:46 Speaker 2 So that’s the advantage of having a mashpia—someone with authority, particularly a rabbi. But even if you can’t get someone with that kind of authority, you can still speak to a mashpia. How does he see it? It gives you a third eye, because he’s a person who isn’t inside the situation, and that’s a tremendous advantage. Personally, many times I’ve consulted my mashpia when I came across certain sichos that I felt created some conflict or misunderstanding for me, or letters or instructions from the Rebbe, whether in yechidus or general instructions. I wanted to make sure I was understanding them correctly. And several times I was surprised—surprised. Maybe I’ll say more about that later. Now, to your direct question. So, we see that in the 5710s and 5720s, especially in sichos during the summer months, on Shabbos, Crown Heights would empty out and all the Jews would go away. For example, they’d travel upstate for vacation, and the vacation there is very long. In Israel, sixty days is customary—July and August. In the United States and many northern countries, it can run from June until Elul. It can be—

08:45 Speaker 4 Almost three months.

08:45 Speaker 2 Yes, it can be a hundred days, a hundred and thirty days. Very, very generous. Here we—

08:49 Speaker 4 How many days do they study there? I don’t know.

08:51 Speaker 2 In Israel we have sixty days, and from that you can subtract the Three Weeks, when people hardly go on outings, from 17 Tammuz until 9 Menachem Av. And some cheders go back already on 1 Elul. Over there it’s very, very generous. In those years, you can see it in Toras Menachem: in the summer sichos, mainly on Shabbos—and apparently these were off-the-record sichos, not recorded—the Rebbe often spoke about “Who is a Jew?” as well. The Rebbe delivered his strongest messages specifically on Shabbos. And the Rebbe speaks—

09:21 Speaker 4 Because the weekday sichos were recorded, and everything was documented.

09:26 Speaker 2 Exactly.

09:26 Speaker 4 The juicy stuff, all the more colorful things, are in…

09:29 Speaker 2 Though some of those sichos also made it into Likkutei Sichos, and you can see the sichos I was talking about in the early volumes. The Rebbe speaks very, very critically of all that pomp and splendor, that materialism, that ostentation—with an alef—and voraciousness—with an ayin—around the whole business of getting a vacation home and telling everyone, “I have a vacation home, and I have a boat.” And the Rebbe says: “And he’s a chossid.” Yet in the summer he behaves this way and that way. The Rebbe speaks about it very much as something negative.

09:58 Speaker 4 Mm-hmm.

10:00 Speaker 2 And in many, many sichos, not only in the summer, the Rebbe also speaks about those wealthy men in Crown Heights who think of themselves as big shots, who wear ties and go around with, uh… The Rebbe says that during a sicha they’re talking about G-dliness, and he’s preoccupied with—

10:11 Speaker 4 Whether his socks match.

10:12 Speaker 2 Whether his tie matches his socks. And the Rebbe says… I think that’s Purim 5718, 5698. And many, many more. I haven’t counted, but I assume there are hundreds, if not more, public statements from the Rebbe criticizing the wealthy and those sorts of things. But when we move forward along the timeline toward the 5740s, first of all we see that the Rebbe no longer speaks critically about vacations and the like. You’ll find very few mentions of that, unlike the 5710s and 5720s, when the Rebbe would mention it five or ten times a month. That changed. And in the 5740s, well before 5751 and 5752, the Rebbe also began speaking about Geulah, Geulah, Geulah, Geulah. One of the sichos about kabbolas ol was also before 5751 and 5752, I think—perhaps in 5744. And the Rebbe began speaking more about Geulah, and showing greater closeness to wealthy people, and holding yechidus for wealthy people, and—

11:10 Speaker 4 Which happened less in the early years.

11:12 Speaker 2 The way of speaking changed. In the middle of the 5740s, the Rebbe began distributing dollars to the tankists. Then, in 5748, when the Rebbetzin passed away, he distributed dollars at home during shivah. After that, it became the regular Sunday dollar distribution. And in 5751 and 5752, there’s no question: throughout the sichos, the Rebbe talks about abundance upon abundance and about drawing closer to the days of Moshiach. And there are the sichos about every Jew being wealthy, and a Jew… and in Parshas Terumah, I think it was 5753, the Rebbe says that every Jew should try to do all he can to be wealthy materially and wealthy spiritually. So, wait—

11:45 Speaker 4 A conflict, yes.

11:46 Speaker 2 How does that fit together? So I asked my mashpia. My understanding had been that the later sichos come along and supersede the earlier sichos, because the generation had changed and so on. That’s a very common view, by the way. My mashpia rejected that approach and told me, “No.” He said that everything the Rebbe says continues what the Frierdiker Rebbe said, which continues what the Rebbe Rashab said. And he said that even what the Rebbe himself says in the 5750s continues what he said in the 5710s. In other words, it’s in addition. We do need to keep in mind that we shouldn’t be completely immersed in materialism, shouldn’t be in it up to here. As Reb Shlomo Chaim Kesselman said, there are people for whom it comes up to here, and they complain, “Why doesn’t it cover my nose too?”

12:26 Speaker 4 Materialism.

12:27 Speaker 2 Yes.

12:30 Speaker 4 You’re saying, on the one hand—

12:31 Speaker 2 So it’s in addition. We have to be aware, on the one hand, of that extreme. It’s like the beginning of chapter one of Tanya. On the one hand, if a person thinks he’s wicked, he’ll be afraid of coming to sin; but if he thinks he’s righteous, he’ll become too proud of himself.

12:42 Speaker 4 Certainly.

12:42 Speaker 2 It’s always both sides. It’s a question for a lifetime. It isn’t a question you answer just like that. It’s constant work, constant contemplation. That’s the point. It means studying Chassidus. We study Chassidus, and we live in the world. The word olam, “world,” is related to he’elem, concealment. The world conceals. Now, when we say “the world,” we don’t mean only the people out there, that they are the false world. No. It includes our own falsehood. And falsehood doesn’t only mean intending to deceive someone or lie about someone. It can also be this: I studied and contemplated—and in a moment we’ll give an example relating to trust in Hashem. I studied and understood that Hakadosh Boruch Hu guides the whole world. He is present in every detail, every detail of creation; everything is by Divine Providence, everything is precise, everything is directed. I go out to my car and a parking officer has left me a five-hundred-shekel ticket. That stings. Okay, that’s completely natural, right? But what do I do afterward, once it’s upset me? Do I return to that Jewish, chassidic point? Because the nature of the world, the nature of the daily rush, is that it sweeps us along and carries us away.

13:39 Speaker 4 “Many waters cannot…”

13:41 Speaker 2 Yes, those are the “many waters.” So the world conceals. And the world includes us. That’s why we constantly need to return to studying Chassidus, to inner contemplation, to taking stock of ourselves in the most precise and proper sense: Where am I? What am I focused on? What goals do I want to achieve? Am I sufficiently connected to my values?

14:00 Speaker 4 That’s interesting, because you’re saying that money and material things are here, they’re part of our lives, right? “Six days you shall work”—you have to work. It’s part of life. You can’t ignore it, close your eyes and say it isn’t there. On the other hand, there is room to say: there’s a world here, but we mustn’t be confused by it or let it lead us.

14:17 Speaker 2 Yes. And it will always be both together. In other words, it will never be absolute.

14:23 Speaker 4 What do you mean?

14:23 Speaker 2 It will always be… First of all, we’re not tzaddikim, and we’re not “a wicked person who suffers,” right? We’re always somewhere along that spectrum, right on that spectrum. There’s nothing absolute. That’s how life works. That’s serving Hashem: we see the world and get confused by it, we get the ticket, look at the five hundred shekels, and it hurts. Then we return to the point of faith.

14:42 Speaker 4 Each time, we return there.

14:44 Speaker 2 We return, and it’s always somewhere along that spectrum. It’s always there. We shouldn’t have the unrealistic expectation that one day it won’t speak to us anymore, okay? If we become tzaddikim, then, as it says in Tanya, perhaps we’ll merit to… But we know: if only we could be a beinoni. Today we know that even being “a wicked person who has good within him” is a level.

15:00 Speaker 4 Yes.

15:00 Speaker 2 That’s a Jew who has regrets. The Rebbe says that everyone can be a tzaddik, so let’s give ourselves a little more credit. But it will always be along this axis; those two poles will always be there. The world draws us into its habits. Work and routine pull us along; outside distractions draw us outward. And through Chassidus, through a farbrengen, through contemplation and through davening, we return to the inner point, to the axis around which the clock turns.

15:29 Speaker 4 And speaking of education, I can say about myself that when I got married, I suddenly realized how different my parents’ approach to money was from that of my wife’s parents, my shver and shvigger. Because when you get married, as a young married man you have to start earning a living, start thinking about money, and that’s a good, positive thing, alongside everything else in life. So suddenly I saw that in the home where I grew up, we did things one way, while my wife came from a home that was a different world. So when I come to educate my children, which approach is right? How do I relate to money? Is it something we should talk about? If I talk about it, maybe the children will become too preoccupied with material things, or they’ll see that I’m preoccupied with them. What happens when I try to pass this on to the children? Because money is here, it’s part of life, as we said, and we need to work with it. In your view, what are the right boundaries in education, or what’s the right way to talk about these things, about finances?

16:29 Speaker 2 Yes.

16:30 Speaker 4 And, by the way, is it even right to talk about it at all?

16:32 Speaker 2 Yes.

16:33 Speaker 4 That’s also a question.

16:33 Speaker 2 Yes. In general, anything can be good if you do it properly, in the right way and in the right measure. Sometimes not talking about it can be good, and sometimes talking about it can be good. It depends on the balance. Regarding both the previous topic and this new one you’ve raised: when I was a chosson, I came to 770, like all chassanim. It was during the month of the Yomim Tovim, and I met Rabbi Blooming[?], the mashgiach of the group at the yeshiva. He saw me and said, “Oh, you’re a chosson. Very nice.” Then he told me about a chosson who was in the weeks of preparing for his wedding. The Rebbe asked him, “How are the preparations going?” He told the Rebbe, “We’ve chosen furniture, we’ve chosen an apartment, but not the dress yet.” The Rebbe rebuked him and said, “No, I’m talking about Igeres Hateshuvah. I’m talking about spiritual preparations—perhaps a maamar for the wedding.” Some time passed, and another chosson came to the Rebbe. I imagine he’d heard the story about the first one. The Rebbe asked him, “How are the preparations going?” He said, “I’ve finished Igeres Hateshuvah.” The Rebbe said to him, “No, I’m talking about choosing a shirt, a rug, furniture.” That brings us back to the earlier point: you constantly need both axes. So what does the Rebbe want? Wait, I don’t understand. Don’t be too focused on just one or just the other. It’s the combination, the connection. Now, when we’re talking about children, it’s even more critical, because our whole outlook today as adults comes from the way our parents saw things. That means not only how our parents behaved at home, but how they saw the world. How my father saw money, how he looked at money, how he looked at work, how

18:10 Speaker 2 he looked at these things, and how my mother looked at them. Fathers have a great influence on their sons, and mothers on their daughters—on their outlook and the way they see the world. That has a very, very strong effect on me. So as parents, as couples raising children, we have a very great responsibility to convey this to them properly. What messages will they pick up from us about money? We want those messages to be right and healthy. And here I want to say something, because you asked earlier whether it’s even right to talk about it. My argument is that we all talk to children about money. What do I mean? About a year ago I gave a talk in Rechovot. There were women in the audience, with a mechitzah, and several mothers told me, “We don’t want to put those messages into a child’s head. We don’t want to make him anxious, confuse him or frighten him.”

19:02 Speaker 4 Let the child grow up without those fears.

19:04 Speaker 2 That statement itself is a little problematic, because they think it’s supposed to be frightening. That says something about their own outlook. We’ll come back to that in a moment. But I said to them, “Wait—how many times this month has your child heard you say, ‘I don’t have the money. I’m not a Rothschild. I can’t. I don’t have it. We’ve run out. The bank is calling. I can’t. It’s not possible. [unclear]. We can’t, we can’t’?” Maybe in the end they do buy him that thing they said they couldn’t buy, at the supermarket, or a scooter, or whatever it is.

19:28 Speaker 4 At a toy store, yes.

19:29 Speaker 2 Yes. They’ll end up buying it, but how many times has he heard, “I don’t have the money, I don’t have the money”? So he has heard them talk about money. He has heard messages about money. If we’re already sending messages about money—

19:37 Speaker 4 And that happens whether we want it to or not.

19:39 Speaker 2 Exactly. So let’s consciously send positive messages about money too. They can be Chassidic messages, messages about kindness and tzedakah, about good judgment, delaying gratification and iskafya, about the right balance between Ahavas Yisroel and taking care to save first.

19:56 Speaker 4 What does that look like in practice, from your own experience—first of all at home, I assume, and also with the people you talk to who seek your advice?

20:05 Speaker 2 When people consult me about how to handle money with their children, it comes from many, many angles. Sometimes parents—just a few weeks ago, a friend contacted me because his daughter is about to have her bas mitzvah, her “bas mitzvush.” She wants a party, and she wants a trip to the Rebbe, and a trip to the Rebbe with her best friend, her bestie. He says, “What is this new thing? Where did it come from?” And on and on. He complained to me about it, too. Then a few weeks later, he and his wife sat down, booked the tickets and arranged everything for her and her friend. So I said, “Wait, wait a second.” There’s the question of the expense, which is a question in its own right: how do you budget for it? But there’s also this: the girl heard “no” so many times. She heard “we don’t have the money” again and again, and in the end you did it. So she got it by forcing the issue. She pressured her parents into giving it to her. She heard a lot of “no” and a lot of “I don’t have the money.” So I say, maybe we should change direction a little. Let’s be slightly more realistic as parents. For example, say it’s Thursday and my wife sends me to pick up a few things at Osher Ad, or Rami Levy, before Shabbos, or to do the shopping, and I arrive with two or three little kids. Let’s be realistic for a moment. It’s seven or eight in the evening, after a day’s work, and the kids are also at the point where they’re starting to run their parents ragged. Just before I go in, maybe while I’m still in the car with the air conditioning running, before I’ve entered the whole supermarket race with the cart and the children pulling the shopping in different directions toward whatever each one wants, I should stop and think for a second. Let’s be realistic. It’s evening; I’m not at my best. So maybe instead of

21:37 Speaker 2 Instead of starting with “no, no, no” with children, let’s start with “yes”—but a “yes” that I, as a father, initiate. That conveys a great many messages. What kind of “yes”? For example, before the children even come to me, I say, “Listen, kids, Dad loves you. Mom and Dad love you. We’ve decided to give each of you a budget of twenty-five shekels to buy something you like, something you want, in honor of Shabbos Kodesh.” First of all, there’s a “yes” here. Another thing: the child has received an expression of love from his parents. Children always want their parents’ attention, but he got it without demanding it and extracting it through manipulation at the mall or supermarket, as children know very well how to do—lying on the floor, all the drama. We’ve all seen things like that. Now, what other positive messages are there? We buy something in honor of Shabbos Kodesh. Another message: we didn’t measure it by the number of items; we measured it by the amount of money. The child will stand in front of a chocolate bar that costs twelve shekels and a bag of chips that costs twenty shekels. He’ll have to choose between them. He’ll have to delay gratification. At some point, he might ask his brother for a loan and say, “Listen, maybe let’s buy the chips together.” He starts thinking about the numbers in the simple sense of managing things, of taking responsibility. He’ll have to give something up. And which of us hasn’t had to give things up in life? I’ll tell you a secret: rich people have to give things up too. Every rich person at his own level. Even a multibillionaire ultimately has to give things up—maybe not because of budget constraints, but because of time constraints. Say he has an event for a very good friend who’s marrying off a daughter, and that same evening he has an IPO on Nasdaq. Just as an example, he’ll have to choose

23:10 Speaker 2 one or the other. And all of us face choices like that many, many times in life. So from a young age, the child—

23:14 Speaker 4 Makes a choice. If I tell him, “You’re getting chocolate,” he doesn’t make any of those calculations. He just gets the chocolate.

23:19 Speaker 2 Right.

23:19 Speaker 4 I understand.

23:20 Speaker 2 Right, right. Or you tell a child, “Choose something,” and he chooses a doll that costs 199 shekels. You can’t afford that.

23:27 Speaker 4 And then you get into a place of—

23:29 Speaker 2 “I don’t have it, I don’t have it.”

23:30 Speaker 4 But I’ll tell you what. As soon as you say that, something comes up inside me. I want my child to be immersed in things without thinking about... Instinctively, this thought comes up: no, I want my child to be immersed in other things. This sounds a little too focused on material things to me. Do you understand what I mean?

23:54 Speaker 2 Yes, I understand.

23:56 Speaker 4 It’s an intuition that comes up immediately.

23:57 Speaker 2 I understand. Now, there’s a difference between teaching a child secular subjects so he can get a doctorate somewhere—like working out just to build muscle—and teaching him basic life skills. For example, teaching a child not to cross a road with his eyes closed, or not to touch electrical outlets or appliances with wet hands or while barefoot, or how to deal with strangers. That’s part of the preparation parents have to give their children, regardless of whether I want my child to study this or that secular subject, or to be good at math. The point isn’t to turn him into a finance professional. Responsibility with money is a form of responsibility and delayed gratification that shows up in many areas. Money is just a mirror, a reflection of the child’s sense of responsibility, his ability to delay gratification, to be resourceful and take initiative. So that’s just one example. And by the way, you can allocate money to him before the start of the school year, for example. I’m just offering an idea: ask the child a question. Tell him, “Listen, we thought we’d allocate a hundred shekels to every child in the family, boys and girls, for acts of chessed.” I’m just throwing out an idea for you as young parents. “Think of an act of chessed you could do in your class with a hundred shekels. Maybe a gemach for orphans, maybe...” You can tell him what another child did, right? Let him come up with ideas. Let him bring ideas that don’t make sense; let him bring impractical ideas. Let him. Let him grapple with this thing called reality and this thing called a budget limit. Because which of us doesn’t have to deal with a budget limit

25:33 Speaker 2 of one kind or another? He’ll choose. He’ll have to take initiative. He’ll have to go to the store, and there he may have to give something up. Instead of taking four packs of pencils, maybe he’ll take two packs of pencils and scissors and something else. And we’ll hear his reasoning too. “What made you choose that?” Because scissors last, while the pencils in a gemach get used up within a month or two. Just an example. But let the child make mistakes; let him lose money too. If you give a child money at the supermarket, it can be actual cash. Just give him an amount. You could also stand over him and say, “See? You bought it. Why did you open it for nothing? See, I warned you that you wouldn’t eat it.” That also conveys a lot of “no, no, no, no.” But what about letting the child confront reality? He saw with his own eyes that the gum, the ice pop, melted, and the money was gone. Next time he’ll make a better choice, and then a better one. Let him do it on his own. After all, these aren’t life-changing decisions. This isn’t a child being given an airplane. It’s twenty shekels. Any parent can absorb the loss of twenty shekels, right? And—

26:27 Speaker 5 For a child, that’s a lot.

26:29 Speaker 2 Yes, for a child, it’s a lot. And yes, let him deal with failure. As parents, we shouldn’t pile on. He’s already disappointed by the failure. He saw it; he’ll remember very well that when he got home, his siblings, who had chosen snacks, still had four left on Shabbos, while he had chosen one ice cream for twenty-five shekels and had nothing left. He’ll come to that realization one day, okay? Don’t interfere. Define this as an area where they have freedom. I’m also familiar with the liberal approach that says to give the child everything without limits. But there do need to be boundaries of time and budget, because we live in a world with limitations. If a child isn’t guided toward a goal and isn’t prepared to work within a particular budget, it can go in all sorts of directions. As parents, we do want to guide the child in a certain direction. For example, with this gemach for the children in his class, we tell him, “A chessed project, a hundred shekels, for the coming school year.” We’ve given it a focus, but from there, go for it.

27:21 Speaker 5 Let him do it.

27:22 Speaker 2 Yes. Go for it. That child will learn so many things, and here he’s received the money in the context of chessed.

27:28 Speaker 5 You said something very nice. You said money is just a mirror of all our middos and of how we behave. What else do you see money revealing about our behavior that we need to work on more? In the context of education, I mean working on it with our children.

27:47 Speaker 2 This week I heard a saying attributed to Levi Raskin.

27:53 Speaker 5 What does Levi do? The name sounds familiar. What does he do?

27:55 Speaker 2 He’s a consultant, a business mentor. He coaches people to reach their potential as they approach a new job or a business venture and so on. He’s not exactly a financial adviser; he doesn’t deal with the numbers. He focuses more on mindset. So he said something: “We all think that if a person has no money, he’s poor. But the reality is that a poor person has no money.” Now, it sounds like wordplay, but that’s exactly what you asked about. A person who is poor in his understanding, in his mindset, lives with poverty, with a sense of lack: “There isn’t any, there isn’t any, there isn’t any.” So, as a result, he won’t have money either. His health will be poor. His avodas Hashem too—and this is the surprising part—his avodas Hashem will be lacking. He won’t invest in shalom bayis, in cleanliness, in his children, in keeping the house in order, in Torah study. All these things can be very, very lacking. And a person who has that mindset needs to work on it. It takes work. It’s important to say that some people are born with it. They’re born winners, genetically. Today we know that some people are born with certain hormone levels—a little more testosterone, a little less of other hormones—and those are traits that are—

28:58 Speaker 6 Some of them are innate.

29:00 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. And some of them simply grew up with life circumstances, their situation, their childhood—the melamed they had at age three, as it were, set them on a certain path. And that combination of childhood, the home they grew up in, their genetics and everything else—yes, that individual investment put them on the path to being winners from the outset. These people don’t need methods. They don’t need a book; they don’t need a podcast. It comes very naturally to them. They have a very strong, intuitive sense of how to succeed in their own sphere.

29:26 Speaker 6 Have you met people like that?

29:27 Speaker 2 I’ll tell you a secret: most wealthy people are like that, with a few exceptions. Elon Musk, for example, isn’t.

29:32 Speaker 6 Right.

29:33 Speaker 2 Elon Musk built what he has with his own ten fingers. He has a harrowing life story. He was the kid everyone picked on in high school. There’s the story with his parents. Some of the books about him have been translated into Hebrew—I think there are four in Hebrew—and his childhood was about as unlike a successful person’s typical childhood as you can get. Usually these are very charismatic people. Look at Donald Trump compared with Elon Musk. Donald Trump exudes self-confidence. Elon Musk is a person who, by nature, is very, very insecure, very sensitive—extremely sensitive.

30:00 Speaker 6 Have you met people whose money didn’t harm their Yiddishkeit?

30:08 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

30:10 Speaker 6 Or are there many like that?

30:11 Speaker 2 Yes, but it takes work. It takes work. Let me just finish the previous point. I said that people who were born strong don’t need guidance; they’re very much on top of things. But people who weren’t born that way—and that’s most of the population—weren’t born winners. They were born somewhere around average, a little below or a little above. These people do need tools for acquiring and building habits of success, various habits that show up in marriage, health, money, emotional and mental well-being, and also in serving Hashem. How do you do it right? There’s a saying, “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” which basically means that if a person wants his mind—the original saying is talking about the soul—to be healthy, his body needs to be healthy. A person needs enough sleep and needs to eat so that his davening, his learning and his soul can be in good shape. And I say: a healthy soul in a healthy mind. If we want our children’s souls, their service of Hashem, to be healthy, we need their minds and emotional lives to be healthy too, with the right balance, the right mix. Before the podcast, we were talking about what “temperament” means. We speak of wine that’s been mixed, or of someone having a good temperament. It’s precisely about the mixture, the proportions. Like with Fanta: you put in a certain amount of concentrate and a certain amount of water. Too much water and it’s diluted; too much concentrate and it’s too sweet. It’s the same with our children’s emotional lives. If we build them up with the right tools—I’ll give a few points in a moment—and give them those tools in childhood, their souls will be healthy too. You can see Jews who are a ten out of ten in serving Hashem, but when their emotional lives aren’t healthy enough, it doesn’t always come together properly. That connection doesn’t

31:54 Speaker 2 work well. For that connection to succeed, we need both davening and our own efforts as parents to give them the healthiest, most beneficial childhood experience we can. And again, let’s be realistic: life is good to us and all that, but as an aspiration, as an ideal, we want to give them a healthy emotional life too, and then their souls will be healthy. Their connection to serving Hashem, and their relationship with material things and with money, will be healthy and sound. And here I come back to your question about whether I’ve met Jews who have done this. You can see it in everyday life. I think there are those who serve Hashem and are businesspeople—Jews who...

32:28 Speaker 6 There’s someone who serves Hashem, and there’s a businessperson.

32:29 Speaker 2 They think; they experience Hakadosh Boruch Hu through learning Torah and seek Hakadosh Boruch Hu in davening. And among businesspeople, one quality you often see is chesed. There’s chesed with one’s own efforts and chesed with one’s money. Anyone who has been to Crown Heights can give dozens of examples: chesed with their home, their car, their time—and in Israel too. By the nature of my work, I deal more with a wealthier population, so I see chesed on a large scale. Not just in nominal terms—the amount of money they give—but I also look at whether someone gives thirty or forty percent of his wealth to tzedakah. That seems like a lot to me. Yes, yes. There was also a story at our office: a shliach sent my partner a WhatsApp voice message, and just then someone was in our office to buy an apartment in Netanya, a very wealthy Jew. He heard the message and said, “Wait, what’s that?” He heard that someone wanted to renovate a women’s mikveh in his moshav. The shliach had sent the recording to my partner, and this man heard it. So he said, “Wait, what? A mikveh is a mitzvah. I want to be involved. I want to. What’s needed?” We hadn’t approached him or spoken to him. And of course, it was also remarkable hashgachah pratis. Later, there was also a story connected to this involving a dollar from the Rebbe—not in this context, but... This was a person for whom the idea was very much on his mind. And that’s exactly the point: a wealthy person has money in his consciousness. A poor person doesn’t. “I have it. I can give, I can give.” And I’ll say it again: some people are born with this, and that connection comes very, very easily to them. These habits of success and this positive thinking come very easily to them. Most of us weren’t born like that, but we do need to

34:09 Speaker 2 keep bringing ourselves back, consciously shifting ourselves toward the positive, again and again, and working on those habits, and so on. Maybe we’ll attain some of it. Our expectations of ourselves need to be—yes, we need to challenge ourselves on the one hand, but our expectations also need to be realistic. We have to understand that for some people it comes naturally and effortlessly. By thirty, they’ll have made their first million and their second. For us, “a million,” as we said earlier, is just an expression of a person’s success and how successfully he connects with his portion in the world.

34:37 Speaker 6 And I think you said that some of it is inborn, and some of it is what we as parents can give our children.

34:43 Speaker 2 Yes.

34:43 Speaker 6 What are those things? What can I do at home today to instill that—how did you put it—a healthy mind, so that the soul within will be healthy, so that my child’s service of Hashem will reflect that? Because money is only the trigger. It isn’t really the issue.

34:59 Speaker 2 Right, right.

35:00 Speaker 6 So what kinds of things would you...

35:01 Speaker 2 I’d even say it’s the symptom.

35:03 Speaker 6 Yes.

35:05 Speaker 2 We mentioned earlier the idea of giving a child a set amount of money. Then, naturally, he has a responsibility, because of the expectations. He also sees and feels that his parents trust him, because his father has put the money in his hands. I know it’s a bit challenging today, because most parents go shopping with a phone or a credit card. So if you can make the effort to get change beforehand—twenty, sixty, fifty shekels, depending on the number of children—and do it in a positive spirit, great. If not, you can also say at the checkout, “You can spend up to twenty-something shekels.” Twenty is just an example; you can choose a different amount as you see fit. That’s roughly the recommended amount for most children. If it’s a very young child, then I don’t know, maybe five shekels to put into one of those machines at the mall that dispenses marbles.

35:46 Speaker 6 You turn the handle.

35:47 Speaker 2 Exactly. It depends very much on age. And when it comes to money, give him the money and close your eyes. There’s a man named Dr. Michael Abulafia[?]. He’s a child psychiatrist who gives a lot of lectures. You can find them on YouTube. I think he works with Machon Meir. He’s a child psychiatrist—the very person you’d expect to tell parents, “Be, be, be alert to what your children are doing.” But he said something beautiful: sometimes parents need to be blind. Sometimes—emphasis on sometimes—you need to be blind, not to see. Sometimes a child lies, and you know he’s lying. You could confront him right then, one on one, or you could treat it as a one-time thing and remember it. If a week or two goes by and it continues, then address it. If it doesn’t continue, let it pass. He says to be blind sometimes. So here, with the money, I gave him an amount—I gave him twenty shekels—and chose to be blind. What happened afterward? Don’t keep watching and don’t take offense. Fine, that’s not how things work in our house. But maybe he bought something, lost it, gave it to a friend, or dropped it. “But I told you to take care of it!” Let him be. Then he feels, “My parents trust me.” I’m not saying to give a six-year-old a Porsche worth a million and a half shekels, but twenty shekels—

36:59 Speaker 7 It depends on the balance. You have to be balanced.

37:00 Speaker 2 Twenty shekels is fine, and as he grows up, give him greater responsibility too. By the way, ten years ago I worked at a school as an aide.

37:09 Speaker 7 Wow, so you actually have worked in education.

37:12 Speaker 2 Yes, and the salary was 2,200 shekels. I really started at the very bottom. I remember I was assigned as an aide to a particular child because he had a health condition. But I would look around the classroom—I actually sat in class during lessons—and see the classroom from the students’ side. I’d notice children who were struggling and so on. From time to time I’d help them a little, voluntarily, during breaks or afterward. Some of them were already in seventh or eighth grade, just about to enter yeshiva. There was one boy who stole things all the time. I didn’t see him steal money, but he would take other things from children’s bags. I noticed it several times. Maybe he knew that I knew. But because he stole, he saw himself as a thief: “I can’t be trusted.” Or perhaps, on a deeper level, he became a thief because people didn’t trust him. Maybe that’s for another episode. Anyway, I saw this, and I went over to that particular boy and said, “Listen, can I ask you a favor?” “Yes.” “I have a hundred shekels here. There’s a kiosk over there.” The school was in Netanya, near a police station and a few kiosks. I said, “If you can go out”—during breaks, the children had permission to go to the kiosks to buy slushies, falafel, whatever[?]—“buy me a drink, a slushie, something like that. Bring it to me and bring me the change.” He looked at me, then at the bill I was handing him. As if to say, “Are you serious? Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know that I—” He didn’t say it, but it was in his eyes.

38:48 Speaker 2 He looked at me. He wouldn’t touch it. I said, “Take it. It’s all right, take it.” He ran off. It was the start of the break. Four or five minutes later he came back. I don’t remember whether it was a drink or a slushie. That’s not the point; I really didn’t need it. He came back and handed me the change—I don’t know, ninety-seven and a half shekels.

39:08 Speaker 7 Wow.

39:10 Speaker 2 And then a connection formed between us. He felt that I genuinely trusted him. I said to myself, “My income is very small.” In fact, my wife and I together earned less than five thousand shekels a month, and a hundred shekels was—I don’t know what percentage it is—two percent of our monthly income. But I still said, “I’m willing to lose those hundred shekels if it means this boy might have one person who believes in him.”

39:32 Speaker 7 Wow, what a story.

39:34 Speaker 2 So that was an example of believing in someone. There’s that kind of trust, and there’s also the trust of saying, “I trust you not to lose it,” or, “I trust you even if you do lose it. It’s yours, and you’ll deal with the loss.”

39:42 Speaker 7 Sometimes you can say that, but it isn’t enough. It’s specifically when you hand him the money—actual money, something material, something of this world—and say, “Here, take it. I trust you.”

39:50 Speaker 2 Yes. Sometimes you should say it and put it into words too. But if it’s only words and not actions, the child sees that. “I trust you”—yes, but he sees what you do with his own eyes. Now, parents have to be realistic and wise about this. They need to recognize when it isn’t the right place or time. For example, telling a three-year-old, “I trust you to carry the plates from the kitchen to the Shabbos table,” when there are four new guests at the table and the plates are thin glass—that may not be the time or place. We need to give a child responsibility and that feeling of trust in situations where, deep down, we know we can handle the failure if it happens—if a plate shatters. There are times when we can handle a plate shattering, because it isn’t such a hassle: it’s not Shabbos, when getting a rag is complicated, and there aren’t guests waiting for the salads. So as parents, we choose where to give that responsibility. It’s not that the child can do whatever he wants and we always trust him. No. We choose the situation, and we need to know ourselves. If we’re tired, it’s not the time. I’ll give you an example. Most people get tired in the evening. I’m the opposite: I work nights and I’m very alert. Midnight or one in the morning—that’s when I’m at my best. But for most people, by ten or eleven at night, especially after a summer Shabbos—let’s say they’ve gone to their parents until Shabbos ends. Shabbos ends, they make Havdalah only after eight, then they sit down to say Veyiten Lecha, and then say goodbye. They get in the car, load up the children and all their gear, and set off. They drive an hour back north or south, wherever they live, and get home at 11:40. Then the little one says, “Me! I want to open the door myself!” And that’s after you’ve gone up two or three flights of stairs, or taken the elevator,

41:22 Speaker 2 with the suitcases and all the things, and with younger children who fell asleep on the drive. So if we’re realistic and know ourselves, we can say in advance, “You can be in charge of opening the door by yourself tomorrow morning—or tomorrow afternoon,” because the morning is rushed. Know yourself and make room for it. And when you do give him the chance, really trust him, even if it takes three minutes. Bear in mind that when a child tries something on his own, it may take a few minutes. If we’re not up to that right now—emotionally or simply because of time—then don’t give him the task. We don’t have to trust a child with every single thing. Know ourselves, know the situation and the timing, and think it through. If the answer is yes, give him the chance happily and let go. If the answer is no, simply tell him no: “Right now, Dad is opening the door.” A child sometimes needs to hear no. It isn’t open to negotiation. Sometimes.

42:07 Speaker 8 Where, in this encounter with money—we spoke a little about this earlier, about character traits and money being the vehicle for what happens—where do you see this? You’ve met many couples who suddenly have to deal with running a home and managing their salaries, as you said, five thousand shekels a month and so on. What do you see people bringing from home, from their parents’ attitude toward money?

42:37 Speaker 2 Yes.

42:37 Speaker 8 I mean, things that can create a negative, difficult encounter.

42:41 Speaker 2 Yes. But since we’re talking about education, as in your question, we can look at them as couples, or we can simply look at them as a boy and a girl. In the end, he was a boy and she was a girl, and each saw certain behaviors from their parents.

42:51 Speaker 8 Yes.

42:52 Speaker 2 I’ll give you an example from this very week. A couple came to see me, and this happens a lot. I’ve sat down with a little over a thousand couples, and with some of them I’ve met three or four times over the years. There are also couples I haven’t sat down with, but I’ve spoken to them on the phone or run into them, and they’ve talked to me about money. People approach me at the mikvah or in shul and bring it up. You can see how ashamed and anxious and embarrassed they are to tell me they’re overdrawn. In a moment I’ll tell you what I think about overdrafts. I’ll say it now: an overdraft isn’t really as terrible as people make it out to be. I know the interest on an overdraft is seventeen percent. That’s not the point. If the overdraft grows from year to year, you have to address it, yes. But an overdraft in itself isn’t the problem; it isn’t the elephant in the room. It took them several minutes to tell me, and they were very apprehensive. The wife says to her husband, “You tell him,” and the husband says— They didn’t actually say that, but they looked at each other as if to ask who would break the news, as though they were telling me, G-d forbid, that someone had cancer. And that’s exactly it: these are children who saw how their parents talked—or didn’t talk—about money, how they pushed the subject aside. Here I want to point out an advantage the religious community has, and I think we Chabad chassidim have a further advantage. Apart from the ideological side—as Chabad chassidim, we have this connection with money and gold, and we see value in using the material world—

44:08 Speaker 8 Riding the material world.

44:09 Speaker 2 Yes. But beyond that, people in the general secular community, particularly the Ashkenazi left-wing community, have a very strong taboo around it. They don’t talk about money in front of the children. Everything is kept bottled up in silence, just as they don’t talk about health problems. Parents find it very embarrassing to talk to their children about money.

44:31 Speaker 8 To the children.

44:32 Speaker 2 And they don’t talk about it. One woman who’s been a client of mine for many years—eleven or twelve years—called me when her son turned eighteen. I said to her, “What do you want me to do with him?” What she wanted was for someone to have a conversation with him about money. As we talked about what she expected, I realized that she actually wanted to have that conversation with him herself, and wanted me there at the side, listening and making sure she didn’t make mistakes. I think that very way of thinking is also a kind of mistake—as though the conversation has to be exactly right. Now, let’s dispel a very big myth. A lot of people think, “If only I knew more about overdrafts, and a little more about bonds and stock trading, I’d do better.” That’s simply not true. Studies in many countries, including Israel, have found that financial education gave people financial knowledge, but did not improve their financial situation. There’s no correlation, even though intuitively it sounds so obvious.

45:39 Speaker 8 Right, if I know more, I—

45:40 Speaker 2 That if a person understands what an overdraft is, what compound interest is, how compound interest grows exponentially, and what, uh, assets are—

45:47 Speaker 8 All those kinds of terms.

45:48 Speaker 2 Assets versus liabilities. Rich Dad Poor Dad, the book. Then surely they’ll know how to manage their money better. But this brings us back to what we said earlier: it’s really a matter of mindset. So parents need to give their children mental skills. We’ll give a few more examples in a moment. Earlier we spoke about responsibility. We spoke about trusting the child, and also about parents talking with their children about money—talking about the elephant in the room, and how they talk about it. For some parents, it’s such an issue that— There are grandmothers who hide money, call a grandchild aside into a room, and very quietly hand him twenty shekels, like drug dealers. What message does that give a child? It tells him that money is something you don’t talk about. Or sometimes children want to please a friend, so they give him a candy as a gift. We parents hear, “I gave my friend my bag of sweets today,” and get upset. What does that say?

46:39 Speaker 8 You gave it away? Why would you give it to him?

46:40 Speaker 2 “I gave my friend money”—the parents go on high alert. What’s this about money? At school? In first grade? Let’s call the parents’ committee, talk to the principal, and so on and so forth. Or my child received money, and again we go on high alert. Sometimes that reaction sends the child the wrong message. As if some sort of drug deal took place. Did something bad happen? Sometimes, precisely when we talk about things—and again, if something needs correcting, talk about it, yes? Talk. But talk about it without treating it as some issue that requires a big buildup. Just talk about it naturally and explain what is and isn’t appropriate.

47:14 Speaker 8 Mm-hmm.

47:15 Speaker 2 And the best thing for parents—often it’s hard for a child, and really for any of us, to accept it when someone says to my face, “You need to do this and that.” But sometimes, when I hear someone tell me how something worked out for somebody else, how they succeeded, and so on, I can take it in. So, for example, as a parent I can tell a story about going to the supermarket. The children are sitting at dinner; they’ve finished their pasta, their juice, everything. There are a few calm minutes before baths and bedtime. So I tell their mother, my wife, for example, or I tell the oldest child, and everyone hears. Children are very curious, very curious; they love to listen. Sometimes they don’t hear what’s said to them, but they do hear what’s said to their parents.

47:53 Speaker 8 What’s said to someone else, yes.

47:55 Speaker 2 So make use of that curiosity and tell the story. “I got to the supermarket, and my budget is a hundred shekels, because that’s what I have available right now.” That’s a message a child needs to hear. Don’t say, “We have no money. We’ve run out of money.” That sends the message the wrong way. “We’ve run out of money”—a child gets very frightened. Quite a few adults have told me they remember hearing a sentence like that thirty or forty years ago. Their parents said to the electrician, “We don’t have any money.” They meant, “We don’t have any cash; I need to go to the ATM,” or something like that. But the child heard it and was horrified. He went to his drawer, took out the four liras or the eight shekels he’d saved over three years, brought it to his parents and said, “Here, take this, so you’ll have money.” By the way, that happened to me once as a child too.

48:34 Speaker 9 You brought it to—yes.

48:35 Speaker 2 Yes. I heard my parents talking in the living room about something. But later I heard the same thing from people in their fifties and sixties, and they remember it as a defining event. A sixty-five-year-old tells me about something that happened when he was eight—before the Yom Kippur War, right?

48:48 Speaker 9 You’re saying how much impact those dinner-table conversations have, and how much we can bring into them—

48:54 Speaker 2 Exactly. So that’s one example of a message that comes across between the lines, without stating it outright. For example: “I went to the supermarket today and set myself a budget.” The child hears that you need to set a budget. Why? Because we also have to pay the melamed, or pay for the chalakah, or contribute to the campaign here in the community to build a new Aron Kodesh.

49:16 Speaker 9 Yes.

49:17 Speaker 2 Okay, so I set a budget and went to the supermarket. I went in to buy what I needed, and I wanted to buy the whole supermarket. What do the children feel? Wow, we’re exactly like that.

49:27 Speaker 9 Me too.

49:28 Speaker 2 So the child understands that wanting everything is completely natural. Very natural. And Dad says, “I had a real struggle. Should I take the ice cream or not? Then I said, let’s see—first I’ll buy the important things, and if there’s room in the budget, I’ll buy the ice cream. I bought this and that, and got to ninety-two shekels. The ice cream costs ten shekels. So I thought, maybe I’ll skip the bread? Then I said, no, bread is important; it’s very important to have it at home. Maybe I’ll skip the milk? No. Maybe the pack of gum? Yes.” Now the father is sharing his inner dialogue. And remember, children see the world through their father’s eyes. So instead of Dad saying, “I was stuck and didn’t know what to do—should we give up the bread?” he can convey the message this way. Saying, “I can’t afford ice cream,” or “I have no money, only a hundred shekels,” feels very much like a struggle to survive. It’s very painful.

50:18 Speaker 9 Yes.

50:18 Speaker 2 You can convey it in a way—

50:19 Speaker 9 And the child can really carry that into his own life.

50:22 Speaker 2 So here, there was a budget. There was self-control, delayed gratification in a certain sense. There was a distinction between what mattered most and what mattered less. Wait, what matters most? What’s the most important thing? What did Mom send me to the supermarket to get? Mom said she urgently needed whipping cream, right? So the desserts are second priority, and the ice cream I want is third priority. I shouldn’t leave the supermarket with just my ice cream and the desserts, but without—By the way, this happens a lot with people who have attention difficulties, and many people in our generation do, because they were exposed to screens from a very young age. Scientifically, a child exposed to screens before thirty months of age—that’s two and a half—is more likely to develop attention difficulties to one degree or another. One of the tips they’re given to help them manage is to pause before leaving a room. A lot of times they walk into a room, lose track of themselves, and think, “Wait, why did I come in here?” And then they leave with the dry cleaning instead.

51:06 Speaker 9 So much so.

51:07 Speaker 2 Yes. So stop for a second and say, “Why did I come in? Why did I come in?” Just as we ask, “Why did I come into this world? Why did I come into shul?” To daven. So I ask myself, “Wait, I could come to shul and talk to this person and that person and that person, but I haven’t davened.”

51:19 Speaker 9 You haven’t davened, right.

51:20 Speaker 2 Right. Or I could go to the mikveh intending to immerse and to tovel two utensils, get drawn into talking about Trump and the news and everything else, and leave without—without immersing or toveling the utensils. It’s the same thing at the grocery store. And then you say: remember that next time, too. So we’ve conveyed the value of having a budget and setting priorities. Then the father says, suppose I got to ninety-two shekels, so I said I’d either give up the gum. This story can have lots of endings; you choose. By the way, it doesn’t have to be a true story, right? It’s a story you can make up a minute beforehand. And then, in the end, I decided—the ice cream, I saw, cost sixteen shekels, and I was up to ninety-two, so I only had eight shekels left. They’re doing arithmetic along the way. So I said, okay, maybe instead of ice cream I’ll save those eight shekels for another day? Not today, maybe tomorrow. There you go: delayed gratification. That’s one option. A second option is to get an ice pop instead of ice cream. A third option, instead of—you can choose where to take it. But with each of these qualities, each of these choices, there was a decision, a moment of deliberation, judgment, and sometimes delayed gratification. So earlier we spoke about responsibility, about giving a child money—

52:26 Speaker 9 Which gives him responsibility, showing that you trust him.

52:27 Speaker 2 Trusting a child, and of course doing it in situations where we really can allow for failure. And that brings us to failure. How many failures do we experience in life? How many blows do we take? How often are those failures our own doing? So—

52:39 Speaker 9 What do you mean, our own doing?

52:40 Speaker 2 A lot of times, I failed not because the boss didn’t hire me, but because I was late. It’s painful for a person to face his own failure.

52:49 Speaker 9 Right.

52:50 Speaker 2 So how does he deal with failure? How does he look at it? How did my father react when I failed? When I dropped a plate, when I lost twenty shekels—did my mother call me in for a disciplinary talk?

52:59 Speaker 9 Or scold you or something like that.

53:00 Speaker 2 Right, and was it a big issue? Yes, that same mother, by the way, who had the conversation I mentioned earlier—the conversation with her eighteen-year-old son, a secular, left-wing family, about money. The conversation was so difficult and so threatening.

53:14 Speaker 9 Oh, you were there for the conversation?

53:15 Speaker 2 I sat there and listened to the conversation for over two hours.

53:17 Speaker 9 Wow.

53:18 Speaker 2 And that’s what she paid me for: to travel to Hod Hasharon, sit in her living room and listen, and correct her about bonds—if she said something financially inaccurate. And I’m thinking, you were right, look, you did everything according to Wikipedia, but the feeling behind it was—and I’m thinking, wow, the child came out of that feeling... wow. “And you should know that some people go into overdraft—you shouldn’t know from it. One of our relatives went into overdraft, and then the bank came and took their house.” It was all very, very traumatic and painful, and I’m thinking, wow, wow, wow, this was a conversation the child really did not need to hear. It would have been better if she hadn’t had that kind of conversation with him. So, we said, how should you do it? For example: judgment, responsibility, delayed gratification, what matters most and what matters less—or, what’s the goal? What’s the main thing? Why did I come to the supermarket just now? Not just within the list itself, but which thing matters more than which. By the way, we also spoke about connecting the physical and the spiritual. Children really enjoy the playfulness of it. Two or three years ago, I gave my daughter—she was six or seven at the time—a thousand shekels of maaser money. I put actual cash on the table. It was—

54:29 Speaker 9 Bills, or—

54:30 Speaker 2 Yes, I think it was twenty fifty-shekel bills.

54:32 Speaker 9 Mm-hmm.

54:33 Speaker 2 I changed it into as many small bills as I could, and then I told her, “Listen, I have lots of good tzedakah and kindness projects I want to do here in Netanya.” I live in Netanya. “Help me decide. I trust your judgment. I’ll tell you the ideas I’ve had, and you tell me what you think.” So I wrote down “give out candy to children in shul,” and then “help an orphan bride.” I wrote them on a sheet of paper and cut it up into—

54:58 Speaker 9 Slips of paper.

54:59 Speaker 2 Tiny, tiny slips of paper. I even kept it on video. And I wrote “Elazar Peretz.” Elazar is a chossid in Netanya who organizes lots of activities for children, for Lag BaOmer and Purim and all sorts of things. She knows him well. As she’s grown up, she’s attended his gatherings, and she really likes him and what he does. And helping a bride get married, and I also wrote “candy for children in shul.” Now, she looked at it—I’d written a list of, I don’t remember, five or six things—and I told her, “Whatever you say, we’ll do.” Wow, what a responsibility. A thousand shekels. Wow, she was thrilled. She was in charge—

55:35 Speaker 9 And it’s not as though she was taking any of it for herself.

55:37 Speaker 2 Right, right. Then she put them in order of priority and said, “Okay, the most important is Elazar Peretz, because he organizes gatherings for children and the children enjoy them. Candy for children in shul is lots of fun, but it’s less important.” So she arranged them like this: Elazar Peretz, helping a bride get married—an orphan bride who was getting married—and candy for children, and then help for shluchim, all kinds of things, various Charidy campaigns. And for some of the causes, I actually drove over—there was also a poor family I’d come to know through hashgachah pratis. Really, a family that lived—I once helped distribute food. It was Erev Pesach during the COVID lockdown, in 5780, with Elazar Peretz. I volunteered to distribute food. Things were very—people weren’t allowed to leave home; it was difficult.

56:23 Speaker 9 There was a lot of chaos.

56:24 Speaker 2 So I helped him deliver boxes and arrived at an address. I saw what poverty is. My daughter and I try to visit her before every Yom Tov and give her something. One time, to paint her house; another time—real poverty. I can tell you, the most extreme poverty. I didn’t know there was poverty like that in Israel. I knew there were homeless people, but I didn’t know people lived in—

56:42 Speaker 9 Lived in conditions like that.

56:42 Speaker 2 Right. So one of the slips said to visit this woman by name. And she put that after candy for the children in shul. Now, I had plenty to say about that, in light of what we discussed earlier about responsibility and giving a child a say. I trust you, and I want to hear your reasoning and ask why you chose that order. To listen a little, enter the child’s world and take an interest in it—that’s her world, too. Now, if I saw a serious problem, I’d talk about it. I’m not going to correct her there and then. Later, on Shabbos, I might tell my wife about a time I had to choose between candy and something else, and what I chose. I’d say, okay, food and challah for a family, electricity in their home—that’s more important than giving them... So she put them in order of priority, and I remember we actually drove to meet Elazar Peretz. He was moved, took a picture and posted a status update. We drove to that woman’s home and gave her the—I think my daughter allocated her fifty shekels. I added a little more myself, of course without my daughter seeing, but the idea was—and candy for the children. There was a certain amount budgeted for that, I don’t know, maybe two hundred and fifty shekels, and—

57:45 Speaker 9 Enough for a whole year of, uh—

57:47 Speaker 2 No, 200 shekels. I don’t remember; it was somewhere around 200. And she set priorities. So there’s a connection here to money, and she automatically understands, without anyone telling her, that if there had been 1,500 shekels on the table—

57:58 Speaker 9 Yes.

57:59 Speaker 2 —then more money would have gone to tzedakah. And she hears this at home, too. Children need to hear it at home. If, with Hashem’s help, you’ve had a chance to donate—sometimes you click on a link someone sent on WhatsApp because a shliach is setting out now for a particular place—you can talk about it at home over dinner. “A friend approached me. I was trying to decide how much to give. On the one hand, I want all that money for Shabbos treats; on the other hand, this is shlichus, and it’s important. I wasn’t sure what to do.” Speaking of a healthy soul and a healthy psyche.

58:24 Speaker 9 Yes.

58:25 Speaker 2 “I was torn. On the one hand, my family is important to me; on the other hand, helping with this shlichus is important to me. So I said, okay, I’m giving 180 shekels now. With Hashem’s help, next year, when he raises funds again, I’ll earn more money. My maaser will be bigger, and instead of giving him 180, I’ll be able to give him 280 or 380.” And there you have a connection to money—and optimism, too. There’s an optimistic note in saying that, with Hashem’s help, there will be more. If we think back to the father we mentioned earlier, who goes to the supermarket with 100 shekels and tells his wife, in front of the children, that he had 100, he doesn’t say, “That’s it, the money’s gone; I can’t.” He says, “Tomorrow, with Hashem’s help, I’ll go to work again and earn more, and then there’ll be more money for the family.” Or, “I also have a responsibility to set aside some of the money for the children and for tzedakah.”

59:07 Speaker 9 And when that child eventually builds his own home, a chassidic home founded entirely on holiness, he’ll face this himself. He finishes his year with the group in 770, starts looking into shidduchim, gets married—and boom! Now he has to deal with it himself. How will that affect him? I mean, how will he look at money?

59:27 Speaker 2 Yes.

59:27 Speaker 9 What will the result be?

59:28 Speaker 2 We all take hits. For one person it’s a blow from a landlord, for another it’s the bank; sometimes it’s an employer, sometimes the neighbors. It might be about money, or parking, or the building committee, or all sorts of things. When that blow comes, what will his inner voice say? What will he tell himself? Will he have that moment of optimism? That moment of, “It’s okay, I failed, I made a mistake. Fine, let’s see what tomorrow brings. Tomorrow I’ll go to work, and there’ll be more money.” Right? Or the bank calls to say a check has bounced. A mess—a serious blow. Right? Any financial adviser would say that, but there’s another side to it as well. Okay, what do I do the moment after? Do I fall apart?

1:00:02 Speaker 9 Go into a slump, into—

1:00:04 Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. Does it close in on me and threaten me? And by the way, who drives better: a driver who’s afraid of the road and extremely careful, or one who isn’t overly cautious? There are reckless drivers, of course, right?

1:00:16 Speaker 9 I remember that—in kvutza[?]—

1:00:18 Speaker 2 Just a second. When someone drives with a reasonable level of caution, he drives more safely than someone who is extremely careful and constantly on edge about making a mistake. So you asked how this kind of upbringing affects children. A child knows that he’s allowed to make a mistake, that he’s okay and loved even when he makes one—even if a plate of techinah falls, even if 23 shekels get lost. He used the money to buy sour candies, and when he got home, he discovered they weren’t kosher and couldn’t be eaten. So no one made a big deal of it. They waited, kissed him, and told him, “That’s unpleasant. It’s disappointing. It’s happened to me too. It’s okay—with Hashem’s help, next Shabbos.” There’s optimism here, responsibility, and trust in him. There’s making things right and learning to cope. It makes mistakes a normal part of life.

1:00:54 Speaker 9 Have you ever—

1:00:55 Speaker 2 Did you go to kvutza[?]?

1:00:55 Speaker 9 The story. Yes, in kvutza[?] they always used to say that there’s Eastern Parkway, and then there are the narrow roads. What are they called?

1:01:01 Speaker 2 St. John’s, Lincoln.

1:01:03 Speaker 9 No, I mean on Eastern Parkway itself.

1:01:04 Speaker 2 Oh, the service roads.

1:01:05 Speaker 9 The service roads. So they always said that if you’re driving on a service road and keep looking to make sure you don’t hit the side mirrors, you’ll be zigzagging the whole time. If you look farther ahead and say, “That’s where I’m going,” and you—

1:01:17 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:01:18 Speaker 9 —drive forward, you’ll get there much more easily—

1:01:22 Speaker 2 And there are two points to that. First of all, it’s healthier to drive that way; you drive better. That means driving on the road, but also how you conduct yourself in life. When a person approaches things with a sense of readiness and maturity and says, “I know”—confidence, as we were discussing before the podcast, doesn’t mean “I know everything.” It means “I know I’m allowed to make mistakes. I’ll try not to make terrible mistakes. I’ll try. And I know that even if I make a mistake, I’m still okay, and I’ll try to put it right the next day.” That can apply to my finances, my marriage, my health, my spiritual life, my service of Hashem. Which of us doesn’t stumble? And another point connected to this: you mentioned driving on the Eastern Parkway service roads. I’d like to use a car as a metaphor for how we conduct ourselves—as a couple, as a household, or even as an individual, a husband or a wife. What is the car? The car is the knowledge I have, the tools I have in life. It could be money, a credit card, the things I know. And then there’s the driver. In other words, all my knowledge is just the car; there’s also a driver. The driver is my ability to choose, my sense of responsibility, my confidence to drive. It’s the confidence that I know Hakadosh Boruch Hu is good and Hakadosh Boruch Hu is with me. Trust in Hashem. Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves me; my father loves me. That might mean my father here on earth, my biological father, or my Father in Heaven. I love myself in a healthy, appropriate way, and that enables me to—and that’s the driver. He’s the driver. Because let’s take a very, very good car, one worth two million shekels. But the driver doesn’t know how to drive, isn’t responsible, has no judgment or self-control, and now he feels like running over a police officer, and now—

1:03:01 Speaker 2 —he feels like going through a red or amber light. So the car was very, very good, but it performed terribly because the driver was no good. Now let’s take a decent, ordinary driver who has a sense of responsibility, good judgment and self-control. He approaches a red light and stops. He sees someone on a bicycle approaching a crosswalk, and he uses his judgment, and so on. He thinks ahead. He’s about to change lanes and sees a truck approaching quickly from behind, so he— But his car is just a 20,000-shekel car, a 5,000-shekel car, a Japanese car, a Subaru Impreza, right? He’ll perform better. Fine, so instead of driving at 130 he’ll drive at 90, but he’ll have fewer accidents and cause fewer injuries, and so on. Now let’s apply that to life. There’s a person with a lot of financial knowledge—an enormous amount. He knows what’s allowed and what isn’t. But the driver is his personality, his inner voice, the way he talks to himself. Does he hate himself? Does he allow himself to forgive himself for mistakes sometimes? Does he give himself a chance? Can he be optimistic about himself? Does he also call himself out when he needs to? Does he give himself credit, too? When a person lives with that inner abundance and works on it, he has room in his heart and soul for someone else—his wife, his children, or a friend. A person who loves himself in the right way, in a healthy and appropriate way, will find it easier to love others. A person who doesn’t feel loved—

1:04:24 Speaker 9 In his own eyes.

1:04:24 Speaker 2 In his own eyes, yes. He doesn’t feel loved, doesn’t love himself, and gets tangled up in all of that. It will be very hard for him to love others. It will be very hard for him to accept other people’s mistakes. So this is all one thing: money, success, marriage, serving Hashem, “Love your fellow as yourself,” and raising children. What inner voice are parents giving their children? Who is the driver who will sit behind the wheel? I can give a child a beautiful car, but who’s the driver? What is his sense of identity? How loved does he feel? How responsible is he? How much do we empower him?

1:04:57 Speaker 9 I think the Chabad driver—now, this is happening along the way. It’s very interesting, because I have shluchim on both sides of my family, brothers-in-law who are succeeding in their shlichus, and they really live it. If we’re talking about finances and financial management, I don’t think there’s—how can I describe the way they live? You know, they live somewhere remote, with no budget. I mean, they try to make a budget. Two have been in India and Africa, and one is in Israel.

1:05:23 Speaker 2 Wow. Very challenging.

1:05:25 Speaker 9 Yes, in some pretty unlikely places, and they simply live. So I’m saying, even if I’m the Chabad driver, I’m constantly hearing stories while managing my own life. In the end, I hear stories about people with incredible faith in the Rebbe and in Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Now one of them is building a mikveh. Where is this person going to get a million—you know, a million dollars to start? Where does he find the drive to do it? He doesn’t work for a living. He says, “No, it’ll happen. It’ll succeed.”

1:05:48 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:05:49 Speaker 9 So that’s how we live.

1:05:49 Speaker 2 That’s optimism in shlichus.

1:05:50 Speaker 9 Hmm?

1:05:50 Speaker 2 That’s optimism in shlichus. That quality of optimism.

1:05:53 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:05:53 Speaker 2 If a shliach puts his—have you ever arrived at a Chabad House where the shliach has this look on his face, where he isn’t welcoming?

1:05:58 Speaker 9 I haven’t been to many, but it has happened.

1:05:59 Speaker 2 I’ve been to certain countries, and in very rare cases—yes, I have to say, most shluchim are welcoming—but you come across someone who’s very negative, very critical, very sour.

1:06:08 Speaker 9 And the Chabad House looks like that.

1:06:09 Speaker 2 Usually the Chabad House reflects that. Sometimes there are surprises: the Chabad House is huge, and I ask myself, “How did someone so bitter build an empire like this?” So I tell myself that he surely has, of course, help from Heaven, but he must also have other qualities that make up for it and offset it. A person might be very, very unsociable, but very thorough and very consistent. Or very wealthy, because he has one sponsor who gives him all the money. That could be too.

1:06:35 Speaker 9 So I’m talking about this struggle with money, faith and trust. You brought it up in connection with money. Because sometimes we’re working very hard, and, you know, at the end of the day it’s Hakadosh Boruch Hu who helps us and provides for us. But when your financial situation isn’t good, what helps me, at least, is knowing that this tune exists—that I see people around me who really live, live, live Geulah in this area.

1:06:57 Speaker 2 It’s inspiring.

1:06:58 Speaker 9 Yes. So I’m not a shliach, but I can get there. I mean, I can strengthen my faith and trust. Have you met couples who were really at rock bottom financially?

1:07:12 Speaker 2 During my first years as a financial adviser, I worked with couples who were dealing with debt settlements, bankruptcies and property seizures. Not business owners—families who had reached the point where their home was actually seized. It wasn’t easy for them. Yes, and it takes an enormous, enormous amount of strength. It’s painful, too, to hear about a family falling apart like that. It’s a crisis in every respect: for the marriage, for the children and spiritually. Internally, it shakes them deeply. On the other hand, as we mentioned earlier, when someone has no money, you often have to help them move beyond those assumptions, old habits and old patterns of thinking. That’s much harder than moving a person from a negative balance to a positive one. You can simply transfer thirty thousand shekels of capital and put them in the black, but they won’t stay there if they don’t have the right mental habits. And I mentioned earlier that being in the red isn’t the point. Yes, being in the red in one’s service of Hashem isn’t a problem. It’s important to say that, because that’s the subject. I think it’s the question I’m asked most often, and sometimes people are too embarrassed to ask it, but it’s the elephant in the room. So those couples are in a very, very low place, and to get out of it they’ll have to acquire and develop new habits of success. You mentioned the shluchim and you mentioned inspiration. I want to make two points about that. The first is important for us. Yes, it’s good that we hear stories about Avraham Avinu, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the Arizal and the Baal Shem Tov. Or let’s take someone from our own generation: Rabbi Orbashkin [?] of Crown Heights. But at the end of the day, when I get home, I say, “Where is Rabbi Orbashkin, and where am I? So where

1:08:49 Speaker 2 is the kindness he does? Where is that leap? Where do I even start?” So we have to remember that there’s a line in one of the prayers—I don’t remember where we say it, perhaps in Selichos: “Beloved, in Your way, establish us in truth.” Or during the High Holidays.

1:09:01 Speaker 10 During the High Holidays, yes.

1:09:02 Speaker 2 Rabbi Ofer once said at a farbrengen—Rabbi Ofer Maidovnik [?]—“What does ‘Beloved, in Your way, establish us in truth’ mean? That everyone should seek out their own way to Hakadosh Boruch Hu.” “Beloved” refers to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, yes. Look at what serving Hashem means for you. So I’m saying, for Rabbi Orbashkin, putting on lunch for a hundred bochurim might be all in a day’s work. It’s like coffee and milk to him. If he launches another project for girls, or builds something here, a sukkah there—then perhaps that would be a little beyond his usual bounds. What does it mean for me? Perhaps going beyond my own bounds and limitations means this: I’m used to leaving work at 6:20 every day and getting home at 6:50 in the evening. One day I see an older hitchhiker standing there, covered in dust, in the blazing sun, hot and carrying bags. I know the bus from Rishon LeZion comes only once every hour and a half. I think about home, check the time, and consider whether, at home, this would really be in the spirit of tikkun rather than tohu, yes? That’s our whole concern: finding that connection, that balance, doing things in the orderly way of the world of tikkun and not tohu. I know that another four minutes on my route will be all right; it’ll be absorbed at home and received graciously. So I pick him up. I’ve gone beyond my bounds. At that moment I was Moshe Orbashkin; at that moment I was one of the tzaddikim of the Jewish people who practiced hospitality or did kindness with body and soul. That’s one point. So when we hear stories about shluchim, they’re very important as inspiration, as something uplifting. Sometimes they pull us a little out of the mud and out of our usual way of seeing things. But when it comes to taking action, we need to take steps that are very, very well suited to where I am today. That’s very, very important. Another point about shluchim: you mentioned shluchim, lechatchila, the Rebbe and ufaratzta.

1:10:39 Speaker 2 There’s a very interesting story. It was also on JEM, and the person who told it was Rabbi Galinstein [?], who lives in Nachlas Har Chabad. At the time he was a shliach, a young newlywed. I think they married in 5737 and went on shlichus to Eilat. Many years later he moved to Nachlas Har Chabad, and in his JEM video interview he tells about the activities he did there. He had just gotten married, and he came to the Rebbe for his first Tishrei. I think it was either Tishrei 5737 or Tishrei 5738. I think it was 5737, because in 5738 the Rebbe had the heart attack, so the yechidus later in the story doesn’t quite fit. He came, and his parents came too. He was there with his new wife, and his father and mother also came to the Rebbe for Tishrei, and then—

1:11:20 Speaker 10 He wasn’t a shliach yet.

1:11:21 Speaker 2 He was a brand-new shliach, just a few months into it. He also had a story from when he was a chosson and was with the Rebbe: he broke his leg and had an infection, and the Rebbe sent him to Dr. Seligson and told him to drink orange juice, and it cleared up. So a few months later he jumped straight into shlichus. He’s a Jew with a very strong connection to the Rebbe, and he seized the opportunity with both hands to be a shliach in Eilat. He also sent the Rebbe weekly updates—not “probably”; definitely. I know stories about his activities. And speaking of people’s personalities, listen to what happened next. Tishrei ended, and he went into yechidus with his wife. Then his father and mother went into yechidus. I think all four of them went in together, and then the Rebbe asked the young couple to leave, so the Rebbe remained with his father and mother. The Rebbe turned to his father and said, “What’s the matter with Yisroel Tzvi? What’s the matter with him?” Yisroel Tzvi was their son. “What’s the matter with him?” And the Rebbe said, “Why isn’t he satisfied with what he’s doing—with his shlichus?” Now, what? The Rebbe would say that—

1:12:23 Speaker 10 To his father.

1:12:24 Speaker 2 The Rebbe would say to a shliach, “Why aren’t you satisfied?” But the Rebbe is always telling shluchim, “Don’t be satisfied.” In so many sichos, the Rebbe demands more of people: if you’ve done two hundred, that’s not enough—do four hundred. If you’ve done four hundred, do eight hundred. Never be satisfied. And here is a man working with all his strength, writing to the Rebbe that he isn’t satisfied. The Rebbe says it isn’t right that he’s dissatisfied; he should be satisfied. The Rebbe didn’t say this to him—he said it to his father. His father, Yisroel Tzvi, didn’t understand what the Rebbe was talking about. It was a sudden change of subject: the Rebbe turned to him, looked at him, and said, “Why isn’t he satisfied with what he’s doing?” Then the Rebbe said, “He has to understand that he can’t accomplish”—this is an incredible statement, incredible—“he has to understand that he can’t accomplish more in one city than one person can accomplish in a city.” Now, when we hear the Rebbe say that, our whole understanding is that one Jew can change an entire country. Right. But that’s the inspiration. In a Shabbos sicha, the Rebbe gives you an ideal, the inspiration to know that, on the level of the soul, you can reach infinity. But in practical, individual matters—in yechidus, in written replies—the Rebbe is very concrete. The Rebbe said, “Why isn’t he satisfied?” Then the Rebbe added a third statement. First, the Rebbe said, “What’s troubling him? Why isn’t he satisfied?” Second, the Rebbe said that he has to understand he can’t accomplish more in a city than one person can accomplish there. Eilat was a difficult city in those years, in the seventies. And then the third statement—

1:13:52 Speaker 2 The Rebbe says to his father, “He should learn from the American shluchim,” who take one day off a week when they don’t answer the phone. They go on a date with their wives. Now, it’s clear to me that if an American shliach came and told the Rebbe, “One day a week I don’t answer the phone. A bride comes to immerse, and I don’t answer. Someone comes to me? No. I’m on a date with my wife, eating ice cream,” the Rebbe would rebuke him. The Rebbe would tell him, “Get real. You need to be like the shluchim in Eretz Yisroel, who are completely immersed in the mission.” But that’s exactly the point we were making earlier: these are the two extremes. One side is very physical, the other very spiritual, and we have to keep bringing them together in a healthy way.

1:14:32 Speaker 10 Exactly.

1:14:32 Speaker 2 Not to escape too far into the spiritual—it’s very easy. Aharon’s sons did that. And not to escape too far into the physical. We have to stay on that line, in the middle, constantly bringing the two together.

1:14:43 Speaker 10 Balance, as you said at the beginning.

1:14:43 Speaker 2 Exactly, balance. And who gives a child the ability to know how to choose when he grows up? His parents. I want to give another example. Parents often think in terms of forbidden or permitted, forbidden or permitted. I’ll give an example of a subject that’s a bit sensitive in Chabad, but I don’t want to approach it from a political angle at all: going to the Ohel. I flew to the Rebbe a year ago with my wife and daughter. It was Chanukah, and beforehand my wife and I talked about how we would explain things to her, what we would say, and so on. Every parent asks themselves that question, regardless of where they stand: How do I convey this? What values am I passing on? So I said I would rather do it differently. It’s important to qualify that there are things that fall under what we’ll call the three completely impure kelipos. For example, I wouldn’t ask a child, “How do you feel about watching television or Netflix, as opposed to watching Melachim?” That’s not the question. But within holiness, there’s learning three chapters a day and there’s learning one chapter a day. What do you learn in Chassidus before davening? How much do you learn? One person likes studying bar mitzvah material, another likes learning Torah, another likes memorizing Tehillim, and someone else is busy before davening giving a coin to another Jew. What’s your connection? What’s your personal connection? How do you connect to Chassidus? How do you connect to davening? Some things are out of bounds, and some things are within bounds. And if we’re honest, the question of the Ohel and 770—both are on the side of holiness; both have a place in holiness. So I said, okay, because this is an open question, I want to bring in the matter of personal taste, of personal choice. And I said to her,

1:16:15 Speaker 2 “Listen.”

1:16:16 Speaker 10 To your daughter.

1:16:17 Speaker 2 Yes, I said it to my daughter. She was about eight then—yes, she was eight. I told her how things stood, and she said, “So what should we do? Where should we go? Go to 770 or go to the Ohel?” I said, “What feels right to you? Of course we’ll be at 770, but whether we also visit the Ohel—what feels right to you? Where do you feel the Rebbe more?” So what did she ask me right away? “Tell me what you do.” I said, “I do what I feel is right. What do you feel?” I put the question back to her. She thought about it and thought about it, and then she said, “I feel the Rebbe when I learn sichos with you.”

1:16:51 Speaker 10 That’s what she said?

1:16:52 Speaker 2 Yes. “I feel the Rebbe when I learn sichos with you.” And I told her, “You don’t have to decide this. It’s not a life-or-death question. It’s all fine.” And we moved on. In the end, one day she said she wanted to visit the Ohel. She prepared for it, went to the Ohel, and was there. Afterward she also met Rabbi Ben Chaim Mushko [?], and so on. But that’s just an example of moving a little beyond the classic questions of what a child is or isn’t allowed to do. Speaking of the driver we mentioned, the child has that personal sense of taste in serving Hashem, too. Which of us hasn’t faced dilemmas? There’s what’s customary, and there’s what I know is right for me. For example, there might be a wonderful, absorbing farbrengen, but I know that if I stay another two hours, it will come at the expense of tomorrow, of things at home, of my sleep and my davening. Everything will suffer. That’s the moment when a child—or any person—makes a choice.

1:17:38 Speaker 10 The driver.

1:17:39 Speaker 2 The driver within holiness, within what is good: how to conduct oneself, how to act, what to say. That judgment is a gift parents can give a child, often by putting the question back to him. Sometimes a child is unsure which bar mitzvah to go to, say. Parents enjoy deciding for him and helping him choose which candy to buy, how much to spend, and so on. But they can look him in the eye and say, “I trust you. Take these ten minutes and choose what you want.” Sometimes a child is genuinely distressed, so it depends on his age and maturity. A child might be very upset because it feels like an enormous decision to him. Then you can help him a little here and there. But challenge the child, and expand the range of things he knows how to choose for himself. Of course, the choices must be within what is good. And here I want to mention that we talk a lot about quantity and quality. We always have quantity and quality.

1:18:25 Speaker 10 What do you mean by quantity and...?

1:18:27 Speaker 2 Everything has a quantity—that’s how much—and a quality—that’s what kind. For example, suppose there are a hundred grams here. Of what? Glass. Glass is the quality. And the glass itself can be high quality or low quality. Now, some parents take a liberal approach and say, “Let’s give the child complete independence.” You know, the child will do everything as he sees fit, and they don’t guide him in any particular direction. In my opinion, that falls short, because a child does need his parents to guide him toward a path. Within that path, whether he rides a bike or a scooter, walks it, dances along it, or skips along it—

1:19:01 Speaker 10 That’s his choice.

1:19:01 Speaker 2 That’s his choice. And that’s essentially quantity versus quality. Because a parent could say, “I only look at the quality. What matters is that the child serves Hakadosh Boruch Hu. He doesn’t need to daven to serve Hashem, he doesn’t need to observe Shabbos to—he doesn’t need to eat kosher. He’s always a child of the King.”

1:19:14 Speaker 10 As though being a Jew, in itself, is more.

1:19:16 Speaker 2 Exactly. Or I could say, “I’m a good father.” True, I don’t hug my children, I don’t approach them, I don’t talk to them, I don’t connect with them, I don’t give them money or provide for the family’s needs—but I’m a good father. That’s quality. It’s a very essential statement. But wait: for quality to mean something, it has to apply to a certain quantity. Because if we take away the quantity—let me give an example. Say there’s a gravel dealer here and a gold dealer here. The gravel dealer brings seven kilos, seven sacks of gravel. Gravel is very cheap. He’s brought a large quantity of something with very little value. And the gold dealer says, “What, he brought you gravel? I’ll bring you gold.” How much gold? Zero grams—but it’s gold. Pure gold. Twenty-four karat. Zero quality—no, one hundred percent quality, zero quantity. So quality is worth nothing when there’s no quantity. What is quantity? Quantity is the direction we give a child. We guide him toward the idea of kindness. We guide him toward initiative. We guide him toward responsibility in serving Hashem. That does need to be there; that’s the quantity, essentially. The quality is the child’s own choice within holiness, within goodness, within the right path. Giving him that choice.

1:20:18 Speaker 10 Like you did with the tithes, for example, or giving—

1:20:20 Speaker 2 Exactly, yes. Or before the school year begins, you can suggest an idea: “You choose whether you want to share something at the Shabbos table—a story with a lesson, a Torah thought, a sicha, or a worksheet from school with an activity and riddles. You choose, and you prepare it as well as you can. When your turn comes, you’ll be responsible.” That builds confidence.

1:20:37 Speaker 10 I have a few things as we wrap up. First, in your day-to-day work, which is mainly in finance, where do you see your shlichus? I mean, often, someone who works in education sees education as his shlichus, or there are Chabad Houses, as we discussed. Where is your shlichus?

1:20:56 Speaker 2 I’m an educator too.

1:20:56 Speaker 10 Yes, that’s what this whole episode has been about. But where do you see your educational role? Maybe it really is in sharing content like this, but where do you primarily see your shlichus?

1:21:04 Speaker 2 It took me many years to do this work on myself, and I—I maintain—

1:21:06 Speaker 10 What work?

1:21:07 Speaker 2 The work of figuring out exactly what my shlichus and purpose are on the spiritual, soul level here. On the financial side, it’s entirely professional: percentages and so on. For years, I thought the work was essentially that I save people interest, save them taxes, help them manage their finances and earn better returns, and so on. And that’s true; it’s there. That’s the professional side, and its value shouldn’t be diminished.

1:21:28 Speaker 10 Mm-hmm.

1:21:28 Speaker 2 I think that in recent years, I’ve come to see more and more clearly that it’s about encouraging people—whether they’re at the bottom or somewhere in the middle, struggling along the way. We all know how hard life can be sometimes: the heat, the traffic, the sun, the challenges in a marriage, the challenges with children. Sometimes people’s health is a challenge, and they find it hard even to maintain their health, their weight, or their livelihood. So you give a person... In the first forty minutes of a meeting, I just go through their financial information with them.

1:21:58 Speaker 10 A financial consultation that you do.

1:22:00 Speaker 2 Yes. So the first forty minutes are always about getting a picture of things. I want to understand who’s sitting across from me so I can advise them accordingly. I look at everything, look and look and look, and then I choose one thing. Sometimes I have to work very hard to find that one thing—one thing where I can see they made a good choice. Speaking of choice, speaking of behav[?], I don’t look at the outcome. The outcome matters, because we’ll have to address it, but on the human level, I look for where they had a choice. Sometimes I see that they took the wrong steps and got the wrong result, but their intention was very, very mature, very sound. There was a moment of choice there. They stopped and said, “No, let’s put this in a fixed-term deposit at the bank.” For them, that was the height of understanding, maturity, and self-discipline they’d achieved. So instead of dismissing that and belittling it, I’ll of course tell them what needs correcting and changing, and how to do it properly. But I’ll take that one small point I found, build them up, and encourage them. I’ve always found that encouragement does more than anything else. You can always encourage a person. If someone is making an effort, encourage them; give them a kind word. Should you tell them, “Keep doing it this way”? That depends on your role. As a financial adviser, I’m supposed to tell them how to act wisely. But I can encourage them and say, “Well done. Wow, there was a moment of choice there.” Or, “Wow, you’re raising seven children—that’s very hard.” Or four children, children with special needs, children in preschool. The very fact that you’re not in debt—or you are in debt, but you bought

1:23:19 Speaker 2 a house—or you’re not in debt and haven’t bought a house. But the very fact that you’re getting by and both going to work every month—I’ll always look for that point.

1:23:25 Speaker 10 Those bright spots.

1:23:26 Speaker 2 Yes, and I’ll build on them. So the shlichus I see today—again, apart from the financial side, which is very important—is encouraging people and giving them a moment of hope. They’re already facing challenges with the children in cheder, at the health clinic, and at the bank. Everywhere, even on the road, they feel hemmed in. And suddenly they have a moment when someone reflects back to them and says, “Listen, you did okay. You’re okay. Even being overdrawn is okay. Boruch Hashem, you don’t have debts outside the banking system—that’s something.” Or, “You consolidated all your debts into one loan. I’ll teach you a better method, but that was a good choice. It’s good that you stopped and thought it over.” Sometimes just stopping for a moment matters. Speaking of which, one of the values we can give children is to stop and think sometimes. I call it exercising judgment. Just a second before I act, a second before I throw that stone into the ravine, yes? A second before I send that email—wait a second. Exercise judgment. Will this really work out well? Will it bring me closer to my goals? I want to mention, very briefly, a few insights and values that we can give our children as a gift. We mentioned responsibility with money. You’re summing up what I said. Yes, and adding a few things we haven’t mentioned. We talked about optimism. Money, optimism. We talked about that balance. We also talked about how, as parents, we sometimes show them that we, too, are weighing things up; we, too, have impulses. We talked about delaying gratification—about how, as a parent, I tell them I wanted ice cream, and so on. We also talked a little about resourcefulness. Why resourcefulness? Because if I get to the supermarket and I have a hundred shekels, and the money runs out, does the world shut down? No. Tomorrow I’ll work, and with Hashem’s help I’ll have more money. We also talked about thinking ahead, because

1:25:01 Speaker 2 I won’t want to spend the whole hundred shekels, because tomorrow I need to pay thirty shekels. So I’m thinking a little ahead. And for children, their natural tendency is to think only about the moment. Yes. Yes. Or I really, really wanted to buy a steak, but I knew Mom was making creamy pasta at home, and I needed to wait six hours. Yes. Pocket money, tzedakah, a connection to acts of kindness, giving children responsibility—but really giving them responsibility, wherever we can, okay? We spoke about that earlier. Initiative, love of Hashem. Now, when I say “love of Hashem,” I don’t just mean loving Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Ahavas Hashem is also the name of a Jewish boxer, yes—Ahavas Hashem Gordon [unclear], a tzaddik. It also means feeling loved by Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Sometimes, because we’re so busy learning Torah and doing mitzvos and so on, we forget this natural thing: Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves us. The Baal Shem Tov said—do you know how much Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves every Jew? How can I give that to a child? Sometimes by echoing that message. By saying, “Wow, how much Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves me for making the effort.” I failed; I failed today. I came to shul and chatted. You can sometimes let the children see that. Yesterday I was in shul. I planned to daven—I planned to. I made a special trip there, prepared—I printed out a maamar to learn. I came, but I chatted, spent half an hour on my phone, and didn’t daven the way I wanted to. I was very disappointed. But on the way back—I say this to my wife in front of the children—yes, on the way back I said to myself, “Wow, how much Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves us for trying.” It’s the same with the child. We also need to love the child for trying, even when they don’t always succeed. Trust in Hakadosh Boruch Hu—sometimes

1:26:27 Speaker 2 you need to trust and let go. Wow, that comes up a lot with making a living. With making a living, but not only there. Sometimes in matters of serving Hashem, too. Sometimes you see parents: the dairy spoon accidentally touched something, or there’s the question of a minyan. Some parents start getting anxious at five past one: “When will there be Minchah?” There are still seven hours until sunset. Pressure, pressure around religion. Sometimes we need to trust Hakadosh Boruch Hu a little, with the sense that Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves us. I’ll try—we’ll try, with Hashem’s help, to daven on time. We’ll try to daven well. It’s okay; we’ll try. And then the child experiences Torah and mitzvos calmly, too. We need to work on ourselves in this. You can’t fake it. Work on ourselves. Even if we don’t get to a hundred, if we go from zero to two, that’s good too, because the child will start at two. Another point: how does a child experience failure? How does an adult experience failure? Speaking of being loved: I am loved, Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves me, I love that, I’m able to accept it. Another point: each of us, like the moon, has a lit side and an unlit side. We have our flaws, our rough edges, the areas where we cut corners, fudge things, do half a job. And we have the areas where we’re good, where we shine more. Shine—your name is Meir, right? Yes. Meir. So it’s easier for us to stay focused on that positive side all the time. But sometimes we also need to accept our less-than-good traits. Acceptance doesn’t mean I want them, but I can live with them in peace. We all know we have an animal soul in the left chamber of the heart, and we live with it in a kind of peace. That’s the left chamber of the heart. Sometimes, for one person, it’s his procrastination,

1:27:56 Speaker 2 for another it’s his cigarettes; for someone else it’s his anger and arguing, and for another it’s his temptation for sweets and things like that. Sometimes we need to accept it. And here’s the surprising paradox: experience shows that דווקא when a person begins to accept it, begins to have a dialogue with his flaws, look them in the eye and see them, he’s more successful at working on them than someone who ignores and suppresses them. I’ll give an example. Say a child— Yes, I wanted to hear an example. Yes. Say I discover that my child stole five shekels from the tzedakah box. There are many approaches. We mentioned earlier turning a blind eye [unclear], and everyone knows the approach of charging in at a hundred kilometers an hour and explaining the grave sin and the sin of theft, and, “Excuse me, why are you doing this? Why are you stealing?” and so on. That’s the common, classic method. Another possibility is that two days later, at the Shabbos meal, I tell Mom or one of the children: “When I was a child, I always really wanted to have money of my own. I wouldn’t get up on time to receive pocket money from my parents, or do the tests to earn a scholarship from school, or whatever it was. And now and then I’d be tempted and take something from the tzedakah box. Why? Because my yetzer really wanted it. On the other hand, I knew it wasn’t right.” And the child thinks, “Wow, Dad too”—but Dad talks about it. Dad talks about it, talks about that desire; he gives it a voice. And Dad says, “When I grew up, I concluded it would be better to earn that money myself, honestly. Then there would be a blessing in my money, and the money in the tzedakah box would go to the poor.” And the child hears all this while I’m saying it to Mom. So what has happened here? Not only has the father stopped the child from stealing; look at how he spoke about his—

1:29:33 Speaker 2 about his flaws. His flaw was stealing. This is about much more than not stealing money from tzedakah. Dad talked about it; Dad had a dialogue with it. The child, too, will have a dialogue with his yetzer: “Wow, I really want ice cream. I want to take one from the store right now; the shopkeeper isn’t looking.” Or, say, instead of stealing, it’s about hitting someone: “I feel like giving him a real smack right now.” Yes. Or sometimes a child comes home from school and says, “I hate that school. It should burn down. A missile should fall on the principal.” Who among us hasn’t heard a child say something like that? Or, “May that child’s name be erased; the terrorists should kill him,” right? And we parents jump in: “Chas veshalom! Ahavas Yisroel!” and on and on. “How can you talk like that?” But the better response is first of all to understand that this child has a flaw. Then to say, “Wow, sometimes I also get very, very angry at my boss.” I also have times when—I’m not going to say, “Yes, I’d kill the principal,” right? We wouldn’t say that in front of the child. But we can say, “I was very angry with him too, and I really wanted to hit that principal. But I realized that if I raised a hand against him, it wouldn’t do any good. It would ruin our relationship, and tomorrow I’d regret it, and tomorrow we’d be friends again. It would be very unpleasant.” I always tell it in the third person; it’s much, much easier. And the emphasis is not just on doing or not doing, but on talking about it too. So we need to see the flawed side of the moon, to look at that side as well. When we make Kiddush Levanah, we look at the shining part,

1:30:55 Speaker 2 So during the rest of the month, when it isn’t Kiddush Levanah, we should look at the darker side too, including in ourselves. And when a child sees that we’re capable of that, that we’re brave enough to look at our own flaws, he’ll be able to take in the message too. All the messages you mentioned don’t start with what I tell him. Always bring it back to what I share about myself, or what I tell myself. Exactly. If I’m not working on it, if I’m not working on my trust in Hashem, even a little—don’t expect yourself to be King Chizkiyahu, who went to sleep while a war was going on. Yes. I also heard that during the Gulf War, someone came to tell the Rebbe that a missile had fallen in the center of the country and thousands had been killed—that’s what one of the news channels reported. Someone came to tell the Rebbe, and I think Rabbi Groner came to say something to him. The Rebbe said to him in Yiddish, “I know.” He closed the door, and someone who lived across the way said the Rebbe turned off the light and went to sleep. That happened during the Gulf War. I heard it from Reshtig[?] a few days ago, on Shabbos. Speaking of trust in Hashem. So if I’m not doing even a little work on it—that’s the level of King Chizkiyahu, the level of the Rebbe, and we’ll get there. But a little trust in Hashem: with Hashem’s help, we’ll get there on time. With Hashem’s help, we’ll find parking. We’re looking for parking, and it’s frustrating not to find any, but I believe we’ll find some. I believe we’ll find some. We’ll get there on time. I believe that around the tenth of the month, things were a little tight; we had a lot of expenses. Boruch Hashem we have sweet children like you, children we love, and boruch Hashem we can find money for such fun things as trips and camps. And sometimes, how nice it is to say, “How nice it is to spend money!” How—

1:32:20 Speaker 2 In other homes they hear, “Oh, another hundred shekels, and then another hundred, and then camp is another two hundred. What are we going to do with all the...?” Yes. So he heard it in a very, very positive way. He heard about money. And often, tell the children, “Boruch Hashem I have a job. Boruch Hashem Mommy has a job. And this month we gave 800 or 2,000 shekels—it doesn’t matter what the amount is—to tzedakah. We gave to people in need; we gave to shluchim. How wonderful! With Hashem’s help, next month we’ll have more money. Instead of giving 800, we’ll give 1,200. We’ll be able to.” Another point: you said “as an adult,” and I always took that back to the child, because the adult was once a child. So when that adult encounters failure, gets turned down at work, finds himself overdrawn, gets a notice from the bank—does he have hope and optimism? What does he tell himself? Does he beat himself up too much? Do you mean us as parents, or the child? Yes, us, and also the child. In front of the child. It’s always the same channel. Yes. So if I beat myself up too much over failures or mistakes I’ve made, what do I tell myself? “It’s okay. You can handle this.” A child falls—and by the way, as parents, when a child falls, we rush to help him. Whether he falls physically or stumbles at something. He calls: “I’m at camp, I’m miserable here. Come get me.” That’s such a hard call for parents to hear. My child is at camp right now, whatever kind of camp it is, and he says, “Come get me.” The first thing we want to do is tell the boss goodbye, grab the car, race down the highway and pick him up. But if we think for a moment, we can tell him, “Wow, I understand you’re dealing with something unpleasant right now. It isn’t pleasant. I’m in the middle of something; I’ll call you back in thirty minutes, and we’ll talk.” Now, in those thirty minutes, first of all, the parent hasn’t abandoned him. The parent said, “I’ll call you back.” What happened during those thirty minutes? He built resilience. He managed to hold on for thirty minutes. I didn’t abandon him and say, “Deal with it yourself, bye,” and hang up. I told him, “Your father will call you back in thirty minutes. In thirty minutes we’ll see where things stand, whatever happens.” And he held on for those thirty minutes. Often, afterward, it also... Dies down, yes. But I’m saying that even if it doesn’t die down and you then come pick him up, you should still come pick him up if there really is a big problem. But he felt that we didn’t immediately rush in and scoop him up. We looked at him with loving eyes. Look at a child who makes a mistake that way. Sometimes I see a child trying to write something and the parent stands beside him, correcting him, correcting him. The child tries to say a dvar Torah, and they correct him. The child picks up a cup to pour something, and they stand there— Now again, sometimes it’s better not to let a child do something. If it involves electricity, if it’s delicate, if the situation isn’t right, don’t let him. But look at him with loving eyes, with eyes that trust him. And between us, what happened if an egg fell? Really, if you think about the child’s feelings—again, if it’s Shabbos, that’s a bit more complicated. Though I think it isn’t forbidden to touch uncooked eggs on Shabbos. But say there are guests over and so on—okay, then no. But when you can give them an apron and let them work with the dough, what will happen? It’s ten minutes of cleanup afterward with

1:33:48 Speaker 2 It’s unpleasant. It’s not pleasant. “I’ll call you back—I’m in the middle of something. I’ll call you in thirty minutes and talk to you.” Now, during those thirty minutes, first of all, the parent hasn’t abandoned him. The parent said, “I’ll call you back.” What happened during those thirty minutes? He built resilience. He held himself together for thirty minutes. I didn’t abandon him and say, “Figure it out yourself, bye,” and hang up. I told him, “Your father will call you back in thirty minutes. In thirty minutes we’ll reassess the situation and see where things stand.” And for those thirty minutes, he held himself together. Usually, by then it also... dies down, yes. But I’m saying, even if it doesn’t die down and you then go pick him up, that’s also okay—because it really is a big problem. But he felt that we didn’t immediately run over and pick him up. We looked at him with loving eyes. Look at a child who makes a mistake that way. Sometimes I see a child come to write something, and the parent stands beside him, correcting him, correcting him. The child tries to say a dvar Torah, and they correct him. The child goes to hold the cup and pour, and they stand there— So again, sometimes it’s better not to let a child do something. If it involves electricity, if it’s delicate, if the situation isn’t right, don’t let him. But look at him with loving eyes, with eyes that trust him. And between us, what happened if an egg fell? Really, really, if you think about the child’s feelings—again, if it’s Shabbos, it’s a bit more complicated, though I think it isn’t forbidden to touch raw eggs on Shabbos. But say there are guests and so on, then okay, no. But when you can give them an apron and let them work with the dough and all that, what will happen? It’s ten minutes of work afterward to clean up with

1:35:10 Speaker 2 the older ones. Sometimes you can let them clean up themselves. That’s life. Or let them sort the rice. “They trust me.” So we also talked about accepting the child’s flawed side. Why? Because if he has trouble getting organized, or struggles with laziness or procrastination, don’t worry: throughout his life he’ll get reminders from reality, from his boss, from his wife, in the car, at meetings. He’ll be late, he’ll... He’ll get enough reminders of it. I don’t need to remind him yet again. Build him up, love him, accept that side of him too. Good. And you can also say in front of the child at home, “I often put off things I need to do.” Say it at home. “And what do I do? I try to think about what will help me. I give myself a reward. I promise myself that when I finish making the bed, I can have two squares of chocolate.” I look at him: “What, do squares of chocolate work for you too?” “Yes.” Or, “I’ll put on music I like. Upbeat Chassidic music makes me feel good.” Or, “Afterward I’ll have ten minutes on my phone,” and so on. Just an example. So there was a lot here: accepting the negative side, working on it, and correcting it. And when we accept our negative side, accept our flaws and talk about them, it becomes easier to correct them, and we’re more able to do real work and make changes. Well, I think we always finish here with a tip. I think this whole episode has been full of tips and things you’ve worked on yourself. But if you could share something that works for you specifically in avodas Hashem or in raising children—something short to end the episode with, one of those treats, that one thing. Yes. I assume that many of those who will listen

1:36:46 Speaker 2 This episode is for young couples raising children. First of all, even before the tip, I want to say: you’re raising children today. Children today are a different generation. We grew up in a generation that was very much in survival mode, and the generation before us even more so. Today’s children deserve a great deal. This is a generation of Geulah and abundance—and there’s the cost of living, traffic, constraints, challenges, social media. So first of all, the very fact that you’re parents raising children and have made time to listen to a podcast that might give you something extra, help you grow a little—you’re champions. Well done. That’s before I even give the tip. My tip is something I’d suggest each of you consider to whatever extent you can. For six years now, my phone hasn’t come into my home, except on Friday and Shabbos. From Thursday onward, it either stays at work or in the car; it doesn’t come inside. Wow, you’ve managed that for six years? Six years, even a little more. It started a little before COVID, and during COVID I found it difficult, and [unclear]. Let’s say you come home at four and leave it in the car. No, when I get home—I usually work evenings. I generally start at one in the afternoon and work until eleven or twelve at night. I leave it at the office and drive home without it. Home is nearby, three kilometers away. Unless it’s a day when I know I need to be available because something [unclear]. Of course, it’s all about setting expectations. I have four employees. They know when I’m available. My partners know too. My wife knows. It’s not, as we said earlier, a fix that becomes a burden. We still need to... So that’s the extreme end. I don’t compromise. No phone at all, or do you have a kosher phone?

1:38:18 Speaker 2 No phone at all. I tried. For years I had a Nokia phone at home just for SMS, but I saw that things started to creep in through that number. I get a great many calls. On a normal day, I usually get to my phone around twelve or one in the afternoon, when I arrive at the office. I don’t touch my phone before I’ve finished my morning routine, davening and putting on tefillin. And again, everyone has the schedule that works for them. It’s very important to me that you don’t hear this and say, “Okay, I’ll do that tomorrow.” Take it to your own situation. Leaving your phone at the office may be too much for you, but leaving it in the mailbox may be realistic. Or you can start with the first ten minutes: the phone goes in the electrical cabinet outside the door. For the first ten minutes after you come home, enjoy seeing the children. Be with them—their chatter, their silliness, the pasta they’ve put on the walls. Be in it, be there, be present. Nothing will happen in ten minutes. Unless you’re on call for a rescue organization or a security response team—you need to be available even on Yom Kippur and carry your phone all the time. But most of us aren’t. We can do this. When I arrive at one in the afternoon, I usually have forty missed calls on a normal day; in the summer, more, because July and August are the busiest time for calls. My phone is on silent right now; I’ll check in a moment how many there are. But the tip I’d give is: choose a reasonable stretch of time and try it out. Try ten minutes, eight minutes. It will affect your happiness. It might even affect your income, because you’ll be more focused on your goals. A healthy mind. A healthy mind, a healthy soul. Yes. You’ll have a little more room to breathe, because the phone distracts us so much, and life

1:39:41 Speaker 2 itself becomes a constant escape from a moment of quiet, a moment of chaos, a moment of pain. So you can start with eight minutes. Anyone can take eight minutes a day and not touch the phone. It’s easier when it isn’t in the room with me. By the way, I tell people I’m very weak. I do this because I’m weak, not because I’m a hero. If I were a hero, my phone could be right here and I wouldn’t touch it for eight hours straight. But it’s hard. Yes, exactly. [Unclear] once told someone who smoked to put the cigarettes up high, somewhere he’d have to climb to reach them—to put the temptation farther away. That’s what I heard in the name of [unclear]. So perhaps those eight minutes, which may later grow into twenty or thirty minutes, will help you enjoy what you already have more. Sometimes more money can’t take the place of another smile from a child, a moment of a child’s silliness. The child started crawling, started standing; the little girl started saying clever things. She shows us a beautiful picture she made with pasta—she drew Trump, or I don’t know what. Those are the moments of happiness in our lives, moments of Hashem’s blessing. Sometimes we can’t see Hashem’s blessing because on social media everyone is at a vacation cottage, everyone is on a cruise, everyone is at a beautiful hotel or a nice restaurant, or—and the phone in general draws us into an outside world. In the end, our lives are me, my service of Hashem, my livelihood, my health, my wife and my children. Those sweet moments, those eight minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. I will tell you that the beginning is very hard. I remember that for the first year or two I was very anxious. I’d go back to the phone. It didn’t stay at the office; it stayed in the car, and I really

1:41:03 Speaker 2 felt the need to go down to the car every hour. Did you find that time was what enabled you to get to this point? Yes. So don’t expect those eight minutes to be all roses and romance. But you can spend those eight minutes sitting on the floor with the family, or on the couch, chatting, looking each other in the eye and listening. Because if your phone is beside you, studies show— Yes, you’re not focused. The very fact that it’s beside you and within reach means you keep checking whether a new message has come in, even if it’s on silent, whether something has happened. By the way, my phone has been on silent for eleven years straight. Eleven years straight: no notification sounds, no calls ringing, nothing. Wow. Yes. My wife knows that if she needs something, she sends me a message, and every so often while I’m at work I look at the phone to see whether anything urgent has happened. If she calls, it’s urgent. So otherwise, you’re not available. Right. No, I generally don’t take calls. People call; if it isn’t work-related, I don’t call back, but that’s another matter. If you can take those eight minutes for yourselves—I deliberately say eight minutes because anyone can do that, apart from someone on call for an emergency or rescue organization. That’s different; lives are at stake. But eight minutes, twelve minutes, fifteen minutes... And beyond that, I know someone who’s on call for—I think it’s Magen David Adom. He’s constantly called out on Shabbos and so on. So he arranged a rota so that one Shabbos a month he isn’t called out. He sits

1:42:16 Speaker 2 with his family, and the radio is connected—I’m not sure what the device is, but it’s connected—and that Shabbos is a restful Shabbos for him. Again, this is a Jew who is permitted under halachah, and whom the Torah obligates, to do this: his profession and skill are healing and saving people. He chose one Shabbos a month when someone else would be on call, all arranged and coordinated in advance, of course. So if he can do it, we can all do eight minutes, ten minutes, and then extend it to twenty. Those are minutes of happiness. By the way, the same applies to learning Torah. If you can learn Torah in one room and leave your phone charging in the next room, that’s a blessing. And at mealtimes, you can even take little breaks from it; it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. Say that for the first ten minutes of the meal, the phones will be in another room, on silent and charging. Just an example. Then, little by little, you practice. Those minutes without the phone will make us happier, perhaps even wealthier, and help us enjoy life itself. Life itself is, in the end, our children. It’s that moment when I enjoyed something I learned, or enjoyed a passage in davening, or noticed a beautiful tree along the way, or a— Bird. A bird, yes. Something different for everyone. A hobby. Good. Much success, much