the jewish people have always had a peculiar relationship with money their torah recounts tales of men accumulating fortunes of biblical proportion when god took his people out of egypt he brought them to the foot of mount sinai and revealed to them many secrets one of which was the secret to wealth throughout the ages the world could not help but admire the jewish people for their business promise admittedly in some generations the admiration turned to hatred and became an excuse to commit unspeakable atrocities their greatest critics will say that they control the banks the media and
the financial markets is it all just a coincidence there is no denying that this ancient people possess a secret to the accumulation of riches that has defied the rule of nature alas what is that great secret i've always been fascinated with money ever since i was a kid i remember that i had this picture book when i was younger that inside of it instead of putting photos i would put bills five dollar bills 10 bills as i grew up i would read any business book that i could get my hands on and i'd also listen
to any positive thinking guru that i could find i guess you could say i've always been a student of money there is a secret to wealth that the jewish people have known for thousands of years it was hidden inside of the bible and was not ready to come out until this very last generation you see we're all ruled by one power by one force by one creator and we all are subject to his laws and when we know how to apply that to our lives we're able to unleash wealth that we never thought possible the
jewish secret to wealth is charity in hebrew called sadaka the big big big key is the tadaka giving the money actually gives us back more because i prioritize giving god prioritizes me the key secret is my charity that i give sadaka plays an intricate role in my everyday life and decisions that i make within my life generous people are more successful people zohar says open up for me a vessel like the eye of a needle and i'll fit an elephant through it now this goes against all logic according to simple math if a person has
ten of something and they take one and give it away they're left with nine imagine a pie that you have in front of you okay someone gives you a beautiful apple pie that you love but that's the amount of money that you've earned during the year that you worked hard for that you sweated with you've got receivables and payables and staff and finding clients we're sweating for our money and that money is that pie the idea of giving away one or two slices away hashem has ways to give you back those two slices and more
what we're talking about here does not go according to nature we are talking about a secret code that the creator of the universe himself embedded into the fabric of the universe we're not talking about karma that if you do good you're gonna get good no we're talking about a [Music] [Music] when i came home from yeshiva and went back to work the rabbi from my synagogue came and he asked for a pledge for the following year he asked me for eighteen thousand dollars which is roughly fifteen hundred dollars a month and it's what i owed
at that time for charity so i gladly said yes by the end of the year i fulfilled the pledge but again didn't think too much about it that next year i left my family business and i went to go start my own company from absolutely scratch right before rosh hashanah the rabbi came to my new office to pledge me as he does every year and when he walked into the room his face turned white he was used to seeing me in a big fancy office with a big mahogany desk with a big corner view and
that year he walked in and i was alone in a dingy office sitting on a 10 walmart chair and those white folding tables that year i was expecting the rabbi to go easy on me he sits down at the table and he says to me this year i'm not going to ask you for 18 000 but this year we'll ask you double six thousand i went into a trance the rabbi froze in front of me it was just me myself and god [Music] and at first i was angry i was saying to myself how could
he do this to me he knows that i'm starting fresh he knows how hard it is how could he ask such a big ask but then i thought to myself if this is all true then god is not going to hurt me for giving charities [Music] i came out of the trance one single tear ran down my cheek and i said one word okay i said it's up to god it's not my problem i'm gonna do my best and i'm gonna commit but at the end of the day it's up to [Music] that year in
business i absolutely exploded it was an incredible year from zero to hero overnight the type of growth that i had was not normal and by the end of that year i was able to fulfill every single dollar of that 36 000 pledge [Music] so i started to go on a search to find where exactly the source for this concept of giving charity makes a person wealthy so i came across the standard line in torah that everybody knows which in hebrew is called which means that when a person gives charity he becomes wealthy tithe to become
wealthy so i continue to learn and study more and i came across the magic phrase i'm about to tell you that changed my life forever and is about to change your life forever and the secret hidden line is found in a book called malachi and it goes [Music] [Music] [Music] the next year when the rabbi came and asked for fifty thousand dollars i gladly obliged of course and the year after that they asked for a hundred thousand dollars now that was really pushing myself i said yes what was i gonna do say no would you
believe that it worked again it was all starting to make sense i tested god and he opened up new channels new ways for me to make a living and i had made more in that year when i gave a hundred thousand dollars that i had ever made in my life and i also had enough left over by then i was so convinced when it came to charity that there's no difference for me between taking a ball and dropping it and letting it fall by gravity and giving charity and getting money back in return there's no
difference [Music] as i started documenting and talking more about my experience with charity all of a sudden from all around the world people would reach out to me telling me about their stories their miracles that they themselves saw so the first time that we gave charity in a way that i would describe as making us slightly uncomfortable was it and i went to a class at chabad of ohio state university they were hosting rabbi yassee jacobson we were super inspired he spoke about a number of things one of the things being giving the importance of
giving we walked up to rabbi jacobson we said rabbi your message is fantastic it's powerful and it needs to be heard by the world why don't you start a website an online yeshiva and we will underwrite it and i had no idea what the financial commitment would look like the dollar amount was you know tens of thousands of dollars to start it build it fund it i was extremely uncomfortable it was uncomfortable but we felt like this is really important hundreds of thousands of people could potentially be learning and growing as a result of this
and we did it every year we would give more and we were testing hashem every year we would see clearly those results when you give you give for fun and for free with no expectation of getting anything in return and what you get after almost becomes just like the cherry on top it was coveted everyone was cash tied i was especially cash tied i was coming out of sabbatical as well where i had very little income and i decided to put a donation in that was well above my means at the time and less than
a year later i closed probably the biggest cash deal of my life and blew my mind the fact that god had reimbursed me not only with the funds amount but also that he rewarded me so to speak with 10x was phenomenal to me i had a friend came up to me told me alberto are you giving how much you're giving do something calculate twenty percent i'm like crazy how can i give twenty percent just do it you know if you're gonna if you wanna continue to be a guy who's uh you know paying your bills
and doing okay okay but if you wanna go strong it's a twenty percent you know after that day i liked what he said and i uh separated 20 i cannot explain how that opened up the possibilities of businesses i did find myself at a point where i had gotten divorced and now i was running a home as a single parent it became a struggle to give as freely as i did in the past even if it was kind of a challenge i always benefited on the flip side so i would get a tax refund that
year or i would have the opportunity to work at another job so i always found that even in giving god will ultimately reward you it was our first shabbat or maybe second shabbat in the community and we're at kiddush and i i meet this guy and i'm talking to him and we're having some drinks and rabbi corn comes over and you know he's he's pouring whiskey for everyone and he says yaakov make sure that this guy gives good donations this year and i'm i laugh it off what am i gonna do so i decide to
joke whatever you give i'll match i had no clue how much he had given so it turns out that he had committed eighteen thousand dollars for the year that was you know five times more than any donation i had ever given what am i gonna say you know i i just hoped and prayed that i'll be able to give it and i meant it somehow with god's incredible blessing i was able to give that much and more the year after i gave at least five times that amount thing i realized at that time that still
sticks with me is we're just a vessel for creating wealth and serving as a channel for god to get it into the hands of those who need it people often ask me what's your secret to success so yes i do a ton of networking i work really really hard but the key ingredient is my charity that i give i really feel that that has enabled me to scale and things that don't even make sense have been working out like it's beyond comprehension i've been in many businesses everything from shoes textiles our last business has been
the most successful one we made sure that every everything that came in we were gonna give 10 percent tzedakah i believe that it's been successful because of us taking so seriously giving charity my story with charity begins a few months ago i was at the gravesite of the rabbi rivnets in muncie new york i had a big project that i was working months and months to get it and i didn't see a path to getting your signature on my contract and i told for the rabbi that if i'm going to get it i will donate
my charity from this project for his schools five six days later and this is already after months of back and forth i got in my inbox a signed contract it was signed on my terms and everything started rolling from there this was like a very special moment for me just five six days after promising charity all of a sudden boom the contract was signed close friend of mine reached out to me and he's like i have a friend of mine he lives across the country he has no money his parents have no money no one
has any money he needs help so i was like sure whatever he needs i'll take care of it and i supported him for an entire year and it came to a point at the end of the year i wanted to go back to israel i needed enough money to get there i was short a short five thousand bucks i went to a friend of mine that i'm like hey this is the situation within three days i had five thousand plus a plenty extra to get me through the entire year and it was just so clear
to me that that was literally me giving to someone else god gave right back to me our minds are so small and it's only us that limit the capacity of hashem and once we do that hashem says okay i'm going to stop here but in your mind if you say no hashem is bigger he's greater there's there's it's endless then hashem says okay you'll see [Music] there's a man in my synagogue that every year gives ten thousand dollars and i asked him if he could stand up in front of the congregation and speak to everybody
and talk about the blessings that he sees from his charity but he told me beryl i can't because i don't see any blessings from my charity and this really bothered me because i'm the guy that pledges him every year so how could it be that he doesn't see it and i went home and i thought about it and i did the math and the reason why he's not seeing the blessings from his charity is because he's not giving enough he only gives ten thousand dollars which means that god only has to give him forty thousand
dollars that is left for him to keep [Music] so if he gave 20 000 dollars then god would give him a hundred thousand dollars if he gave forty thousand dollars then god would give him two hundred thousand dollars you see the problem with charity and the way we've been looking at it forever is this most people look at charity going backwards they say to themselves if i made a hundred thousand dollars this year then i owe ten thousand dollars to charity the problem is if a person makes a hundred thousand dollars after tuition after rent
after food after insurance and after a vacation he has no money left he might even be in debt he doesn't even have ten thousand dollars left over to give to charity so he's not even doing that bare minimum here came the lubavitcherev and changed everything and flipped it completely on its head instead of looking backwards at what you made to determine what you owed to charity he challenged us to look forward and make a pledge and decide how much money we want to make for the upcoming year and based on how much our pledge is
that's how much we're going [Music] [Music] after learning all this last year when i went to go make my pledge for charity i wanted to really test god with charity at the end of the day a lot of people think that it says you can test god but really if you read it properly it says test me with charity as if it's a commandment it's a mitzvah to test god with charity so this year instead of going up by 18 000 or 36 000 i decided to really test god and see if this thing is
true once and for all i pledge a quarter of a million dollars and what do you think happened true to his word a new business was formed my executive coaching firm that not only paid off the quarter million dollar pledge but left me thank you god with plenty left over that i was able to do it with joy and with happiness just goes to show when you test god in charity you're going to see incredible miracles in your life i now want to give you the exact method that you could start applying this in your
life exactly where you are right now right here step one you make a pledge to institutions that the foundation is based on god now disclaimer the pledge that you make should not be irresponsible and it should be within the world of reality but from the same time the pledge should be something that pushes you beyond what you're comfortable giving step two is you write a document to the institutions that you're pledging to telling them the exact amount of money that you're going to be pledging for the next year and then step three is every single
month you send a check out to those organizations my personal favorite is writing post dated checks and giving them at the beginning of the year so i take myself out of it what you're about to do is testing god with the greatest mitzvah that there is which is charity and it says that nothing brings the messiah the mashiach closer than giving charity once you test god and once you see the blessings explode in your life you will never be able to go back to a regular life again and when you do see those blessings make
sure to tell everybody that you know about this incredible mitzvah of testing god with cherry [Music] you
