Make A Million Dollars In 90 Days Or Less

A Torah Anytime original series. There was once a billionaire, his name was Glenn Sterns, who agreed to one of the wildest challenges [music] ever put on television. He was approached by people who offered him the following challenge. They said, "We're going to take away your name, your money, your contacts, your status. You're going to be dropped off in a random city with just $100, a pickup truck, and a phone with no contacts, and you'll have 90 days to build a business worth $1 million. [music] 90 days. So, he accepted the challenge, and he suited up in some nondescript clothes. And he was dropped off in the city of Eerie, Pennsylvania. [music] Now, picture that. You've got a hundred bucks. You know, no one. You're in a city you've never heard of. What would you do first? So, most people would just start panicking. Where do I sleep? Where do I eat? But not him. The first thing Glenn Sterns did in Erie, Pennsylvania was walk down the street, go to the first stranger he met and asked him, "Where is the closest synagogue?" A synagogue. Of all the places he could have wanted to start, he chose to start with a synagogue. He wasn't Jewish, but something inside of him understood a secret that's ancient [music] and eternal. If you want to rebuild your life from scratch, if you want to find people of depth, of vision, of discipline, you go where purpose lives, you go where people show up, you step into a schul. What ended up happening was on his way he found a local gym and he spent 35 of his precious $100 on a month's membership not to work out but to surround himself with people who were working on themselves. And it worked. Within days, he started meeting people who opened doors for him and he built connections and he earned trust and slowly dollar by dollar, he built a barbecue restaurant that by the time CO shut down the challenge 2 and 1/2 years, two and a half months later, it was valued at $750,000. And when they asked him later why he originally chose a synagogue, he said, "Because that's where you find people who are making positive changes in the world and that's how you start anything." That line hit me because that's us. We are the people who walk into the gym of the soul every day and we push ourselves to [music] grow and to rise and to become more than we were yesterday. No one in all of world history has had to start over more than the Jewish people. No one in all of world history has had to leave behind their homes and their families and their livelihoods and their languages and their communities and step into a world completely unknown more than us. Throughout history, we've been dropped into new cities and new countries and new continents, stripped of everything we knew and everything we built and everything we loved. No one has been forced to rebuild from nothing time and time again in city after city and continent after continent more than the Jewish people. And yet every single time we rebuild, every time we take the fire, we carry the fire of Senai, the fire of our traditions, the fire of our values, and we plant it into the soil of our new land. And we take it and we nurture it, and we grow it, and we make it thrive. That's who we are. A nation forged in exile, a people who knows how to start over and make something extraordinary out of absolutely nothing. We are the masters of reinvention, the world champions of resilience. No one in history has had to reroot themselves as many times as we have. No one in history has been tested by the necessity of beginning again more than we have. And no one has done it with the determination and with the courage and with the vision of the Jewish people. We are the people who turn adversity into opportunity. We are the people who take fire and turn it into light and take ashes and somehow someway turn them into flames. We are the people who no matter where we're dropped. Whether in a tiny town, a massive city, a foreign land, or a strange continent, we always rise and we build and we grow and we thrive. We are the people who always find our way back. Back to Shaw, back to Tyra, back to our values, back to each other. We are the people who never stop growing and never stop striving and never stop turning every challenge into a triumph. That's who we are and that's our legacy. That's our fire. A people who take every exile, every challenge, every new beginning and turn it into a force that changes the world.