Shaar HaBitachon Lesson 47 (Big Update)

Okay. So, if you're watching this or you're listening somewhere, you've probably been studying Shaheen with me and maybe you're excited or curious what's this update because we covered the entire text of the book from the beginning to the end. So, you know what's happening here? Is this a round two? Are we starting over again? Um, so I want to clarify a little history of the Shaheen course because um, a lot of you have come over to me in person and told me that you studied Shabbaten with me and um, I'm not sure that everybody knows, you know, how it came to be and then like where it's supposed to lead to. It came to be during the spring of 2020 during the lockdown where I was basically I mean most of us were just at home and I said I got to make myself productive somehow and so I started this class. It was officially for Kabad of the five towns where that's where I'm locally based in the five towns. Um, but it was on Zoom, so it was open to anyone. And then we would take the recordings and we would post them usually later that night or the next morning on YouTube and then on the other like podcast platforms. Um, what happened is, you know, it started as something of like it was a nightly class, 30 minutes a night every night. I think 10 p.m. It started as just a way to keep ourselves busy, be productive, but it's 5 years later now. And obviously thousands, tens of thousands, I think if you add it all up, hundreds of thousands of views and and listens later, it became much more than just what it was at the time, which I'm very, very grateful for. And like I said, people still come up to me in person and tell me how much it meant to them to study Shahaken with me. Um, where's it supposed to lead to? So where is it supposed to lead to is increased ptoken in your life. I you know as an aside I give a parenting course. Um so people ask me I've had at this point over 2,000 mothers and fathers who have taken my parenting course which I'm very very proud of to say that I've been trusted entrusted by by by families to to help them with their parenting. When when parents will ask me, okay, what safer, what Jewish book, what holy book should I study to help me with parenting? You know what I tell them? Because I tell them the best thing you can do as a parent is emotional regul regulation. Meaning to learn how to not be triggered by the stresses of life. And where are you where are you going to get that from? Shahaken, right? So shaban is so much more than just let's go through the safer or even go through the safer a few times because I know a lot of people have told me that they went through the classes a few times because I mentioned based on a letter of the reb to mend where he told him to go through shabaten a few times. So a lot of people have told me they actually went through a few times. Um but it's much more than just learning it. It's applying it. And applying it means in parenting applying it means here's another area that triggers us a lot financial um the our making a living money. Um it has to do with uh our relationships with other people. It has to do with our just our general feeling of of purpose and joy in life. When we think about, you know, what's it all about? Um, it all comes down to this ability to feel safe and secure under any circumstances to be confident that God is orchestrating every detail for our benefit even when we don't see it, even when we're going through a painful situation. And to be able to surrender to that and move through the current chapter of life gracefully. Now I want to share with you personally an area where Shahvaten I implemented it personally but in a way that was much more than just personal. It ended up affecting others and it's continuing to to affect others. Um actually you're looking at it right now. If you're watching this on a video you're seeing me in this studio which is a new studio. The bat that you watched was recorded in two studios ago. Um, so this is now two locations later, but right now this we're in the Soulward Studios, which is a brand new state-of-the-art video production facility, which we have in the basement of the Soulwards House, which is a physical location that we procured a half a block from the IHL from the Labavis resting place in Queens, which like I said, the basement is a full video production facility. First floor is an event space where, thank God, even though we only opened a few months ago, we've already had thousands of people come through and learn with us and gather. And we had events on various meaningful occasions like Lagime, we had uh Kimotas on the art site. Um we've we've been able to use this place as a center for gathering and for for communal growth. It's been a tremendous thing. But I want to tell you that this house is a direct outgrowth of the shahin classes which I gave because basically I told you this was in 2020 after the classes after things opened up a little you know 2020 2021 so it became clear to me that soulwords as a virtual community was growing. growing and that there needed to be some type of physical component primarily soulwards is a virtual community and in fact we now hashem have 10 million people a month who engage with our content across all platforms you add it all together the YouTube and the Tik Tok and the Instagram and everything together yeah it's 10 million people a month who are engaging with our content so it's primarily it's a virtual community but also you know we are souls and bodies. And for me personally, I've shared this, you know, that's one of my struggles is embodiment. I'm very comfortable being in the world of abstraction and ideas and deep thought. And it's harder for me to show up, you know, to show up in physical form. And I knew that there had to be some component of a physical place where the soulwards community could meet from time to time at events, classes, fabangans. So, I started to look for a location and like I told you, I'm in the five towns, which is 20 minutes from the oil. I'm at the oil four or five times a week anyway. I often meet groups here to prepare for going into uh the oil. And I I realized, you know, this is the location. Where else where else should I be? And so, we started scouting around for a location. And, you know, there's nothing but like houses here. It's a residential area. And the house is it's New York, you know, the the rates uh the the the the the prices are are expensive, right? But I I decided this is what we need for the next phase of growth to go from the the virtual to the the physical. And so with Bhen with full confidence that if this is meant for the growth of this community, an opportunity will present itself. Um, and by the way, I I I was watching this area for so long. Very few opportunities open up like like we are we're half a block from the aisle and I was only going to do something that was like a block or less from the aisle and then an opportunity opened like presented itself and uh you know it's a lot of money but we do an annual fundraiser every year. we do a fundraiser and with all the support, you know, I set my intention that we're going to have this house. So, I raised the the goal of the of the fundraiser with all the support from the Soul Works community. Um, we had the down payment, just barely had the down payment and we got an accepted offer two years ago on Gimmel Thomas. The the seller accepted our offer on the Rebort site. We got the the good news. They accepted the offer. Okay, so that was that was two years ago. Spent all all of our money on the down payment. So what are we going to do now? So we have this amazing location. They say in real estate everything, you know, the three most important things of a property are location, location, location. So we have this amazing location, but no more money. So again, the ben was okay, it's going to be okay. We're going to continue to pay a mortgage. We're going to continue to pay utilities. And and the Soul Words community is a is a very supportive community. You can't hit them up for money every day, but you we'll do another annual campaign a year from now. You got to wait a year. And so that's what happened. So last year we did another annual campaign and we were able to do the renovations on this house and create this amazing I don't know how to describe it other than this this haven this peaceful uh oasis of this very warm inviting physical space for spiritual growth and it's we had the house open 24 hours and we had visitors from all over the world, literally from all over the world. It was very, very special. And we learned that and we did it in three installments, night, morning, afternoon, and we live streamed it all. Everything we do here, we live stream everything. The house is wired for being like a lighthouse to the world, like a beacon to the world. So, all of our events that we do in person here, it's all set up for live streaming. We put it out uh on all of our platforms. So, thank God we finished the renovations and we opened the house. We actually officially opened the house alf's birthday of this year. Took about a year of renovation. Okay. So, now we've got this house open. But now, and this is where you come in, my dear friends. I've got to fill this house with programs, with classes, with gatherings, with events, fabangans. Uh, and that's on top of the team that keeps all of the online content going, the long form content and the short form content. Like all of that requires a team. It's not just me. I hope you realize that. So with Bin, I raised our fundraising goal for this year to $600,000 and we started a campaign. We started we launched it on Alfivven, which is my birthday in case you want to get me a birthday present. And that was over a month ago and we did not reach our goal. We got about 75% of the way to the goal and I said I'm not stopping. I know that the Soulwords virtual community is an incredibly devoted and connected community and the love is out there, the support is out there. It's just a matter of time just getting in front of everybody, letting them know, reminding them um that we need their help. We're going to reach our goal. So, I want to just update you because it's now five weeks after we started the campaign, but we're moving. We we we're there's still progress. Now, we're at 83% of our goal. Told it's a $600,000 campaign. So, we're now at $52,414, which means that we are less than $98,000 away from finishing, but it's all matched funds. There are matchers here. So, everything is double. So, really, we're um $49,000 away. We're 49,000 like Okay. So, here's here's how I look at it. If I look at all the people who have learned Shaheen with me and I add up all the numbers across all the platforms you're talking about ten tens of thousands of people easily 50,000 people probably more but conservative estimate 50,000 if everyone who study shaken with me would give a dollar just give a dollar um we'd be done with the campaign right now and then I I could move on from fundraising mode and just focus on creating programs and classes and content which is where I'm happiest. But I have full beten that if right now we're still in fundraising mode, then this is where Hashem needs me to be for right now. That's okay. Um and and I and I thought about it, you know, sometimes I I learned this from fundraising calls. Sometimes uh I reach out to someone to ask them to support Soul Words and it's not even about the donation. Sometimes they don't even give a donation, but it's about the connection, just checking in with that person. And it's always something happens whenever you reach out and you make that connection, it's always something that happens. So whether it's for you, they they give a donation, they don't give a donation, but there's a connection. And so it occurs to me that maybe the reason we haven't reached the goal yet is because I haven't reached out to my in five years. And maybe it even occurred to me that a lot of you don't even know about the other content that we have. Like some of you maybe you study Shabbat talking with me and then it stopped there. So I just want to let you know first of all there's this whole website soulwords.org but nobody uses websites anymore. Very few people use websites but if you want to use a website soulwords.org which has not just shim but it has Tanya and it has para and it has my mimm it has lectures on holidays and on life cycle events and then all types of topics but then of course there's there's like the podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple podcasts and the like so do you realize that shabbaten is just one podcast series that we have we actually have like I think 15 different series different series of different types of content or you can just subscribe to what's called full library but it's so hard that the it's hard to find because I think the search functions on these podcast platforms are not very robust uh and the algorithm doesn't I don't know it hasn't been work hasn't been working in in our favor but if you'll look for soul words or rabbi ta full library and then you'll get all of our content or YouTube a lot of you engaged with these classes on YouTube so subscribe to the channel. If you're watching it on YouTube right now, subscribe to the channel. Um, so that you'll see all the other content that we put out. It's not just shaken. That's one thing that we're very proud to have been involved in, but there's so much more content. So, bottom line's like this. If you can give a dollar or more, but at least, you know, give a dollar, that would be amazing. And if everyone just does a dollar, we'll we'll be done and then we move on from fundraising mode. Um, if you'd like to write a message, I read all of the dedication messages. I read them. I enjoy them. I read them probably more than once because sometimes um okay, I'll be honest with you. There are times when I need motivation in my schlickus and what I do and I'll reread the dedications that people wrote on the on the website on the campaign website and it gives me the uh encouragement to go on. Uh I'll mention the name of it. We'll write it also in the description, but charitywithd.comst rst is like Rabbi Sha Ta. charitywithd.comrst give any amount um and even if you're not able to give a dollar right now. So first of all we want to wish you you should have you should have ample sustenance you should have so much money that you can support all the causes that you want to support um in and and to do so comfortably. But uh if you can't give right now it's understandable. Please maybe subscribe to whatever platform you're watching this on right now. Like subscribe or at least give the algorithm some indication. Leave a comment. Leaving a comment is a strong user signal the algorithm that you want more of this content or or a like even just you know put a little like but whatever it is it'll just help us to be in each other's lives more frequently. In case you haven't heard from me since you were studying talking with me, this is me popping up and saying, "Hey, let's re let's renew our our connection." Okay. Thank you for watching. Thank you for your support. Thank you for being part of this journey, this soulwards journey. May it continue to bear fruit and to benefit many many more people in connecting with the wisdom and the clarity of of of Torah and applying that into our day-to-day lives. Thank you very much and blessings to all of you.