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There was once a billionaire, his name
was Glenn Sterns, who agreed to one of
the wildest challenges 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. 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. 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 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 schol. 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 COVID shut
down the challenge 2 and a half years
late, 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 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 rroot 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 Schul, 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
