Rabbi Evan Moffic uses this show to reflect on how King Solomon saw the world. Rabbi examines who he was and what some of his achievements were. He discusses why mistakes are inevitable to success and achievement. He encourages us to take action, seek guidance from God, and work through our fear.
Announcer 0:02
Welcome to the Solomon Success Show where we explore the timeless wisdom of King Solomon and the Bible as it relates to business and investing false prophets and get rich quick schemes are everywhere. Let’s not be distracted by these. Instead, let’s go to the source, the eternal principles that create a life of peace, power, and prosperity. Here’s our host, Jason Hartman.
Rabbi Evan Moffic 0:31
Welcome to the Solomon success Show. I’m Rabbi Evan malefic. I’m a friend and a client of Jason. And he was kind enough to invite me to co host the show, and I’m honored and thrilled to be teaching to be talking about some of the core principles rooted in a 3000 year old texts that can guide us today. I’m a rabbi and a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. And while I’m a Rabbi so I’m rooted in the Jewish tradition. I believe that the Bible has a message for people of all faiths, or no face or anybody who is looking for wisdom. That’s why this book has been studied and treasured and drawn from for so many years, and shaped the world in which we live. So we’re going to learn and delve into some of the core principles. I’ll also bring some knowledge of the Hebrew language and see some of the really practical guidance and principles that really built the free market culture in which we live. And that we can renew ourselves and deepen our understanding of how these principles work today. And in doing so we’ll also hit on some of Jason’s 10 commandments of real estate investing because not only is there a nice linguistic parallel with the 10 commandments of the Bible, but there’s also a great wisdom in those principles. Last principles work because they’re eternal. They love They work in different markets, they work in different areas. And that’s what the Solomon success show is really about. It’s about these principles that remind us of what life is really about and how to achieve the kind of life we want. And that’s a life of success, not just material success, although material success is important. But material success is a means to an end. It’s an end to a happier, more meaningful, deeper life. In fact, that’s one of the core lessons of Solomon. We know the book of Ecclesiastes, which is written by Solomon talks about his life journey, and his pursuit of mass amounts of wealth which he got his pursuit of a life of pure hedonism of thinking of eating and drinking and being married. And then his ultimate dissatisfaction with that life and his finding life and what really matters, which are the people he loves. The relationship he’s able, he’s able to cultivate, and the work that he enjoys doing, and that’s why we invest That’s why we try to build wealth so that we can live that kind of life that we want. And that’s not just a modern Western notion. That’s not just something that was discovered by the fire, financial independence, retire early movement. These are ideas rooted in the Hebrew Bible. So we’re going to start back with Solomon, and talk about what did Solomon teach? That’s so important. We know one of the reasons this is called the Solomon success show is because Solomon was very wealthy. But even more than that, Solomon was wise. So this show is about getting the wisdom, finding the wisdom that will make us wealthy and make us Wise One of the unique things about Jason, if you’ve listened to his shows, is that Jason Hartman talks not just about practical tips for real estate, although he has so many of those. Jason talks about concepts and principles, and you learn these concepts and principles, and then you make the better decisions in your life and not only with real estate, but in relationships in public. Text. That’s what distinguishes Jason from so many other teachers. And that’s why he started the Solomon success show to help see these principles that are more than 3000 years old, rooted in our religious tradition. So I’m going to start back with Solomon again. And Solomon not only wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, while he was king of Israel, he also wrote the book of Proverbs, of course, Proverbs are so deep and so wonderful. And what I want to do in the next few shows, is look at some principles and look at some applications. And while we do those applications, we will explore an idea that can really add wealth and add a practical perspective to how we live. It’s not always a concrete step, do this. Sometimes it’s just a new way of looking at something because we know those concepts, but that perspective makes a difference. We all have to make decisions in real estate. We all have to make decisions and investing in in life and the way we look The way we frame decision often shapes what we decide. So with the right frame, the right perspective will make better decisions. Here’s one of my favorite verses from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible, written by Solomon. Now sometimes, by the way, as a rabbi, I’m used to saying Hebrew Bible, or Torah, it’s the same thing. The Hebrew Bible is the Old Testament, the Torah, the five books of Moses, the writings, which are you know, the Book of Esther, the Book of Psalms and the prophetic books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Solomon right in the writings. So the book of Ecclesiastes is sometimes people say the Song of Songs was written by Solomon, which is a beautiful song, but probably what we’re going to focus most on our books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, but this text is actually from Ecclesiastes. And King Solomon says, There is no utterly righteous man on earth, who achieves any good without sinning. Isn’t that an interesting claim? that oftentimes you perhaps you’ve heard that saying behind every great fortune is a great crime? I happen to not believe that. But there is something that says we’re not perfect. And what Solomon I think what Solomon is saying there’s two things I think he’s saying, first, Solomon is looking at the world as it is. He’s not sugarcoating it. He’s not saying, people are wonderful people will always be giving people will be eternally loving and do everything to help you. He’s not saying that he’s saying, people are people. People make good choices. Sometimes people are good. Sometimes people are bad. In Judaism, we actually have the idea that every person has what’s called a yetzer Tov, which is a good inclination, and it gets there hora, which is the aggressive inclination. And the Jewish sages said that you have to bring the two into balance you have to channel they get Sarah, the aggressive inclination and channel it into good activities and they say there would be no civilization. There would be no families without the guitar. Hurrah. We all have that aggression. It’s how we use it. No person is perfect. But we can channel we can learn, we can sublimate that let’s just call it negative energy, even though it’s necessary negative energy, taking that negative energy and putting into something productive. So Solomon says, No one achieves success by being perfect. So one thing is he’s looking at the world as it is. But he’s also saying that we have to take action. You can’t achieve anything without making mistakes. Let’s The Hebrew word for sin is very interesting. The Hebrew word for sin is hate. Hate. Hate simply means missing the mark. It’s not an inherently evil thing. sin. Sin is simply making a mistake missing the mark. So someone is saying, we are going to make mistakes, but if we don’t act, we’ll never achieve anything. Right. We have to enter act with the world to achieve things. And doing so inevitably means making mistakes and missteps because we’re all fallible. The only way to never sinned never make mistakes is to never do anything. Don’t start a business, don’t buy that home, lock away in a cave and never interact with anyone else, then perhaps we’ll be perfect. We’ll never sin, but we’ll never achieve anything. And how does that apply to wealth? How does that apply to living the kind of life we want to live? Well, one, we already said we, if we pretend we’re going to be perfect, we’ll never take action. But also, it’s that we have to take action knowing that we will make mistakes. Jason always says that there are going to be inevitable bumps in the road. That’s part of the process. Think about, you know, part of the Solomon success principles are that there’s no perfect road. Some In himself goes through many ups and downs, he taxes the people in the north. It’s a very interesting biblical story. He taxes the people in the north in order to build his palaces in the southern kingdom. And there’s a revolt and he doesn’t know how to handle it. There are times when he miss judges, Solomon is brought all these different disputes, and they’re clear cases where he makes the wrong decision. Solomon constantly airs, but he ultimately succeeds, because he’s constantly taking action. That’s a deeply important biblical principle. And not only Solomon, we see that with Abraham, Abraham, I’m going to talk about Abraham in a future episode. But Abraham is called by God to leave his father’s house, he’s journeying to a new place. He could have said, Sorry, I’m happy where I am. Because maybe we know he was wealthy already. He could have just said, I’m happy where I am. Instead, he takes the risks. He goes, he takes action. That’s the key principle to one of the key things principles that Solomon teaches. Now there are a lot of questions this raises, it’s easy to say just take action. Right? That’s, you’ve heard that from me. You’ve heard that from Jason. You’ve probably heard that on commercials. Remember Nike Just do it. What stops us from taking action? What is it? Why do we so often not pull the trigger not do something that we know is the right thing to do? It comes down to one word, fear, fear. In fact, the most repeated phrase in the Torah, that’s the five books of Moses, the most repeated phrase that God says, is do not fear. Over and over God says to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all t Ray, which is Hebrew for Do not fear. Fear is so powerful, we constantly need to be reminded not to fear.
Rabbi Evan Moffic 10:53
What do we fear? What is it that we fear? Well, we fear failure. That’s of course, that’s an easy one to do. We fear failure, and humiliation and looking bad. All of us feel that we fear other people’s judgments. Now, I’m sure if you got started on the real estate journey, and perhaps you’re buying houses you hadn’t seen before, you might have thought to yourself, your friends, your family might have said, What are you doing? How can you be doing that? So we, we fear other people’s judgments. And that stops us from taking action. All the time. Somebody said the number one fear in America is public speaking, people fear that more than death. I think Jerry Seinfeld talked about that. And why do we fear public speaking? It’s because we’re being judged people are looking at us are and we’re afraid people are going to evaluate us. So those fears keep us back. And so how do we get through those fears? Before we get to that, I also want to make one more important point, you know, Solomon is writing 3000 years ago. I actually think fear is even more prevalent today. I think that’s because there’s so many options. opportunities for us to compare ourselves with other people. One of the things about fear is, if we don’t get instant results, we think we’re failing, right? If we don’t start making huge amounts of money on our first real estate deal, if we don’t get an immediately high paying job right out of college, we say, Oh, I failed. I’m not doing it right. And part of the reason we sometimes feel that way is we look at social media, we see what people are putting on Facebook, and we’re thinking, Oh, my goodness, they’re getting so much how are they doing that I must just not be good enough. We compare our real life with other people’s highlight reels. And that causes us to fear even more to think less of ourselves. I remember when when my kids were young, both my wife and I were working and we were working hard and sometimes I confess sometimes the kids would be home just playing on the phone some days on a weekend and you know, we might have to go work we might have to go do something. I would see other parents, and they had taken their kids to the museum to the symphony, you know, volunteered at a nursing home, and my wife and I would be thinking to ourselves, goodness, you know, we’re not good enough parents. Now, of course, our kids are fine. Our kids are great. Yes, everybody makes mistakes. Yes, we probably could have been doing more. But if always we compared ourselves to others, and what we thought we should be doing, we would never do anything, we would just keep wallowing in a kind of self pity. And so getting over that fear of comparison, that fear of other people’s judgments, and constantly comparing what we are really experiencing with what other people are highlighting in their own lives will keep us back because we have to know the truth. What we’re seeing other people show that’s not the whole truth. That’s something they’re choosing to show somebody who says, Yeah, I flipped this house and double the price. Maybe he did that once, but maybe he’s not telling you about the 10 others times that he either broke even or lost money. That’s the danger, reminding ourselves of the real world, talking to people we can trust, having a circle, perhaps your investment counselor, if you’re a client of Jason Hartman. I know, my investment counselor, I’ve been an investor is a wonderful guide, he’s totally honest. Having that perspective, where we can be reminded of what the real growth is what we’re really dealing with, and knowing that these are parts of the bumps in the road, and they don’t tell us we’re a failure. But we stick with the principles that we know and that have worked over time. That’s what makes the difference. That by the way, is is why the book of Ecclesiastes ends, the way it ends. It ends with the saying, just simply follow the laws of God. That’s the book of Solomon ends. It ends with this notion of stay true to certain core principles. Don’t believe that you have some extraordinary insight or you know, something that people before you didn’t know now, maybe you’re genius, and maybe you do. But the Solomon success principles are deeply rooted wisdom. And so we have certain principles in the past, Jason has them in the 10 commandments of income property investing. But this is not an income property investing show. This is a life wisdom show. And there are certain principles of life, wisdom that we just have to stick to it. Remember there in the financial markets, there’s this saying, whenever someone says this time is different, you know that they’re wrong, because things happen over and over again, there are certain truths and patterns in human nature and learning those and living by those and remembering those that will help us live a healthier, happier, more meaningful life. There’s also another principle that is really core to Solomon. Success. Remember Solomon? Solomon is a king. He’s the son of King David, born to bat Sheva, who which was a sad story with David King David for all his good also sinned also made mistakes. He slept with Bathsheba who was the wife of one of his generals, and we had killed and Solomon was their son. So Solomon was born into wealth and privilege. But the Solomon success principles, one of the things that he teaches in the book of Proverbs is that the only way we build wealth, the only way that we add value to the world is that we find out what other people need and want. And then we give those things to as many people as we can. That wealth comes out of giving it giving something that people need, you get paid for it. It’s not giving as in giving away everything, although we’re going to talk about that principle as well. It’s giving of yourself to meet the needs of others. In fact, the Hebrew word for prayer is avodah. Hebrew word for work for productive work is also a voda. That interesting, there’s a lot of ways to interpret that. But I think that work is a form of service. Prayer is a form of serving God. Work is a form of serving other people, not serving as being a subordinate, being less than, but serving as in doing something to help somebody else. That’s a true business, true free markets, true building wealth is meeting other people’s needs. Now, there’s another real hint of that truth in a much earlier biblical story that I think kind of pre stages some of the settlement success principles. And that’s the story of Cain and Abel, the word Cain, the Hebrew word, Cain, Cain, it means acquisition. Now, when we think acquisition if you’re a Jason Hartman, listener, you think real estate, but acquisition is purely self centered graph. Something that’s what it implies the word kind. All Kane cared about was getting more stuff. He didn’t care about giving, using that stuff to benefit others. He didn’t care about using his wealth to invest in others in other people in, in what we would say today, other businesses, other ways of adding value to the world he just wanted to consume and consume and acquire and acquire. In contrast, Joseph, when we’re going to talk about next week, Joseph acquired many things, but he used his acumen, his wisdom, to save Egypt, he used his acquisitions to help ensure prosperity. Now, one of the interesting things this is somewhat controversial, but I heard somebody say this, and he said that Bill Gates did much more for the world through creating Microsoft Then he has done through his philanthropies. Now, that’s an interesting now, Bill Gates, his philanthropy, these are incredible. But what the point of this was, is that by building a incredible business that allowed people to be more productive, essentially investing in people in processes, he actually allowed more wealth to be created in the world. And so that lifted many more people out of poverty than pure philanthropy. And so simply consuming simply getting wealth and hoarding it. That’s what Cain did. That’s a kind of sinful way of looking at the gathering of wealth. But true wealth, the way we develop even more wealth in the future is by acquiring and then reinvesting and then doing more to bring it back to real estate. You buy one house, you make money on it, and refinance, you buy two more, that’s the way we build up wealth. So that principle doesn’t just apply to real estate. It applies to knowledge. It applies to relationships even I mean You get married. Now, not all people have kids. But through that one relationship between two people, you produce more people into the world, the knowledge, the benefits, the wealth that we gain the wealth and social capital, the wealth and money that’s used to build more. It’s not zero sum. It’s constantly growing. And that it’s not about growing for the sake of growing. It’s growing for the sake of meaning. That’s what we’re going to get to in a couple weeks that we find meaning and satisfaction. This is another core Solomon success principle. We find meaning and satisfaction through creating and doing. We’re born not simply to relax. We’re born to produce to give now building wealth can allow us to do what we want to do to have more freedom to create things that’s not simply just about making more money. We can create things simply for the joy of creating, but there is joy in creating Solomon Like many of the other kings of Israel, were lazy bumps. This is not much talked about in Sunday school, but most of the kings were really lousy. What made Solomon and David and a few others so outstanding was that they were constantly renewing, constantly reinventing, they could pivot to a new project. And the creativity is something that Solomon embodied. The person who was Solomon before they were Solomon was Joseph. And Joseph, as Jason and I once talked about Joseph was a land magnate, he essentially purchased all of Egypt. And he didn’t do it just to control more land, he did it to save Egypt, that true wealth, true creativity can actually helps improve society. That’s another one of the core solid principles. And that’s what we’re going to get to next week. Now, I hope you’ve enjoyed learning from a rabbi because the Solomon success principles are tremendously important and really meaningful for people all faiths. Now it’s not just going to be me talking on future podcasts. It’s going to be Jason Of course. And it’s going to be me interviewing some of the people in my network, Jason’s network, so that we can really benefit from the wisdom that we’ve inherited. Because if you listen to the show, you’re not all about just building wealth, for wealth sake. You’re about building wealth for more meaningful life. And that’s what we’re going to learn and explore it. If you have any questions for me, the best way to reach out is Evan EV a n at Rabbi ra BB phi dot m e or also you can go to Rabbi masik r a BB i, m o FF IC Rabbi morphic calm, and I would love to answer any questions we’ll have much more to explore. I’ll teach you one more Hebrew word you probably know already. Shalom. Peace,
Rabbi Evan Moffic 22:58
blessings. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show’s specific website and our general website heart and Mediacom for appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.