TRANSCRIPT
*Transcripts are auto-generated and reviewed for accuracy, but there may be some errors in punctuation or words. Listen to the podcast at https://rabbidaniellapin.libsyn.com/ for clarification
The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: The Forgotten Foundation of Prosperity
Date: 07/09/26 Length: 00:33:52
Daniel Lapin 0:01
Greetings, happy warriors. And here's an opportunity for you that you may not be aware of, and that is, we've got a sale going on here. If you've been considering joining our We Happy Warriors special access community, now would be a really good time to do that. You can get 25% off special access, which is our biggest discount we've ever offered in two years. When you become a special access member, you will get number one access to the new Rabbi Daniel Lapin artificial intelligence with info drawn from more than 11 million words of my work. Ask your individual questions and get immediate individualized answers. Number of people have written to say how impressed they are with it. I'm impressed with it. I don't want to be made redundant, but it's pretty darn good, and it's very, very insightful, very, very creative, so you do get access to the artificial intelligence RDL AI, it's called, you get a rich library of ebooks and audio teachings, you get more than 450 ancient Jewish wisdom television episodes, you get live monthly chats with my wife and myself. That's sorry, we talk live on Zoom to our special access members. We talk questions, discussions, conversations. We get you get 15 Lapin lens audio commentaries every month, like roughly every second day. You get weekly deep dive videos that Susan Lapin and I make, and you will be part of a welcoming community committed to growing through timeless biblical principles, plus even more. There's never been a better time to join, so join our special access today at RabbiDaniellapin.com or at WeHappywarriors.com. There's never been a better time.
Daniel Lapin 2:11
Greetings, Happy Warriors, and thank you so much for being part of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I, your rabbi, reveal how the world really works. Thanks for being part of the show, and thank you for helping to spread word about the show. Our numbers of listeners keep growing. I just got some numerical information this week. Do you know that 60% of the regular listeners to the show are subscribed, and that means 40% four out of every 10 listeners, has not yet subscribed. So, if you are part of that little minority, please go ahead and subscribe. That's good for me and doesn't hurt you, and also, if you are not yet a member of our Happy Warrior community, well, that's something you really ought to jump into right away. The address, the URL for the website where our Happy Warrior community hangs out is We Happy warriors.com plural, right, warriors, we happy warriors.com and if you are trying to find your feet in the Rabbi Daniel Lapin universe, then go to Rabbi Daniel lapin.com forward slash start, and you'll be able to find your way quite easily. Now you know that in my individual coaching work, as well as in the podcast, and in my newest book, called The Holistic You: Integrating the Five Vital Parts of Your Life - finance, family, faith, fitness, and friendships. That's what we're focused on today. I'm speaking specifically about faith and finance, and yes, they really do connect with one another in a very important way, not just that when they pass the plate to church, you give money, that's not the connection between faith and finance that I'm thinking of at all. I'm looking at something quite different, and I think the place I'm going to start is the incredible difference that the world of Protestant missionaries in the 19th century made in Africa. Now they also made huge differences in parts of Asia as well, but I myself am most familiar with the difference that missionaries who came out at tremendous cost to themselves, tremendous discomfort, tremendous health challenges, these people came out to Africa and. They set up Protestant outreach missions, and they set about teaching people about the Bible, and the reason this is interesting is because Africa fascinates me. I think Africa has incredible potential. A lot of people assume that the fertility of Africa is a problem, but it isn't. It's part of the vitality, and yes, optimism to be found among the people of Africa.
Daniel Lapin 5:32
And I must say, I do not visit Africa and don't come back uplifted and cheered and optimistic and positive, yeah, the that's what you find among the people, and I think it's important to know that a lot of that has to do with the presence of children, but what I wanted to mention was that there are very clear pockets of economic vitality throughout the African continent, and it's quite possible to put them on a Mylar sheet and lay that over a map of Africa, and then you can see exactly where these pockets of economic vitality are found. Let me give you a clue. They are not found. They are never found in Muslim parts of Africa, northern Nigeria, a basket case economically, but places where there are Protestant enthusiasm, where they are large Protestant churches, they do very well, and it's noticeable that there is a complete congruence between pockets of Protestant vitality and pockets of economic vitality. What's going on here? Is this a coincidence? It's unarguable, but it's not a coincidence. So, what I should explain is that for a generation the world was taught that the answer to poverty might fit in the palm of your hand, a tiny loan, a woman with a dream, a village transformed by entrepreneurship. It was a beautiful story. It had heroes and villains, Nobel prizes, celebrities, and photographs of smiling borrowers holding sewing machines or goats. But over time, the evidence told a quieter and more uncomfortable story. Micro finance helped some people, it gave liquidity to some families, it expanded some existing businesses, but as a grand program to lift entire societies out of poverty, it failed. It was a big disappointment, and that raises a deeper question, what actually creates prosperity, and I want to know that, not only for Africa, but for you, because you need to increase your revenue. Why do I say that? Well, because the value of your money has dropped significantly, even if you've got raises, even if you are making more money in dollar numbers, the value has dropped dramatically in the last six seven years, and the only way to make up for that is by making more money, and so how do you make more money, and what role, in other words, in integrating the 5f of your life: your friendship, your finances, your faith, your fitness, and your family? Which ones should you be focused on the truth? Is all of them, but today we're going to look at the one that's most surprising, because most people feel that the faith part of their lives is a cost section, not an a revenue section. Faith is where I give money away. No, today we're going to look at the role that faith plays in increasing your revenue, and that's really important. And so, back to the basic question, What is it that creates prosperity? Is it access to money, or is it access to literacy? Is it access to trust, is it family stability, schools, and education, is it habits, law, conscience, voluntary cooperation? Right, you sense, don't you, that all those things play a role. Soul, and that is why the contrast with 19th century Protestant missionaries is so fascinating. They did not come to Africa with development jargon, they came to convert souls, but in the process they built schools, they translated languages, they printed books, they trained teachers, they opened clinics, they taught girls, they challenged local tyrannies, and they created the habits of association. That's right, member, family, faith, friendship, finance. Yeah, friendship and finance. These Protestant missionaries often laid down the cultural and institutional tracks on which later economic progress could run like unstoppable railway locomotives with huge momentum, this episode of The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Show is not about romanticizing every missionary, nor am I trying to demonize every micro loan program. It is about a very hard lesson. You cannot lend a civilization into existence. Prosperity is not merely financed, it is formed. Micro finance tried to fight poverty by moving money. Missionary institutions often fought poverty by forming the kinds of people and communities that can use money productively. What was microfinance? Well, this was a program originally thought of by Muhammad Yunus, who was an Asian guy, I think he was an Asian American.
Daniel Lapin 12:05
He studied in America, and he came up with this idea of lending small sums of money, $100 $200 $400 to help a woman buy a sewing machine to help a family buy a few goats, and he felt this was the secret. In fact, he rather audaciously said that before very long you're going to have to go to poverty museums to see poverty. In other words, he had this dream that this program of lending people small sums of money was going to eliminate third world poverty. He did get a Nobel Prize, but in a, in an aspect of it that preserves a little bit of the integrity of the Nobel Prize, Muhammad Yunus did not get the prize, the Nobel Prize in economics, because as you're going to find out, this is not a program that worked. He got it, he got the Nobel Peace Prize, and I think by today I think we all know that the the Nobel Peace Prize is something that should embarrass you. If you win the Nobel Peace Prize, you don't want anyone to find out about it, because it's proven to be political pablum nonsense, meaningless. You will remember that they gave it to Barack Obama before he'd even done anything. It means nothing at all. So, I'm happy that he didn't get them. It would have been embarrassing for the Nobel Committee had he won the Nobel Prize for economics, but he didn't. He won the peace prize. Okay, fine. So, bottom line is, this has failed. Why has it failed? Well, for some of the reasons I've already started hinting at, and that is, it didn't come with any change of culture, it was just giving people a little bit of capital, and that's going to change every.. no, it didn't change everything, and they've been the reason I decided to talk about this today is because there have been a number of articles in major economic and financial publications, including, including a lot of coverage in the Wall Street Journal lately, basically covering the failure of the micro loan program, and what went wrong. Well, people had trouble repaying just because somebody gives you a sewing machine does not mean you now know how to go into the clothing business, obviously, right. And people came, and the way that Muhammad Yunus did this, he actually set up a bank to specialize in, he sold bonds, and he took investments, and he argued that the payback. Rate on these micro loans given to peasants around the third world had a good repayment rate, and that people could invest money in it. Well, turns out not so much. It also worked very well from the point of view of propaganda and feminism, because a lot of these loans were made to women entrepreneurs, and again, what's happened in many of these cases is they've had to come back for more loans because they couldn't keep up with the interest payments on the first, and they just found themselves going more and more and more into debt. It's basically sadly it's a failure. Microfinance and micro loans tried to create prosperity by lending capital, but mission schools created prosperity by forming human capital. Microfinance assumed poor people need credit, missionary education assumed. People need literacy, discipline, moral formation, community schools, and education, and institutions. The first is a financial product. The second is civilization building it's hugely different now. What above all, what were Protestant missionaries doing in Africa? Well, they were, yes, they were building hospitals, they were building schools, they were doing clinics, they were making sure girls got education, but they were also building institutions of connection, and above all of these was the church, and so successful were they that the descendants, the 20-first century descendants of the Protestant churches built in Africa by Protestant missionaries in the 19th century, you know, 150 years ago, 180 200 years ago. These churches, and I've spoken at a few of them, one of them had 23,000 people, really. They were, I mean, it was incredible. It was a huge building, and then around the building, the building was like in the middle of a stadium, and then in the bleachers around the building were 10s of 1000s of other people, and they were watching on huge screens with loudspeakers, and I inside the building I could hear my voice echoing around through the open windows.
Daniel Lapin 17:45
It was an extraordinary experience, and there's a lot of these churches. These all to this day are epicenters of economic and business activity. So, not surprisingly, these churches are doing very well. They continue. They've got a legacy of nearly 200 years, and what goes on in these churches, and very refreshing for me to see, by the way. Bible study, Bible study, Bible study, it's going on and on at different levels, in different zones, in different ways for different people and different groups, but that's what they're doing, and one of the problems I find is that we're, we're sort of, we take the Bible for granted in a way, and so we don't realize just how revolutionary it is, and 19th century Africa was a really good place for us to look back at, and to see how absolutely transformational the Bible was for these people. Just think about it. The Bible, particularly.. let me, let me speak for the moment about the five books of Moses. It's filled with transactions, real estate transactions, commercial transactions. Very early in Genesis, Abraham buys a field for 400 pieces of silver, that raises all kinds of questions of owning real estate, private property, socialism. It has all kinds of discussions on lending, debt, interest, business ethics, weights and measures. In fact, in the American Constitution, the section dealing with weights and measures reads as if it was lifted word for word out of the five books of Moses. There are verses dealing with labor, the rights of labor, obligations of labor, wages, taxes, tithing. It just goes on and on and on. In the five books of Moses, there are about 5845 verses. I say. About, because they're slightly different ways. Some versions have a verse broken into two verses, and others it's counted one, but it, the difference is small, you know. It might be 585 1847 It doesn't matter, whatever. It's a, it's 5845 is pretty good. Over 1500 of them concern money and finance and transactions. That's over 25% Now, in the New Testament, there's another about 800 verses that touch on money, and in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, not just the five books of Moses, there's another 1000 verses that refer to financial transactions, and so it's not an accident that cultures around the world that never had any exposure to the Hebrew Bible or to the Bible at large very often didn't get money, they didn't understand, they, the whole idea of creating an abstract representation of value, which is absolutely fundamental if you want to build wealth, you got to have that, but you can't just lend it to people, you've got to create the vessel in which it can reside, you've got to create the vessel of community and connection and education and accountability and trust and relationships, in other words, things that fall into the category of faith, and so you see where I'm going here, right, that faith and finance actually do go very closely together, and they depend on one another, and yes, we do see more easily why faith depends on finance, but I bet you didn't see as intuitively how finance depends upon faith, and that is really exactly what we're talking about here, maybe you're starting off, you're going to apply for a job. Does faith have anything to do with it? Yeah, sure, because it is the quality of faith that makes it possible for you to go to 11 interviews, 15 interviews, 23 interviews, and be turned down by them all, and to go to the 27th interview with a spring in your footstep and a bounce in your walk and a smile on your lips, feeling optimistic. This could be the one. It's the quality of faith. Don't make the mistake of thinking that faith is always a capital F, meaning faith in God, not necessarily faith is a spiritual commodity. It is the ability to see that which is not evident and which is not tangible. Let me give you another example. Optimism, that's really what we're talking about. Optimism is more frequently found in people who have trained the faith muscle. You know that I'm fascinated by fertility, and I'm fascinated by why it is that fertility is dropping throughout the Western industrialized world, dropping way below the replacement level of 2.1 which is not enough to maintain a healthy economy, that's just replacement.
Daniel Lapin 23:50
A healthy economy, for reasons I have discussed in other podcasts, depends on a pyramid structure, or maybe an inverted pyramid. There, as you move along, population must increase, and so if you want to make sure that your investments continue paying dividends, then the factories in whose shares your investment portfolio invested, those factories need to continue selling their merchandise and their products, and for that to happen, there must be more people to be customers. This is hugely important, and so I've always been fascinated by why it is that the exceptions to the rule are Israel, primarily America is way below replacement value, Japan, Korea way below replacement value, Israel higher, Africa higher. You know why optimism. Now it so happens that faith is an avenue to optimism, but optimism is what you cannot pay. Couples to have babies, I know, because they've tried it in many, many countries - Portugal, Hungary, others as well - that don't come to mind right now. Many countries have tried to give subsidies to couples, Denmark subsidies to couples to have babies, because everybody recognizes that this is a profound problem, putting money into daycare facility, none of this helps. In the final analysis, a husband and wife bring a child into the world because they feel optimistic about the future. That's the secret, and faith brings one to optimism. Africa, by and large, is an optimistic place. Now, again, Africa is made up of a lot of different countries, and I will tell you right now, Muslim countries in Africa are terrible places, they're failures, they're places of tyranny, poverty, cruelty, nothing's working there. The Protestant countries are doing very well, and then there are a lot of countries that are neither Muslim nor Protestant, and they're just sort of bumbling along. South Africa is one of those, having started off with a phenomenal infrastructure that was bequeathed to the country by its Afrikaner Protestant founders, very Bible-centric. They've abandoned that, and so South Africa is now coasting along in the fumes in the gas tank, and not looking good. I'll tell you, sadly, I wish it weren't so, but it's not looking good, and there are other countries in Africa that are restoring their economic vitality by Bible centrality, and by everything that the Bible encourages, and they are not going down like South Africa, they are on their way up, and so it's.. it's.. I think it's very important to understand how it is that faith generates finance, and so you know I'm talking about you, you want to raise, so you build a case, and you're going to go to your employer, and again, radiating optimism that comes out of faith is crucial. Confidence, confidence is a spiritual quality. There's no question that an employer pays more for a confident employer than an unconfident, worrisome employee, right? You do, obviously, because you feel that that person shows confidence in being able to solve problems for you, taking worries off your shoulders, making your life easier and better helping to make your enterprise more profitable, all of that is radiated by an employee who is able to radiate confidence. Again, if you are somebody who has worked on the faith aspect of your personality and the faith aspect of your life, you will find it easier to build a confident personality, which is very, very valuable in the world of business. Connection is more easily done if you have faith, very, very helpful. Even basic things like extending credit, I remember learning a lesson once from a coach who asked me what the bad debt ratio was in a business I was in charge of, and I said zero, we have no bad debts, and he said, well, that's the wrong answer, that means you are being so tight on credit, you have so little faith in your customers that you are not extending enough credit. You should have a small quantity. If it grows, you're extending too much credit. If it shrinks to nothing, you're extending too little. Credit is a necessary component in business, even at its most basic level, when I go to buy a pair of shoes, I actually put those shoes on, and I walk around in them, and I might even leave them on before I go to the cash register and pay.
Daniel Lapin 29:17
Even at that basic level, the vendor is giving me those shoes, and we see how this gets exploited, because right now in a number of cities in America where district attorneys have decided not to prosecute shoplifting, we've seen how a credit system that builds and propels and fuels business gets exploited when people walk in, pick up items and goods and products, and then walk out, bypassing the cash register, and people are doing that in many cities around the country, in many cities around the United States. It's because credit was created and is part of what made a vital economic system in the United States of America, and it's now being exploited to the point that you now go into many drugstores in many cities and items are behind glass or plastic doors with a lock, and you have to go and call an employee to give you the item you want. That's what happens when we destroy the faith aspect. The economy plummets, deteriorates, and goes downhill, and so the, the, the idea I want to emphasize to you, and if you have your copy of the holistic you, then spend a little time reading up on the faith finance connection, and give a little bit of thought. Spend a little time trying to figure out how you can enhance the faith aspect of your life, because that is what is going to help you enhance the financial aspect of your life, and heaven knows, with what the government did with inflation over the last six years, you certainly need to increase the amount of money you make, you need to increase your revenue, no question about it. And working on the faith side is one of the ways of doing it. If you are not yet connected to a faith family through a church or a synagogue, then you should go ahead and do that. Take whatever effort, make whatever effort it takes to find a place you feel comfortable with, with church leadership you can look up to and be mentored by. And then you, and make sure, by the way, larger church better than smaller church, more opportunity to network, more opportunity to connect, to meet people. All of that is what you want to do, maybe your best thing at the moment is building a men's faith group. Just means inviting at first just one friend to get together once every two weeks, once a month, and maybe for Bible study or to discuss matters of faith, helpful, hold each other accountable, and then you invite a third guy, and then a fourth guy, but a men's group like that is something you can be doing around the faith pillar of your 5f's There are many other instances as well. There are many more things you could be doing, and I would like to have you make use of the Happy Warriors community to discuss this. You will find many, many people in the Happy Warriors community eager to give you the ideas they have found helpful, and you can share the ideas you are working on, and it becomes a real locus of mutual assistance as people find out from each other what works, what doesn't, new ideas, and making these things turn into additional revenue for you. Absolutely, give it a try. Well, until next week, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave you with this, because there's homework, right? There's things for you to actually get on with doing. Go ahead and do them. All of that is possible here on the Rabbi Daniel Lapin Show, where I, your Rabbi, remind you that you should devote this week to improving your family, your friendships, your finance, your fitness, and this week, above all, your faith. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin. God bless you.
