BONUS: Torah Saved Me From 300 Years in Jail
with Rabbi Eli Riesel (crosspost from Inspiration for the Nation, hosted by Yaakov Langer)
The happiest time that we had in my life was not having anything.
Clips from this episode are coming. The full episode is below.
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Quotes
“I had to walk and fall in the pit.”
“You can't go relying on a miracle.”
“People just fold.”
“I feel like I was already successful. It didn't matter what happened afterwards.”
“Real strength doesn't always come from fighting back. It comes from holding your ground when no one would blame you for folding.”
Takeaways
- 1 Riesel left yeshiva for a real estate development career at 21, driven by a wish for financial independence.
- 2 Chasing the next deal never felt like enough: there was always a better car or bigger bonus, along with anxiety and little fulfillment.
- 3 He slowly came back to serious learning, eventually about five hours a day on top of a full-time job, and felt less stress, not more.
- 4 In 2012 his rav said he could leave work to learn full-time if he could cut costs (for example from $150,000 to $40,000 a year) and show a realistic plan. He calls the lean years that followed the happiest of his life.
- 5 In 2014 he was indicted on 25 counts of bank fraud and one of conspiracy over condo sales programs from 2006-07, facing a theoretical 312 years.
- 6 He refused to testify against his former boss and turned down a possible plea deal.
- 7 The jury found him not guilty on all 25 bank fraud counts and guilty on the conspiracy count, with a guideline of about 11-13 years.
- 8 His rebbe, who never missed a shiur through cancer treatment, flew in and told the judge 'today I missed the class.'
- 9 The judge said the life change was what moved him and gave 36 months, a sentence Riesel describes as a historic departure from the guideline.
- 10 In prison he organized a joint minyan among about 40 Jewish inmates and kept learning. A friend's promise that his family would be taken care of was what mattered most to him.
- 11 His point: the change he made for its own sake became what carried him through the crisis.
- 12 When he proposed quitting to learn, his wife answered, 'If that's what you want' and offered to sacrifice. She left midwifery school to babysit for income. Her 2002 high school yearbook had joked she'd be too poor for a car because her husband was learning, and ten years later they made that choice.
- 13 His wife backed refusing to testify without hesitation: 'We're together in this. We're not testifying.'