הקוד היהודי להצלחה

Introduction

True wealth almost never starts with money.

I know this because I once tried to start there. I tried to think about money, plan for money, and chase after money. And every time I set out from that starting point, I found myself back in exactly the same place: exhausted, drained, trapped in a never-ending chase.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized our first question should never have been, “How can I make a lot of money?” The first question should be something completely different. How do you create something of value? How do you turn an idea into an impact? And how do you become a person who not only manages to survive in the world but also manages to change it?

The people who truly changed their lives—and later, the course of history—woke up in the morning with questions that sound almost innocent. How do you solve a problem that no one is willing to tackle? How do you create meaning amid chaos? And how do you take talent, crisis, or pain, and turn them into a force that drives millions?

Money, almost always, came later.

It wasn’t the goal. It was a byproduct, a natural result of creating value. Because there’s a profound difference between a successful person and an influential one.

A successful person can build a business, accumulate wealth, status, and achievements. An influential person does something beyond that. They open doors for others, they change ways of thinking, they create solutions that didn’t exist before.

They leave behind an idea, a system, or a way of life that continues to operate in the world even when they themselves are no longer in the room.

These are the people who interest me.

And before we move on, I want to share one statistic with you. Just one. Because sometimes a single number is enough to pull the rug out from under everything we thought we knew.

As of October 2026, when this book went to press, six of the ten richest people in the world are Jewish or of Jewish descent, according to Forbes magazine’s Real-Time Billionaires Index.

Larry Page, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer. Six people who helped shape the world of technology as we know it.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Jews make up only about 0.2% of the world’s population, and yet, at this moment in time, six of the top ten spots on the global wealth ranking are held by people of Jewish descent. Just 0.2% of humanity, but half of the world’s wealth.

And it doesn’t stop at just money.

If you look at the top lists in other fields, you’ll find that this pattern repeats itself over and over: More than twenty percent of Nobel Prize winners, the leading minds on Wall Street, the people who founded Hollywood and shape the consciousness of billions, the fathers of modern psychology—Freud, Frankl, and Kahneman—and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are writing our collective future.

This isn’t a one-off case of genius.

It isn’t limited to a single field.

It isn’t a random story that can be dismissed with a shrug.

It’s a pattern. And patterns can be deciphered.

✦

But I have to be honest with you.

I didn’t arrive at deciphering this pattern out of intellectual curiosity. I didn’t sit in an air-conditioned library leisurely leafing through history books. I arrived at it through a complete collapse.

In October 2023, in a single day, my world turned upside down. Not gradually, not as part of a process. In a single day.

Since that day, two full years have passed in the shadow of air raid sirens, missiles, and combat helicopters slicing through the sky above our home. Two years in which children learn to run to the shelter before they learn to read fluently. Two years in which the most ordinary sound in the world is a sound that is extraordinary anywhere else on earth. My husband served 500 days in the reserves.

Five hundred days.

I write this number and still can’t quite wrap my head around it. Five hundred days during which I ran the household alone, raised the children alone, worked alone, and above all, was afraid alone. Not the cinematic, dramatic kind of fear, but the quiet, persistent kind. The kind that settles between your ribs and refuses to budge. The fear that accompanies you as you wash dishes, as you answer emails, as you prepare dinner and try to smile at the children who understand more than you’d like them to.

One morning, after a night when the sirens wouldn’t let us sleep for more than two consecutive hours, I sat in the kitchen with coffee that had already gone cold. The kids were still asleep. The house was silent with that tense quiet that only exists on mornings after a night of sirens—a silence that isn’t really silence, because your ears are still waiting for the next siren.

And then I opened the bank app.

Zero.

Not almost zero, not a small amount, not a negative balance you can manage. A round zero. Zero money. Zero clients. Zero future in sight.

The screen illuminated my face with a bluish light, and I remember thinking: That’s it. It’s over. There’s nowhere to start. The war took everything. My sense of security, my livelihood, my ability to plan even one week ahead. I closed my phone and set it on the table, screen-side down, as if what you can’t see doesn’t exist.

And for a moment, I truly thought there was no point. No point in trying, no point in getting up, no point in looking for another solution in a world that never stops throwing stones at you.

At that moment, all the inspirational books I’d ever read seemed like a cruel joke. All those beautiful phrases about “believing in yourself” and “your dream is waiting for you” lost their meaning. When you’re sitting in the kitchen with zero in the bank and sirens blaring in the background, there’s no room for pretty words. You have no time for motivation; you have no patience for blind faith.

But there, in the midst of absolute nothingness, when I had nothing left to hold onto, one question arose in me: If there are people who manage to get back up even when the world is collapsing around them, and if there is a people that has lived for thousands of years amid uncertainty and yet manages time and again to build, create, lead, and make an impact—what are they doing differently?

I wasn’t looking for someone to blame. I wasn’t looking for comfort.

I was looking for a code.

And when I had nothing left to lose, I did the only thing I could. I went back. Not back in the sense of retreating, but back in the sense of digging deeper.

Like an archaeologist sifting through the layers of time, I returned to the oldest texts I knew: the stories of the Bible. But this time, I read them with different eyes—not just as sacred stories, but as survival guides. Like navigation maps for people who lived in utter uncertainty, yet still founded nations, led, created, and built ideas that live on and influence us to this day.

I read about Abraham, who left everything behind and set out into the unknown without a map, without a promise, and without a safety net. About Joseph, a boy sold into slavery in a foreign land who became the economic strategist of the world’s most powerful empire, because he knew how to read the future and prepare for it while everyone around him was still celebrating. And about King Solomon, who was faced with the opportunity to ask for anything, and instead of asking for money or power, asked for a listening heart.

I saw an amazing pattern there. None of them started out chasing money or security. They all started from something deeper: courage, wisdom, a willingness to venture into the unknown, the ability to see what others hadn’t yet seen, and the willingness to take responsibility for something greater than themselves.

That morning in the kitchen, I made a decision that changed my life. I decided to stop chasing, and I refused to continue acting out of desperate survival. I chose to act, right here and now, like a person of influence. I pulled a single word from the ancient texts. A simple word. A powerful word that Abraham, Moses, and other leaders used in their greatest moments of trial.

I said to the world: “Here I am.”

I am here.

I am ready.

I take responsibility.

And the moment I began to say “Here I am,” something in the reality around me began to change. Not with a great noise, not with a single dramatic miracle. But door after door began to open.