In this episode of Truths: Jewish Wisdom for Today, Levi Brackman sits down with his longtime friend Adam Haston, real estate investor and author of The Wonder Effect: An Adventurous Guide for Igniting Your Passions and Pursuing Your Calling.

Drawing on nearly 30 years of shared history from yeshiva and Chabad outreach, Levi and Adam explore how to move from “just sitting” through life to actually living with vision and purpose. They unpack core ideas from The Wonder Effect — crushing limiting beliefs and “idols,” knowing yourself, using curiosity as a compass, and building a concrete vision for your next 3–5 years — and put them into conversation with Chassidic and Kabbalistic concepts like ratzon (deep will), kavana (intentionality), and bittul (self-transcendence).

Along the way they talk about: why people are afraid to really look at themselves; how to distinguish your true purpose from other people’s expectations; the “Jonah complex” and fear of success; why many religious people never actually experience spiritual ecstasy; and how the same inner work that leads to a meaningful career can also open you to a genuine encounter with the Divine.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• How two former yeshiva bochurim ended up talking about AI, real estate, and wonder
• The origin story of The Wonder Effect and why Adam wrote it for his kids
• “Crushing idols”: breaking false self-images and inherited narratives
• Practical ways to start discovering your calling if you feel you “have no passions”
• Purpose as an answer to “What am I for?” — religiously and psychologically
• Ecstasy, bittul, and why you can’t reach God while protecting your image
• The danger of confusing spiritual experience with spiritual truth
• How Jewish sources on ratzon and Keter map onto modern purpose-in-life research

Perfect if you’re feeling stuck, rethinking your life direction, or looking for a bridge between Jewish spirituality and modern personal-growth tools.

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Levi Brackman is a rabbi, Ph.D. in psychology, best-selling author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, and founder of Invown, a platform for real estate fundraising and investing.

Rabbi Yitzchok Lowy grew up in Lakewood in a Hasidic–yeshivish home, learned in top Lithuanian yeshivot, and later immersed himself in the world of contemporary Hasidic and Kabbalistic teachers.

In this conversation, we sit together in his beit midrash in New York and trace the “origin story” of his Beit Midrash Iyun LaMachshava—a study space built for people who can’t turn their minds off, but also don’t want to walk away from Torah or community.

We talk about the disappointment that pushed him away from standard mussar and hashkafa talks—“flat, one-dimensional” Torah that never allows for real complexity—and the attraction he felt to the broader “Hasidic renaissance” and Chabad-inflected thinkers who took ideas, soul, and inner work seriously. But then we follow him further, to the moment he realizes that even those teachers live in their own “boxes,” have red lines they refuse to cross, and sometimes won’t follow their own arguments to their logical end.

From there the conversation opens into bigger questions: the difference between faith and knowledge, why “I believe” is not the same as “I know,” and why the simple sentence “I don’t know” is, for him, a moral and spiritual stance rather than an admission of failure. We talk about the Rambam “ruining” the Talmud’s open-endedness, the loneliness of serious teachers who have no peers, the dangers of charismatic leadership and tzaddik-culture, and what it would take to build a real community of thinkers inside Haredi life rather than outside of it.

If you’ve ever felt “too thoughtful for the system” but still deeply attached to Torah, people, and place, this episode will feel uncomfortably familiar—in a good way.

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Levi Brackman is a rabbi, Ph.D. in psychology, best-selling author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, and founder of Invown, a platform for real estate fundraising and investing.

Rabbi Avram Wilner has reissued, footnoted, and clarified key works of Rabbi Aharon of Staroshelye, a towering but under-learned student of the Alter Rebbe. We explore the fault line between learning Chabad as a path of inner avodah and affiliating with the modern Lubavitch movement; the two tiers of Kabbalah (universal vs. elite); the role of hispa’alus and bittul; and why emotion can’t be skipped if transformation is the goal. We also compare the Middle Rebbe’s methodical, head-to-heart pathway with Rabbi Aharon’s allowance for early emotion, and discuss today’s non-Lubavitch but Chabad-focused communities that focus on lived bittul.

Support the show

Levi Brackman is a rabbi, Ph.D. in psychology, best-selling author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, and founder of Invown, a platform for real estate fundraising and investing.