Twenty-five years later, you’ve now published eight Maggid books containing hundreds of stories. Where do you get them all from?
For the second book in the series, I went to Rabbi Schwadron and asked him if he had more stories. But then I started getting stories from different rabbanim and askanim. And then many [ordinary] people started telling me stories because if you tell a story, people want to tell you one in return.
And it just grew. Wherever I was invited around the world, I always met with people and let them know that I wanted to hear great stories. That’s how these books are written. People will stop me in the middle of the street or on an airplane to tell me a story.
How do you decide which ones to put in your books?
Ninety-eight out of 100 stories I can’t use because they don’t contain universal lessons. A story in a book has to be something that somebody’s going to read it and say, “Oh my, if that person could do that, I could too. I could change.”
That’s why, whereas in the first Maggid book most of the stories had to do with great rabbanim, in the other books many of the stories have to do with just plain people like me and you who do extraordinary things. When you read that a common person does something so uncommon, it’s amazingly inspirational…
In your books and speeches you seem to have a special ability to motivate and inspire. What’s the secret of your success?
There are two things that I think are very important. One, never ever write or tell a story that you don’t believe in. You have to believe there’s a great lesson in it. People ask me, “Do I get nervous when I speak?” and the answer is, “No, I get nervous when I prepare.” When I’m preparing, I could be sweating like I just went through the most diligent workout because I’m trying to figure out which story I should use, how I should present it, etc.
So the first thing is you have to only tell something you believe in very, very strongly. And it can’t be half-hearted. It has to be total. And I think when you tell stuff you really believe in, or that has inspired you, you tell it with such power and fervor that that comes across.
The second thing is: Don’t get caught in the details. That makes it boring. Get to the point. If you’re talking about a trip you made to Israel, it’s not important what airline you went on, and it doesn’t make a difference that the plane came five hours late. That’s not the point. If you went to Israel and you met a certain tzaddik, you should be at the tzaddik’s home by the second sentence of the story.
Many times people will say to me after a speech, “You put five speeches into that one speech,” and that’s true because many speakers will say the same story and repeat it and review it and tell it another time in another way.
The same is true of a Torah thought. Say a thought, finished. The audience has to be at the edge of their seats. They can’t fall asleep, and they won’t fall asleep if they know they’re going to miss something.
You once described yourself as a “mohel who has a mission.” What did you mean by that?
When I do a bris, especially for a family that’s not religious, I feel that I have a responsibility to make it such a meaningful event that they will never forget it. A family that’s not religious doesn’t have too many religious occasions. We have Shabbos and Yom Tov and all the mitzvos – we have ways of being inspired – but how are these people going to get inspired?