Podcast # 57: Parashat Vayakhel

This week's parasha is Vayakhel, where Moshe brings the people together to rebuild the community after the golden calf incident. This is a lesson in leadership and how to turn failure into success. It's important to take breaks and rest to foster creativity and innovation. Moshe's actions show that starting with serenity and calmness can lead to great ideas. Shalom Shlomo. Shalom Elisha. Hi everyone, it's good to be back again. We're approaching the end of the book of Shemot and we have two more parashot to go. This week is parashat Vayakhel, which usually appears along with Pekudei, non-leap years. But it is a leap year, so it has its own Shabbat this year. And I'm really happy this year because Vayakhel usually, it's usually like the middle child. It's like a sandwich and it's overshadowed. Kitisah, the golden calf, wow. And then Pekudei, which has so many things in it. But seven times out of 19 years, Vayakhel stands by itself and we get to really look into it. And boy, it's really fascinating, Elisha. It is, it is, it is. And I want to begin with an apology to Moshe Rabbeinu. Last week we talked about Moshe and his, I called it a temper tantrum. And he smashes the tablets that were written by God himself that weren't really his. And then he goes off in a broigis, as we say in Yiddish, a fit of anger, and pitches his tent way outside the community and people have to come to him. And I'm thinking, this is a leader with low EQ. And we talked about emotional intelligence. And I want to correct what I said and apologize officially to Moshe. Because in Vayakhel, he makes a big comeback. He figures it out. He figures it out. He figures out how to be a real leader and how to build a community. And he does that by giving the people a task, by crowdfunding. By the way, if you want to do a startup, Elisha, you can go to GoFundMe and do crowdfunding. Everybody thinks crowdfunding, raising money from a crowd is a new idea. Moshe did it in the Torah. And it was brilliant. Because when you contribute to something, you contribute your money, your labor, you feel part of it. And he was re-gluing the Bnei Yisrael, the children of Israel, after they had come apart with this wrenching episode. And he figured it out. He's re-gluing them, bringing them together. And I think it was brilliant. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. And what's interesting here is that it indeed starts... The word Vayakhel means he congregated them. So he brought them all together. And one could say that maybe the assembling of the tabernacle, because that's where we're at, assembling the tabernacle is a metaphor for knowing how to assemble a community, a group of people, and create this unity from a multitude of individuals. Exactly, exactly. And you have a brilliant passage in your drashah. But as a forward, before I read that, Elisha, it astonishes me every single week how incredibly modern the Torah is, even though it was written 3,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, about stories that happened 3,000 years ago. And Elisha, it's almost a manual that I can use in my course. Yesterday my course met entrepreneurship. And we had a speaker, Dadi Perlmutter. Dadi was, until a few years ago, the Executive Vice President of Intel Worldwide, which means that he employed 80,000 people all over the world. He was the highest ranking Israeli in a global company. And he spoke to my students. And he talked not about his successes, and he had so many. He talked about failure. He talked about failure. This is what we have in the Parshah and in Ketisan. Massive failure, the golden calf, a big crisis, and then how do you come out of it as a leader? What do you do? And he explained what he did and how you turn failure into success. But that's what Moshe did 3,500 years ago. And it's absolutely fascinating. I'm really curious. I feel like asking you, what did he do? What did Dadi Perlmutter do? I'll tell you a story. So years ago, Intel had a group of brilliant Israeli creative engineers, Intel Pituach here in Haifa, in Matam, in Haifa. And Dadi was the head. And they were given a task. We want you to design a very inexpensive, cheap chip, microprocessor, so we can let IBM build a $1,000 PC. And they invested a lot of money. And three years on the project, and a lot of people worked on it. At the end of three years, Alicia, failure. They did not succeed. They didn't succeed in making a cheap, inexpensive chip. And they informed Intel headquarters in Santa Clara. We failed. And it was a huge crisis. Are we going to lose our job? Are they going to close down the whole operation? Intel lost $250 million in development costs and much more in opportunity costs. They lost income from the chip they were going to sell. And so they sat around, and you mentioned in your Darsha about creativity and pressure. Boy, that was big-time pressure. And Dadi said he had no idea what to do. He was at a loss. And then someone came along. One of his engineers. One of his engineers came along and said, I have an idea. Let's produce a chip that is less powerful than the ones that Intel makes. And everybody looked at him. The model of Intel was making faster and more and more powerful chips, and you get more and more money. What are you talking about? Are you crazy? No. We make a chip that's less powerful, but it takes a lot less space. It's a lot cheaper to make. It has less power consumption. That means that your battery lasts longer, and that means you can carry your laptop around without plugging it in all day. And that means you can plug in to Wi-Fi. Nobody has Wi-Fi. We'll make it happen. That was the centrino. That was the beginning of mobile, the laptop. Take it anywhere. Unwire your world. And in the end, Apple plugged into this with the phones, and now we have phones that plug into Wi-Fi anywhere. But this was success that came out of failure and an idea of how to turn failure into success out of desperation. That's really interesting on so many levels. There's one level. One level is also on the biggest enemy that we have is the best. And sometimes just good enough is so much better than the best. Having a weaker chip that can actually do so many, it can allow for so many other things to happen. Very, very interesting. The reason I'm quite amazed by your drasha is that you basically describe what I just said. You take your basic assumptions and you turn them on their head or you smash them. This is a known method in creativity if you're looking for a new idea. Ask yourself, what are the most basic fundamental assumptions I believe in? And then smash them to bits and see what you get. And sometimes it's amazing, and you do that with parashat Vayakhel because it begins with Moshe describing Shabbat. He's really strict about it. You've got to observe Shabbat. Oy vavoy. Or else. Or else. And we assume, everybody assumes, I assumed, the whole world, I think the whole Jewish world, okay, you work six days and then God rested on the seventh day. So we work and then we get the reward of Shabbat. Shabbat is the rest after work. And you point out, which I think is brilliant, uh-uh, it doesn't work that way. We start with the calmness and beauty and serenity of Shabbat and then we go to work. And that's actually a principle of innovation, Elisha. So here's the question. Suppose you're intel and you're in a big crisis and you need a smashing new idea. Do you put people into a pressure cooker and tell them, guys, this is it. Our jobs are on the line. Or do you take them off on a hike in the north and have some coffee and fool around, play shesh besh and say, by the way, if anybody has an idea, you know, pop it up, pop it up. In other words, serenity, Shabbat is the framework for creative ideas and not pressure, not pressure. Yes, I believe in that so much and there's so many things about it that I think are important to be said. First of all, that indeed, under pressure, there's no creativity. Under pressure, it's really hard to be creative. When someone is stuttering, someone's stuttering, the more, the calmer they can be, the quicker the words will actually come out. The more agitated and obsessed they will be, the more stuck their speech will be. So, yes, creativity and new ideas, freshness, work, comes from play, from being restful, from being in a good place, being in a good, good place, which is another reason why I usually, when I counsel couples, is, no, don't argue until you resolve it. There are couples who made a commitment, they are not going to go to sleep until this is resolved. This is a big mistake. Never sleep on a quarrel. Right, that's what they say. And I want to suggest something different. I want to smash this one too and say, sleep on a quarrel. Meaning, if you're in a quarrel, which is a very intense space to be in, when you're in a quarrel, you're not thinking straight. You're accusing, you're blaming, your mind is in a very narrow, narrow-minded thinking. Best thing is to say, you know what, we are not thinking straight now. You know what, let's sleep on it. Let's just go to sleep. Tomorrow, everything will look different. So just having a night, a good night's sleep, is already going to make a good, a new, good start. And very often, the following morning is like, ah, whatever. It just seemed so important last night, but right now, you know what, it's not that, not such a big deal. So, certainly, you're getting into a tight spot, let it go, rest, and then see a few hours later if that spot is still tight. And I think that's exactly what Moshe did. He took his tent, pitched the tent way outside the camp. That's right. Time out, as we say. We do it with little kids, right? Okay, time out, time out. I want to read these two paragraphs from your Darshah because they're perfect. Quote, most of us, when feeling stuck, when creativity does not flow, make a serious mistake. We work harder, we try harder, we invest more. This is a very common error and it's hard to avoid. When we're stuck, our brain tells us, just a little more, hit the gas, we're almost there. When the springs of creativity run dry, when everything appears stuck, the right thing to do is not to do anything, just to stop. Go to sleep, go for a walk, breathe fresh air, go into nature, go to the beach, go to the gym, put a foot on the brakes, not on the gas. Someone please remind me. I will not read that letter because it's harder to do than to say. Absolutely. It's an important sentence. I wrote there, and someone please remind me when I'm in that place, remind me to put my foot on the brake. Finally, after too many years, realized this about myself. Having an unsolved problem, for many of us, for me especially, is very uncomfortable, very big dissonance, and for those of us who have this unsolved problem, we try to jump to a solution very quickly, solve it. And the solutions that come so quickly without real thought and thinking and without our subconscious working, they're often not ideal. And one of the things we teach in entrepreneurship, here's another piece of relevance of the Torah, we teach, don't jump to conclusions about a solution. Understand the problem first. Let it sit. Let it ferment. Let it ripen like a pear, or let it ferment and age like good wine, and let your brain work on it and your subconscious, and then in time, in time, you will probably have a better solution. Right. And I think that's where really Shabbat indeed comes in. Shabbat is, I remember first discovering Shabbat, Shabbat, yeah, it's for rest for sure, but we can take an afternoon nap and rest it. We don't need that much more than that, or a good night's sleep. Shabbat is really a time to take the foot off the brakes in order to create and be much more effective on Sunday. And well, outside of Israel, Sunday is also a resting day, but here it isn't. And it's something that our brain will always tell us otherwise. And we have to, here we really have to outsmart our brain. We have to simply remember we start with Shabbat. There's a very famous story. I'm surprised I didn't put it into the Dirashah from a few years ago, but there's a famous story of a man who gets lost in the desert. It's from the Talmud. And he gets lost in the desert and he loses sense of time. He doesn't know what day it is. And he's observant, so he knows he cannot walk a long distance on Shabbat, but he doesn't know when Shabbat is. So the big discussion in the Talmud is when should he start counting now six days, one, two, three, four, five, six, and then declare Shabbat. It doesn't matter what day it is, but then declare Shabbat. Or, better yet, and that's what they eventually conclude, better yet, say, you know what, I'm not so sure. Let's start with Shabbat. We'll start with Shabbat. We'll let Shabbat out, maybe even Monday. But as far as we're concerned, it's Shabbat. And now let's count six days until the next Shabbat. So they two really confirm this idea that Shabbat starts the week, not ends the week. And I think also in the story of creation, even though it says, you know, God created the world for six days and then He rested on the seventh day, Shabbat is one of the days of creation, meaning the last day it was created was the day of rest, which is from now on going to be your first day. Human beings were only created on Friday. So they were created into Shabbat, the first thing they experienced, of course, the story of creation, the first thing they experienced is Shabbat. And then the week began. So it really isn't a day of rest. It also says in the Hebrew, Shabbat, Vayinafash. Vayinafash means He became soulful from the word Nefesh. So on Shabbat we connect with our soul, become soulful, and out of our soulfulness, out of the soul, come out all these great ideas. And then on the weekday, we start implementing all those beautiful things that came out for us on Shabbat. That's really great. Shabbat is a day of creativity. After a week of creation, a day of creativity, and then you spend a week implementing. I have another take on Vayakhel as well, Elisha. So I re-read a wonderful book by Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. Hawking was this amazing genius who had ALS, eventually died but had a productive career, was chosen to the Royal Society, a group that Newton had actually belonged to, and wrote this wonderful book basically about the Big Bang. And the Big Bang is about Vayakhel. The Lord of the Universe, 13.8 billion years ago, gathered all the mass, all the matter in the whole universe into a tiny, tiny point, a lot smaller than an atom. And then there was this massive explosion, the Big Bang, and our universe was created or recreated, as you wish. And I always had this picture of Hawking and others, the astrophysicists, the quantum physicists, being very stern scientists and anti-religion. And this is the introduction to his wonderful book by a man called Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a famous astronomer, astrophysicist. He designed spaceships that went to Mars and so on. This is what he writes about Hawking's book. This is also a book about God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. In other words, when the Big Bang happened, did that just happen because of gravity and the laws of nature, or was there a God in this? And this makes it all the more unexpected, the conclusion of the effort, at least so far. The universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a creator to do. Well, I buy most of that. You often talk about infinity, insof. But good heavens, there's an awful lot for a creator to do, Alicia. But it's fascinating that even among these scientists who understand the inner workings of a tiny atom, it's about God. It's about God. Right. And you know, I think we have it better in Hebrew. Now, I don't usually say the word better because then it's very judgmental. But in this case, it really is better since the original language is in Hebrew, not Greek and not Latin and certainly not English. As we know, we've learned quite extensively here at Archela, we have many names for God. But the two basic, basic names that we have is Adonai, the four letters of the name that should not be spelt, or we often call it like Havayah, which is a reshuffling of letters so it makes it more legitimate. So we have Adonai and we have Elohim, or we can say Hashem and Elohim. And the sages have already told us that Elohim is the God of nature, the God of nature. And the God of nature indeed creates, creates the world, creates things. It's very creative. It's part of the dualistic part of life. It's the finite. It's the creative process within the finite. So, for example, a couple can bring new life into the world. That's Elohim, that's nature. It's doing and it's creative, but it's from two finite creatures, a third finite creature appears in the world. But it's all finite. Hashem or Adonai or Havayah, that is the infinite. That is the infinite. Now the infinite, if you look at the stories of creation, the first creation, the first chapter of Genesis, is the God that creates is Elohim. Adonai doesn't create. Adonai is infinity. Infinity doesn't create. The creativity is the finite. However, it's when they leave Egypt in the Exodus, that's when, as we know, Moshe is first introduced officially to the name Adonai. Adonai appears before that, but Adonai is always there. It's infinite. So it's always been there, but the awareness of the existence of Adonai, of infinity, is first introduced to Moshe in Parashat Va'era. And it's hinted in the burning bush already, but it really appears first properly in Va'era. And what we can see here is that, yes, the God of creativity, the God of the creation of the world, the God that perhaps needs rest or doesn't need rest, that's all Elohim. These are the laws of nature. That's very much Spinoza's God and Einstein's God. And I would even suggest it's probably even Hawkins' God. Our novelty, and we've talked about that in the past, what we've introduced here is a whole other dimension, the infinite within the finite, the infinite that never changes. So, for example, I believe in there being a soul, a shema, a spirit to a person. And there are two ways of looking at a spirit. The common way, those who, most people who believe in spirituality, in there being a spirit would usually say, well, yes, I'm a human being and I have a spirit. I personally think it's a huge, huge mistake because the statement should really be, I am a spirit and I'm having a human experience as a spirit. I think we've discussed this before. I'm having a human experience. First and foremost, I am a spirit. Now, spirit is infinite, is infinite. The human body is finite. The human experience is finite. But so much can be relieved, so much pain, anger, suffering, if we realize that no, we've been wrong all along. We're not a body with a spirit. We are a spirit having a human experience. And how does it all fit into what we're talking about? Shabbat, Shabbat Vaynafa, Shabbat is about the spirit. Shabbat is a moment of, it's a capsule in time, which is outside of time, which connects us to the infinite. So, creativity at its source comes from the infinite. From the infinite come all kinds of great finite ideas. Shabbat is the realm of the infinite. So, it all starts in the infinite. The minute we have Elohim, who starts creating like in the first chapter, we're already in the finite. We're already on, And then on Shabbat, the finite Elohim, who created the world, returns back to His own source, i.e., the infinite. So, that's why everything begins from Shabbat. Shabbat doesn't end things, Shabbat begins things, because everything begins from the infinite. And along the way, if we look at Shabbat, Shabbat Vaynafa, Shabbat Vaynafa, And along the way, if we can really remember that we are an infinite spirit, we're never going to die. We're never going to die. We're always present. And a metaphor for spirit is light. We're always bringing light to the world. Continuously bringing new light, not light of electricity. Light of electricity is finite. It's finite light and finite energy. We're talking about infinite light and infinite energy. And that is to be found metaphorically in Shabbat. Shabbat is all geared to be a setting for an experience of the infinite. I'm reminded, when you speak of this, I don't think Einstein observed Shabbat, but he got his ideas from his own approach to kind of Shabbat. Einstein used to go for long walks in the Swiss mountains. And he sometimes walked with a friend, a physicist, and they discussed ideas. And very often, I think, I know he said so, his ideas came from these long walks. Not from sitting and writing papers or reading, but walking in nature and in these beautiful mountains. I've been to the Swiss mountains and they are astonishing. They are spiritual, Alicia. You have a feeling of the presence of God when you see this massive mountain, 15,000 feet high. Or in other words, why do we feel this way when we're in the Swiss mountains, in the Alps or wherever? Or when we go to the desert, to the naked desert? It's because we connect with the experience of infinity. And that's why, if you're having an argument, you're stuck deep in the finite world. And you're trying to work out finite issues. The solutions are not going to come from these finite little nitty-gritty kind of arguments you have. No. Go to bed. Go to sleep. Sleep to begin with connects us with the infinite. I want to tell a little story about another scientist. I think it's relevant. Someone who thought about the big pictures and about the world and creation, Charles Darwin. Darwin wrote a book, The Origin of Species, described natural selection, survival of the fittest. And it's kind of a message that's antisocial. The strongest, the toughest, the most violent, they survive and they reproduce, they procreate. And so violence is how people survive and nature survives and it's the nature of human beings. And when Darwin wrote that, it troubled him. He was a very religious man. He believed. And it troubled him a lot about human society. So a few years later he wrote another book called The Descent of Man. The Descent of Man is a translation in English from the Bible. How are human beings different from animals? And then Darwin solved it. And we don't pay attention to this. We read his original book, but we don't read The Descent of Man. This is what he said. This is from Rabbi Sachs. He was a brilliant man. A tribe including many members who possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, he might have added emunah, faith, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes. And this would be natural selection. And we are seeing this in front of our eyes today with all the young men and women showing up to defend their country and laying their lives on the line for this. This is natural selection in human society based on love. And of course the Torah knew this all the time. We didn't need Darwin to tell it to us. But it's nice that he came to that conclusion. And we see this in V'ahavta, in our community. We have this tradition. We bring our sadness and our happiness, both of them, we bring them to V'ahavta. And we share it and we celebrate it and we strengthen one another. Right, right. Yeah, that's very beautiful. It's a really important comment on Darwin because he was indeed religious and that's a great addition kind of suggesting that, again, that's Elohim and Adonai. Survival of the fittest is very much Elohim. Adonai, from a certain point where human beings were created, let's remind ourselves that the Torah is not a history book. It's a descriptive book. So at some point the human being appeared on the face of the earth and the human being was not just a person who walked erect and could maybe talk. That too. But there was a, as Eugene Jensen calls it, there was a flip. There was a flip where the human being, our eyes were opened. Consciousness was made possible and at that moment a whole new ballgame began. A whole new ballgame where it now no longer is only Elohim but it's possible to bring Adonai, to bring the infinite. I really don't think, I love cats but I have no idea if cats have any business thinking about infinity. They may be in a Zen mode but that doesn't make them connected or conscious of the infinite. And human beings are able to be conscious of that which is beyond them. They're finite. That which is beyond them and we are able to fathom that. We're able to imagine infinity. Now not fully. The finite can never fully grasp the infinite. But nevertheless, even the fact that we're having this conversation now is a testimony to human, well I don't want to say human greatness because it's as if I'm glorifying us here. But human beings can discuss divinity, can discuss infinity. So it's beautiful to read Darwin saying those same things exactly. And the last quote, Elisha, and the last couple of minutes from your drashah. Makor habracha, the source of blessing. I quote, Shabbat is the source of blessing. Shabbat is the expanse that is entirely being. And from that being, all answers and insights flow from the place of quiet. The path reveals itself to us from the place of quiet. Yes, yes, yes. So all that's left is now to be quiet. Even though it's only Wednesday, we have two more noisy days before a Thursday and Friday before we can actually enter Shabbat. But we can take Shabbat breaks during the day. We don't have to wait for Shabbat. We can, when we see that we're stuck, when we see that we're, whether it's an argument or whether it's a project we're working on, anything at all, that we're stuck, that's a sign that we have used up right now our finite creative juices. And it's time to return. Return home. Return back to the infinite. Reconnect with spirit. Reconnect with our soul. To do like Shabbat Vaynafash. To have a soulful Shabbat. Even if it just means in the middle of the working day, step out and if you can walk out to nature, do something fun, do something else that is truly restful and quiet and different. And your brain is going to tell you, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. You can't waste time right now. Intel is waiting for us for answers. Go against your brain. Go against your better thinking and take a break. And take a power nap and think of it as a mini Shabbat. Right. Yes. Shabbat Shalom, everyone. Shabbat Shalom. Leetot.