podcast #48 Parashat Sh'mot

Two friends discuss the importance of helping troubled individuals and finding hope in difficult times. They also discuss the significance of black dots (tragedies) and white dots (acts of bravery and kindness) in history. They mention a story about a nuclear plant in Japan that was protected from a tsunami due to knowledge of past black dots. They then talk about the importance of leaving order and planning for the future, as well as the significance of God's name, "Eie, asher, eie," which represents infinite potential and the miraculous. They believe that all three names of God (El Shaddai, Elohim, and Eie, asher, eie) are necessary for a balanced worldview. They conclude that human potential is a central theme in the Torah. Shalom, Shlomo. Shalom, Elisha. We're meeting here once again, Tuesday morning, our weekly ritual to discuss this week's parasha, opening a new book, the book of Exodus. Before we tackle Shemot, Exodus, Elisha, two small things, a story and a kind of a question. I usually walk our little dog before I come here to meet with you. And once again, walking past a beknesset that's on my route, I saw a lady standing outside and praying very fervently. And I see her quite often, Elisha. And several times I asked her if I can help if she is troubled. She basically didn't want to talk about it. So I just walked on. But Elisha, there are so many people out there who are lonely, troubled, disturbed, upset, personally by what's going on, by the news. And I'm sure you talk to many of them as a rabbi. It's something we will need to deal with in our country, is how we find these people, how we help them. And this is a new territory because we haven't had a three-month war. And it's going to last for quite a while at different levels. What do we do, Elisha? And what do you say to these people when you talk to troubled people? Yeah. Well, first of all, I have to talk to myself. I'm also often troubled and upset about what happened and what's happening. And every day when new names show on the media, the fallen soldiers, the grief rises. I have no idea how people without faith, without a deep spiritual connection in life, how they go about dealing with the situation right now. I'm actually really curious. I don't know what I would have done without having a strong, strong sense of the divine, of God, even of the eternal nature of spirit. So what I'm trying to do is talk about hope. In our Beit Midrash this week, we read a beautiful piece. I actually have it here. Someone shared, a soldier who's in Gaza right now, a reservist, wrote a beautiful piece. And one of the things that he said was that one of his teachers told him the following. One of his teachers told him the following. He said, if you take a timeline of human history, Jewish history, whatever, and you mark the black periods as black dots on the timeline, clearly the Holocaust, for example, would be like one big, huge black blob, marking a horrific era. And he said, and then start marking throughout on your timeline all the beautiful moments, moments of human heroism, of human greatness. Mark them with white, white symbolizing light. And he said, there's a very good chance that the amount of dots of white, of light, accumulated between 1939 and 1945 are going to be much greater than the black dots of those same years. That's such a beautiful metaphor, because clearly it was a very dark period. But there are so many amazing stories of human bravery, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, of small little acts of kindness and bravery. And in my humble opinion, that's where our attention needs to go. That's where, now, someone may say, yes, but what do you do about those black dots? So, I would argue, the black dots are so that we can create white dots. It's up to us to create those white dots in the world. You said the black dots are the context, historical context, and they're crucial. So, a small story that your conversation reminds me of. Japan just had a tsunami caused by an earthquake. Japan had a terrible tsunami in 2011, and it destroyed a nuclear plant and made nuclear radioactive waste in the area, and people had to leave. It was terrible. There is another nuclear plant in Japan, which is even much closer to the sea, and it wasn't affected at all by this huge tsunami in the south of Japan. Why? The engineer who designed it was from the local area, and there were plaques showing a tragedy that happened in the year 869. That's 1,200 years ago. But there had been a tsunami, and he knew of it. He knew the history. He knew the context. He knew the black dot. And he designed the nuclear power plant with a very high wall that protected it from the tsunami, and nothing happened to it, and nobody was hurt. Interesting. We need to know the black dots in order to create our own white dots. Right, and then another white dot in that tsunami in 2011 was, I don't know if it was the head of the plant or the chief engineer or whoever who risked his life, went into the plant, and I think turned it off or something, did something really heroic, knowing that he's sacrificing his life, knowing that he's going into the holy of holies of nuclear radiation. And he could have fled like everybody else tried to flee, but he did the exact opposite, just like all those officers on 7th of October and civilians, too, who found themselves facing these terrorists who threw in grenade after grenade, and youngsters who simply jumped on the grenade in order to save other people. These are white dots. We see them often as black because, hey, they died, so it's tragic. But their act of courage and their act of caring is a white dot, and it brings a lot of light to the world. It does, and your drasha, your wonderful drasha from five years ago, explains, I think. But before we come to that wonderful drasha, I need to tidy up something from last week. Last week we talked about human blindness. That was the topic of your drasha. So I missed something important in the last parasha of Bereshid, and it just occurred to me during this week. I get up early in the morning. I get up at five and have some quiet time. Sometimes I walk the dog, and I thought about this. I waste a lot of time. I watch old movies, and I watched the 1998 movie with Brad Pitt called Meet Joe Black. Meet Joe Black is about the angel of death who comes to earth. That's Brad Pitt. You can imagine the handsome young Brad Pitt playing the angel of death. It's pretty funny. And the reason the angel of death comes to earth is to try to understand these human beings and why in the world are they so afraid of death, which is part of the cycle of life. It's a Hollywood movie. It's based on a wonderful Italian play from 1924, and another movie was made, and so on. But my point is at the end of Vayakhi, Yaakov is giving a blessing to the sons, and they are really deep, insightful blessing. He's really worked on this. He knows the end of his life is coming. He's preparing for it. He's tidying up the loose ends. He's not afraid, and he's trying to leave order. He's trying to leave seder in the world, and this is such an important lesson, especially for us, for us seniors. So our chairperson, Daphna, who's a lawyer, has counseled us that we need to do with something called an enduring power of attorney, and she drew it up for us. It's 35 pages, and it tidies up all the loose ends, Alicia, and this is very important. It's a lesson that we learn from the Parsha, from Yaakov, and I think it's something we can apply in 2024, for all of us, especially our seniors. On to the Drasha, on to the Parsha, Shemot. We begin the story of Egypt and the Exodus, and Alicia, your Drasha has a bombshell, absolute bombshell. Let me read it. Moshe stands in front of the burning bush, and he asked God, Hey, who do I say sent me when I talk to the people of Israel? What's your name? And God says, Eie, asher, eie. And the second line in your Drasha says, This may be the most significant phrase in the entire Torah. It is a phrase that changed the face of human history. What? An enigmatic phrase that's mistranslated in English, totally. Eie, asher, eie. That's God's name, and this changed the face of history. And I came to understand, thinking about this deeply, that you're absolutely right. And this is so brilliant, because the Shema, the Ten Commandments, Eie, asher, eie, changed the face of history. And it did, it did. How did you come to this? How did I come to this? I don't know, to be quite honest. I actually, I don't know, but I'm deeply moved by Eie, asher, eie, which is God's name. And you're right, it's problematically translated. I was wondering why you're not saying it in English. And you're right that it's, how do you translate Eie, asher, eie, I will be that which I will be. It's the God of potential, the God of, God in which everything can be, everything will be. That's the God of freedom, the God that brings us out of those narrow straits. And in our course that we had, three, four years ago, a year-long course about the different names of God, I think it impacted the strasha, or the strasha impacted the course, I'm not so sure. But until now we had, we only really truly had El Shaddai and Elohim. El Shaddai, the God of plenty, the God of, a very powerful God, the God of fertility, and Elohim, the God of nature. But neither of them talks about infinite potential. Both of them talk about, well, what you sow is what you shall reap. And that's Elohim, and that's beautiful, that's great. And if you work diligently, you'll see success in your life, God willing. Eie, asher, eie, suggests the miraculous. The miraculous that there are no boundaries, no confines, no limitations. Everything is possible. And I don't think we can have one without the others. We need all three of them, both El Shaddai, the God of fertility and abundance, both Elohim, the God of nature, and Eie, asher, eie, the God that is above nature. If we have one without the others, the whole system collapses. So we need all three. And what Moshe brings to the world, I would say the following. I would say that the patriarchs brought El Shaddai, Yosef brought Elohim, and Moshe brought Eie, asher, eie. Indeed, and let me share some of my thoughts about why this really is the most important thing in the Torah. Eie, asher, eie. I am who I am. So look at Shemot, at Moshe, a shepherd, a lowly shepherd. And he becomes a great leader who creates our people and leads them into freedom. This is the story of human potential and to me this is why Eie, asher, eie is so crucial. I've often said to you that my favorite phrase in the Bible is Veshachanti betocham, betochacha, God dwells within us. I believe that. And I see things in my professional work in the Technion of God dwelling inside of brilliant inventive scientists and engineers and researchers and entrepreneurs coming up with things that are divine. I see that every day. So yes, Eie, asher, eie is about the God of our own potential. And Moshe looks inside himself and God tells him he's going to do great things and he doesn't believe it. He's very modest, but he realizes his potential. And this is why Eie, asher, eie is so important. It's a message to us, if only we could understand it. Look inside yourself. Understand who you are. Don't be afraid and just do it. Like the Nike phrase says, realize your potential. Be self-aware and exploit the godliness, the divine inside of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really beautiful. There's so much to say about this. It has so many ramifications. It's so beautiful. But indeed, every time we feel stuck, whenever we feel stuck, and we feel stuck often, like right now, as a nation, as a people, I think as humanity, we're pretty much stuck in very narrow straits, whether it's from anti-Semitism, through global warming, through just the wars all around the planet. Right now, it just feels like we're not going to a good place. And I want to suggest that indeed what's happening here is all kinds of narrow boundaries that we've gotten used to, that we've learned to accept, are beginning to crack and to fall so that new light from the infinite, new light from Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, can emerge. We can't really do Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. We can't really fulfill our potential if we are stuck in the confines of what we already know, of what already exists, of what already is. And we are creatures of routines. We love repeating ourselves. We're repetitive. We love the familiar. We're addicted to it. We're scared of change. Often we want change. There needs to be change. People talk about wanting change. When push comes to shove, most people throughout their lives don't really change. So if we're totally honest with ourselves, we love Mitzrayim. We love Egypt. We love the confines. We love the routines. We love being told what to do, not to have too much freedom. And Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh is the most difficult god to worship. To really agree to be free, to be free to be who you can be, most people are not there. I don't think I'm there. I think most people are really way too scared of being what they can be. They prefer the comfort of being what is familiar. And that's Egypt. Absolutely, Alisha. As an economist, it troubles me a lot that we are still in slavery. And this time we are in slavery to the consumer society, to the idea that you have to go out and buy things and buy more and more stuff. And this is definitely not freedom. And it relates to Nietzsche, which you and I are both fond of. Right. Before Nietzsche, because Nietzsche deserves, I just want to say something before that to follow what you just said. If we think of the Nile River as a place of, it's deep, it's murky, it's muddy at the bottom. I was there and I remember you were there too. The bottom is really muddy. So what happens to the children of Israel with their consumerism, with their materialism, they start sinking. Materialism makes us heavy, really heavy with too much weight bringing us down and down. And eventually we just sink in the mud. We become enslaved to the Nile River. So Egypt is all of that. So let me put some context on this going back to Nietzsche. Nietzsche's most famous book is Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It was published 140 years ago, 1883. And Nietzsche is famous for a number of things that he said. The most famous was put on the cover of Time magazine. Big red letters. God is dead. Gott ist tot, as Nietzsche wrote. And this was totally misunderstood. Totally. Totally misunderstood. Absolutely. Let me try to explain what I think Nietzsche was talking about. 1883 was sort of a period of the second industrial revolution. The British had discovered electricity, how to use it, and gas and oil. And all of a sudden human beings had this new source of energy. And it made them gods. It made us gods because we could do things, powerful things, create things. And it started a decline of religious thinking, of being spiritual because we became gods rather than God. And that's what Nietzsche wrote. God is dead in the organized religion because people usurped the place of God instead of God being inside of us. We are the gods. We are the gods inside of us. And he went on to say, become who you are. And that puzzled many people because I am who I am. Yes, I am who I am. Not at all. Not at all. We are mostly driven by trends and forces and advertising and marketing. Marketing is the new god, telling us to buy this and that and you have to have iPhone 15 or whatever it is. I still have 11. It's perfectly good. So Nietzsche was a prophet in a sense and become who you are, I think, is related to EYEH ASHERYEH because you note that God shortened it. Moses shortened EYEH ASHERYEH to EYEH, I will be. What does that mean? Here's my interpretation. I may be totally wrong. Maybe the I in EYEH, that's first person, maybe the I is us rather than just God. In other words, we will find our potential. I will be who I really am, who I really can be. The American Army tries to recruit people with a wonderful slogan and they put this on television. Be the best you can be. That's kind of the message to me of EYEH ASHERYEH. Be in future as the best person that you can be. Create a blessing. Make a blessing. Realize your potential. I think, to me, that's why you're absolutely right. This is the message from the Torah on a personal level to every single one of us. Be the best you can be. Be a blessing. Right. Here you just added something. You inserted this. You brought Abraham straight into the book of Shemot. Be the best person you can be. Then you added, be a blessing. I think that's really beautiful what you just said now. When you inserted the Abrahamic kind of notion here, what does it mean to be the best person you can be? What does that mean? The Nazis did a great job annihilating six million people as well as many, many others. They did the best they could do to annihilate people. Being the best you can be, that's why it's divine and not satanic. It basically asks us to bring forth the divine potential within us. The divine potential can only be a blessing. Furthermore, if we bring divine blessing which humanity is not yet ready for, then it's not a blessing. If we bring too much of a good thing, it could be a terrible, terrible curse. So, Eh Yesher Eh Yeh has its own laws in a way as well. It has its own boundaries. It's bound by our ability to have that. There's a beautiful, in the world of Kabbalah, there's a beautiful imagery of Kelim V'orot, vessels and light. It's great if there was tons of light, but if the vessels cannot contain all this light, then the mythical primordial shattering of the vessels takes place and that's a terrible, terrible tragedy. We can see the children of Israel at first when Moshe comes to them at the end of this parasha, goes to Pharaoh and said, let my people go and Pharaoh in response punishes them and makes their slavery circumstances even worse than what they were before Moshe came. The children of Israel turn to Moshe and say, who asked you? Just go away. So, yes, we whined and we cried. That's all true, but look, now things are even worse and Moshe is besides himself and he turns to God and said, why have you hurt the people that you're trying to help here? So, as long as people, a person is not ready yet to be delivered, is not ready to take his or her next step and we know that if we give someone great advice, but the person is not ready for that advice, the advice is useless. It may even be a curse if he's not fully ready for that next phase of his evolution. So, there is patience within it. Like, don't worry, I have all the time in the world. I'm infinite and I will be. I will be that which I will be and I'm in no rush whatsoever, but know that this is the driving force of evolution, your own personal evolution, societal evolution, and perhaps even cosmic evolution. That is what drives slowly but surely. And by the way, not always slowly, but surely sometimes in bursts of evolution. And we'll discover, for example, that the 7th of October, that treacherous day, in retrospect, we will learn to see that will be a huge step in our evolution. We will grow from that in leaps and bounds. So, Ehyeh She'Rehyeh works in mysterious ways, sometimes painful ways, and has a tremendous amount of wisdom to it and finally, connects to what you said, it's a blessing. And this is related to one of the lessons, Elisha, that we're learning from October 7th and it's related to realizing potential and how we use technology. One of the mistakes we made over the past years is that we have relied, we are a high-tech nation, we are the start-up nation, we drank our own Kool-Aid about that and our army seems to have relied too heavily on technology, on intel, intelligence collected from radio waves and phone conversations, rather than human conversation of talking to real people on the ground and correcting human intel, as the slang goes, human people intelligence. And artificial intelligence is a good example. I've just written a short piece about this Artificial intelligence can be a huge blessing to humanity. But right now, it has immense problems. It uses material called generalized artificial intelligence. It reads all the New York Times articles ever written. But those are copyrighted, Elisha. That means that you have to ask permission or sometimes pay for it. In AI, chat GPT, they don't ask permission and they don't pay anything. New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI really for violating copyright. So this is true of all technologies including the one that Nietzsche talked about and was so disturbed by. The electricity revolution, the second industrial revolution, electric power creating gods out of people. All technology, all of life is like that. The good side and the bad side. And we need to be wise in order to control and guide and navigate through the perils of the bad side. And we are learning from October 7th. We failed in that. And we will do better. And it will be a white spot after the black spot, as you say. And also, if we're back to that metaphor, I think it's important to say that on the 7th of October, there were the most amazing white spots that I've witnessed since I... ever, perhaps ever. And so you're saying that we have the backdrop, the context of the black spots only to allow us to pour tons of white spots onto the paper of life. Indeed. Something we teach our managers is called Air Force debriefing. Something the Israeli Air Force does really well. After every flight, every flight is really expensive. An hour of flight in an F-35 is very costly. So the pilots come back and they sit in a room and they debrief. That is, they go over lessons learned. There are no ranks in the debrief. And you objectively analyze what went well, what went wrong, what was good, what was bad. And it's become a model for businesses and even for people. Learn. Derive the lessons from what you just did. Not in order to blame, but in order to learn and evolve and improve to realize your potential. And this, again, I think is the lesson of Eieh, Asher, Eieh. I will be. I will be better. I will be a better person. Yes, yes, yes. And it's not a coincidence that Moshe doesn't want the job. And who wants this job? He knew all too well the human beings he is going to face don't want Eieh, Asher, Eieh. They want Elohim, maybe. They want El Shaddai. They don't want the God of potential. They'd much rather stay small. And that's exactly what happens when the mad man kind of runs up and says, you know, God is dead and we killed him. We killed him. And it's kind of asking, what will be now? What will replace it? How are we not going to be confined in our own made-up confines So Moshe is, when they say that Moshe was, you know, rejected this invitation, said, I'm heavy of tongue, heavy of mouth. People usually say he stuttered. He didn't stutter. Moshe didn't stutter. Moshe had a beautiful rhetoric ability. Moshe knew that he cannot deliver the message of the infinite, to people who think in finite terms, who think small, who think Egypt, who think slavery. How can you possibly talk to them about infinity? And the first thing you said at the beginning of the podcast, you asked, you know, what do we tell? How do we talk about the despair that people are at right now? And I think this is the answer. The despair is, we have to acknowledge it. It's okay. Yet, we are invited to connect to a space that is miraculous, a space of Eie Asher Eie. And there we will be redeemed from Gaza, from the Hamas, from anti-Semitism. But you really need to be spiritually open, aware, and willing. There's a great comfort in coming to Ve'ahavta, with our Kehillah, every Shabbat. Great comfort indeed. You're absolutely right. Okay, okay. So, we have to end. I want to thank you all for listening. And be sure that when you face the burning bush, and we face the burning bush all the time, moments, not all the time, but moments of being called, being called to rise beyond our boundaries and really connect with our infinite potential, know that you are called by a holy voice that's inviting you to become in the world. And it's a very quiet voice, Alicia. Very quiet. Very quiet. You have to really listen. That's true. It's a still, quiet voice. Absolutely. And by the way, it's the same mountain. We're on the same mountain where Elijah the prophet will one day return there and hear that still, sound voice. So, may we be able to hear the still, sound voice of infinite potential. Amen. Shabbat Shalom. And have a good week, everyone. Shabbat Shalom, everyone.