podcast #10 Shvi'i Shel Pesach

The main ideas from this information are: - The host and guest discuss the importance of framing thoughts in words and finding relevance in Torah stories. - They talk about the story of Nachshon jumping into the Red Sea as a leap of faith and its relevance to our own lives. - They discuss the importance of making meaning in our lives and the concept of existentialism. - They share examples of leaps of faith, such as a soldier pursuing Hamas in a tunnel and a scientist choosing to research how cells die. - They mention the impact of the Israeli army experience on decision-making and faith. - They emphasize the importance of storytelling and how stories can heal and bring meaning to our lives. - They highlight the role of leaps of faith in shaping our lives and the world around us. Shalom. Hi, Shlomo. Hi, Anisha. It's good to see you again. We actually met recently because it's only Tuesday today, but it's a very joyous Tuesday, not because all Tuesdays are doubly blessed, but it's Erev Chag, Erev Chag Shini, here at least in Israel, in about 36 hours or so. We will be eating hametz again, and if you're living outside of Israel, it may take a little bit longer, and we hope you enjoy this conversation. Anisha, two brief comments before we begin. I love these podcasts, and I finally realized why they've become so important to me. This is our 10th Aminyana podcast. Somebody once said, how do I know what I'm thinking if I can't listen to what I'm saying? The reason for that is that we think in words, and we think by framing words. Until we frame a thought in words, it's really not a concrete thought. In this podcast, I find I'm framing things in words, and then saying, yeah, that's right, that's what I think. So I'm learning about myself in chatting with you, and the second thing I learned, not about me, but about you, Anisha, what is your secret for these wonderful drashot? What is the secret sauce? And I figured it out. No, tell me, because I haven't. The secret sauce is that you find these wonderful stories in the Torah, and that's fine. Lots of people find good stories in the Torah and the drash and the tamut, and then you find a way to make them relevant to our lives. So the story in the Torah, the chromatic story we're going to talk about is Nachshon jumping into the Red Sea, almost drowning, making this leap of faith, and that's a great story. But then you show us exactly why this is so relevant to our own daily lives, to me personally as well, and we'll discuss that. Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that. So indeed, just to give maybe the background, that Sh'vi Yishu Pesach, the seventh day of Pesach, is when they finally reach the Sea of Reeds, after a week of wandering from Goshen. It's a really weird and strange journey that they make, and finally, seven days later, they're facing the Sea of Reeds. And it's important also to note that basically, Pharaoh sent out his soldiers, not because he had a change of heart, because Moshe promised him they're only going for a few days to celebrate, and within a week or so they're going to be back. And they did not come back, and therefore he went to pursue them to bring them back. It's a side comment, but our real conversation is about the splitting of the sea, and Nachshon ben Aminadav. But we can explain why Pharaoh did this. Why were the children of Israel so important to him? Slavery meant that the slaves were an economic asset, and they were very, very valuable. He could not let all this economic value escape. He had to bring them back. Who's going to do the work? The Egyptians? I don't think so. So that was his motive, you see. Okay, so take it away. So, as I mentioned before we were discussing this, the leap of faith by Nachshon ben Aminadav, leaping into the Red Sea, and almost drowning, and not knowing if he would survive, what is the story about this this leap of faith? And the answer is, this is important in our lives, because people change the world by making this leap of faith. And I have a short story to recount, Elisha. But one second, I just want to make sure, I don't know if everybody knows the story of Nachshon ben Aminadav, because it's not in the Torah, it's a Midrash, and the Midrash basically says that it wasn't really Moshe and the staff that split the sea, rather it was Moshe was too busy praying and calling out to God. And God said, you know, just keep going. And it was Nachshon ben Aminadav, it's a beautiful story, but Nachshon ben Aminadav, the leader of the tribe of Judah, who just jumps into the water, and as he jumps into the water, the water starts parting. The Midrash has it that he starts drowning in death, and then God says to Moshe, stop praying, just split the sea, and save this guy, and cross the Sea of Reeds. But what really started the whole process of opening the sea was the leap of Nachshon ben Aminadav. A leap of faith. A leap of faith. And we have a modern version of that, Alisha, and I'm going to ask you afterwards about your own leap of faith, and perhaps I'll talk about mine. But the leap of faith I want to talk about is a soldier, a commander, deputy company commander of the Givati unit. His name is Eitan Fond, and this is in 2014, in the 50-day bitter, fierce war against the Hamas in Gaza, called Suketan. It's called in English Operation Protective Edge, for some reason. And the story is this. Hamas attacked over the border, and managed to surprise the unit, and killed three soldiers, the commander of the patrol elite commander unit of Givati, Benaya Yisrael, Hadar Goldin, who was his deputy, and the communicator, the person in charge of communications. They killed these three, and they kidnapped the body of Hadar Goldin, jumped into one of the tunnels that Hamas built, and fled. And the deputy company commander, whose name was Eitan Fond, was in pursuit, saw them go into the tunnel, and against orders, in a leap of faith, jumped into the tunnel, you can imagine, and pursued the Hamas for several hundred yards in the tunnel, collecting evidence that they had actually killed Hadar Goldin. For this, he was given a medal for bravery, but it's a classic example of the Bible, Midrash story of Nachshon, someone who acts in faith that this is the right thing to do, even if it's against orders. Yeah, yes, yes. And we can never know, it's a leap of faith, because we can never know ahead of time if this is wise, if this is smart. It could end in disaster, and instead of a medal, we may receive, if we come out of this alive, we may actually be imprisoned. So it's a split second of a decision, of what action to take. And it is indeed remarkable, and I think it says a lot also about the army experience in general. Army wars, they're not fun, much better living in peace and harmony, and not needing an army ever, ever, ever. And nevertheless, having said that, it's amazing how the Israeli army experience really shaped Israeli society, because you're faced with situations such as these. This is an extreme situation nevertheless, but you're faced with all kinds of situations that civilian life will never, never offer you. And you have to make decisions and stand by them, and comradery is tested there, and faith is tested there. And so many things are like a split of a second decision, and that's where these leaps happen. It's not a coincidence that you bring an example from a military operation. So Elisha, that's when I became an Israeli, in the army, doing basic training. In our final march, or run, and I was in a unit with a mixed bag of people, including a little red-haired hussie, who wasn't in very good shape, and he was really struggling. It wasn't that hard of a march. So I carried his weapon, and we managed to get him through. But during that basic training, I feel that's when I became an Israeli, because I met every walk of life, every type of person in that unit. It was a unit that was called Shlavet. These were all the people who fell through the net, who had been drafted later, and we had drug addicts, and the criminals, and people who would serve time in jail, and the hussied, and the altruists, and a whole bunch of people, and a professor from the Technion, John Wahlberg, everybody thrown in together, and we had to get along. Wow, wow, that's amazing. Yes, yes indeed. So, Elisha, what was your leap of faith? I'm pretty sure that in becoming a rabbi, from the background that was not religious, especially, what was your leap of faith, and how did it happen? What was my leap of faith? Wow, that's a tough one. I think there were a number of such leaps. One leap of faith was, and that's a more inner leap of faith, deciding that there is a God, deciding that, as a philosophy, as a person who loves philosophy, and is quite addicted to philosophy, God cannot be proven, and as long as God cannot be proven, I cannot take that leap, or I cannot take that step. The reason it was a leap of faith was because I made a decision that, yes indeed, there's God, and with that leap of faith, I could start running through a terrain, a field in which God exists, and then retroactively get to feel God's presence, retroactively get to understand, have a much deeper understanding of the religious experience, as William James calls it, and had I waited to be convinced that God exists, I would have remained just a boring philosopher, and never had this kind of religious experience. So Alicia, I've spent my professional life in a science and technology university, and this is a place where there may be leaps of faith, but I call them conditional leaps of faith. That means you have an idea or a hypothesis, but that's only stage one. Stage two is verifying, and that's why you find not very much evidence of deep religious faith in science and technology universities. Very often people there believe that they are, in a sense, gods by creating amazing technologies. The true leap of faith is unconditional. You do it without evidence, and you know, today's society is all evidence-based, and I understand that, and that's important. We want medicine that's based on evidence, but we're missing something in our modern society, and people are feeling that. People are feeling that this super scientific, rational basis, evidence, show me evidence, something is missing. What's missing is God, and God begins with a leap of faith that's unconditional. I believe that you exist, and then amazingly, as happened to me, you find incredible evidence in this beautiful world, this incredible planet that God created. Yeah, that's a very important insight. That's a really important insight that's emerging here, is that until you take that leap of faith, until you make that decision and take that leap, even though there's no evidence, it's not evidence-based, you will never really get to know, but once you do, once you take that leap, there's a whole new level of knowing presents itself, and knowing which comes through experience, and knowing which comes through a very special kind of conviction that was just not there before you took the leap. You know, in doing some research for this, after reading your drasha, which was inspiring, I found that the concept of leap of faith is actually the basis of a very deep philosophy. It's a philosophy called existentialism, and the father of existentialism is often regarded as Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, and in his book, first let's say what existentialism is. Very simply, it's very complicated, but existentialism is the belief that each of us is responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our lives, and it's not given to us. We each have to find it. We have to find this purpose, and the leap of faith is about individual experience, like William James said, and it isn't something that has external proof or evidence-based. It's experiential. So the leap of faith allows us to live a life that has meaning. I used to teach my students a saying by a marketing expert named Guy Kawasaki. He was the marketing guru of Macintosh. He made Macintosh for Apple, and he used to tell people four words. Friends make meaning, not money. If you make meaning for people, meaning create value for them, you'll probably make money, but if you only try to make money, you won't succeed, and strangely enough, that sounds like a capitalist proposition that is actually part of existentialism. Make meaning. Make meaning in your life. Serve people. Beautiful. That's really beautiful. We mentioned William James quite a lot in our conversations, and I've only realized through his podcast that we're both fans of William James, and William James has an existential crisis. As a scientist, he was a scientist, and he even contemplated suicide at some point out of despair, and then he made that leap of faith, and it's interesting because it's siding with meaning as opposed to siding with facts, and recognizing that facts are important. They're certainly important for science, and they're important for our lives, but what's more important than facts is our own existence, our own personal understanding of life and what life means to us, and that's really what our life is made of. It's not made of the facts. If we sit down and relate the history of our personal lives, we can go through all the facts. I went there, and then I did this, and then I did that. That is so not interesting and not inspiring, but when we tell the story, first of all, as a story of the evolution we went through, the growth we went through, the way we evolved as human beings, and all of a sudden this story, the story of meaning and the facts are, they need to be factual, but they're only the taf'ora, the backdrop of where meaning plays itself out. So, I have a story about stories. I had an experience last week. I interviewed Yishai Shalif. Yishai Shalif is the first Israeli-born Haredi psychologist. Oh, right. Yes, you mentioned him in our podcast. I mentioned him in the podcast. He's head of school psychology services in Modena. He's a wonderful man, and he does therapy. He helps people. He's an expert on something called narrative therapy. He says that a lot of psychological approaches are structural. They're very rigid. They have one method, and this is what you need to do, and his approach is narrative, telling a story. He gets people to tell their story, but stories are very pliable. They're very flexible, and you can retell your story in a way that helps you heal, and he's very good at that. So, stories can heal us. The Torah stories can help heal us. The story about Nachshon jumping into the Red Sea can heal and help by showing us the way forward. Sometimes you have to rely on your intuition, like Eitan Fon, the brave soldier. You have to just go for it. Just go for it. If I have a moment, I can tell a story about that, how to win a Nobel Prize. Elisha, you can win a Nobel Prize by a leap of faith. We have a colleague at Technion, a wonderful man, Avram Hershko. Avram Hershko won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with his student, Aron Chernivor. He's a wonderful man, and I interviewed him and visited his lab, and he's there every day, working, Nobel Prize or not. Sending my best regards, because his grandson had an Aliyah L'Torah here at our big Knesset. Oh, cool. Wow, I didn't know that. That's amazing. He won the Nobel Prize because, as a postdoc student in America, and then coming back to Israel, to Technion, he had to decide on his research specialty. He decided, I'm going to research how cells die. How cells die when they've done their job in the body. Our bodies, by the way, are always changing the cells and renewing. Everybody told him, Hershko, you've just put a total end to your career. Forget it. Nobody cares how cells die. We want to know how cells live, and how they divide and specialize. Who cares how cells die? He said, I want to find out. I want to do this. Alisha, it turns out how cells die is crucial. The reason is, some cells should die, and they don't. That's called cancer. Based on what he discovered, the protein that gets cells to die, called ubiquitin, based on his discovery, we now have drugs that can cure terrible types of cancer like multiple myeloma, which is bone marrow cancer. It prevents the body from making red blood cells, and then we can't have oxygen going from our lungs to our heart. A very small story, and I'll end with this. He had a friend come and visit him, and they had a wonderful time. The friend went home to the U.S. and discovered he had multiple myeloma. He was treated with the drug based on Avram Hershko's discovery, giving him years of life, a leap of faith. That's incredible. That's incredible. Yes, that is incredible. There's so much in what you're saying. There's so many little nuggets of wisdom, as you call them, in the stories you just told. Professor Hershko, when he chose to research dying cells, or how cells die, there's a mystery there. Why did he choose that? Was it a burning interest? Who knows? He probably doesn't even know either. Well, he does know. He does know. There's a combination here of leap of faith and pragmatism. The pragmatism was, we have limited means and resources at the Technion. He did his research, Alicia, with bowls set into pans of ice. I mean, he had limited, limited funds, and he had to find something that other people weren't researching, because he couldn't compete with the big projects that had billions of dollars behind them. So, he chose a field that he could make a unique contribution to. Besides, he was just curious, and you mentioned curiosity as an important factor here. Yeah, but I want to argue that point. I see what you're saying. I fully see what you're saying, but nevertheless, very often, in retrospect, when we tell a story, we give the reasons why things happened the way they happened. But once we tell the story in retrospect, we already ascribe meaning to them. It's already existential. At that moment in time, if we could capture that moment and interview both him and everyone around him, we may have discovered that the facts were actually a little bit different, but the way he eventually frames his story gives it meaning, and therefore, and that all goes back to William James, whose philosophy was the philosophy of pragmatism. For him, leaps of faith are pragmatism, because we don't know the truth. We don't know what's going to get us a Nobel Prize. We don't know what's going to work and what's not going to work, what's going to bring the future, what's going to bring the remedy for cancer, and the pragmatic part is to take a leap of faith, and it's not as if, oh, thank God we chose the right path. If we take that leap of faith, it will be the right path. By taking the leap of faith, we're making it the right path. We're carving a path, and the path will lead to something, something, and we'll be able to tell our grandchildren a heroic story. Every path, every leap of faith has a heroic story at the end of it. So that's why it's both pragmatic and beautiful, let's say. Exactly, and our country, Elisha, the country, this little beautiful country, our country is based on a leap of faith essentially by Ben-Gurion, and he was advised, this is madness to declare independence. We are about to celebrate our 75th birthday, and it was dicey for a time. There were only 600,000 Jews in the whole country, Elisha, at this time. We had no weapons. Yesterday I watched a program about somebody from the Mossad who managed to use connections in the Czechoslovakia then, and managed to get rifles. We had no rifles. When I did my basic training in 1968, I was given a Czech, which is a Mauser, and it's a three-shot rifle, which was obsolete even then. And Czech means check, a Czech rifle, and those saved us because every soldier had a personal weapon, and so then we didn't have them. And by the way, it's a very, very accurate weapon. Yeah, that's an incredible, incredible story. I'm going to ask you a question. So one of the points you make in your wonderful brochure about Nachshon is that when we make a leap of faith, it's not either-or, it's not binary, it's not zero-one. We have an infinite number of choices, an infinite number of paths that we can take in making our decision, and you note that yamsuf can also be interpreted as insuf, which is infinite in Hebrew. I'm troubled by something about our modern life. Elisha, you probably had this happen. You go into a supermarket, and let's say you're going to buy cereal, right? Cornflakes. Elisha, there are 10,000 different kinds of cornflakes with vanilla flavoring and chocolate and this and that, and you have a whole shelf all the way down the aisle, and it's dizzying. We have too much choice in our economy, and it's wasteful. And the reason is simple, because the cornflakes makers think that if they can muscle in more shelf space, they can sell more stuff. So they proliferate all this choice. I think we have too much choice, and it's complicating for people. Yeah, and I think in America, even all the more so, when we go into a supermarket in America, it is incredibly overwhelming. Yeah, that's a good point. Having way too many choices. So a society that has too many choices needs to really teach its young ones the value of a leap of faith, of how you make a choice. How do you choose what you choose? You really need to either have trust in an internal guiding system, or have a very strong moral compass, or whatever it may be, to make those choices. And making choices is a muscle that needs to be practiced. I think some people become religious for that reason. Some people artificially choose. I think I was one of them. It's one of the reasons I became religious. We chose to close down all these options that we have in order to be able to move forward in life, and keep it simple. To keep it simple, yes. Yes, keep it simple. So I think maybe we're coming to the end of our half hour together, and I regret it, but I want to quote your last sentence, which is powerful. You write that the divine sea, the insuf, has within it an infinite number of possibilities which await our choice. They await our first move. God will reveal our path once we take action. A small quick story. So my granddaughter is about to enter college. She's religious. She's one of eight children, and she is debating her future. And I'm privileged to bring her to the Technion, and we're going to walk around and interview some people and show her that precisely what I tell her is exactly what you said. She doesn't really know. How can she know what chemical engineering is, or biomedical engineering, and how can she choose? And the answer is, you choose something that looks okay, and you jump into the sea, and you try it, and God will tell you, does this work for me, or does it not? Does this fit? Just like you put on a suit of clothes, and you try the jacket, and it does fit, or it doesn't fit. And if it doesn't fit, try something else. I've had students who studied mechanical engineering for four years, and they found they couldn't stand the smell of machine oil. And they went and studied political science. So don't be afraid. Be like Nachshon. Jump into the sea. Try it. See how it fits. Does it fit? Does it feel right? Is this right for you existentially? Yes? Go ahead. No? Try something else. Yeah, that's very beautiful. And in this sense, it's also the way the Egyptian army was pursuing us was a lifesaver in a way, because had it not ran, had it not chased the children of Israel, we would have still been standing there on the shores of the Sea of Reefs, debating what to do, where to go, how to move forward. So it's those moments in life where we're between a rock and a hard place that amazing things end up happening. So we have the wonderful Nike mantra, right? Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Yes. So I want to wish everyone a happy as we say goodbye to Pesach. And here in Israel, not only in Israel, but in Israel, we feel it all the more so. We're entering the, in a way, the Israeli high holidays, Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, Yom HaTzma'ut. We will talk about that a bit more in our future podcast. So Shlomo, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Chag Sameach, everyone.