Podcast # 52: Parashat Yitro

In this conversation, the hosts discuss the concept of simplicity and complexity in thought. They reflect on how simplicity can lead to clarity and the presence of God, while complexity can be a result of cluttered thinking. They also explore the dilemma of feeding the people of Gaza, who are considered enemies, and how to approach this ethical dilemma. The hosts suggest reframing the question and finding a solution that serves justice and the cause of right. They propose issuing ration cards to the people of Gaza to ensure food distribution is not controlled by Hamas. Shalom Shlomo. Shalom Alisha. Hi to everyone and welcome back. It's an incredible, incredible parasha this week, parasha Yitro, one of the greatest, one of the loftiest, and it's the giving of the Ten Commandments and many, many other gems. And as usual, Alisha, rather than focus on the place where the light is shining, the Ten Commandments, which most rabbis do, you have found kind of a dark corner to illuminate for us. And your drashah is titled The God of Simplicity and Joy. And you talk about two gifts that we get, the Jewish people get. And of all people, we get it from Yitro, the father-in-law of Moshe, who's not even Jewish. He's a Midianite. A priest, no less. A priest, a Midian priest, father of Tzipporah, Moshe's wife. And he gives us these precious gifts. And it's also a parasha that is basically a textbook in management consultancy. Because Yitro gives Moshe a lesson in how to manage and how to organize because he's drowning. He's not able to delegate. He's very responsible. And he is drowning in work and judgment and bureaucracy. And Yitro comes and gives him this precious gift of simplicity but also of joy. And that's what your drashah focuses on, and I think it's brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. It's fun to reread these drashot. Sometimes I can't listen to my own voice. I think it's a very well-known human issue of people being embarrassed by listening to their own voices. I'm not so sure I understand why that is. It's very hard. I have trouble with that. Do you know why that is, though? What's the mechanism of embarrassment? It's a kind of self-criticism. Because when you listen to other voices, you can say, it should be louder, softer, clearer, too fast, too slow. But when you listen to yourself, it's personal. It's personal. It's painful. It could have been better. It's painfully personal. So, yes, I reread the drashah in preparation for our podcast. And, yes, for many years I really thought that complexity was a sign of something sublime and wonderful. I would always talk about how if it's complex, then if we can grapple complexity, then we're very evolved human beings. And over the years I realized that there's a problem with that statement. Because when something is simple, it means there's clarity there. And when there's clarity, I believe God is to be found in places of clarity. When our brains are cluttered, and I think sometimes complexity is because of a cluttered brain, clutter doesn't mean that we're disorganized. It could be that, too. It could also be just over-complicating things and not being able to see clearly the plain truth of reality. So I think God really is to be found in simplicity and certainly in joy. That's a great Hasidic gift to the world, teaching us that God is to be found in places of joy. Absolutely. So I live in the academic world. In the academic world, some of us worship God, and pretty much all of us worship complexity. Why? Because if you write something that's complex, there must be depth to it, right? If it's simple, well, it's trivial, not worthy. So there's much too much complexity in the academic world. And let me quote from your drashah. This is one of the lessons I've been trying to internalize for years without great success. I have to admit the idea that God dwells in simplicity. If something is too complex, complicated, and clumsy, it is probably not divine. I absolutely agree we need to search for simplicity, but here's the dilemma, and I'm going to hit you with a tough question, Alicia. Einstein, who was a great simplifier, and maybe later I can explain his amazing equation, E equals MC squared, which is perhaps the greatest equation of history. He won the Nobel Prize for it in 1905, a special theory of relativity. Einstein said, simplify as much as possible, but not more so. That's the catch. What is more so? And Alicia, ethical dilemmas, moral dilemmas, we find them in the Torah. They're complicated. They are complex. And when we simplify them, do we do right? Do we get to the right answer? So let me try this on you, Alicia. I apologize in advance. Alicia, we are at war with Gaza, and we are feeding the people of Gaza. And not only are we feeding them, we are bringing trucks, bringing flour on shiploads into Ashdod Port, unloading them on trucks and sending hundreds of trucks with tons and tons of flour into Gaza to feed the people. And there Hamas are mostly commandeering the flour and selling it or giving it to only their supporters and asking their supporters who get the flour or people who get the flour to pledge allegiance to Hamas. We are feeding our enemies. Alicia, this has never happened in history. We Jewish people, we have soft hearts and we have values. And we are empathic with the suffering of women and children and ordinary people and elderly in Gaza. Alicia, do we need to feed the people of Gaza, especially since they are holding our hostages? Is there a simple answer? That's a great example. You're right, it's a great example. The instinct would be to say, well, you know, Shlomo, it's complicated. It's complex. But then we're saying, well, if it's complicated and complex, then God is not there. And I think that's the feeling that God is not there. So I want to evade the question a little bit. Maybe we can eventually come back to it. But I think that the issue of complexity and simplicity is not that there's a simple answer. It's where is our thinking coming from? I think there are two modes of thought, of thinking, of thought. One is divine and one is human. I'm going to try and explain. Everything, everything, everything derives from thought. There's nothing that is not derived from thought. Nothing. Emotions, before every emotion, there had to be a thought. There was no emotion without a thought that preceded it. But yet we know that there's different qualities of thought, of thinking. There are days where our thinking is just really lucid and clear and we can make a point really simply and easily and it reverberates with the other side and really it feels great to communicate that thought. And then there are days where the thought, the thinking is so combobulated and so messed up and it's anything but clear and lucid and transparent. And I think that's where divine thought versus human thought kicks in. Now all thought, all thought always, always comes through our brain. It doesn't have another means of entering the world. It comes from our brain. Yet sometimes we are connected to divine thought and sometimes we are stuck and mired in human thought. And human thought is very, very limited. It's just really limited. It's limited to what we know, to what we remember, to our education, to our programming, to our limited intelligence and intellectual ability, etc. Divine thought doesn't have, isn't programming, isn't education, and there are moments, it doesn't happen a lot, but there are moments and we've all experienced those moments. We've experienced those moments of when suddenly our thinking becomes, not only is it very clear, but suddenly we have a new thought, a fresh thought, an insight. We've talked about that before. All of a sudden an insight appears from out of space and it's metaphorically, but literally from out of space. It's divine. And we can feel the quality, the differences in the quality of the thought. Divine thought feels fresh, feels wow, feels illuminating, feels like, wow, how come we never thought about it earlier? Human thought is just regurgitating and regurgitating things that we already knew. So, back to this dilemma. So in this dilemma, when we discuss it, we immediately sink into human thought. How can we feed them? They're our enemies, they're holding our hostages, and on that level, indeed, it's complex. And that's what we have right now. That's what we have. We don't have divine thought available any time we want it. It's almost like a grace of God, divine thought. So, right now we're in a very complicated situation. But if the situation is complicated, to me it means that we're not connected to divine thought on the matter. And if we will be connected to divine thought, then all of a sudden, number one, a great answer will present itself. And we will say, wow, how come we never thought about it earlier? And you can't hurry love, as the extremes say. You can't hurry love. And when love will present itself in the form of simplicity, of clarity, perhaps more than simplicity, it's clarity of thought. We'll know that, and our body will know it. We will feel that we're on a different plane of thinking. So, listening to you, Elisha, I just had a thought. And it came from a question. What would Yitro say if we posed the question to him? And here's what he might say. This is from a management consultant. I taught management. I still do for many years. The question is not should we feed the people of Gaza. We have to do that. The question is how can we feed the people of Gaza in a manner that serves justice and serves the cause of right, right and our cause. The question is how, not whether. And there is an answer to that. And by the way, often in moral dilemmas, it's a useful tool to find divine thought by reframing the question. And this is a tool used in innovation. You take a question and then you ask it in many different ways from many different angles. How should we feed the people of Gaza in a manner that makes sense for us? And here is my suggestion. In the 1950s, Israel is an incredibly poor country. And we had a shortage of food. And we had rationing. People got one egg and one pound of flour and one liter of oil according to a card. And everybody had a card. And you stamped the card every time you got an egg or something of that sort. Israel should issue ration cards to the people of Gaza. And we should distribute the food and not Hamas, not those criminals, not those horrible murderers. We should distribute the food. And when we do that, the people of Gaza will understand who we are and who should run the place. If not us, then people who have their interests at heart and not the Hamas who are speculating and making money on the people. So that was helpful. Clarity of thought, reframing the question, and again, divine thought. Always ask the question driven by our core values, but at the same time, feet on the ground. Right. I want to get back to Einstein for a second because I think we even talked about it many months ago. He has a great example. You mentioned the special theory of relativity as opposed to the general theory of relativity. And he describes how he came up with it. Well, he sat for hours, for days, for days, in a home where he was sitting by the lake in Switzerland, actually. If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't in Germany, I think it was in Switzerland, where he actually sat down and wrote, if I'm not mistaken, it doesn't really matter, and he was stuck. He was stuck. He just sat for hours and was stuck. And then he went out for a walk around the lake. So it doesn't matter if it was Switzerland or Germany, but it was a lake. And he went out for the walk on the lake, and as he walked out on the walk, he was walking for a while, and then, boom! Suddenly, the answer came to him. The answer came to him. And there's a very practical message here. Sometimes when we are mired in our own human thinking and human thought, and we're sitting there, we're trying harder, let's try harder, let's spend some more hours trying to resolve the problem, sometimes it's just a matter of letting it go. Just dropping it. Go out for a walk. Do something fun. And our instinct is the opposite. Our instinct is to sit. I'm not getting up from my chair until I resolve this. And divine thought suggests the exact opposite. So if you're just continuing to mess with your own human thought, which is not taking you anywhere, and you're trapped in human thought, step out of it. Go out for a walk. I just feel like telling our leaders who are sitting in their own bunkers and working really hard, really hard. I want to give them all the credit in the world. But if they could just go out for a walk. There are not many lakes in Israel, so it doesn't have to be a lake. But if you could go out for a walk in a safe place, you don't have to have bodyguards. It's really just walk, do some sports, do something creative, something fun, something nice. Fresh thinking will appear. Now I know it sounds like such a lame advice for our military leaders, so I won't elaborate further. But Elisha, I actually teach that. So when I work with groups about innovation and how to innovate, I tell them this story. Andy Grove, who is a Jewish immigrant from Hungary, became the CEO of Intel. And Intel did well and then got into heavy competition, and Andy Grove wrote a memo to senior managers in Intel. Everybody, get serious. We're in competition. Quit fooling around. Just focus and get serious. That's often the message in companies. And I tell my students it's the exact opposite. You come up with ideas when you're laughing and having fun and experiencing joy and relaxing and walking. And I tell them that companies should have social events because people communicate then, they bond, and ideas come at very strange times. So you are absolutely right. Divine ideas do not come from serious, focused attention and stress. Stress is the great killer of ideas. Yes. Tension. I want to echo what you said. Stress is the killer of great ideas. Exactly. So we definitely learned that, I think, from the Parsha. Right. So actually, I'm going to interrupt one second because your question was what would Yitoo say to Moshe. And in fact, now that I'm thinking of it, thanks to what you just said now, that's exactly what Yitoo is telling him. He said you can't solve the people's problems when you're sitting there for hours a day mired in their problems and you've got to delegate so you have some free time. You have some free time. And indeed, that's what happens. When Moshe frees himself from the burden of taking care of everybody's problems, all of a sudden, lo and behold, we get the Ten Commandments. Divine thought kicks in once Moshe could step away from the stressful management of the people. So that's what Yitoo would suggest. He would say, I'm not going to tell you how to distribute the food. You're smarter than me on that. But I will tell you that your solutions are coming from stressful thinking. And if you could connect to a place of play and fun, amusement, etc., then new solutions are going to show up. And you know what? Hey, surprise me too, would Yitoo say to them. So here's an example, Alicia, and we'll go back to Einstein. And I want to explain his famous equation and how he proved it. I have a minor connection with Einstein. I studied at Princeton for a couple of years. I did my PhD there. Einstein, of course, studied, taught, worked, researched at Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. And I used to love to jog, and I would jog by his little house. He had passed away, but his house is still there. It remains. It's on a golf course, a lovely place. And I thought about how he reached his amazing breakthroughs. He did it on his bike. He wasn't walking. He was a bike rider. And riding on his bike one day, this is maybe apocryphal, but I think it's true. Riding on his bike, it was at night, and he turned the light on. And he thought to himself, so I'm turning the light on. How fast is the light going? 186,000 miles a second. That's the speed of light. But wait, I'm going at 10 kilometers an hour on my bike. So the light is going faster, right? The light is going 186,000 kilometers per second plus 10 kilometers per hour, which is speed of the bike. And he said, what if that's not true? What if the speed of light is a constant? Let's call the speed of light C. So let's say there's a body like the sun or something, and it's a mass, it's a big thing, and it's radiating energy. It's radiating energy, and that energy is causing it to lose mass because the principle says there's not something from nothing. It's losing mass. How fast is it losing mass? So the energy is, we'll call that L, loss of energy. And it's losing energy divided by the speed of light squared and the speed of light is a constant. So mass equals L over C squared. Or E, we'll call it, instead of loss of energy. Energy equals mass times C squared. He came to his theory not by proving the equation, but by a thought experiment, by kind of assuming it and by a leap of faith. And I think it was a divine inspiration because it saved the world, Elisha. Einstein wrote a famous letter to Roosevelt saying, the Germans, Werner Heisenberg, famous physicist, they're working on a bomb based on E equals MC squared on nuclear energy, nuclear efficient. We've got to do the same. If they get the bomb before we do, God forbid. Roosevelt passed away, but Truman, actually Roosevelt did initiate the Manhattan Project and found the money for it and hid it, kept it all secret. And Oppenheimer, who was Jewish, built Los Alamos, a whole installation, a whole city. And nobody knew what the heck was going on there. And Elisha, Einstein, Jewish, Oppenheimer, Jewish, Richard Feynman, Jewish, Leo Szilard, Jewish. The Jews ran that down project, Elisha. So we defeated the Nazis because the bomb ended Japan, ended the war in Japan, but basically signified American victory. Long story, a long story, but it was based on Einstein's leap of faith and his simplification. He won the Nobel Prize in 1905. Einstein was one of 200-plus Jewish people who won Nobel Prizes in science out of 900, more than 20%. That's incredible. Yes, that is incredible. Yes, so on the bike, as it was on the bike, that's where our best ideas come from. So either if you don't have a bike, you can walk. You can even jog, or get on a bike, or just get into the shower, or just do something fun. And whenever, I think, back to the theme of this workshop, simplicity, whenever, and it happens a lot, so whenever our thinking gets intense, mired, confused, that happens a lot. It's part of being human. I think what's really important is to remember, just to have this memory there, that right now, we're not thinking straight. Right now, we're mired in human thought, and as soon as we can get out of this state of stress, of stressful thought, new thinking will present itself, and much higher quality, divine thinking will be made available to us. And Einstein said something else worth noting, I think. He knew a lot about physics, but he said, imagination is more important than knowledge. And there's a lot to that. In academic life, we push knowledge, and in schools, Alicia, this troubles me a lot, we push knowledge on our little kids, rather than spurring their imagination. We teach them how to write the letter Aleph correctly, and insist that they do it, rather than let them experiment and try their own ways in writing it. I wish in school we would put that big sign up in every school, in the teachers' room, the coffee room. Imagination is more important than knowledge, and I think it's even almost a religious principle. Of course it is, and the reason why it's a religious principle is that, you know, it works better in the Hebrew, but the human being was created in God's image, and image is a source of imagination. So, b'tzalmo b'dmuto, there's an imagination there. So, humans were created with God's imagination, and imagination is how we connect to divine thought. I want to bring another example of this, Alicia, and move on toward the second gift that you noticed in the Parsha. The first gift is simplicity, but the second gift is joy, and they're related, because when we simplify and achieve clarity, there is a feeling of joy. People have great ideas, but there is an immense feeling of happiness that arises from it. So, Alicia, on Tuesday we had a wonderful event here at Be'er Havta. Amot played a song by Yonatan Geffen, and interspersed with quotes from one of your favorite people, your favorite person, Adi Gordon, Aleph Dalet Gordon, a great thinker, Zionist, pioneer, and I noted one of those little quotes. Four words, and that gave me great clarity at that moment, and I'll tell you why. Let's translate it first. Be a partner in creation. Be a partner in creation. Creation, how this amazing world, how the universe was formed, and who formed it, and how, and when, and so on. And from that quote, I understand that creation never ended. It wasn't just the Big Bang, and that's it. Creation is ongoing, and we are creators and partners of God. And if you're a partner of God, it tells you what you need to do in this world. You need to create, and create means create value. Be a blessing for people. Just very quickly. Last week, a wonderful man passed away. He was in his 90s. His name is Arno Penzias. Like so many Jewish scientists, son of refugees, came to America. He worked at Bell Labs. He was a physicist, and he made an earth-shaking discovery that's relevant to the notion of creation. At Bell Labs in Holmgren in New Jersey, there was a radio telescope, and it was designed to receive radio signals from a variety of sources. And Penzias had the idea that it could be used as a telescope to understand the universe. And so he and a colleague, Robert Wilson, listened to the signals from this sensitive radio telescope, and there was a lot of white noise, a lot of static. This is a true story. They went out to the telescope, climbed on it, and cleaned off the pigeon droppings because they figured the pigeons were messing up the signal. And they cleaned off the pigeon droppings, and they still heard this white noise, this static background noise. And in the end, they figured out, whoa, we know what this is. This is microwave radiation from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. They discovered this, and they were the first to provide empirical proof that there was a Big Bang. Because until then, there were all kinds of theories how the universe started, who started, and complex theories. And this finally solved the puzzle. Simple idea of everything condensed into a tiny, tiny space, and then exploded and expanded. And this is how the universe was created. Arno Penzias won a Nobel Prize for it in 1978. So we have a simple physical explanation for the Big Bang, but who created the Big Bang? Who created the Big Bang? The simplest assumption and theory is there is a creator. And we are partners with our creator in the work of creation every day, every hour. Yes, and I think one of the biggest differences between the Big Bang theory and the Taurus theory is not if it's 13.8 billion years versus 5,784 years. That's minor stuff. I think the biggest difference is that in a Jewish perspective, creation indeed continues, meaning the world is recreated anew every moment, anew, and is being refreshed all the time. It's almost like doing a refresh in a computer software. And this idea changes the whole concept of time and linear time. But here we're getting complex, and if we're getting complex, that means we're losing God. Well, there's a simple example to what you just said, Elisha. As I've been mentioning, I'm 81 years old. I feel that I'm a different person from the Shlomo that existed 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 60 years ago. And actually, physically, biologically, that is the case. According to biologists, every 100 days or so, the cells of our body are replaced. They're constantly happening because cells are constantly dying and being replaced. And we are physically, biologically, different people now than we were last year or 10 years ago. And by the way, two Israeli scientists, Moshe Hershko and Aron Cheranover, were those who discovered what happens, what causes cells to die and then be replaced. Nobody else was interested, and they did that at Technion. So yeah, we are being recreated ourselves as part of the great mystery and puzzle of creation. Yes, yes. And then the big question will be, so how does a new cell know how to be a finger or fingernail or an eye or a hair? And so the answer, the scientific answer would obviously be our genetic code and DNA, etc. And the Jewish answer to that, which is not a contradiction, it's just on a different level of thinking. The Jewish answer would be imagination. There is this image or imagination to which everything is responding to in the world. And if we're able to imagine a different, truly imagine, a different reality, reality will change, will change. But we're stuck in our old imagination and we're unable yet to imagine something new. Every time there's a big breakthrough in the history of humanity, it's because someone imagined something new. When someone imagined the wheel, the wheel was created and changed the course of human history. In the Torah we have human beings who created the first brick. It's in the story of the Tower of Babel. And so often a whole new imagination appeared of building, of being industrious and building. So I think we need to end. Am I correct? We do. We have a couple of minutes. Okay, okay. So maybe one thing, not only do we have simplicity, not only do we have joy, we now have something new. We have imagination that also came up from this podcast for people to really let loose, free their imagination and see how new thinking can come about with not through knowledge as you said, Shlomo, but through imagination. Exactly. And this is actually an exercise that we have our students do and which I taught our managers when I was teaching managers as a useful exercise. I want you to take your cell phone or your digital camera and I want you all to take a picture of the future. Where are you in five years? And I want you to be very precise about the details. The room, the weather, the desk, your clothing. Picture yourself as you wish yourself to be in the appropriate setting in five years and describe it. Because imagination needs to be pragmatic. It needs to be detailed and real. Lots of us have fuzzy ideas, but imagination, creativity is defined as something novel and useful. So you can have new ideas, but then you have to translate that into something useful, something that is pragmatic, something that's not just a wild idea. And then you need to be really practical. That step, by the way, between imagination and useful practical feet on the ground is not easy, but it takes practice. And our minds are like biceps. If you exercise your biceps, they get stronger. If you exercise your creative mind and your imagination, it gets stronger and it becomes a habit. And again, I think this comes from the Torah and as you notice, maybe we should end with this. You connect simplicity and joy. When you use your imagination, you achieve this clarity, this insight, this simplicity of understanding. There is a true feeling of inherent joy in this. And if you experience this, once you experience it, you try to recreate it again and again. And this happens to me fairly often, especially in reading the Parshah and reading your Droshod and talking to you. This joy of clarity and insight, and the Hasidim brought us that. I have to say, that's their simple idea. What is Hasidism? Worship God with joy, with happiness. Right, right. What a great place to end. So we want to wish you, in spite of the very complex times that we're living in, just knowing, imagining a world in which there is simplicity and joy and go out either on a bike ride or walk around a lake, if you have a lake. If not, it rains tremendously in Israel so we have all kinds of temporary lakes and puddles all over the place. Find a good puddle and just walk around it and connect with your imagination. And may God be revealed to all of us through simplicity, joy and imagination. Amen. Bye everybody. Bye bye.