podcast #17 Behaalotcha

Shalom everyone. Welcome back. It's our 17th podcast. My name is Elisha and I'm sitting here with Professor Shlomo Eital and discussing Parashat Beha'alotcha. That's the parasha that's used, the third parasha in the book of B'mitbar, Numbers. And it's an amazing, amazing, amazing parasha. So Shlomo, Shalom. Shalom Elisha. And Elisha, Beha'alotcha is the 36th parasha out of 54. So we're exactly two-thirds of the way through the Torah. And we haven't even started our journey yet. That's right. So in your amazing parasha, you begin with a caution, a big stop sign. Deep parasha ahead. Not suitable for everyone. Why? Wow. I love your comment that you know we're two-thirds of the way through the Torah and we haven't really started the journey. And just to give the context, in Parashat Beha'alotcha, the journey in the wilderness actually begins. For over a year now, they've been camping at the foot of Mount Sinai. And now, after two parashot of getting ready to leave, in this parasha, they're still getting ready to leave, but also finally leaving. So that's what Shlomo meant by two-thirds into the Torah and they haven't even started the journey. Why? So why? Yeah, that's a... I also mentioned in the parasha in another place that the truth, the deep, deep places, is really hard to talk about. It's so easy to talk about everything around the truth. You know, all kinds of things in the periphery of the conversation. But actually talking about the inner truth of something is really difficult. And some people are, you know, don't want to make it too personal, but some people are not into going that deep, and that's okay. Absolutely. So in the parasha, there are so many fascinating things that happen. But basically, I'm really interested in the cloud, and you spend a lot of time as well. The cloud rises. They don't leave until they get God's direction, God's indication of where to go. And it struck me, Alicia, we have the divine cloud, the cloud of the spiritual cloud, the cloud of God's wisdom and love 3,000 years ago. And we have the Amazon cloud of now. And Amazon Web Services were founded 20 years ago. Jeff Bezos, the founder, is brilliant. He foresaw the need for cloud services and made a fortune. He recently just launched his $500 million yacht, which I feel is a bit of a scandal, because a lot of people could be fed with that. But in any case, look at the contrast between the cloud, which is a spiritual cloud giving us spiritual guidance in our journey, and the cloud, the bitnet, the byte cloud, the Amazon cloud, which basically is trying to store all of our knowledge. And just one last word about that, Alicia. I looked up, you know, I'm a number guy, I'm an economist. Nothing I can do about that. The cloud has 100 zettabytes of data in it. A byte is like a zero one. And 100 zettabytes is one with 23 zeros, which is a number so big that we can't even comprehend it. And so we have all this knowledge there, right? Meanwhile, the world has climate crisis, we have wars, hungers, famine, all these things with 100 zettabytes of information on the cloud. So I'm afraid the Amazon cloud is not the answer. We need God's cloud. Shlomo, that was brilliant. That was really brilliant. It's such a great contrast between the cloud, God's cloud, and today's modern cloud. What would we talk about if we were writing this, if we were talking about this 20 years ago? You know, one of the images is interesting in saying Amazon cloud. For a long time, I used the metaphor of the iCloud, the Apple cloud. I think that's the iCloud, you know, iPhone, etc. And I think that's where kind of maybe the secret lies. And there's the divine cloud and there's the iCloud, the me cloud. So there's a qualitative difference between divine wisdom and accumulated knowledge. Knowledge is good stuff. It's good stuff. And I don't want to pretend to be an expert because I'm not an expert in any way, shape or form. But from my really limited understanding, AI, at the end of the day, is an accumulative knowledge that human beings have ever created and will ever create, and the ability to add it all up to something that's greater than all of its parts. And that's wonderful. That's great. But yet it's based on existing knowledge and knowledge that will continue to be accumulated. But wisdom and knowledge are not the same. And wisdom is, in Hebrew we say, yesh me'ayim. It's something that comes from the infinite, from the not existing yet, from the non-existent. And knowledge is something that comes from data, something that comes from, something that exists. And knowledge is very good. Knowledge is really, really important. But wisdom is our ability to think totally outside of the box, take us to whole new places. And we're talking about a journey here. This whole story is a story about a mysterious journey from the known into the unknown. We can't have the known guide us into the unknown. These are two very different kinds of wisdoms. Absolutely. In your G'drashah, you say that the Torah is not a history book, although it recounts history. It is an ultimate guidebook for Am Yisrael. And by that you mean that the journey in the wilderness, the journey toward the holy land, it's somewhat metaphorical. It's an archetypal journey going into the unknown. And we can use that because we all have engaged in such journeys. My wife and I did that in 1967. And we made aliyah to Israel at a very dramatic, unusual time. And Elisha, my eye was caught in this parasha by Moshe's breakdown. Rabbi Sacks calls it a breakdown. Moshe hits bottom with the people of Israel. I'm going to read what he says. And I found this very, very personal because I encountered something similar. Moshe says, why have you brought this evil on your servant? He's talking to God, complaining to God. Why have I failed to find favor in your eyes that you place the burden of this whole people on me? Did I conceive this whole people? The Hebrew is, did I give birth to this whole people? Did I give birth to it that you should say to me, carry it in your lap as a nurse carries a baby? Where can I find meat to give this whole people? And they cry to me saying, give us meat to eat. That's what they wanted. They don't remember the slavery in Egypt. They just remember the meat they had and the squash. I cannot carry this people on my own. It is too heavy for me. If this is what you are doing to me, then if I've found favor in your eyes, this is amazing, kill me now. And let me not look upon this, my evil. This is Moshe's low point. Absolutely. And there's a real lesson here, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Well, I'm just wondering, is this a low point or a high point? It sounds like a low point, sounds like a breaking point where Moshe is like, I can't take it anymore. And I've come to discover that low points only seem low at that moment. They're really very, very high. And we break right before something brand new is created. And to realize that we are not responsible for, we're not responsible for the world. We care for the world. We care for others. We certainly do. I don't want to suggest that we have no responsibility over other people. We certainly, certainly do. But at the end of the day, Moshe's big lesson, our own lesson is that we're not God. We're not God. And Moshe's learning here and realizing here that it's not his role to carry the people. That's God's role. And the question is, what is Moshe's role? And I'm not so sure that I know. I don't know yet. Hopefully, hopefully I'll have more clarity about that at some point. But Moshe realizes, I've done my best, my ultimate best. I don't know what to do now. I just don't know what to do now. And I want to say one more thing about that. When he said, you know, if that's the case, kill me. That's wonderful. I want to applaud Moshe for saying that. It's like, do me a favor, God. Kill that part in me that thinks it's responsible for the whole world because it's leading me to despair. I just can't do it. But I can't let it go that easily. So help me, God. Kill that part of my ego, that part of my thinking that thinks that I'm responsible for everything. That part, kill it. Please, I can't. Do me a favor. Help that part die. I need to connect to new wisdom. But until I can kill that part within me, I won't be able to connect with the wisdom, with the deeper wisdom of how should I be with the people. And that's true for parenthood, and that's true for being part of a couple, that's true for leading a kiilah, it's true for everything. So Elisha, there's a modern counterpart to Moshe's cry. And that's in the startup. And I've seen this so many times. In a startup, Moshe was the leader of a startup. He was the founder of a startup. And he took the people to Har Sinai, to Mount Sinai, and they received the Torah. Now it's a different ballgame. Now they have to be organized, bureaucracy, tribes, leaders, advisors, judges. This is a different ballgame. This is not Moshe's game. And Elisha, I've seen so many startups with a fatal illness called Founder's Disease. The founder who had the idea, and he has a couple of friends, and they do something amazing. And then they have to build up an organization with a hundred people, and pay taxes, and follow the regulations. And man, is that boring. And the people, the workers, complain. And there are two kinds of founders. Founders like Moshe who say, that's it. This is not for me. I've done my share. I'm out of here. And that works very well. Google brought in Eric Schmidt after the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, realized they did something brilliant, but they don't know how to run a big company. So they brought in somebody from IBM. And many founders create this baby, as Moshe calls it, his baby. And they're not going to give the baby up for adoption. And the company fails, because they cannot run it. This amazing modern lesson here from 3,000 years ago. And you know what? That's the story of Key Latvijas, that we're celebrating 20 years this year. And our big, big celebration is two weeks from now, on the 15th of June. And if you're in the country, we would love you to join. It's going to be a huge party, and a show, and a concert hall. And when we started 20 years ago, we were deeply inspired. There were a bunch of us. There was a number of families, and myself. I was the rabbi. And thank God, thank God for this one woman, whose name is Aviva. Aviva came in, and she was working with me as a volunteer at first, but then realizing, we need exactly what you were saying. And she took over the day-to-day running of this startup. Had it been up to me, Key Latvijas would not have survived, and would not have thrived as it has. And this is a great opportunity to thank Aviva for taking this baby, and nursing it, and carrying it, and really taking good care of it. That's a great metaphor. Now that we're 20 years old, we can actually put our finger on it. I can tell you exactly when Aviva started working here, and maybe that's the source of our success. So in your Drosha, Elisha, you speak about the cloud, the pillar of God, and you say that God, the Divine, continues to speak to us, and it is time we listened, because we don't always hear. And the idea here is that the cloud is still there, not the Amazon cloud, the Divine cloud, and it's speaking to us, but boy, we sure have trouble really, really listening to it. You talk about an inner sensation of God's presence, and there's scientific proof of that. Let me explain. So in my own life, I've often debated about hard decisions, and I've found it's very helpful not to think about them, not to overly think about them, to feel them from the gut. And then you hear a very small, quiet voice that's really hard to hear, and it's telling you what you should do. And you have to listen to it. And this is science. It's amazing. Let me quote a brilliant scientist who wrote about this. So her name is Judith Orloff. She's a doctor. Yeah, I know Judith Orloff. Judith Orloff. She wrote a book called The Empath Survival Guide and the Guide to Intuitive Health. She says that, in my private practice, I work with women executives who come to me to develop their intuition. They see it as a superpower to use in all decisions and work, as well as a guide how to be good leaders and organizers. And she explains the origin of female intuition, because Alicia, both you and I know, women have better intuition than we men. And there's a reason. In evolution, men use clubs to attain their goals, and women use their brains. In the brain, there's something called the corpus callosum. In the brain, there is gray matter. Those are the neurons. And we get those at birth, and basically that's what we have. But the corpus callosum is white. And that is replaced, and it does grow. And women, this is a fact, women have a bigger corpus callosum than men do. What does the corpus callosum do? We have the right brain and left brain, and they communicate. And the more they communicate, the better we think and the better intuition we have. And the superhighway is the corpus callosum that joins them. And women have a bigger one. So it's physically true that women are better at intuition because their brains are more connected. Which means, by the way, that God is a woman, among other things. Yeah, that's very beautiful. Ken, there are so many things that you just said now, and so many things I want to tap into. And obviously, at best, I'll tap into one. I'm a firm believer, firm believer, that our brains were not built for creative thinking. Our brain was built for pragmatic thinking, meaning, I need to drive from here to there. How do I do it? I need to get a certain thing accomplished. How do I do it? The big ideas don't come from the brain. They come through the brain, but not from the brain. They come from, you know, metaphorically speaking, obviously, they come from the cloud. But the cloud needs a receptor. So most people think of our brains as the source of knowledge and wisdom. But what if the brain was actually more of an antenna? The antenna was basically, if the antenna is clean, and what do I mean by clean? Meaning, there's not too much overthinking. There's not too much worry. There's not too much data floating all the time. The antenna could start receiving from the cloud, from the G cloud, the God cloud. And then great things happen. So when you're saying, so often when we are stuck, when we're on a crossroads, on a junction in our life, we say, well, let's think. Let's think this through. I'd love to say, let's not. Let's really not, because our thinking will give us practical advice. It may even provide us with knowledge, but it won't provide us with wisdom. And now, when wisdom does come to us, it appears through thinking. It comes from our brains, because the brain is the antenna. So obviously, it comes from that. It's just like the radio receiver. The woman, Tina Turner, may she rest in peace, when she sings, she's not sitting in her little transistor, sitting there with her microphone and singing. She's somewhere else singing, maybe even 20, 30 years ago. But our radio is simply receiving data, information, receiving and sometimes even wisdom. Our brains are the same thing. And we know with our radio, when the radio is not tuned pretty well, then we get a lot of static, and there's no clarity. When the radio is tuned, and suddenly we hear it loud and clear and really, really beautiful and crisp. So yes, just not to overthink. In other words, what we're discussing here is how do we connect to this cloud? What is this cloud? How do we connect to it? And one thing that you're suggesting, we're both suggesting, is don't overthink. I wouldn't say don't think at all, but thinking is overrated, certainly in modernity and in the West. Small footnote to that, Alicia. So the same Dr. Orloff, Judith Orloff, in her book makes this point. We have neurons in our brain, but believe it or not, we have neurons in our stomach as well. We have neurons in our gut that also send messages. I thought that was amazing. So when we talk about gut feeling, there really is such a thing as a gut feeling. We have these neurons there. I don't know what they're doing there or how they got there, but she's an eminent scientist, and she knows what she's talking about. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that's beautiful. And again, it doesn't mean that our gut is always right. It kind of just means that just as our brain in the head is a great antenna and a great receiver for the G cloud, the God cloud, the gut is also a receiver. And I would suggest noting the heart. The heart is also a great receiver, and it doesn't mean that wisdom is in the heart. It doesn't come from the heart, but the heart is another place in the body where an antenna is there, and it's a tuned to a certain kind of information and certain kind of wisdom. I want to tell you a personal story, and it relates to Moshe's breakdown or Moshe's desperation. So I came to Israel, and I was given a job, even while I was in the U.S., finishing my degree at Tel Aviv University, which was just being formed then, a new university, and used to be a shulchan, annex of the university. And I got a letter offering me a job. Just before we left, after we got married, I got information that I was being fired before I had the job. So we were going to Israel without a job. Eventually it worked out. It turned out to be a mistake. But Elisha, as an academic, as you know, you go through stages of promotion. Lecturer, senior lecturer, senior lecturer of tenure, associate professor, professor. At every stage, every single stage, I was turned down. I was told I was not adequate. I was not up to being an economics teacher. And part of the reason was that I was doing economics differently, trying to understand how people behave at a time when economics was built on math, mathematical models. And each time I was turned down, I have the letters in front of me. In fact, one of them was posted in front of my desk at work, telling me why I'm inadequate. And I felt like Moshe, because in Israel, if you're turned down for tenure, that means you're not worthy and nobody else is going to give you a job. So you have to take your family and leave when you want to live in your own country. That was desperation. I share Moshe's feeling of despair. But I fought through it. I persisted. I heard the voice saying, don't give up. I once did a marathon, which also taught me to persist because it was really hard from the 20th mile. I was cramping and out of gas totally. I finished it. I identify with Moshe, and you're absolutely right. Sometimes great things come out of failure. You kind of plumb the depths of yourself and you figure out who you are and what you're made of. And then you tell yourself a new story. Despite it all, I fought through this. I managed. I finished 26 miles. I managed to get tenure. And what was, I'm curious, what was the, you fought, you fought for this cause. What did you do? What was the nature of this fighting? I'm trying to see what's the wisdom here. I worked harder. I worked harder and I learned to play the game a little better. And I wrote papers more along the lines of what was acceptable at the time. Because economics at the time, and this is 40, 45 years ago, wasn't interested in psychology or how people behave. And it's ironic, Alicia, because all of economics now is behavioral. We've discovered people. Economics is about people. Wow. Amazing. But I wasn't through then. So I just kind of shifted direction a bit and played the game and did what had to be done. Sometimes you have to do that. So what you're saying is, is basically that you were, you were bringing some new wisdom that wasn't yet, the system here was operating on old knowledge and you were bringing new wisdom that the system didn't really want to hear yet. And in order to stay in the system, you kind of had to play the game and kind of adapt to the existing knowledge. But then at some point you did feel that you could bring, you could really bring forth the wisdom that was driving you. I did. Together with a colleague, Ben Gilbert, I actually started an academic organization called the Society for Advancement of Behavioral Economics. And it still exists. And then we have a large group of people who believe in trying to understand people and how they behave. That's beautiful. That's great. So what else? What else do we have here? So getting back to the cloud, and the cloud is a divine presence. And we have the cloud in us, all of us. Sometimes hard to find. Sometimes it's harder to see than others. You do spiritual counseling, Elisha. How do you help people discover their own cloud when they come to you, sometimes in great sadness and despair? Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, you know, one of the quotes that I love, anyone who's been following, you know, my Darshot and stuff, one of the quotes that I love is how, you know, the Pasukh that talks about Moshe in Hebrew, Moshe, as he walked, went, approached the mist, i.e. the cloud, and I shall shun my Elohim, in which God dwells. So there's like, for me, there's an axiom here, that God dwells in the mist, in the cloud. And what it means, what it came, what it's come to mean for me is not to fear the cloud and the mist. And what's the cloud and the mist? The cloud and the mist is times of great unclarity. Like you're describing this tremendous breakdown. The breakdown is a form of a mist. And we don't know what to do anymore. We don't see a path. We don't see, what's the next step? I'm clueless. I just don't know what to do. That's mist. And knowing that God is in the mist. Now, why is God in the mist? Because wisdom is not knowledge. We hate the mist. We hate the unknown. We hate not knowing. We hate not having control. So we're pulling any source of knowledge that we have in order to illuminate our path. Because we just can't stand not knowing. And that's a big mistake. It's a big mistake because God is in the mist. Wisdom is in the mist. So in terms of counseling, I think the first thing is not to fear the mist and the unknown and the confusion. And knowing that it's scary. Knowing that it's painful. And yet knowing that's where God is. And what does that mean? It means that it's from the mist that a whole new approach will present itself. A whole new path. A whole new truth. A whole new level of growth will present itself. Leading us to our next stop in the journey. So it'll be great if I could tell people, and myself, when I say people, obviously including myself, oh yeah, just follow the cloud. Follow the yellow brick road. They too were not sure where they were going. It was a very confusing journey in the Wizard of Oz. So following the cloud and the pillar of fire sounds beautiful, romantic, and sounds easy. It is not easy at all. It's not easy because we don't want to follow the cloud. We want to follow something concrete. And Moshe, I think that's what Moshe's breakdown is he thought he was meant to lead. You're not meant to lead. The cloud leads. What you need to carry is not the people. You need to carry the confusion. You need to carry the I don't know. Carry the, you know, I'm lost. And whoever's able to carry that, out of that, new clarity will be born. A very quick example of what you just said about going into the mist. There are two little countries with five million or eight million people, Israel and Singapore. They both were established because a leader looked into the mist and saw great uncertainty, 1948, and decided to declare the country, no matter what, against all advice, against the odds. And Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore did the same thing in 1965. And no one would help Singapore except Israel. And we sent Tan Hanim paratroopers to help and organize their army. And Singapore now is a very wealthy country. And Israel too is a relatively wealthy country. And these two little countries exist only because their leaders did not fear going into the mist. I did not. I didn't realize this connection between Israel and Singapore that there was a historical connection. And if we're really talking metaphorical, it's really interesting that they sent paratroopers. The paratroopers land from the cloud. You know, the airplanes like let them loose in the clouds and they just come trickling down onto the on into the earth. So that's really that's that's that's very inspiring. And it's really beautiful. So there's so much more to talk about. But our time is up. And so I want to wish everyone a happy cloud. And just remember, it's not the I cloud, it's the G cloud, the G with a capital G. And it's not the Amazon cloud either. It really is the cloud of confusion, of not knowing, of allowing ourselves to go into the unknown. And having faith, that's where faith kicks in, having faith that it's through this confusion, through this not knowing, that our new path is going to present itself. So Shlomo, Todah Rabah, thank you for this inspiration. Todah Elisha, words of wisdom. We must heed what you said. Amen.