I recently heard a podcast with mega-coach and serial entrepreneur Tony Robbins in which he identified the three decisions he sees people make every moment of their lives:

1. What do you focus on?

2. What does it mean?

3. What are you going do about it?

We often think about “life decisions” as major forks in the road like career or marriage choices, and weighty ethical dilemmas, but from this perspective, any moment of any day of your life is likely full of choices to make.

• What of the many things you could focus on will you focus on?

• How will you choose to interpret what you’ve chosen to look at?

• How will you choose to alter your behavior as a result of your interpretation?

Since the most important difference between the artificial intelligence (AI) of machines and the real intelligence (RI) of humans is the agency humans possess and the identity that is forged through those choices, these three domains of choice can be seen as emblematic of our humanity.

I want to suggest that they correspond to the three Hebrew words:

• khokhma-חכמה

• bina-בינה, and

• da’at-דעת,

the three central words for intelligence.1

Before we continue, an important disclaimer:

The purpose of this post and my last one is not to prophesy an imminent AI armageddon, nor to discourage its use. My intent is to use the Divinely precise language of Hebrew to identify the uniquely human dimensions of intelligence, which are more important than ever for us to recognize and cultivate. The goal is that we preserve and deepen our RI so that we can use AI to amplify our positive impact on the world without losing ourselves in the process.2

OK, here we go:

1. What Do You Focus On? (khokhma-חכמה)

This was our topic last post. The world is big and complicated. At any given time, all people have multiple things going on and must choose what they focus on. Life is constantly demanding from us that we distinguish between what’s important and what’s more important.3 If we don’t learn to do this, we will instinctively chase the closest, shiniest object.

Especially in the looming “Age of Abundance,” our modern world has made this work more difficult and more vital. Due to our overwhelming access to information, goods and services, combined with algorithms ingeniously trained to irresistibly put them in front of us at all times, we now bear even more responsibility in discerning what we should be pursuing and when’s the right time to pursue it.

This ability of know what we need and appreciate when we find it is called in Hebrew khokhma-חכמה. The Zohar teaches us that this is alluded to in the letters that make up khokhma-חכמה which can be reordered to spell koakh mah-כח מה, the “power of ‘what?’” Modern technology gives its users access to the entire universe, but it is the user who must now more then ever, choose what he’s looking for, and care enough to look in the first place. AI does not solve the wisdom problem for us. It amplifies it.

What else makes human intelligence real intelligence?

Subscribe now

2. What Does it Mean? (Bina-בינה)

The appreciation of knowledge is what fuels people to seek out and absorb ideas from the world around them, but what’s meant to happen after they have done so?

“I found the information I was looking for…what am I supposed to do with it?”

My father has mentioned to me on multiple occasions that he has hired graduates from the fanciest of Ivy League universities, who produce beautiful slide decks with complex mathematical analyses to back them up, but too often, when he asks them “what does it all mean?,” they don’t know what he’s asking them for.

The problem is that for most people, school was entirely about the acquisition of knowledge. We listened to teachers talk. We took notes. We crammed, took tests, cranked out papers, rinsed, and repeated for two decades or so.

Technological changes over the last 30 years have for the most part obliterated this model. Students tend to feel, now more than ever, that they can just listen to recordings at 2x speed, watch a YouTube or Khan Academy video, or just ChatGPT to get the content they need.

Let’s say that they’re right.4 They can get to the information they need. What would be the next step? What is one meant to do with a new piece of information he’s learned? In Hebrew, the word for this next step is bina-בינה. Bina is what deepens, broadens, and enriches understanding with insight.5 Bina is the process of meaning-making.

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists and teachers of the 20th century, explained that most intelligent people are satisfied with merely “knowing things.” What makes truly brilliant people brilliant is not that they’re necessarily smarter, but that they consistently ask themselves and their teachers, “OK fine, but what does this mean???”

Whereas wisdom (khokhma) is the absorption of ideas, understanding (bina) develops only through the digestion of those ideas. I can watch a video on how to fix my car’s engine, but that does not mean I will understand how it works, or why I would be fixing a particular problem in a certain way and not any other. To get to bina, I must question every step along the way. There is no shortcut to understanding how an engine works without breaking it apart into its pieces, and putting it back together. This is why the word “bina-בינה” shares the same root letters as “boneh-בונה,” which means “build.” Bina can only emerge from a person deconstructing and reconstructing things and ideas.

It’s for this reason that making mistakes along the way are required to arrive at insight. Your mistakes are your tuition in the school of insight.6

While AI mimics this process of trial and error when it’s being trained, it never arrives at meaning — only at a semantic structure that is meaningful to humans who unpack it. The model’s mistakes along the way are also meaningless because there is no self behind the model to suffer through those mistakes, which renders the model’s achievements meaningless as well. This was recently noted by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in his comments about AI art.

It is this process of working through an idea, embodying it, experiencing it, contemplating why it is the way it is, asking why isn’t it any other way, misunderstanding it on the way to understanding it, figuring out how it applies in other areas — that produces the quintessentially human bina that is the source of meaning in our lives.

3. What are You Going to Do About it? (Da’at-דעת)

The hallmark of maturity according to Jewish law is not khokhma or bina, but a third thing called da’at. Da’at is your connection to the heart of the matter, your sense of why it matters, and what you are going to do about it. A person can be brilliant in his curiosity and focus, and profoundly insightful in his understanding of its meaning, but if he does not know how he should act as a result — or knows, but doesn’t actually do so — he is essentially a child.7

The final stage of real intelligence is the integration of knowledge into your perspective, experience, behavior and identity. This downwards vector from the brain into the body is what is known as da’at.

This integration of what we know in our heads into our muscle memory is symbolized by the straps of the head tefillin that form a “ד“ for “דעת“ near the brain stem and flow down from there to our belly buttons and loins, representing the merging of our wisdom with our most basic and primal faculties.

“Real intelligence” must ultimately be judged by our actions, not our published academic papers or lip service. The more educated we are, the more our actions should reflect what we’ve learned.

Da’at is where we most clearly can see that artificial intelligence is eminently useful but inescapably artificial. Models have no skin in the game. They don’t have to live up to anything they say. They don’t feel bad when they’ve hallucinated. They don’t have to defend why they gave you a different answer to your prompt than they did to me with the same prompt. They don’t have any true opinion because they don’t bear any responsibility. They can’t bear responsibility because they don’t truly exist as an entity, and therefore have no identity. They are merely models of human reasoning.

We, however, possess all of these. We have a whole lot of skin in the game. We are taken to task when we don’t live up to what we say we will. As we should. We are called out for saying one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. We are expected to form opinions, and take actions based on those opinions. For this, we bear responsibility, and through this we forge our identities.

AI can really help us, but it cannot and will not replace us. Perhaps most importantly, AI will help us come to know who we are and what we are capable of — if we are wise enough to see it.

Share

I first realized that we had a major problem on our hands in the fall of 2012. I had just returned to the US to serve as a rabbi for college students after six years of studying Talmud and Jewish philosophy in Jerusalem, and I was experiencing some culture shock — in the culture I was raised in.

The community I had spent that prior chapter of my life has an attitude towards technology that ranged from “suspicious” to “antagonistic.” Part of this aversion was cultural. Technology is seen by most of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish community in Israel as opening the doors wide to influences that are considered dangerously seductive, particularly to young people.

The other part, however, is principled. Torah study sits at the sacred center of the Orthodox world. Taking a shortcut in learning could be compared to offering a sacrifice from stolen goods.

If you didn’t invest effort to acquire it, how can it be considered yours to offer?

Learning is meant to be hard.1 And hard it was.

There were practically no shortcuts available to us in my yeshiva2.

The fonts of the Talmud come in three sizes: tiny, tinier, and tiniest. Its pages are filled with footnotes and sidenotes, commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries. My flip phone was obviously not equipped with Google Translate, and certainly not with ChatGPT. I had nothing except a thick, physical dictionary to help me break down the dense Aramaic vocabulary devoid of vowels or punctuation.

There were no CliffNotes to the Talmud (thank you, Cliff for getting me through high school and college). And if you’re wondering: what about the ubiquitous Artscroll translation of the Talmud? At that time, it was considered contraband in those hallowed halls.

It doesn’t help that the legal cases that the Talmud deals with are, at first glance, abstruse and archaic. And most challenging for me, the Talmud’s logic is endlessly layered, ever-branching into diverging opinions, and opinions on those opinions. To be honest, after 20 years, I still find Talmud as dizzying as it is dazzling.

Nothing about the external packaging of the Talmud is alluring. I’ve come to absolutely love it, but back then, the only thing pulling me to study it was the millennia-old assurance that there was life-changing meaning to be found in its study.

Any delicious whiff of Divine meaning I had gleaned from the more accessible, contemporary English books on Judaism was sourced in the Talmud and Zohar, and the rich Hebrew library that surrounds them. I felt that I owed it to myself to push through my deep-seated aversion to Talmud that I had developed in my early teenage years. I would never forgive myself for not trying as an adult to break through to the pleasure of learning Talmud.

At some point, it became clear to me that I would only find meaning and relevance in the Talmud through my own concentration, effort, and contemplation. My teachers, supportive as they were, couldn’t concentrate or contemplate on my behalf. The best they could do was answer my questions, correct my mistaken assumptions, and guide me through the infinitely ornate maze of Jewish texts.

After two decades of cramming my way through some of the top public and private schools in the country, I had arrived at the oldest, continuous educational tradition in the world without any way to hack it. My success or failure as a Talmud learner would depend wholly on my own effort.

Back to the fall of 2012 and realizing that the old fashioned, black-and-white Jews of Jerusalem might be onto something:

It was my first full-time job, and I was being onboarded by Rabbi Shmuel Lynn at the University of Pennsylvania. I watched carefully as he led the opening session of his “Maimonides Fellowship,” a 10-part “Intro to Judaism” course that he would recruit for through a combination of charm and a modest stipend that students would “earn” upon completion. After warming up the crowd with some jokes and pop culture references, Rabbi Lynn asked the group to turn to the person next to them and together come up with a definition of "wisdom.”

A third of them instinctively pulled out their phones and Googled “wisdom.”

Wide-eyed, I realized that I was witnessing the beginning of the end of wisdom as we knew it. Even wisdom had been reduced to mere information.

Increasingly, it is dawning on people that while the first two industrial revolutions that spanned from the 18th century through the early 20th century began the process of replacing the human body, the technological revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries, sometimes known as the third and fourth industrial revolutions, have begun replacing the human mind.

The 20th century computing revolution introduced sophisticated calculation, machine automation, and the ever-expanding internet. The 21st century has most notably introduced the world to AI, propelling us at warp speed towards a drastically different future.

It seems like every other post, article and conversation these days is about AI. Some futurists caution — while others romanticize — a post-labor economy in which all or most of us will be out of a job. “It will be okay,” they say, since our needs will be provided for by autonomous robots that do everything that was once upon a time called “work.” And whatever cash or bitcoin we will need will be provided by a mythically benevolent government-like entity that will dole out what is known as UBI (universal basic income) happily ever after. But all of this begs the devastating questions of what will we do with our time? And who will we be without our professional identities?

These third and fourth waves of industrial revolutions have washed over us so quickly, and have so successfully distracted us that most of us have yet to appreciate the proportions of what is happening to us faster than we can keep track.

When those Ivy Leaguers reached for the phones after being prompted to think about wisdom, they were embodying what it meant to be raised in the “Information Age.” Memorization and “knowing stuff” were “no longer a thing” — or so we had been told. The promise of emerging technologies was that we could outsource our memory to the cloud so that we could do the “real thinking.” How wrong that hypothesis was.3

What we are living through now should be appreciated for what it is — a massive step towards not thinking at all. Whereas the Information Age was about outsourcing information retrieval and calculation, the Age of AI is about outsourcing thinking, processing, judgement, and decision-making.4

We are being led to believe that real, human intelligence can be completely substituted with artificial intelligence.

As an educator, I want to challenge that foregone conclusion.

Subscribe now

As we’ve seen already in the Language of Life Series, the richest concepts in Jewish consciousness have a full palette of distinct words in Hebrew to reflect distinct experiences in the world. Sharpening each word against the other can give a person a much more clearer view of life. We’ve seen this most notably in our exploration of joy and speech. There are a multitude of words for both because there are a multitude of kinds of happiness and communication. Each word points to a different one.

Our exploration of what constitutes real intelligence should bring us to the definitions of three essential words in Hebrew for the work of the mind. We’ll see how each of them is brought into high contrast through AI, which does not possess any of them:5

• khokhma-חכמה

• bina-בינה

• da’at-דעת

Let’s start with khokhma.

Khokhma-חכמה

In the “Age of Abundance,” the issue is no longer finding what we need. It is about knowing what we need.

When I was in elementary school, we spent a considerable amount of time learning the Dewey Decimal System for categorizing and finding books in a library. If you knew what book you were looking for, you would have to hunt it down in a physical library, which may or may not have it, by flipping through musty index cards in a yellowed wooden cabinet system. I’m not sure how people looked for books before 1876, when Melvil Dewey made his system public. There were far fewer books and periodicals in print, but they were even more difficult to locate.

Today, there is a veritable deluge of knowledge.6 About ⅔ of humanity could search virtually the entirety of human knowledge with a device they carry in their pockets (when it’s not in their hands). But having access to information is only a precondition to becoming wise. To become wise, a person must know what they want to know, and want to know it in the first place.

The Zohar sees in the word khokhma-חכמה an acronym for koakh mah-כח מה, the “power of asking ‘what?’” Google and ChatGPT can deliver what we ask for, but only if we ask for it — only if we care to ask “what?” Technology will only make humanity smarter if we continue to educate humans to value and seek out knowledge.

And once we do prompt it with our question, and subsequently get sprayed with the firehose of knowledge that is the internet, we must be wise enough to distinguish between “what is important and what is more important.”7 Receiving a bulleted, bolded, and thoroughly emoji’d list in response to my ChatGPT prompt challenges and highlights what wisdom is. It is ultimately I and only I who must sift through its response, and decide how I digest it.

Khokhma-חכמה is usually translated as “wisdom,” but it’s far more precise to translate it as our receptivity to wisdom. Wisdom is less about the content of the wisdom itself, and more about a person’s curiosity and openness — his willingness and ability to absorb it. Unwise people parroting otherwise wise aphorisms are not considered wise precisely because of the way they mishandle wisdom. Wise people think before they speak, unwise people tend to just speak.

Wise people handle wisdom with care because they value wisdom like their life depends on it because it does. This is why the hallmark of a wise person is that he or she “learns from all people,” always thirsty for wisdom, wherever it is found. Wisdom lies in the ascribing value to wisdom, and it is precisely this notion of weight and value that must be trained by humans with real intelligence. This is why artificial intelligence will only ever work with information, but will never replace human wisdom.

The deluge of information we are living through is preparing us for a future beyond our imaginations. In the meantime, whether it is a blessing or a curse depends on our desire and ability to process it.

Stay tuned for an exploration of the two other areas of real intelligence, bina and da’at.

One of the great mysteries of life — biologically, psychologically, and spiritually — is the immense amount of time we spend sleeping and dreaming.

The average person, over the course of their lifetimes, will spend over two decades worth of time sleeping, and nearly 7 years dreaming.1

I invite you to ponder these staggering numbers for a moment.

Why is it necessary for us to dream at all?

Why can’t it be that while our bodies are physically recuperating at night, our minds are completely blank?

If we look at the Torah, the question gets compounded, because dreams occupy an outsized chunk of the narrative — certainly in the book of Bereishit-Genesis.

Why is so much precious ink spilled on the unreal mindscapes of the subconscious?

The cast of characters and the contexts of their dreams are also noteworthy:

• Avimelech, the would-be sexual predator, king of the Philistines.

• A penniless Yaakov, unexpectedly, as he sleeps on rocks while on the run from his brother Esav.

• Lavan, Yaakov’s conniving father-in-law, on his way to do something terrible to his son-in-law.

• Yosef, whose dreams of grandeur backfire, leading ten of his brothers to lower him into a pit with intent to forever extinguish him and his dreams.

• The Head Butler and Baker of Pharaoh’s court in a royal dungeon for less than petty crimes.

• And then there are the dreams of Pharaoh that shook his whole kingdom, and changed the course of world history.

What’s going on with all these dreams, and how might they help us understand our own dreams — or lack thereof?

Subscribe now

The tool we’ve been trying to arm our readers with in the Language of Life series is:

If you have a questions in Life or in Torah, start by looking closely at the Hebrew words themselves.

The word for “dream” in Hebrew is khalom-חַלוֹם.

How might this help us?

Let’s make some connections. Every Hebrew word has a root, a shoresh-שרש, usually made up of three letters.

The words that branch out from that root help us triangulate its meaning. As we better understand the root, our understanding of its individual branches deepen.2 In our case, these connections may initially raise more questions than answers, but ultimately, they’ll help us get closer to the deeper meaning of dreams.

The root chet-lamed-mem (ח-ל-ם) is most immediately recognized as the root of the verb lakhlom-לחלום, which means “to dream,” but is also connected to the word lehakhlim-להחלים, which means “to recover medically,” which naturally begs the question:

What’s the connection between dreams and recuperation?

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains, in his richly linguistic commentary on the Torah, the root ח-ל-ם to mean the reconnection of estranged parts.3

When someone is recovering, their body is reintegrating itself. If a person suffers an injury that isn’t treated, and the limb doesn’t receive enough blood or drain out toxins, he or she could end up requiring amputation, the ultimate disconnection. If the injury is treated on time, however, the body can begin to reconnect the limb into its holistic system. The same is true if a person gets sick. The body first wages war against the disease, and then begins to restore and reintegrate itself. Hakhlama-החלמה, healing, is the reintegration of all of ones parts into the whole, which is the hallmark of health.

Dreaming, then, can be thought of as a sort of spiritual recovery that our psyches must undergo regularly, just as our bodies must every night. Over the course of any given day, and certainly over the course of our lives, all of us become somewhat estranged from our hopes, dreams and aspirations. When we allow ourselves to dream, we are able to reconnect with those aspects of ourselves before they float away from us completely.

This helps us understand a startling statement in the Talmud:

Talmud Berakhot 14a:

…וְאָמַר רַבִּי יוֹנָה אָמַר רַבִּי זֵירָא: כָּל הַלָּן שִׁבְעַת יָמִים בְּלֹא חֲלוֹם נִקְרָא ״רַע״

Rabbi Yonah said in the name of Rabbi Zeira: “Anyone who sleeps soundly for seven days without a dream is called “evil” (רע).

Why would this be? Wouldn’t bad dreams specifically be a problem? What’s wrong with not dreaming at all?

If you meditate on what evil is in its essence, you will eventually arrive at some notion of disassociation and estrangement — the alienation and cruelty from which all bad things stem.4 It’s for this reason that the only day in the 7 Days of Creation that is not called “tov-טוב (good)” is Day 2 — the day of division, when the waters were separated, and nothing new was created. It was Day 2 that introduced the notion of opposites, which never the twain shall meet.

By looking for other words that share the etymology of ra, we find another illustration of evil as disconnection:

The teruah sound of the shofar is meant to conjure for us the staccato, shattered sound of a person uncontrollably sobbing. The word "Teruah-תרועה” comes from the same root as “ra-רע (evil).”5 We cry in a shattered way when our lives feel like broken, disconnected pieces with no hope of ever coming back together.

Now, we can understand why someone who stops dreaming is called “ra.” He’s become so estranged from his higher consciousness that even when his judgmental lower consciousness is unconscious (i.e. he’s sleeping) he still cannot hear his soul’s intuitions.

When people stop dreaming, they’ve closed out all possibilities about who they can become or what the world could be. The lack of dreams is a symptom of a spiritual disconnection that must be healed. As people begin to heal and reintegrate their practical, rational selves with their intuitive, expansive, open selves, they can begin to dream again.

You probably know that Hebrew is built out of consonants. There are 22 consonants that get strung together in the Torah without explicit vowels to indicate how to pronounce them.

The implied vowels have names and symbolic forms called “nekudot-נקודות,” literally, “dots.”

There is a vowel whose name is essentially the same as the word for dream: “kholam-חולם.” It looks just like the letter vav, the sixth letter in the aleph-bet, with a dot hovering above it.

In his Kabbalistic work Sefer Hanikud, Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla (1248-1305) opens his exploration of the meaning of the Hebrew vowels by discussing the kholam, which he describes as the highest and most spiritual of all the vowels — the one that represents the connection to the infinite and impossible-to-capture. The dot on top represents that which is so close but so far, and the vav visually represents the integration down to the ground. The letter vav grammatically means connection by functioning as the conjunction “and,” and the word “vav” actually means a “hook” or “connector.” So, the kholam symbolizes connecting with that which is otherwise disconnected from a person a.k.a dreaming.

Dreams introduce us to ideas, visions, desires, possibilities that we can’t fully understand or visualize in practical terms. Not only would we not be able to comprehend them if we were awake and conscious — we would outright reject them as absurd. This is precisely why we must dream. If we have any hope of the status quo changing, we must allow ourselves to dream of that which we would otherwise see as impossible.

When we sleep, we are more loosely tethered to the world around us. This looseness allows us to consider possibilities that don’t yet make sense — and to be okay with them. This thin connection to those possibilities allows us to begin building bridges to a future that is incomprehensibly far from us now.

The Book of Bereishit is full of dreams is because in that lawless, Godless, ancient world, there was no rational reason why things shouldn’t have just descended deeper and deeper into violent, pagan tribalism. No intelligent person would have accepted the future, which we now know as reality, and certainly no one could have imagined the utopian future that yet awaits us.

The king of the Philistines, the king of Egypt, Jacob’s father-in-law were all men who were closed to the status quo changing precisely because of the power they wielded. God had to circumvent their egos by coming to them in dreams.

So too, Yaakov running into the unknown away from his brother — only a dream could have shown him that everything would be okay.

Yosef’s dreams reflected his desire to lead, but he could never have understood how they would play out. In the short term, they backfired. He shared his dreams with his brothers and they hated him even more. Instead of bowing their heads before him, they threw him into a pit. But decades later, in the unlikely setting of an Egyptian royal palace, those dreams came to be.

The whole saga of Yosef itself was like a dream. His leadership, though brief, introduced an idea into the Jewish psyche: that leadership is possible — that unity is possible. That idea was the seed that would eventually grow into the concept of Jewish kingship.

Devarim 33:5:

וַיְהִי בִישֻׁרוּן מֶלֶךְ בְּהִתְאַסֵּף רָאשֵׁי עָם יַחַד שִׁבְטֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃

He was king in Yeshurun, when the leaders of the people and the tribes of Yisra᾽el were gathered as one.

Israel’s current national anthem centers around hope — ha’tikvah-התקווה, literally “the hope.” Hope is a vague sort of optimism. Some have critiqued the anthem for representing too low of a bar for the future we as Jews should aspire towards. We should want more for the ourselves and the world than “to be a free nation in our land — להיות עם חפשי בארצינו.”

It’s interesting to note that one of the other candidates for Israel’s national anthem was a line from Tehillim-Psalms — attributed to King David — recited by many before Birkat Hamazon (Grace After Meals) on Shabbat and holidays:

Tehillim (Psalms) 126:

שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת בְּשׁוּב ה׳ אֶת־שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן הָיִינוּ כְּחֹלְמִים׃

A Song of Ascents:

When Hashem restores the captivity of Zion, we will have been like dreamers.

As the Jews return to Israel, we will see ourselves as dreamers. On one level, we’ll realize we were asleep in our exile. But on another level, we’ll realize that our subconscious — or better, our superconscious — kept us connected. Not just to a glimmer of hope. But to a vision. To a dream.

Our dreams are always partially-self-fulfilling prophecies.

Subscribe now

3

Perhaps going out on a limb, he proceeds to claim that the root .ח.ל.מ is also related to the word khalamish-חלמיש, which he understands to be what we call “granite,” and the precious stone achlama-אחלמה.

It turns out that that’s what granite is: minerals pressed together under immense pressure.

Apply even more pressure, and you get diamond, yahalom-יהלום, which would also be connected to our linguistic tree above using the concept of interchangeable letters (אותיות מתחלפות), which posits that letters from the same source location can be interchanged while preserving semantic connection.

Hebrew letters are organized according two the five locations from which their sounds emerge in the body of the speaker:

1. Lips – בומ”ף

2. Teeth – זסשר”ץ

3. Pallate – גיכ”ק

4. Tongue – דטלנ”ת

5. Throat – אחה”ע

By now, we should be pretty familiar with the notion that the Hebrew language is a highly economical language. While English has, according to some linguists, around a million lexemes (core words), Biblical Hebrew has only around 10,000.

The reason Hebrew can afford to be so lean on lexemes is that many words can branch out in meaning from a single, shared 3-letter root (shoresh-שרש). If you’re interested in learning Hebrew, this is great news, because the learning curve is bent in your favor. Once you start recognizing roots, you can start figuring out words in context relatively quickly. It’s this linguistic elegance that is partially responsible for the remarkably high literacy rates in Jews in the ancient world.

“the learning curve of Hebrew is bent in your favor!”

While many people are familiar with the 3-letter root system, most don’t realize that the system goes much deeper. 3-letter roots are generally organized according to their 2-letter roots.1

Let’s take, for example, the holiday of Chanukah (חנוכה), which has in its name the root khet–nun–kaf (ח־נ־כ), which, as we explored a few weeks ago, literally means “dedication,” but it also shares a root with the word khinuch (חינוך) — “education.”

The first thing to note here is that education is meant to function like a dedication ceremony — or like the rededication of the Temple that the Maccabees led after their hard won battle against the Seleucid Greeks.

Education is not merely the transfer of information, but is meant to be a celebratory push along the growth trajectory in which a student is meant to travel on over the course of their lives. The Hebrew word “חנוכה” teaches us that dedication is what drives education, and that Jewish education was at the heart of the Macabbees’ rededication of the Temple.

“The word ‘חנוכה’ teaches us that dedication is what drives education.”

But what’s at the heart of this dedication? What exactly are we trying to cultivate in our education?

Subscribe now

If you look at the word חנוכה, you’ll find that there’s a 2-letter root within that 3-letter root — the root of the root — in this case, the word khein (חן).

Khein (חן) is an elusive word that appears throughout Tanakh. It captured the curiosity of the Greeks themselves in their attempts to translate the Torah, known as the Septuagint. The sages of the Talmud understood Ptolemy II’s intention in commissioning the translation as an attempt to subsume and suppress the teachings of the Torah, reducing it to just another book in their library.2

In the Septuagint, the word khein — as in “Noach found khein in the eyes of God — נֹחַ מָצָא חֵן בְּעֵינֵי ה׳”, or “Yosef found khein in the eyes of [his master] — וַיִּמְצָא יוֹסֵף חֵן בְּעֵינָיו” — is translated as “charis,” which means “grace” or “favor,” related to the English word “charisma.”

This, however, begs the question: what’s charisma?

As a word, “charisma” is simultaneously shiny and opaque. Most people have a strong sense of what it is because they’ve seen people who possess it, but it’s hard for them to put their fingers on what it is. It’s a je ne sais quoi, an “I-don’t-know-what-it-is” (IYKYK in modern parlance). Charisma, it seems, is a “secret sauce” that makes people likable, but what exactly we like about them remains obscured.

The Hebrew, on the other hand, does two things. Firstly, by calling it khein (חן), it recognizes the mystery of our attraction to certain people. It does this by associating the word khein (חן) with the word chinam (חינם), which means “free.” You like them, but you don’t know what they’ve done to earn your approval, which you’ve essentially given to them for free.

A closer look at the word khein (חן) reveals why.

The opening piece of the Chassidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s magnum opus, Likutei Moharan centers around khein, and resolves this paradox.

He explains that this 2-letter word can be broken down even further into its letters. The letter chet (ח) represents khochmah (חכמה) — Divine wisdom. If you look at the way chet is written in a Torah scroll, you’ll see an arrow pointing upwards (the chatoteret). It points toward a grasp of something above its head — which is the essence of wisdom. Wisdom, in Jewish consciousness, is not information or intelligence, but rather the reception of a life force, a perspective and vision that flows down from above, as it says in Kohelet: “wisdom gives life to those who possess it — הַחׇכְמָה תְּחַיֶּה בְעָלֶיהָ“ and “wisdom makes a person’s face shine — חָכְמַת אָדָם תָּאִיר פָּנָיו.” It’s for this reason that many have said that the pinnacle of wisdom — the crown on the head of the wise — is to know how much he does not know — how much is above his head.

The nun (ן), continues Rebbe Nachman, represents the precise opposite end of the spectrum of life from wisdom. It represents the concept known in Kabbalistic texts as malchut (מלכות) — kingship — the ability to practically apply wisdom in the world.3 It’s for this reason that the “final nun” (ן) is written as a line that starts up top and continues down into the “ground.” It is also the letter of constant practice and resilience, which are the hallmarks of bringing ideas into reality. A person who lied once shiker-שקר, but a liar who lies habitually is a shakran-שקרן.

If you put these two ideas together, you start to get a picture of what khein is — and what it is about people who captivate us even before they’ve achieved anything per se. Those who try to stretch themselves to grasp ideas that they don’t readily understand, and to practically apply those ideas to the best of their abilities, inspires in those around them, attraction and admiration. The khein is there even before they’ve achieved anything.

The greatest illustration of khein is kids. Kids — when their curiosities haven’t been blunted by brain rot — are constantly stretching themselves to understand things “above their pay grade” and experiment with those new ideas in their world. When we put aside the mess they might make in the process, we feel khein towards them.

It’s this natural desire to stretch in both directions that education is meant to cultivate. We all possessed this khein as kids, but when we stopped cultivating it, we started losing it.

“We all possessed this khein as kids, but when we stopped cultivating it, we started losing it.”

Ask kids in 1st grade, “who thinks of themselves as an artist?” Tons of hands will shoot up.

“Who here is a little scientist?” Again, many kids who enjoy science will identify as scientists.

Ask kids in 8th grade the same questions. Far fewer hands.

Tragically, we tend to lose our khein as we stop growing, and stop stretching ourselves.

The Jewish notion of education is not about transferring information. Nor is it about expanding proficiencies, per se. It’s about cultivating this khein. It’s about preserving and developing this quality that children have naturally — of curiosity, of boldness, of willingness to experiment and to apply this wisdom in the world, each person in his own way.

This is the same thing we find so compelling about the Maccabees. A small army — which wasn’t really an army at all — but a family of kohanim, priests, who primarily identified themselves in their service in the Beit HaMikdash (Temple). But when the time came, and they realized that it was do or die — they pushed themselves. They understood that they had to stretch out of their comfort zones, and face a military force much greater than they — and would fight however long it took to defeat them.

And they did.

And when they finally did, and they arrived at the Beit HaMikdash, they pushed themselves again. They knew that somewhere there must be pure oil — even though there was no rational reason to believe that there should be. They committed themselves to searching until they would find it.

And they did.

The message in the miracle of the oil is that it also stretched beyond its normal limits — and burned for eight days. It’s precisely this khein-חן that has carried the holiday of Chanukah-חנוכה for millennia in the hearts and minds of millions of Jews.

May we find the khein in ourselves and in the people around us — the khein we all possessed from childhood — and reawaken it as adults, to stretch ourselves to grasp ideas we may have considered above our heads, and be bold enough to make them realities. May we find khein in Hashem’s eyes. And may we see the world stretch around us — with khein.

For more XL on Chanukah, read this 👇

Have you ever had the experience of repeating a word to the point that it starts to sound almost unrecognizably foreign?

This apparently universal phenomenon actually has a name. It’s called “semantic satiation.”1 The jury is out as to why exactly this happens, but the effect is clear. A word normally full of meaning can decay through repetition into mere noise.

Saying “thank you,” “thanks,” and “thank you so much,” as well as texting “ty,” “thx,” and “tysm” are ubiquitous in our generally polite society, and yet, as these words fly out of our mouths and off our thumbs, they seldom emerge from a profound inner sense of gratitude.

One of the core teachings of Jewish character development (mussar) is that the simplest, most seemingly obvious concepts are the ones we tend to understand the least — precisely because we assume we know everything there is to know about them. Ironically, the most meaningful concepts — like gratitude — are at the greatest risk of becoming meaningless.

Here’s where learning Hebrew as a second language can help. Hebrew self-identifies as a laser-cut language of Divine origin whose words encode the inner meaning of life itself. Precisely because it’s not our native language, we can better use it to gain perspective on concepts we likely feel are simple and straightforward, and in so doing reclaim our thank you’s.

The word for “thank you” in Hebrew is todah (תודה). The common “thank you very much” is todah rabbah (תודה רבה).

The first thanksgiving ceremony in American history was two years prior to the more famous meal of the Pilgrims upon landing on Plymouth Rock. On December 4, 1619, Captain John Woodlief arrived with 36 English settlers on the shores of America, not far from Jamestown, Virginia. It is recorded that the first thing he did upon arriving is kneel, pray, and subsequently declare:

“We ordain that this day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for [a] plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

It wasn’t Woodlief though who coined the word “thanksgiving.” That juicy English word can be traced to the first complete (Christian) English translation of the Bible, where it appears a handful of times in the Psalms attributed to King David.

Tehillim 100:

מִזְמוֹר לְתוֹדָה הָרִיעוּ לַה׳ כׇּל־הָאָרֶץ: עִבְדוּ אֶת־ה׳ בְּשִׂמְחָה בֹּאוּ לְפָנָיו בִּרְנָנָה…בֹּאוּ שְׁעָרָיו  בְּתוֹדָה חֲצֵרֹתָיו בִּתְהִלָּה הוֹדוּ־לוֹ בָּרְכוּ שְׁמוֹ׃

A song of thanksgiving: Make a joyful noise unto Hashem, all ye lands. Serve Hashem with gladness: come before His Presence with celebration…Enter through His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, and bless His name.

Although the American celebrations of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have all passed, Jews can be thankful that thanksgiving for us is never more than 6 days away. Shabbat is a very much a weekly holiday of thanksgiving. We carve out the time to push aside distractions to gather around a table to an elaborate feast with family, friends, and community in gratitude to God for everything we have in our lives.

“Although the American celebrations of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have all passed, Jews can be thankful that thanksgiving for us is never more 6 days away. Shabbat is a very much a weekly holiday of thanksgiving.“

Going back to Psalms, we find quite explicitly that the “Song of Shabbat” is the expression of gratitude itself:

Tehillim 92:1-2:

מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר לְיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת׃ טוֹב לְהֹדוֹת לַה׳ וּלְזַמֵּר לְשִׁמְךָ עֶלְיוֹן׃

A meditative tune, a song for the Sabbath day: it is good to give thanks to Hashem, and to sing meditative praise to Your highest name.

Moreover, Jews are called “Jews” (יהודים) and Judaism “Judaism” (יהדות) with this same root הוד — after the tribe of Judah (יהודה). This is because those who were left after the ransacking and exiling of Israelites by the Assyrian Empire were primarily from the tribe of Judah, living in an area that was known as Judea (יהודה) — and is still known by many today as Judea.

The original name “Judah” — Yehudah-יהודה — comes directly from the word hodaa-thanksgiving (הודאה). The reason is that his mother Leah experienced, when she had her fourth child, this moment of, “wow, this is beyond my wildest dreams.” She had thought that since there were four foremothers of the tribes of Israel, each one would merit to have three children (4 x 3 = 12), from whom would emerge three tribes. When she had her fourth, she realized that her expectations were off, nothing is really owed to her, and she felt an overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude that inspired her son’s name.

Bereishit 30:35:

…וַתֹּאמֶר הַפַּעַם אוֹדֶה אֶת־יְ-הֹ-וָ-ה עַל־כֵּן קָרְאָה שְׁמוֹ יְהוּדָה…

…she said, Now will I thank Hashem: therefore she called his name Yehuda…

More than this: the name Yehudah (יהודה) includes God’s name (י-ה-ו-ה) — because in that thanksgiving is a recognition of God Himself.

We can ask though: why did she only feel gratitude to this extent with her fourth child? And, going back to our original question: what will it take for us get past the superficial “tysm” way of saying thank you to which we’ve become so accustomed?

In Hebrew, the full meaning of “lehodot-להודות” is more than just to “say ‘thank you’” — it is to admit and recognize the role of another. “Admission” is a word we intuitively associate with guilt — not gratitude. But think about what we’re doing when we say thank you — not in a performative, polite way, but when we really say it with our heart and soul. My sincere expression of gratitude is an admission that I couldn’t have done it without you. By recognizing what you did for me, I must recognize my own limits and vulnerability. For Leah, it was only her fourth child that broke her schema of what was “coming her way” and elicited her thanksgiving. She also modeled for her son Yehudah what it meant to verbalize her error, which he famously did many years later when he publicly accepted fault for the episode with his daughter in law Tamar.

In order to truly be grateful, I must admit that I am not an island. I’m releasing a part of my ego that would like to think I’m a self-made man, and I’m handing credit over to someone else. This is what makes true gratitude difficult even if mechanical “thank you” isn’t.

“A sincere expression of gratitude is an admission that I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Again, when we say “thanks” — or “thank you so much” to the barista at Starbucks — we may not be feeling this. But notice how much easier it is to say thank you for something small, like a cup of coffee, than it is for something massive — like thanking your parents for raising you, or your spouse for being your partner in absolutely everything. How can we do justice to what we owe them? We can’t. We wouldn’t know where to start or where to end. So we too often avoid it entirely, whereas our normal, sweet, cute, performative, check-the-box “thanks” and “thx” can continue business as usual.

This brings us to the other major meaning of the etymological root hod-הוד. It’s sometimes translated as “splendor” or “glory.” I will admit that I don’t really know what these translations are getting at other than fancy ways of saying beauty — but I can illustrate it like this:

When someone stands up to receive an Oscar or an Emmy or a Grammy, the standard, accepted thing to do is not to credit oneself, but to immediately express gratitude to all the people who helped bring him or her to that place.

But take a look at it’s opposite: imagine how ugly it would be if someone went up to receive one of those awards and gave a speech about how vindicated they feel, because they — and they alone — deserve it for all their talent and hard work.

It wouldn’t just be wrong or dishonest or unethical. It would be — on top of all those things — ugly.

If you understand this, you can appreciate how beautiful the opposite is. How beautiful it is when people express real gratitude — when they put their egos aside and recognize all those who deserve recognition, and give credit where credit is due. They become transparent prisms through which the light of the universe courses through them, and the beauty and splendor of all of reality becomes more visible.

It will likely surprise no one that the modern Hebrew word “evolutziya-אבולוציה” (meaning “evolution”) is not a word sourced in authentic Biblical Hebrew, but an English word that was imported and adapted into modern Hebrew in the 20th century.

In 1953, the Israeli government established The Academy of the Hebrew Language to research and adjudicate issues of the newly established language of modern Hebrew while preserving its authenticity as it faced the forces of modernity.1 Ironically, they called their institution for the preservation of Hebrew’s authenticity “Ha’Akademia La’Lashon Ha’Ivrit — הָאָקָדֶמְיָה לַלָּשׁוֹן הָעִבְרִית,“ using a word, “akademia” (i.e. “academy”) that is as authentic to Biblical Hebrew as “evolutziya-אבולוציה” .

This, for me, is a cute illustration of how much smaller the Hebrew vocabulary of the Torah is compared to the vocabulary of modern English. How much smaller is Biblical Hebrew? About 100 times smaller.2 Hence, the need to import words into modern Hebrew to flesh it out as a modern language.

Elizer ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew and his successors needed to be resourceful and plagiarize from other languages to come up with words for concepts they couldn’t source in Tanakh or the Mishnah. English would serve handsomely to fill the gaps in Hebrew as it was and is a massive linguistic melting pot, borrowing and blending from other languages as a result from immigration, commerce, and colonialism in the British Commonwealth and the United States.

Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, self-identifies as Divine in origin. The practical upshot of a language designed by God is that it would possess precisely the number of words it needs to convey the essential kernels of reality — no more, no less.3

Now, back to evolution. Evolution is one of the foundational concepts in modern science. It’s rare to read an article about psychology, sociology, economics, philosophy or medicine that doesn’t at least mention evolution as the underlying explanation for whatever is being discussed. The word was coined in 1864 by English philosopher/scientist Herbert Spencer. The basic workings of the theory were later developed and made famous by Charles Darwin, but was simultaneously worked on by the lesser known Alfred Russel Wallace, and after a century and a half of research all over the world, has become ubiquitous.

As we mentioned above, there is no indigenous Hebrew word for “evolution.”

On the other hand, seeing as the body of evidence for evolutionary processes at work in the development of life on Earth, maybe it should surprise us that there is no word for it. Does the lack of a Biblical Hebrew word for a thing mean that the thing in question doesn’t exist?

If evolution is as real as it seems to be, why isn’t there a word for it?

The Torah is laser-cut in its precision when describing things, verbs or properties that have clear, logical distinctions. One area in which we can see this is the different words for creation itself:

• Bara (ברא) - to create something “out of thin air” that did not exist before — even conceptually (creatio ex nihilo). 

• Yatsar (יצר) - to develop the form (tsura-צורה) and function of that which has already been created.

• Asah (עשה) - to finalize its practical manifestation.

Because many believers, agnostics and atheists alike possess a vision of God that is abstract and distant, the only sort of creative action they would associate with Him is “bara” — the sudden, lightning-from-Heaven, boom!, bam!, wow!, and-there-you-have-it-folks! sort of creation.

However, a close look at the story of creation in the beginning of the Torah reveals that the word “bara” — creation from nothing — appears only in connection to 3 very particular moments in the creative process in which new things, without precedent emerge into reality:

1. The creation of the primal stuff of the cosmos, the energy contained in the singularity of the Big Bang:4

   Bereishit 1:1 (with commentary of Ramban):

   בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

   In the beginning, God created (bara) the Heavens and the Earth.

2. The emergence of will and consciousness:5

   Bereishit 1:21 (with commentary of Vilna Gaon):

   וַיִּבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים וְאֵת כׇּל־נֶפֶשׁ הַחַיָּה  הָרֹמֶשֶׂת אֲשֶׁר שָׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם לְמִינֵהֶם וְאֵת

   כׇּל־עוֹף כָּנָף לְמִינֵהוּ וַיַּרְא אֱ-לֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב׃

   God created (bara) the great sea creatures and all of the living consciousness that crawls and is spawned in water by species and all flying winged creatures by species, and God saw that it was good.

3. The appearance of human uniqueness, conscience, and the marital unit:6

   Bereishit 1:27 (with commentaries of Rashi and Malbim):

   וַיִּבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים  אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱ-לֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם׃

   God created-from-nothing (bara) humanity, each person in his [unique] image — in the image of God He created (bara) him; male and female He created (bara) them.

Everything in between, is not beriah (creatio ex nihilo) but yetzira or asiya, a giving of shape to that which already existed.

Rashi 1:14:

“…all that emerges from the heaven and earth were created on the first day, but each of them was [simply] put in its place on that day when it was so commanded…”

Ramban 1:1:

“Initially, [God] brought forth from total and absolute nothing an extremely ethereal substance devoid of corporeality but having a power of potency, fit to take on any form and to proceed from potentiality into reality. This was the primary matter created by God. It is called by the Greeks hyly (prime matter) [and by modern scientists energy]. After the hyly, He did not create anything, but He formed and made things with it, and from this hyly He brought everything into existence and clothed the forms and put them into a finished condition.”

Even a cursory look at the Torah’s account of creation shows a process that is generally compatible with an organic process of evolution from:

• simpler inanimate elements (like light)

• to growing, living vegetation to conscious, moving animal life

• to intelligent, communicating, free-choosing human beings.

So why is there no word in Biblical Hebrew for this magnificent process of unfolding of reality from within itself that the Torah is so careful to articulate?

It’s for the same reason that there is no word in Biblical Hebrew for “nature.”7 In modern English, we tend to personify nature. There’s a long standing pagan tradition of doing so, referring to it as “Mother Nature” or “Gaia.” As elegant and powerful of a theory as evolution is, and as much as the Torah may describe the development of the world in a way that is organic and evolutionary — as opposed to synthetic and sudden acts of God — Hebrew does not give a name to evolution so as to not personify it. It is, after all, ironic that intelligent, secular people who adamantly refuse to believe that there is a fundamental will and intelligence underlying the universe habitually personify the universe, nature, evolution, and randomness as autonomous actors.

While evolution certainly has its natural mechanisms, it is Hashem Who is behind it. Neither mutations, nor changes in climate are random. The unfolding of the universe in the Torah is indeed natural, but it is moved along quite clearly by the deliberate commands of the Creator, Who says “let there be light,” “let the earth sprout vegetation,” “let the waters teem with conscious living creatures.”

Only the personified randomness of evolution is negated by the Torah — not the process.

“Only the personified randomness of evolution is negated by the Torah — not the process.”

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Orot 565:

“Evolution itself—rising step by step from the lowest forms to the highest—shows with great clarity that existence follows a far-seeing vision, a purpose set in advance. This only deepens the sense of Divine greatness. It strengthens every foundation of faith, and makes our trust in God and our service of Him even more fitting…There is, therefore, no real difficulty in harmonizing the words of the Torah or the teachings of our tradition with an evolutionary understanding.”

Rav Kook, no doubt unique in his open-mindedness, not only saw no conflict between evolution and the Torah, but saw in the notion of evolution a manifestation of Hashem’s Dynamic Perfection.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Shmoneh Kvatzim 1:443:

“What do we mean when we speak of Divine perfection?

“We might be tempted to think of it as the same kind of perfection we see in created things — the perfected state that results from a complete and finished existence, beyond which nothing can be added. If that were the case, Divine perfection would mean that nothing more could be added to it.

“But this is impossible. For in the Divine, perfection does not negate the possibility of addition. Rather, there is a perfection that includes the power of infinite growth and addition — a perfection that is not static, but dynamic, ever-ascending, overflowing with new vitality and revelation.”

May continue to see the evolutionary process of the purification of our language that heralds the next evolutionary stage of humanity:

Zechariah 3:9 & 14:9:

כִּי־אָז אֶהְפֹּךְ אֶל־עַמִּים שָׂפָה בְרוּרָה לִקְרֹא כֻלָּם בְּשֵׁם ה׳ לְעׇבְדוֹ שְׁכֶם אֶחָד׃

“For then I will turn to the peoples a pure language that they may all call upon the name of Hashem with one, unified effort.”

.בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִהְיֶה ה׳ אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד…

…on that day, Hashem will be One, and his Name with be One.”

Education is not about information. It’s about initiation.

If you walk the halls of a high school in 2025, and as you do, peak at kids’ laptops, you’ll see them playing video games, on Snapchat, watching videos on YouTube, or sometimes doing shopping. If they happen to be doing school work, they’re probably using ChatGPT.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that virtually all homework done by teenagers today is done with the help of AI (if not entirely by AI). This may not alarm you because, at this point, you also use AI quite a bit. So do I.

The massive difference is: if you graduated high school when dial up modems took a minute or so to connect to the internet, or prior, you had no choice but to learn how to think for yourself. Of course, plagiarism has existed since time immemorial, but even the plagiarists had to do some thinking about how to plagiarize back in the 90s.

Here’s the issue:

If you don’t learn how to think when you’re a full time student, when will you learn how to think?

If you are a thinking person, and through your own efforts, over many years, you’ve discovered your own voice, and style, and convictions, so then AI is a tool you wield, no different than spellcheck, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia and a word processor. But if you’ve never learned to think for yourself, and never had to put in effort, you are a tool wielded by artificial intelligence and the companies that design it.

I am not a Luddite, and this isn’t another prophecy of doom about technology, but I do believe that this is one of the big hairy societal problems we have today. If we’re not concerned about it, and not thinking about it, we won’t adapt our educational approaches fast enough to avoid its dangerous pitfalls.

If you’re not convinced that this is cause for concern, I recommend that you have a conversation with a teenager. Try to convince them that it’s important for them to learn to write on their own — without AI.

“When will I have to write anything on my own in the future?”

Even if they don’t, they definitely will have to think in the future. I’m willing to bet that they haven’t thought about that.

For decades, we have been told that we have entered a shiny, new “Information Age,” in which the entire universe is literally at our fingertips, and at worst, in our pockets. However, we were not told, or trained, or more importantly, educated to flourish as humans in this new age. And it feels like nothing could have prepared us for AI.

When information can be accessed in fractions of a second, and research papers produced in a matter of minutes, we need a new notion about what education is.

Or perhaps an old one.

“When information can be accessed in fractions of a second, and research papers produced in a matter of minutes, we need a new notion about what education is.

“Or perhaps an old one.”

The Hebrew word for education is Khinukh-חינוך.

As we’ve encountered many times in the Language of Life Series, the problem with 1-to-1 translations is that they end up squeezing round concepts from a one language into the square holes of analogous concepts of another language. Languages were not created in coordination with one another. As a result, words never neatly translate from one language to the other. Something is always lost in translation.

We might assume that the Torah’s concept of khinukh-חינוך means the same thing as what “education” means to most traditionally educated English speakers today. But, of course, it doesn’t.

Most people’s experience of Western education is of memorization and regurgitation. This was the issue that struck a chord with tens of millions of viewers of Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk, one of the most listened-to talks on their platform. This reveals that the problem with modern education is not modernity per se — it’s not ChatGPT and MathGPT — it’s that an underlying view of education was always superficial, just waiting to be exposed as such by AI.1

The word khinukh-חינוך comes from the same word as Chanukah-חנוכה, which literally means “inauguration” since the holiday of Chanukah celebrated the re-inauguration of the alter in the Beit HaMikdash (Temple) after it had been defiled for years by the Syrio-Greeks.

The question is:

What does inauguration have to do with education?

Think about the high level tasks you do at work. The sophisticated processes people pay you for: complex analysis, surgery, therapy, diagnosing problems, negotiating deals.

You didn’t learn how to do any of these things by watching YouTube videos. Nor did you learn how to do them by reading about them in a textbook. Ultimately, your education began when you were given a chance to do it yourself — that terrifying moment that a mentor believed in you and let you climb into the cockpit and fly — even though you weren’t fully (or even partially) qualified yet.

This brave moment of initiation — and a celebratory inauguration — is the essence of education.

It’s a brave moment for students, and it’s a brave moment for their teachers who allow them to try (and fail) for the first time.

When the Torah provides a window into what God saw and loved in Avraham it doesn’t merely speak of his belief in Him as a religious person. It focuses of his belief in people as an educator.

Bereishit 18:19:

…כִּי יְדַעְתִּיו לְמַעַן אֲשֶׁר יְצַוֶּה אֶת־בָּנָיו וְאֶת־בֵּיתוֹ אַחֲרָיו וְשָׁמְרוּ דֶּרֶךְ ה׳ לַעֲשׂוֹת צְדָקָה וּמִשְׁפָּט

For I know and love about him that he instructs his children and his household after him to keep the path of Hashem by doing what is just and right…

Note that Avraham’s teachings are not described as static information or even spiritual secrets, but as “a path” that we learn to walk on.

“…Avraham’s teachings are not described as static information or even spiritual secrets, but as “a path” that we learn to walk on.”

One example that comes to mind of how Avraham would actually do this is when he had the opportunity to host hungry merchants beaten down by the desert sun, he didn’t just do the mitzvah of taking care of their needs on his own. Nor did he rely on some sort of esoteric osmosis of role-modeling in which the members of his household would somehow learn to be kind from his example while they sat on the couch doomscrolling on Tiktok.

Avraham would get them involved. He trusted them to do the job with him.

Bereishit 18:7-8:

וַיְמַהֵר אַבְרָהָם הָאֹהֱלָה אֶל־שָׂרָה וַיֹּאמֶר מַהֲרִי שְׁלֹשׁ סְאִים קֶמַח סֹלֶת לוּשִׁי וַעֲשִׂי עֻגוֹת׃ וְאֶל־הַבָּקָר רָץ אַבְרָהָם וַיִּקַּח בֶּן־בָּקָר רַךְ וָטוֹב וַיִּתֵּן אֶל־הַנַּעַר וַיְמַהֵר לַעֲשׂוֹת אֹתוֹ׃

Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Quick, three seahs of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” Then Abraham ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to the young man who rushed to prepare it.

Rashi, ad loc:

אל הנער. זֶה יִשְׁמָעֵאל, לְחַנְּכוֹ בְּמִצְוֹת

“to the young man” — this was [his son] Ishmael [whom he asked to take care of preparing the meat] to educate him in the performance of mitzvot.

Expensive social-emotional curriculums that talk about kindness may make us feel like we’ve done our due diligence in educating our kids to be caring, but this is not education (khinuch-חינוך) at all. The actual kindness-education happens when people actually start down the path of kindness by being kind. Even if they don’t get it right the first (which they won’t), the most important thing is happening: they’re starting.

It’s for this reason that only when Avraham gets news of his nephew being taking hostage, and responds right away by mobilizing his students from their studies to go fight that they are called his disciples, khanikhav-חניכיו:

Bereishit 14:14 (see Rashi):

וַיִּשְׁמַע אַבְרָם כִּי נִשְׁבָּה אָחִיו וַיָּרֶק אֶת־חֲנִיכָיו יְלִידֵי בֵיתוֹ שְׁמֹנָה עָשָׂר וּשְׁלֹשׁ מֵאוֹת וַיִּרְדֹּף עַד־דָּן׃

When Avram heard that his brother was taken captive, he mobilized his disciples, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued the [enemy] to Dan.

Only when they’ve been mobilized are they called “his disciples.”

“Only when they’ve been mobilized are they called ‘his disciples.’”

Artificial Intelligence is and will remain a challenge in education, but the real problem lies not in the technology, but in how we think about what education is — and if we’re thinking at all.

If I had to name the psychological phenomenon that is most glaringly absent from the conventional model of the human psyche, I would point to teshuva-תשובה.

Freud spoke a lot about pleasure, self-image, and people-pleasing. Skinner — reward and punishment. Maslow — actualizing one’s potential. Frankl — people’s search for meaning. Kahneman — loss aversion and satisfaction. And Seligman — wellbeing.

But what about teshuva?

To quote the famous first words of the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook in his tour de force on teshuva called the Orot HaTeshuva (“Lights of Teshuva”) :

Orot HaTeshuva, Foreword:

Teshuva occupies the largest part of the Torah and life. Upon it are built all of our personal and collective hopes. It is a commandment of God that is, on the one hand, the easiest of all — for even the mere thought of teshuva is already teshuva — and yet, on the other hand, it is the most difficult of all undertakings, for it has not yet been fully realized in the world and in life…

…Much has been written in the Torah, in the Prophets, and in the words of the Sages concerning [teshuva], yet for our generation, these things remain hidden and in need of clarification.

Teshuva is everywhere around us and within us, but still eludes us.

We’ve started thinking about this mysterious but somehow simultaneously familiar concept of teshuva-תשובה in the last XL post, and the one before it.

Firstly, it literally means “return.”

Most simply, it refers to a person who turned away from God, in his behavior and attitude, but later finds the desire and the humility to turn around and come back.

But Rav Kook explains it more:

Orot HaTeshuva 15:10:

The primary role of teshuva…is for the person to return to his true self, to the root of his soul.”

Teshuva isn’t merely about behavior. It’s about identity.

In recent years, this understanding of teshuva as a “return to self” has been widely disseminated, especially in contrast to the Christian-influenced notion of “repentance” that is essentially synonymous with “penitence,” meaning the pain of remorse.

While returning to oneself requires remorse at some point, teshuva, in Jewish consciousness, is not defined as remorse.

In case you missed the footnote in our last post, Maimonides’s proof for this is a verse in Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) that seems to very clearly place remorse as a step one takes after the personal transformation of teshuva:

Yirmiyahu 31:19:

כִּי־אַחֲרֵי שׁוּבִי נִחַמְתִּי וְאַחֲרֵי הִוָּדְעִי סָפַקְתִּי עַל־יָרֵךְ בֹּשְׁתִּי וְגַם־נִכְלַמְתִּי כִּי נָשָׂאתִי חֶרְפַּת נְעוּרָי׃

For after I returned, I regretted; and after I was made aware, I slapped my thigh [in remorse]. I was ashamed, and even mortified, because I carried the shame of my youth.

After one grows and matures, he has the perspective to look back at his actions and regret them — and should do so to continue to move forward in his growth process. But teshuva is not the regret itself. True regret is rooted in true teshuva.

Teshuva is about moving forward to a new place by going back to one’s original place — a sort of transformation that brings the person back to who they were all along. This sounds paradoxical. How does it work?

Teshuva does not mean “return” because a person is going back to an arbitrary starting point. The notion of returning of teshuva is much deeper. A person is pulled back, by his own soul, his own conscience, to his most natural state, much like the way a spring goes back to its equilibrium or a boomerang comes back to its starting point.

The sages coined another word in post-Biblical Hebrew for the verb “to return”: lachzor-לחזור. Interestingly, they took it from the Biblical word for pig, chazir-חזיר. But this notion of returning is different. ”Lachzor challila” means to go “around and around.” This is a return to the beginning that is not really returning to any true, essential point of origin. It’s just an endless loop.1

We are used to thinking about teshuva as a discrete, linear, almost ritualistic recipe that we do once a year between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. It almost seems odd to be speaking about it now, after the holiday season. But as we begin to see it more clearly, more deeply, and in a more real way — as a return to our truest self — we realize that now is the best time to speak about teshuva. Now is when we can really put the teshuva mindset into practice because teshuva is iterative.

“Now is when we can really put the teshuva mindset into practice because teshuva is iterative.”

Rav Kook, Orot HaKodesh 3:

The call to purify one’s character never ends. One may have already purified it when on an intermediate spiritual level; however, after growing further, new mysteries of life that have never yet been exposed emerge from the depths of chaos for one to refine and clarify.

There are holy people who never cease growing. They go “m’chayil el chayil” (from strength to strength), always engaged in practical repentance, of which purifying and refining one’s character is a vital ingredient.

The very fact that, on some level, human beings want to get better — that people drift from living the way they know deep down they should be living — and then feel pangs of desire to come back to themselves — bespeaks of the inextinguishable flame of the soul within them.

To understand human beings, we must first accept the neshama (soul) as part of the human psyche, and then train ourselves and others to listen to its gentle but resilient voice:

Rav Kook, Orot HaTeshuva 11:2:

One must believe in oneself; one must believe that one’s life and feelings come directly from the essence of one’s soul, are good, and lead one upon a straight path.

Rav Kook, Maamarei Hare’iyah:

The way to truly heal an individual is by uncovering the wellspring of strength and health that is hidden within the self. It is through the revealing of the soul within the soul, the uncovering of the unconscious self that is so hidden and covered up that often people do not even recognize their own essence.

Once we get it — once we grasp the meaning of this return, we don’t just understand teshuva, we believe in it. It is for this reason that the Torah assures us that the national teshuva of the Jewish nation is an inevitability:

Devarim 30:2:

וְשַׁבְתָּ עַד־ה׳ אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ וְשָׁמַעְתָּ בְקֹלוֹ כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם אַתָּה וּבָנֶיךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשֶׁךָ׃

You will [eventually] return to ה׳ your God, and you and your children will heed His voice according to all that I command your today with all your heart and soul.

Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Teshuva 7:5:

Israel will only be redeemed through teshuvah. The Torah has already assured [us] that, ultimately, Israel will repent towards the end of her exile and, immediately, she will be redeemed as [Deuteronomy 30:1-3] states: ”There shall come a time when [you will experience] all these things... and you will return to Hashem, your God...”

May we see and accept that teshuva is not reserved for only 10 days a year, but is the essential driving force of who we are — and and ongoing process — for us as individuals, couples, families, communities, a nation and as a civilization.

What a privilege to be alive to bear witness to moments of redemption — glimmers of the ultimate peace that humanity is destined for and longs to see, hear, smell, taste and feel — whether we can articulate our desire for it or not.

May we all live long healthy lives to bear witness to the ultimate redemption and may it come soon.

As I finished the last of seven laps around my synagogue Monday morning with lulav and etrog in hand, elated from the news that the 20 living hostages had actually been returned intact to Israel, I read this prophetic verse from Isaiah that was referenced in the final lines of the prayer unique to that day:

Isaiah 51:11

וּפְדוּיֵי ה׳ יְשׁוּבוּן וּבָאוּ צִיּוֹן בְּרִנָּה וְשִׂמְחַת עוֹלָם עַל־רֹאשָׁם שָׂשׂוֹן וְשִׂמְחָה יַשִּׂיגוּן נָסוּ יָגוֹן וַאֲנָחָה׃ֿ

The Lord’s redeemed shall return, and come singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall attain gladness and joy, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

It’s not lost any Jew who is aware of the Jewish calendar that the last living hostages in Gaza were returned to safety two years later, to the day, from the day of their brutal capture and abduction. They were taken from their homes and from their dancing on the holiday of Shmini Atseret/Simchat Torah 5784, and they were brought back to Israeli soil this past Monday, Hoshana Rabbah 5786, which led straight into Shmini Atseret/Simchat Torah 5786 that night at sundown.

In addition, let it not be lost on anyone that the literal meaning of Hoshana Rabbah (הושענא רבה) is none other than “Great Salvation.”

And yet — on that radiant day, I found a dark question lurking in the back of my mind. It’s an uncomfortable question, but one I believe must be asked — because if we don’t, it will no doubt fester in the shadows of our psyches:

• These 20 remaining living hostages are back to safety, but are not back to normal. They have come back with unimaginable wounds from what they’ve endured, which will undoubtedly will leave scars on them and all those around them.

• 251 people were taken hostage on October 7, 2023. Those that were thankfully returned — by the grace of God and the courage and sacrifice of the soldiers of the IDF — will similarly bear their burdens, each in their own way, probably forever.

• 92 of the 251 hostages were murdered while captive in Gaza.

• As of this writing, Hamas has only returned 7 of the 28 deceased hostages whom they committed to returning in the deal signed last week. One of the bodies they returned was confirmed by Israeli forensics to be the body of a Gazan.

• 1,195 people were murdered on October 7th itself.

• 915 IDF soldiers have fallen in this war. The IDF have identified over 6,500 bereaved family members who have lost loved ones in this war, and this is just the closest circle of people mourning those lost in battle.

• 3,830 soldiers have been lightly wounded in battle, 1,557 moderately wounded, and 946 severely wounded. May they all see complete recoveries.

• Earlier this week, another Nova survivor took his life. His pain, he wrote in a note to his friends and family, was too great to bear. May Hashem bring consolation and healing to all of those suffering from what they’ve experienced.

• The country is exhausted from the two years of war — the word “exhausted,” I’m told by those who live in Israel, just barely captures the feeling of tension, strain on marriages and families, tiredness, seemingly endless calls into the reserves, hearing sad news, and enormous economic strain.

• Gaza is in ruins. Tens of thousands of non-combatants have lost their lives. Millions of Palestinians have been left living in misery.

Here’s my question — maybe it’s yours too:

How can we truly celebrate the return of these 20 hostages with so much destruction wrought? It’s not even a return to things as they were on October 6, 2023… The word “return” makes it sound like things went back to where they came from, but they didn’t. Everything is different. We, of course, should be grateful and relieved, but can we celebrate in good conscience?

We, of course, should be grateful and relieved, but can we celebrate in good conscience?

Here’s a utilitarian way to answer this question and put our minds at ease.

We could claim that things are objectively better after the war than they were before the war:

• We are no longer naive to the threat of Hamas and the vulnerabilities in Israel’s border security. The Israeli security apparatus has a much better grasp on how to secure Gaza as well as Judaea and Samaria.

• Hamas’s leadership and fighters have been decimated.

• October 7th provided the critical opportunities to obliterate Hezbollah, which was far more formidable than Hamas. It similarly allowed Israel to take decisive actions against the Houthis, and of course, deal historic blows to Iran’s nuclear program and weaken its regime that was the proverbial “head of the octopus” of global terror.

These points can be made, are made by many, and ought to be made, but they do not satisfy, at least for me, the depths of our question. They feel like emotionally detached rationalizations akin to chalking up the devastation of the Holocaust as a necessary tragedy to allow for the establishment of the State of Israel. They may satisfy some people’s minds, but not their souls.

I want to propose a perspective that isn’t entirely rational, but does resonate with me more deeply.

Throughout Biblical and Rabbinic literature, redemption weaves together two threads that most of us would not have intuitively connected:

• teshuva (“repentance”) and

• the return from captivity.

Here’s a notable example:

Devrarim 30:1-3:

And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and you will take to heart (וַהֲשֵׁבֹתָ) among all the nations, into which Hashem your God has driven you, and you will return (וְשַׁבְתָּ) to Hashem your God, and will listen to His voice according to all that I command you this day, you and your children, with all thy heart, and with all your soul; that then, Hashem your God will return (וְשָׁב) your captives (שְׁבוּתְךָ), and have compassion upon you, and will return (וְשָׁב) and gather you from all the nations, amongst whom Hashem your God has scattered you. If your outcasts be at the ends parts of heavens, from there Hashem your God will gather you, and from there He will fetch you.

Notice that the Hebrew language makes the connection virtually impossible to ignore. The repeating Hebrew root ש-ב runs through it all: returning to a truth one had previously ignored, our return to Hashem, the return of our captives, and the return to our homeland.

There is more meaning to this than a mere linguistic coincidence. When a person has led his life certain way, with certain habits that have harmed himself and/or others — and eventually wishes to change that path — and even succeeds in doing so — sinister thoughts may stop him from celebrating: the regret of all those years wasted, what he “could have” and “should have” done. How “life could be different if he had only…”

The penitent is very much like a prisoner released from captivity, but still haunted by a past that hinders his future. He wants to go back and live his life, but feels like he can’t.1

It’s been thankfully well-publicized that the common translation of teshuva-תשובה as “repentance” is misleading. The English word “repentance” comes from the word “penitence,” which refers to experiencing pain, shame and remorse over one’s actions. The notion of teshuva-תשובה, however — although certainly includes remorse as part of its process — refers to the person’s return to his natural state of alignment with his ideal self.2 If the pain, shame and remorse stop him from this realignment then they are, by definition, working against the teshuva. This realignment — despite looking like going back to “square one,” must be celebrated because it is not square one. The one who has set himself free from these habits and mindsets is unlike anyone else:

Talmud Berachot 34b:

As Rabbi Abbahu said: In the place where “masters of teshuva” stand, even the fully righteous do not stand…

Having made his mistakes, even when he makes the necessary changes, he is a new person. True, he doesn’t regain his innocence. That isn’t the idea of teshuva. The idea of teshuva is that he now knows more about life, more about himself, and more about his God Who has given him the opportunity to grow through it all. He has more experience, and is a deeper, richer person. This transformation must be celebrated.

It’s not an accident that the Jewish calendar places the holiday of Sukkot, known as “Zman Simchateinu,” the “Time of Our Joy,” four days after the conclusion of Yom Kippur, the culmination of the season of teshuva that began 40 days prior to it on Rosh Chodesh Elul. Imagine for a moment what it would feel like to receive forgiveness and atonement, emerging with a fresh slate from the prison of past mistakes and not have a dedicated time for celebration for the chance to live another year of life unburdened by the past. After breaking our fast, we’d remain saddled with opportunity cost, too fragile and terrified to start anew. This would be sad indeed. We would have ostensibly returned to a “pre-sin state,” but without celebrating that we have matured in the process.

The message of Sukkot, which ends with Hoshana Rabbah, and is capped off with Shmini Atseret/Simchat Torah is to not allow sadness to overwhelm happiness in the teshuva process. Just the opposite —  we are instructed to actively make sure that our happiness overwhelms our sadness. Gratitude, happiness and actual celebration are the very things that lock in our commitments to change.

For this reason, one of the main events in the Holy Temple during Sukkot was a song and dance performed by two groups of elderly men, those who were renowned for the righteousness their whole lives, and those who were renowned for having had youthful lapses in their righteousness, but eventually turned their lives around:

Talmud Sukkah 53a:

The pious and the men of action [would dance before the people who attended the “Simchat Beit HaShoeva” celebration].

The Sages taught that some of them would sing [in their song praising Hashem]: “Happy is our youth, [as we did not sin then,] that did not shame [us in] our old age.” These are the pious and the men of action, [who spent all their lives engaged in Torah and mitzvot].

And some would sing: “Happy is our old age, that atoned for our youth [when we sinned].” These are the “baalei teshuva.”

Both these and those say: “Happy is he who did not sin; and he who sinned should repent and Hashem will forgive him.”

True teshuva is cause for celebration, and celebration is essential to true, long-lasting teshuva.

The families of hostages suffered unfathomably for 738 days. But when they greeted their kids, siblings, spouses — they cried with pent up sadness — but also with tears of joy. They smiled and laughed, hugged and kissed them. Their joy did not contradict their sadness and suffering. This joy reinaugurated their relationships with their loved ones now in their arms. It is this joy that brings with it the belief that they are actually home. They are actually back. With a long lives ahead of them, please God.

Teshuva means to “return,” but it never meant to go back to where we were. There’s an ironclad rule of the universe that things never go back to what they were. We cannot understand spiritually why exactly we have to go through what we went through, but we know in our souls that this process is what makes us who we are, even if we never would have asked to go through it.

Perhaps this is why the message of this journey is sent to us in a wordless code long before we get to the last days of the holiday season.

The sound of the shofar begins as a unified tekiah sound, but then breaks into three wailing shevarim (literally “broken pieces”) sounds, and then shatters into the staccato teruah (literally “shattered”) sound. The code clearly signifies a breakdown in life that at some point seems like it goes from bad to worse. But it doesn’t end there. It returns to a tekiah on the other side. The pieces are put back together. Although the second tekiah sounds like the first tekiah, one who appreciates it coming after the breakdown in between understands in his soul that it is so very different. It shines bright with joy on the background of sadness.

May we merit to hear the tekiah gedolah of a world in which all the pieces come back together.

Isaiah 51:11

וּפְדוּיֵי ה׳ יְשׁוּבוּן וּבָאוּ צִיּוֹן בְּרִנָּה וְשִׂמְחַת עוֹלָם עַל־רֹאשָׁם שָׂשׂוֹן וְשִׂמְחָה יַשִּׂיגוּן נָסוּ יָגוֹן וַאֲנָחָה׃ֿ

The Lord’s redeemed shall return, and come singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall attain gladness and joy, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

I know we are still knee deep in our Language of Life series, studying the Divine depth and precision of Hebrew language, but I had an epiphany when studying the book of Jonah last Shabbat, and feel compelled to share it with you. I hope you find it meaningful as I did.

On Yom Kippur, the day of forgiveness and atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Book of Jonah is read at Mincha, the afternoon service.

Why? Of course, it’s about teshuva (repentance) — but most of Tanakh is about teshuva. It also ends in such a strange, anti-climactic way. It’s not even clear if Jonah himself repented. He seems to have ended right back where he started.

Rabbi Yehoshua ibn Shuaib (Spain, circa 1280-1340) explained that the role of the book is to broaden our vision outward — to the whole world’s repentance — since over the course of Yom Kippur we may have become too narrow in our focus — as if everything is just us Jews and God. This is how Rashi (the classic French medieval Biblical commentator) explained Jonah’s reluctance to enable Nineveh’s repentance: if they succeeded, it would make the Jewish people look bad for their weak teshuva record, and allow Assyria to become God’s instrument to displace the Jews from the Land of Israel. But Jonah was wrong. Moses refused to indict the Jewish people — but not at the expense of other nations’ repentance!

The Malbim (19th c. commentator) adds another layer. He explains that Jonah wasn’t opposed to helping even non-Jews repent — but only if it was real repentance — not some pro forma, “Disney repentance” that would last a week, while making for horrible optics for the Jewish people. No, Sir. He would not be accomplice in this mission.

Here’s my added insight, which I thought was worth interrupting our study of Hebrew for: Jonah was a black-and-white thinker. He is introduced as “Yonah Ben Amitai,” literally, “Son of my truth” — a man of truth — perhaps to a fault. If repentance wasn’t “real,” he wanted no part in it. So convinced was he of his absolute stance that he slept in the bowels of the ship while the waves crashed around them to get him to change his mind and return to his Divine mission. He even introduced himself to the pagan captain of his ship as “a Hebrew and I fear the Lord.” So sure was he that God was merely testing his resolve to not compromise the reputation of the Jewish people for the superficial teshuva of others. Only after three days at death’s door, squished inside the guts of a fish, did he shift — to repent, if you can even call it that. He agreed to go to Ninveh and do what he was told, but ironically, his own repentance is eventually shown to be incomplete.

Nineveh did a spectacular albeit partial repentance. They abandoned the sin theft altogether, returning stolen objects in their position, but not their idolatrous beliefs. Jonah cries out in frustration, “This is exactly what I was talking about!” Apparently, he hadn’t fully accepted God’s will after all.

And so Jonah asks to die. “What would be good is if I died — and don’t live.” There is no thought more black-and-white than this. The only objectively good outcome for Jonah at this point is for him to cease to exist.

God’s response? “Are you upset about a mere marginal improvement?” In other words: Would you have preferred that the 120,000 people of Nineveh remain exactly the same? Would that have been better than their incomplete but still meaningful step forward in spiritual living?

This question connects powerfully back to the very first act of repentance: Cain’s partial repentance after killing his brother Abel.

Right before he committed that first murder, God asked him: “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you improve yourself, won’t you be uplifted?” (Genesis 4:6–7).

Cain was angry and sad. Angry at himself for failing, and sad over a reality his ego wouldn’t let him change. He was stuck. But God’s solution was clear: just improve — even marginally. Learn from mistakes, and you are by definition moving in the right direction. Cain’s stubbornness stopped him from accepting this advice. And yet, ironically, he is the one who ends up teaching his father Adam — the first human being that he’s not stuck. We can all change. Through Adam, and later the Jewish people, all humanity was taught about teshuva — that partial repentance is still called repentance. When Cain admitted, “My sin is too great to bear,” he modeled the first step towards return. You can’t go anywhere without taking a first step.

The episode of the kikayon plant God provided Jonah for shade drives home the same point: even temporary shade is better than no shade at all. Jonah doesn’t fully internalize this. But the fact that God’s last words to him are left hanging — with Jonah giving no answer — leaves open the possibility that he did accept, at least partially, that absolute good is not the only good. Improvement is also good — and a necessary good towards ultimate, global good.

And this is the message we need — not on Shabbat Shuva or the morning of Yom Kippur, when we aim high — but at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, as we begin to accept that we haven’t fully repaired ourselves, let alone all of creation. This is precisely what we need to hear: perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Absolute good should not stand in the way of genuine improvement.

I want to share two stories with you about people I know personally.

• A friend of mine, now a man extremely influential Jewish leader, was once a fairly not religious college student studying abroad in Jerusalem. One day, when visiting the Kotel, an Orthodox woman came up to him — he assumed to ask for money. She said to him, “I know that if I tell you to change your life and become fully religious, you’ll ignore me completely. So too, if I tell you to start keeping completely kosher. All I ask is that one time that you are about to eat something not kosher — you don’t.” For reasons unknown to him, he agreed. A month or so later, he found himself at Wendy’s ordering a double bacon cheeseburger. Again, inexplicably he correct his order, and asked the woman serving him to “hold the bacon.” Confounded but intrigued, he sat to eat his hot double cheeseburger. This is how he described the experience to me: “As I bit into that double cheeseburger, I felt waves of kedusha (holiness) wash over me, and so began my process of becoming religious. It was the holiest cheeseburger in history.”

• Another couple, who were likely in their early 70s when I met them, shared with me that they started keeping Shabbat in their 60s. That’s fairly unusual, so I asked them to please tell me the story behind that life change. They said that the rabbi at the synagogue they were attending asked them a couple of years after they started going regularly for Shabbat, how they got to Shul. Slightly uncomfortable, they admitted that they drove. The rabbi, without flinching, recommended that they try driving the following week halfway. Puzzled at his bizarre suggestion, they agreed anyway. The next Shabbat, they drove halfway, parked on the side of the street, walked the rest of the way, prayed and enjoyed kiddush. On their way back, they got to their car, stopped and looked at each other. “Are we really going to get back in the car? We’re already halfway.” That was the last time they drove on Shabbat.

Like these stories there are hundreds of thousands of stories of people growing through small, incremental changes. In the face of big life changes, they would have stayed stuck forever.

The Vilna Gaon (also known as the “Gra,” 18th c.) pointed out that this is the deeper message of the book, which he understood was an allegory for the journey of the soul into one body, not being fully successful and needing to reincarnate to complete its mission. The whole concept of reincarnation (gilgulim) rests on the idea that no one repairs their entire being in one lifetime. Each lifetime accomplishes a partial rectification (tikun) until the complete rectification is achieved. In this way, Jonah’s prophecy is truly for the generations. Like Eliyahu the Prophet, to whom he owed his life for reviving him as a child, Jonah’s life work unfolds not in one moment but across Jewish history — one Yom Kippur afternoon at a time.

Gmar Chatima Tova.

🖨️ Printable Version for RH

You take either some fish head or meat from the head of a lamb, and before you eat it, you pray “נהיה לראש ולא לזנב — we should be a head (rōsh), and not a tail.”1

It makes you wonder if the name for the Jewish New Year “Rosh Hashana,” literally, “the Head of the Year” is intentional or just a trivial quirk of the Hebrew language.

Why isn’t it called “Hatchalat Hashana — התחלת השנה,” which would translate to “the beginning of the year”?

Or, as we do in English, “Shana Chadasha — שנה חדשה,” “the new year”?

The Jewish concept of Rosh Hashana is very different than the secular concept of New Year. On December 31, people around the world watch their clocks with great excitement as they approach 12am, eventually counting down from 10 — 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, bursting in catharsis, releasing confetti, chugging champagne, and kissing the closest person to them. The year changes, but unsurprisingly, this ritual doesn’t lead to people changing.

Instead, the cycle continues. After all, from a scientific point of view, there’s absolutely nothing special about 12:00am on January 1st. Astronomically, nothing — literally nothing — happens at that moment. The Earth keeps sliding along its elliptical orbit.

In order for our lives to change in a meaningful way, we have to change our minds. We need a new outlook. A new perspective. A new way of seeing, and a new language to talk about it.

“In order for our lives to change in a meaningful way, we have to change our minds.

This is the change we look to make on Rosh Ha’Shana. We don’t just want our feet to keep moving mindlessly in the direction we’ve been walking all year. We want to start the year with perspective, with our head on our shoulders. With a fresh Rosh-ראש.

This brings us to another Hebrew word that perhaps we haven’t given much thought to: Shana-שנה, “year.” What is its deeper meaning?

On the one hand, the verb lishnot-לשנות means “to repeat,” from the word shnayim-שנים, “two.” On the other hand, the word shoneh-שונה means “different.”

Aren’t “repeat” and “different” opposites?

They are, but they come together in the English word iteration. To iterate is to repeat a cycle but with a conscientious modification every time.

“To iterate is to repeat a cycle but with a conscientious modification every time.”

Herein is the misnomer of “10,000 hours of practice” to become an expert, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, based on research by K. Anders Ericsson. The misconception was founded on the notion that if you repeat an activity for 10,000 hours, you automatically become an expert. This is patently false. The world is full of bad doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and teachers who have practiced their craft for well over 10,000 hours — and did it wrong every single time. It’s for this reason that Ericsson made sure to call it 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice.” It isn’t the repetition alone that makes one improve. It’s the mindful learning with every repetition, that makes the person 1% better than the time before. This is iteration, and the idea of a Rosh Hashana — mindful iteration.

Before we restart the cycle again, another lap around the sun, we need to feel the existential judgment that asks us if we’re running in circles or becoming better.

May we experience the mind expansion of Rosh Hashana that allows us to see higher than the patterns we tend to mindlessly travel along. May the judgment be sweetened in knowing that the changes we have to make are the changes of growth, improvement, and self-actualization.

Shana Tova!

Join the last 10 days of LASHON TOV 💬

I can’t tell you yet too much about what’s in store, but I will tell you that I’m excited.

The future of XL is more interactive, more interconnected, and more dynamic. Our vision is much deeper and broader than an newsletter…

A few weeks ago, we began to explore what prayer is by carefully studying the Hebrew word for it, mitpalel-מתפלל.

This week, I want to think together about the most essential mental maneuver to be able to pray — what’s known in Hebrew as kavana-כוונה.

Kavana is normally thought of as “concentration,” and is most often translated as “intent.” While these are reasonable English language associations with the Hebrew word kavana, they miss its core meaning, and may not help you actually figure out what it is you’re supposed to do when you decide to concentrate.

“Concentration” conjures up an image of a person physically exerting himself, trying with all his might to get himself to think intensely.

In my experience, this approach to mental focus ironically makes it harder to concentrate. I personally end up getting distracted by the physical strain in my face and body, as well as by the focus on “trying to focus” — instead of what I want to be focusing on.

The word “intent” is better. The problem with it is that it gives to indication as to how to live and pray with more intentionality. After all, we may intend to have a meaningful prayer session, but fail dismally despite our best intentions.

What secrets are encoded in the word kavana-כוונה that can guide us to actually putting it into practice?

Kavana-כוונה is the verb form of kivun-כיוון, which means direction.

To have kavana is to direct, aim and align your mind, heart and body. It’s this alignment that allows our intentions to flow through us — and it’s this flow that is the essence of prayer.

“To have kavana is to direct, aim and align your mind, heart and body.

It’s this alignment that allows our intentions to flow through us — and it’s this flow that is the essence of prayer. ”

The problem is that the mind’s natural state is s c a t t e r e d.

If this isn’t immediately evident to you, try to be quiet for two minutes, and watch your thoughts bounce from one thing to another.

“Am I doing this right?”

               “Has it been two minutes?”

     “My nose itches.”

                        “Oh man I forgot to call Steve back!”

Because our attention is loosely attached to whatever happens to be scrolling through our minds at any given moment, we tend not to realize how random our thinking is. We just follow the bouncing ball of our thoughts.

Manually scrolling through social media just masks our inattention. It does this through an illusion of focus on whatever the algorithm feeds our bottomless appetite for distraction.

While those with diagnosable ADHD certainly experience a significantly larger deficit of attention relative to most people, most people suffer from an objective deficit of sustained attention on what we truly want from life — and suffer we do from the consequent misalignment.1

Spiritual disciplines over the millennia have had to reckon with the problem of our perpetual distraction. It’s a hard fact of the human condition. Any discipline that ignores or avoids this fact is naive and not a discipline at all. And it’s not just because of smartphones and micro-form video content (although these certainly haven’t helped).

The Buddha was teaching people how to calm and direct their minds 2,500 years ago, and Hinduism was already addressing the issue even prior to the Buddha. Both traditions often refer to the dilemma of the “Monkey Mind.”2

Although the discipline of meditation was prominent in Judaism in ancient times, and was revived more recently in pockets of the Mussar tradition, some Chassidic schools, and the Sephardic Kabbalistic system of the Rashash — the meditative tools of Judaism remain essentially invisible to the general population today.3

Let’s look at kavana as a mindfulness practice of alignment more closely and practically:

The Talmud, 1,500 years ago, identified a number of verses in Tanakh, written millennia prior, as speaking to the need to align one’s mind, heart and body — not just before uttering words in prayer, but also before performance of a mitzvah.

It should be noted that even this oft-used English word associated with mitzvot — “performance” — is precisely what the sages of the Talmud wanted us to avoid. Mitzvot and certainly tefila (prayer) are meant to be profound experiences of connection and relationship with God. In order for them to indeed be connection points, not merely “performances,” we have to first align the many layers of who we are towards the goal of connection.

This is precisely the function of saying a beracha before a mitzvah, and the goal of the entire lead-up to the amida in prayer — inner and outer alignment.4

Here’s a visual of what alignment might look like:

Our first flicker of awareness should be trained towards gratitude towards the One Who has given us another day of life.

As mundane as it sounds, we have to make sure we use the bathroom so that our bodies are clean, healthy and undistracted. We wash our hands to be physically clean, but also to shed the sleepy unconsciousness from them.

We get dressed in a way that doesn’t produce a mismatch between how we look and the momentous meeting with God we are hoping to have.

Since our emotions do not autonomously blossom when we open up a siddur (prayerbook), we have to warm them up to align with the encounter with our Creator. After some discussion, the Talmud concludes that the appropriate emotional state for prayer is a joyful reverence (or a reverent joy). By considering how precious the opportunity is to have quality, mindful time of connection, we are meant to feel great about having achieved a state of true trepidation.

This emotional state is reached through a conscious state of awareness that we are “before God.” Meaning, although we cannot visualize God, we can visualize ourselves before Him. We can consider that our actions, words, and even thoughts are all seen by Him. This “being seen” is what all of our souls desire, and naturally brings joy.

We then focus on aligning the words we say with this consciousness. To mean what we say we need to: a) understand at least their simple meaning, and then b) actually mean them sincerely.

The desire that is meant to course through this alignment is the sincere desire to connect with our Creator. If this sounds foreign, think about it as simply the desire to connect — the desire to be aligned with your purpose — the desire for meaningful moments. All humans desire this. We just need to calm our minds enough to allow this desire to shine through.

This alignment isn’t necessarily a specific step-by-step process. Different people on different days may have to focus more on one element than another, but the idea is that a powerful spiritually experience of connection depends on this alignment — on our kavana.

The alternative is the default, mindless state of misalignment.

Without intentional alignment, we are all scattered. We barely know where we are, and have given no thought as to where we want to be. We might be dressed like we just rolled out of bed, and haven’t even stopped to take care of our bodily needs. Our emotional state is blowing in the wind. We open the siddur and mumble words out of habit, often not even noticing that they don’t register meaningfully in our minds.

Without doing the work of alignment, we obviously have no awareness of being in God’s presence, and our conscious craving is for breakfast and/or sleep — not to connect with our Creator.

Alignment is a choice.

Perhaps the most important choice we can make everyday.

It’s all in the word kavana-כוונה. Another example of how the “language of life” can guide us.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the word for prayerbook, siddur-סידור.

Share

Prayer is the quintessential religious activity. Around the world, about half of those surveyed by Pew responded “yes” when asked if they pray daily.1

Its popularity, though, doesn’t explain how or why prayer should work.

• Are we just begging God until He “gives in” to our pestering prayers?

• Are we meant to formulate logical arguments to “convince God” to let us have what we’re asking for? Is that what prayer is supposed to be?

• Or is it that God, for some reason, is unaware of what we need until we bring it to His attention? Because this would make ZERO theological sense.

These are actually hard questions that would likely stump most people who pray daily.

What is prayer? How does it work?

In Hebrew, “to pray” is L’Hitpalel-להתפלל.

The strange thing about L’Hitpalel is that it’s a reflexive verb. “Reflexive” means that people do it to themselves.2 Let me give you some other examples:

• L’Hitlabesh-להתלבש - to get yourself dressed

• L’Hitkaleakh-להתקלח - to take a shower

• L’Hitgaleakh-להתגלח - to shave

This might surprise you since ostensibly prayer is something you do “to God” — not to yourself.

This may help us answer our original questions because it would mean that praying is not about changing God’s mind, but rather changing my own. But in the meantime, it spurs new questions:

How does talking to God change me? And if I am the one being changed, how does this help me get what I want from God?

Here’s how prayer works and why it all makes perfect sense.

The Hebrew root of מתפלל (Mitpalel) is .פ.ל.ל (P-L-L).

It means “to contemplate a possibility as real.”3

It also has a connotation of judgement because a judge needs to do precisely this: he or she must consider each side as a real possibility, and then judge which of those possibilities is most plausibly real. Doing this successfully requires a sincere desire to arrive at the truth, a robust imagination, and clear thinking, which incidentally are essential for powerful prayer.

Now, when we conjugate .פ.ל.ל (P-L-L) with the reflexive structure, we get התפלל (Hitpalel). Hitpalel means to get myself to consider my own deepest desires — my needs and wants — as real possibilities — even as I try to consciously stand before the objective truth of God’s will.

“Hitpalel-התפלל means to get myself to consider my own deepest desires — my needs and wants — as real possibilities — even as I consciously stand before the objective truth of God’s will.”

Is what I’m asking for reasonable? Do I really need it? Do I really want it? Do I deserve it? Am I doing my part to get it? These are all questions that run through my mind as I turn to God with my requests.

I think back to when I was once again single after my divorce. At some point, during that dark period, I had so given up on the idea of me being happily married that I barely prayed about it. I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words. Or rather, I was afraid to. What if the answer was “no”?

(The story goes that my dear friend’s mother-in-law spontaneously gave me a blessing that opened my mind to the possibility of, in her words, a “grand family,” allowing me once again to ask God for Him to help me make it a reality. I am grateful beyond words for Him continually answering those prayers over the last 11 years!)

God may want something for us — to get married, find a job we thrive in, have kids, get one of our kids into the right school, or married to the right person — but our inability to see it or appreciate it may be the bottleneck that prevents it from happening. Why would He provide it before we’re prepared to accept it?

To truly be open to life’s most wonderful possibilities, we need to first see them as possible and believe that the One Who runs the universe wants them for us.

We must:

1. Be so fully aware of Hashem’s existence that we actually feel ourselves in His Presence.

2. Believe that He wants what is best for us and no obstacle is stopping Him from bringing it about.

3. Feel deserving of receiving it.

The work of Tefila-תפילה (prayer) is reflexive because we are changing our own minds. To th degree to which we succeed in doing so, God will provide us the good He so wishes to give us.

Listen to XL on Spotify 🎙️

Listen to XL on Apple Podcasts 🎙️

1

Here’s a breakdown by Pew, if you’re interested of the rates of daily prayer by country. Note that white Americans in “blue states” tend to underestimate how religious their country is.

One of the many crimes against the English language according to my legendary high school English teacher Mrs Marie Miller (of blessed memory) was the error of one saying or writing the phrase “very unique.”

“A person or thing cannot be ‘very unique.’

‘Unique’ means ‘one of a kind.’ One is either unique or he is not.

There is no such thing as being ‘very unique,’ or ‘somewhat unique,’ for that matter.”

-Mrs Marie Miller

This error is more than just grammatical. It reflects the superficiality of our sense of individuality. The things we might assume make us stand out in certain settings are discovered to be commonplace in others. This realization can be upsetting. A so-called “genius” in high school can have a minor identity crisis when she arrives at her Ivy League campus and finds herself to be average.

A personal anecdote that comes to mind is that I ironically stopped wearing a kippah when I spent a gap year in Israel after having started wearing one when I was a senior in my mostly non-Jewish public high school. What I had thought made me unique in my rural Connecticut hometown dissolved upon arrival in Jerusalem. A shallow sense of individuality is inevitably revealed as such.

It is this same superficiality about what makes us unique that is the source of our fear of being replaced by AI bots. Our reliance on ChatGPT (and other LLMs) to accomplish so many annoying tasks we used to do ourselves belies our anxiety that we’ll be replaced by them.

But the opposite should be true. Artificial intelligence begs the question as to what is real intelligence.

What is the essence of who we are?

What makes me irreplaceable?

It is axiomatic in Jewish consciousness that every single human being is a unique phenomenon in the history of the universe. No where else on planet Earth is there someone who contributes to the mosaic of humanity what you do. Not now. Not ever.

What about identical twins?

No one challenges the fact that although identical twins share the same DNA, their personalities can be quite different. Modern science, averse to the existence of a immeasurable soul, once believed that the personalities of identical twins diverged exclusively due to environmental differences. This theory found did not find scientific support as personality differences existed whether or not twins were raised in the same home. Minor environmental differences could not be said to account for major personality differences.1

People are, of course, affected by their environments. All of us, without exception, are forged by our times, our societies and cultures, our parents and families, our schools, our shuls and our workplaces — even our own bodies undoubtedly shape the people we are. But Judaism does not see personality as exclusively determined by that which is outside of it.

The human spirit is not a chunk of tofu that merely absorbs the flavors it comes in contact with.

Nor is the human being like the hollow “eye of the storm” surrounded by environmental factors raging around it.

At the center of the person is his unique, Divine essence.

While people are influenced by their environments, they still possess a fundamental personality that is essentially theirs. Uniqueness begins there. AI can simulate everything else, but it is merely amalgamating factors externally. It cannot synthesize this inner uniqueness.

The word “unique” in English was borrowed from French, and originally from the word unus in Latin, meaning “one.” Similarly, in Hebrew the word for “unique” is Yakhid-יחיד. It is related to the much better known word Ekhad-אחד, also meaning “one.”

In this way, a person who manages to tap into his God-given uniqueness (יחידיותו), connects with God’s Uniqueness (אחדותו).2

God is Unique in His Uniqueness because by definition there is no One other than Him, but a person who shines his or her unique light is doing something no one else can. It can therefore be said that your uniqueness is as real as God’s.

It is for this reason that the passuk (verse) in the Torah that describes the human being as “made in the image of God,” first makes the point that every single human being is made “each in his own image” despite all descending from the same original Adam and Eve.

Bereishit 1:27:

וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹקִים  אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹקִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם׃

So God created mankind in his own [unique] image,3 in the image of God He created him — male and female He created them.

The unique color of light that shines into and through every person’s consciousness is the key to understanding the Image of God.

The Talmud refers to the crucible of identity that is the Image of God as a press, like one mints coins. This press can be understood as the combination of a person’s uniqueness within pressing against a person’s unique circumstances without. My soul’s essence is unique AND my life circumstances are unique. I am forged through my decisions between both.4

Uniqueness is not a New Age fad. I mean it is, but it’s so much deeper than the way it’s presented.

Individuality in pop culture is about “your personal brand” and “your unique look.” While there is something to this, it does not begin to scratch the surface of the uniqueness that connects us to the Unique One. A deeper sense of our own uniqueness also allows us to appreciate the uniqueness of others against whom we are not competing. In the immortal words of Mrs Miller:

“You cannot be ‘very unique.’ You either are unique or you are not.”

Share

To read more about the profound understanding of individuality in Torah consciousness, please read the book I coauthored with my dear friend Rabbi Dr Yosef Lynn Nurture their Nature, on sale today.

To order a copy, send $12/copy to any one of the following payment options, and include your U.S. mailing address in the note (after Monday, the price goes back up to $18 including shipping, which is still less than Amazon).

• Venmo: @rabbijackcohen

• Paypal: jackcohenperel@gmail.com

• Zelle: jackcohenperel@gmail.com

Abraham Joshua Heschel described the translation of words and concepts from the Holy Language of Hebrew to modern English like pressing flowers between the pages of a book.

The basic stuff of the flower remains, but all of its depth is lost in the process.

“…the translation of words and concepts from the Holy Language of Hebrew to modern English like pressing flowers between the pages of a book.

The basic stuff of the flower remains, but all of its depth is lost in the process.”

Sometimes, though, an English translation manages to hold onto some of the nuance from the original.

You may have noticed that the English word “heaven” is often used in the plural, as in: “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

Heavens.

The word “Heavens” preserves the plural from the Hebrew word for sky, Shamayim-שמיִם, which ends with “יִם-” (pronounced “-eem”) indicating a plural noun.1

Note that this isn’t intuitive to most modern people. If you and I were standing outside, and you were to point up and ask me what you were pointing at, I would respond, “the sky.” I wouldn’t say “skies.”

As we’ll see in a moment, though, skies are exactly what you are pointing at with your finger skywards.

When you point to the sky, you aren’t just pointing to our atmosphere. There’s not much there for you to point to other than 60 miles or so of thin, transparent air. The illusion of a blue dome stretched over our heads is nothing more than the scattering of blue light, as photons ricochet between air particles to make their way to us.

Beyond the edge of what we call “the sky” is a different sky — many orders of magnitude more vast than our atmosphere.

Just the Solar System (including the Oort cloud beyond Neptune) is over two billion times the diameter of planet Earth. If the Earth were the head of a needle, the solar system would be the size of North America.

If we then zoom out to properly consider that our solar system is only a single star system among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, we would have to appreciate that if our Solar System would be the size of a U.S. quarter, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States.

And based on what the Hubble Telescope can currently see, the Milky Way is only one of around 2 trillion galaxies like it in the observable universe.

All of this — and much more — is out there when you point to the sky.

You are pointing to a “there” you can see, but at the same, pointing beyond it to a much further “there” you cannot see.

“You are pointing to a ‘there’ you can see, but at the same, pointing beyond it to a much further ‘there’ you cannot see.”

This idea is elegantly contained in the word Shamayim-שמים. The word “Sham-שם” means “there.” The word “Shamayim-שמים” essentially doubles over the word “Sham” — in the same way that the word “Yad” (hand) is doubled with the word “Yadayim” (hands) — as if to say “beyonds” or even better said, “beyond the beyond.”

What a gorgeous way to refer to the Heavens.

It is explicitly this conception of the Heavens about which King Solomon, in his wisdom, remarked upon inaugurating the Holy Temple to the Infinite, Blessed Be He:

Melachim I 8:27:

“For will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heavens and heavens of heavens (השמים ושמי השמים) cannot contain You — how much less this house that I have built?”

How many heavens are there?

It depends how you count, but according to the the standard way of counting, there are seven.

The English idiom of being “in seventh Heaven” comes from this ancient cosmology recorded in the Talmud, and shared with other ancient cultures, of there being seven distinct levels of heaven.

Chagigah 12b:

Reish Lakish said: There are seven firmaments, and they are as follows: 1) Vilon, 2) Rakia, 3) Sheḥakim, 4) Zevul, 5) Ma’on, 6) Makhon, and 7) Aravot.

Vilon, literally, “curtain,” is the firmament that does not contain anything, but enters at morning and departs in the evening, and renews the act of Creation daily, as it is stated: “Who stretches out the heavens as a curtain [Vilon], and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22).

Rakia, firmament, is the one in which the sun, moon, stars, and zodiac signs are fixed, as it is stated: “And God set them in the firmament [Rakia] of the heaven” (Genesis 1:17).

Shekhakim, heights, is the one in which mills stand and grind manna for the righteous, as it is stated: “And He commanded the heights [Shekhakim] above, and opened the doors of heaven; and He caused manna to rain upon them for food, and gave them of the corn of heaven” (Psalms 78:23–24)…

Without going through each one, I want to share with you one more insight.

Rabbi Meir Levush “Malbim” (1809-79) explained just as we’ve started to explain.2 The lowest level of the Heavens is what we call the “atmosphere” — it contains the celestial forces that affect daily life on Earth: rain, snow, hail, dew, wind, fluctuations in pressure and temperature, etc. It is what the Talmud calls “Vilon” (curtain) in the sense that it creates a daily illusion of curtaining us off as separated from the rest of the cosmos.

The next level up is what the Talmud and the Torah itself call the “Rakia” (firmament). It refers to the ethereal fabric of spacetime itself in which the celestial bodies of the sun, moon, stars and everything in between are suspended. It is what we usually mean when we say “universe” or “cosmos” (and we’re only 2/7 of the way there!).

The next level up, the third level of Heavens counting from the Earth upwards, is called “Shechakim.” The Talmud clearly refers to a metaphysical dimension that is beyond what we speak of in physics as the “known universe.” Perhaps the Talmud makes a reference to the source of manna, the food that materialized out of nowhere for the Jews in the desert, because this dimension of reality of Shechakim is beyond the beyond the beyond of spacetime — the dimension from which matter and energy themselves materialize seemingly out of nothing.

Not only is each level of the Heavens bigger and beyond the level below it, but each one makes the level below it look physical relative to it. If you manage to get out of the city and look up at the blue sky, you will be filled you with wonder and expansiveness. But if you were to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, you would perceive Earth’s atmosphere as heavy and physical in comparison — so much so that from space, we refer to its heavens simply with the word “Earth.”

“Not only is each level of the Heavens bigger and beyond the level below it, but each one makes the level below it look physical relative to it.”

So too with every level above it.

The Malbim illustrates this phenomenon of spiritual relativity with the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the highest Heavens in which the angels of the level below it (Ophanim) are pictured as if standing on the Earth. They’re nearly in the highest heaven, but relative to the level above them, they are standing on solid ground.

This helps us answer King Solomon’s question: “the heavens and heavens of heavens cannot contain You — how much less this house that I have built?”

The Heavens do not contain the Infinite. The Infinite contains them and everything in them.

Judaism is not about “containing God.” It is about realizing we are contained by Him.

“The Heavens do not contain the Infinite. The Infinite contains them and everything in them.

“Judaism is not about ‘containing God.’ It is about realizing we are contained by Him.”

Share

Not that the United Nations is in any way a respectable institution to be taken seriously — but for historical purposes — we should be aware that in 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" with 72 votes in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions. It was revoked fourteen years later with a large majority with Resolution 46/86, but the damage to the word “Zionism” was done. Its association with chauvinism, hatred and bigotry was officially normalized, and the road was paved for modern accusations of war crimes and genocide, and casual usage of the term “Zionazi.”

“Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

-The United Nations

This was all part of a plan.

Following Israel’s pyrrhic victory in the Yom Kippur War (1973), its enemies pivoted in their strategy towards seeking the legitimization of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a diplomatic and governing entity — a change from how it had been known up until that point: an umbrella organization for terror organizations (e.g. DFLP, PFLP and Black September). While activists worked to legitimize the PLO on the world stage, they simultaneously worked to delegitimize the “Zionist entity” on that same stage.1 Their successes fed the mutation of these campaigns into an global movement hellbent on demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and ultimately “liberate Palestine” through the ethnic cleansing of Jews “from the River to the Sea.”2

It goes without saying that all of this is seriously messed up — and we haven’t even scratched the surface.

But maybe — maybe — there is a Divine message for us in all this.

Maybe the world’s misunderstanding of Zionism is pointing at a misunderstanding we have ourselves about what “Zion” is about…

Share

The word “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by the Austrian Jew Nathan Birnbaum, a leader of the Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) movement, a loose federation of Jewish groups who wanted to drum up support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the historical homeland of the Jewish people, which was then occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Of course, most people have never heard of Birnbaum, as he was eclipsed in public eye by Theodor Herzl who popularized the term that Birnbaum had coined with his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896 and the momentous convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.

The two men eventually diverged dramatically with Birnbaum becoming significantly more religious, and a vocal opponent of Herzl’s secular-political Zionism.3

We’ll return to these clashing icons of Zion, but it should first be clear that the word “Zion” was most certainly not invented in the 1800s. The word Tzion (ציון) is over 3000 year old, appearing for the first time in the book of Samuel:

Shmuel II 5:7:

David captured the stronghold of Zion (ציון) that is [now] the City of David.

“Zion” is mentioned another 158 times in Tanakh (Scriptures), elusively referring to the Land of Israel in general, or the city of Jerusalem or parts of it specifically.4 This fact was not lost on even the most secular early Zionists who drew heavily on Jewish history as recorded in Tanakh, and its prophecies of the ingathering of the exiles in the Land of Israel in the future.

“The word Tzion (ציון) is over 3000 year old…”

If you scan through the many appearances of the word, you’ll see that the connotation of “Zion” in contrast to “Israel” and “Jerusalem,” points not only to a place in space but also to an era in time in which the ultimate destiny of the people of Israel is fufilled.

“…the connotation of ‘Zion,’ in contrast to ‘Israel’ and ‘Jerusalem,’ points not just to a place in space but also to an era in time — towards the ultimate destiny of the people of Israel.”

So what is the precise difference between Tzion (ציון) and Yerushalayim (ירושלים)?

• Tzion (ציון) is the aspirational homeland of the Jewish people. There, and only there, can we live up to our national destiny according to the principles and practices of the Torah, independent of the approval or persecution of the nations of the world and their whims, but prepared to be a light unto them not through proselytizing, but through our example as a model society.5

• Yerushalayim (ירושלים) is what it sounds like — the actual city of Jerusalem, which normally hosts 3+ million tourists a year and more Associated Press staffers than in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. Jerusalem is where the rubber hits the road, and where we either succeed in inspiring the world, or don’t.6

We run into problems when we cross wires between these two terms. “Zion” is not meant to be a public-facing word, nor was the Zionist movement about gaining acceptance among the nations. The Zionist movement was meant to awaken the sleeping giant (the Jewish nation) to fulfill its destiny.

Jerusalem is where our work in Zion comes to fruition.

“‘Zion’ is not meant to be a public-facing word, nor was the Zionist movement about gaining acceptance among the nations.”

The dichotomy between Zion and Jerusalem can be seen in the well-known verse from the prophet Isaiah:7

Yishayahu 2:3:

וְהָלְכוּ עַמִּים רַבִּים וְאָמְרוּ לְכוּ  וְנַעֲלֶה אֶל־הַר־ה׳ אֶל־בֵּית אֱלֹקי יַעֲקֹב וְיֹרֵנוּ מִדְּרָכָיו וְנֵלְכָה בְּאֹרְחֹתָיו כִּי מִצִּיּוֹן תֵּצֵא תוֹרָה וּדְבַר־ה׳ מִירוּשָׁלָ͏ִם

[In the future,] many peoples will go and say: “Let us go up to the Mountain of Hashem‚ to the House of the God of Jacob, so that we may be guided in His ways, and walk in His paths,” for [the truest] Torah is that which will emerge from Zion, and the word of Hashem from Jerusalem.8

Zion is the place where of the guidance of the Torah for Jews by Jews is contextualized within our national mission in the land of Israel.

Jerusalem is the place where the nations of the world will be able to experience the “Word of Hashem,” which is what they will seek — not “Torah” per se.

Herzl was not well-educated in Torah, but through the events of his life, he became enraptured by the idea of Jewish self-determination and statehood. Although his vision was vital to the formation of the Jewish State, it didn’t penetrate to Zion.

Here are Herzl’s final words in The Jewish State:

The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. Whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.

He clearly envisioned Israel having a massive positive impact on the world, but in his mind, it would be due to “our liberty,” “wealth,” and “greatness” — not the “Word of Hashem” shining through us.

Birnbaum, on the other hand, especially as he learned more Torah and became more observant, felt that Herzl’s vision was not deeply rooted in that which makes the Jewish nation Jewish, and gave up on the whole project of Zionism entirely.

Both men were right, and both men were wrong.

Jerusalem will become the lightbulb for the world, but only when filament that is the people of Israel glows with the electricity of Torah plugged into Zion.

The notion of Zion means that we cannot be satisfied with being a religion of disparate communities scattered around the globe, who gather on Zoom periodically for “unity events.”

Zion means that our destiny is to be a cohesive, healthy, happy, growing society that is committed to fulfilling the Word of God in the Torah in a way that is realistic, sustainable and edifying for all elements of that society. This mission of Zion is no one’s business but our own.

When we succeed, which we will, then, “the Word of Hashem will [go out] from Jerusalem, thus He will judge [disputes] between nations, and arbitrate for the many peoples — they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks — nation shall not take up sword against nation, they shall never again know war.”

Where does your sense of security come from?

If you’re like most people, your sense of security is distributed over a number of factors that you’ve assembled around you over the course of your life to allow you to feel safe enough to get your stuff done.

You may have a “security portfolio” that includes but is not limited to:

• the roof over your head

• a job that pays you every couple of weeks

• cash stashed away in your bank accounts

• investments in real estate & the stock market

• health, car, home & life insurance

• your fancy degrees and work experience

• a network of capable people who care about you whom you can turn to if need be

• plus the police, the military, and perhaps your government.

In Israel, people also have: nearby bomb shelters, the Iron Dome, and knowing that Trump is in the Oval Office.

In Gaza, what’s left of Hamas continues to keep its brutal, tight grip on our hostages and their own civilians because they know that the IDF will do everything in its power to not harm them, thereby granting them a spotty sense of security in their dank dim tunnels under the Gaza Strip.

In Iran, Ali Khameinei and his yes-men, until recently, believed that their half a trillion dollar nuclear program was a deterrent for their enemies, and would bring pride to their nation. In it they placed their trust.

These are the sorts of things that cobbled together produce a vague sense of bitachon-בטחון — trust, confidence and security.

By design, a security portfolio can only engender a vague, wobbly sense of security because if we rely on a portfolio of factors, we never really trust anything or anyone specifically. Instead, we lean on our own abilities to put all those pieces into place, which brings us back to relying only on ourselves, and thereby feeling vulnerable and insecure. This explains our highly insured but also highly anxious generation.1

Without a sturdy, integrated belief in God, Who oversees all, can do whatever He wills, and desires what is good for humanity in general and every individual in particular, we’re stuck slapping together security portfolios, and hoping for the best.

In this episode of the Language of Life, we want to better understand this oft-used word “bitachon,” and awaken a desire for the gold standard of bitachon — the bitachon in Hashem Alone.

Typically, the word bitachon-בטחון is used interchangeably with emuna-אמונה, which is normally translated as “faith” or “belief.”

Although they’re related, they’re different concepts:

• Emuna (אמונה) refers to the belief in our minds about that which we cannot perceive directly. Assuming I am a sane person, to do a “trust fall,” I must first believe — and see in my mind’s eye — that the people behind me are prepared to catch me, even though I can’t see them.

  But emuna isn’t enough.

  

• It is bitachon (בטחון) takes emuna to the next level. Bitachon is the visceral sense of security in my body that allows me to physically stay calm with respect to the elements outside of my control and focus on what I have to do.2 In our “trust fall” example, it is my bitachon that permits me to actually lean back and fall into that which previously existed only as my abstract belief.

Since most of us work long and hard to hedge all the elements in our security portfolios, we end up distracted us from the real work of uncovering and actually practicing our deeper sense of trust that life is good because God is good, and things will therefore work out for the best. This is a critical mistake because the sense of trust must be actually practiced in order to be developed. For bitachon to become bitachon it must filter down to our actual bodies’ physical reactions. This can only happen with physical practice.

Ultimately, the only stable sense of security is that which relies on God Alone. Everything else might be a rational effort that is a vital part of life but cannot determine our destiny.

Ultimately, the only stable sense of security is that which relies on God Alone.

Everything else might be a rational effort that is a vital part of life but cannot determine our destiny.

The prime embodiment of this truest form of bitachon was David.

When no member of the Israeli army was willing to stand up against Goliath, the secret weapon of the Philistine army, David, not yet a solider, stood up — if only because no one else would.

King Saul lent David his armor, but it didn’t fit him, so he removed it. Wearing the armor would have been a “rational effort” for him to make — if it fit — but it didn’t — so he went ahead without it.3 As a result, he approached Goliath with what he was accustomed to work with, a sling and a few stones he picked up off the ground.

With every step towards the giant, David not only put to work the bitachon he already possessed. With every step, he strengthened it.

Shmuel I 17:45:

David replied to [Goliath] the Philistine:

“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come against you in the name of Hashem Master of Cosmos, the God of the ranks of Israel, whom you have defied…”

It was David’s confidence in God Alone — not in his own bravado, or his intelligence, or technology — that gave him strength as King of Israel. It is this trait that runs like a golden thread through his poetry in Psalms, and it is this trait that we all need to draw on and develop during these unpredictable, otherwise dangerous times.

We do so every time we physically lean into our belief that our job is to do what we’re here to do, and everything else is Hashem’s job.

Let us stand firm not on our own strength but in who we are and where God has placed us to serve as individuals and as a nation.

Our place is as established as Mount Zion.

Tehilim 125:1

שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת הַבֹּטְחִים בַּה’ כְּהַר־צִיּוֹן לֹא־יִמּוֹט לְעוֹלָם יֵשֵׁב׃

A song for the ascending steps:

Those whose sense of security comes from God Alone

Are like Mount Zion

It will not budge

It endures forever.

Next week, we will study a word that’s become a slur in many corners of the world, but we have bitachon that it will rise like a beacon of light and endure forever:

Zion-ציון.

One of the most repeated words in Jewish prayer and practice is Baruch-ברוך.

It’s also one of the most poorly understood.

Baruch-ברוך is usually translated as “blessed.” It’s uttered hundreds of times a day, most often in the form of:

If you stop to think about it, though, you’ll realize that it’s quite an odd thing to say to God.

• Isn’t HE the One Who is doing the blessing?

• Doesn’t referring to Him as “blessed” imply that someone else is blessing Him???

It sounds downright heretical, actually.

But even in English, the word “blessing” is confusing:

• On the one hand, we talk about the “blessings in our lives” like health and wealth…

• On the other hand, we talk about “making blessings” like the blessings we make before we eat…

These are two separate concepts. Why do they use the same word to refer to both?

We need a deeper, more precise understanding of blessing — one that can change our day and the way we pray.

The great medieval authority on Jewish legal theory and law Rabbi Shlomo ibn Aderet, known as the “Rashba”1 (Barcelona, 1235–1310) was one of the first to put in writing the inner secret of what blessing is. His explanation resolves our questions, and if you put it into practice, it can transform the experience of making a blessing from a mumbled ritual into deep micro-meditation that can transform your life like a steady drip of water on a rock.

Subscribe now

The word beracha-בְּרָכָה is almost identical to the word bereicha-בְּרֵכָה, a “pool [of water]” designed with channels to irrigate the crops below.2

What’s the connection between blessings and pools? Berachot and bereichot?

God’s kindness that brought the universe into being out of absolute nothing, and maintains it in existence is absolutely boundless.

We are surrounded by this boundless abundance, but are usually oblivious to it.

It’s like there’s an infinite pool of water, which we can draw from, but not if we’re not aware of it.

What opens these channels to this abundance?

The awareness that its there, and the appreciation for being able to drink from it.

Every small increase in awareness and gratitude — every beracha — opens a channel for His blessing to flow into our lives. In this way, the blessings we articulate are the other side of the coin of the blessings we possess.

While berachot are normally thought of as austere religious incantations, they are really meant to be more like micro-gratitude-meditations that help us recognize the blessings in our lives as blessings. They do this by tracing them back to their ultimate source:

The Infinite pool of Hashem’s boundless kindness.3

After a couple of decades of practice, I no longer just shove a piece of food into my mouth the moment I feel like eating it. Instead, I pause for a moment to consider: does it grow directly from the ground, or from a tree that produces fruit year after year? Let’s say it’s a piece of mango (I love mango). Upon recalling that it’s the latter, I try to appreciate how incredible it is that there exists such a thing as a “fruit tree” — a living organism that yields dividends year after year. I then proceed to make the appropriate beracha of borei peri ha’etz for tree fruit — to consciously appreciate this sweet, tangy, soft, and leathery experience of mangoness I’m about to partake of. As a tree fruit, it is quite literally a gift that keeps on giving from the Creator Who made it for my enjoyment.

By recognizing the abundance we already have, we open the channels for more abundance to appear.

The more I appreciate my blessings as blessings the more the One Who wants to bless me will bless me.

By recognizing the abundance we already have, we open the channels for more abundance to appear.

The more I appreciate my blessings as blessings the more the One Who wants to bless me will bless me.

The key factor that affects the blessings in our lives is the degree to which we feel blessed by them. Health, for example, is one of the greatest blessings. We should jump out of bed with joy if we wake up healthy. But specifically those who are blessed to be healthy tend not to see it this way. We don’t because we take it to be normal. Static. We tend to not see health as a blessing from on high, but as a frozen, default state.

We’re surrounded by blessings, but don’t always feel blessed because we take them for granted, not as gifts intentionally given.4

“We’re surrounded by blessings, but don’t always feel blessed because we take them for granted, not as gifts intentionally given.”

Now, we can answer our initial questions:

If we appreciate that our appreciation matters — that our consciousness is not a random accident of the universe, but rather that which gives the universe its meaning — we actually CAN “bless” G-d.

The more aware we are that He is the Source of our abundant blessings, the more blessed we realize we are. This awareness opens new channels for His blessings to flow down on us. Although God Himself is unchanged by our blessings, the abundance of awareness and appreciation of God in the world actually increases as a function of our awareness and appreciation of His Presence in our lives.5.

If we verbalize our blessings — not in a tacky, screaming from the rooftops way, but in a sincere and meaningful way — this God-consciousness multiplies, and the world, quite literally, becomes more filled with blessing as a result.

If we verbalize our blessings — not in a tacky, screaming from the rooftops way, but in a sincere and meaningful way — this God-consciousness multiplies, and the world, quite literally, becomes more filled with blessing as a result.

In this way, we can truly say that God is “blessed” — by us — as we humbly recognize His blessings in our lives.

ברוך אתה ה׳ א-להינו מלך העולם שהכל נהיה בדברו

ּּHow manifest are You Hashem, our God, King of the Universe, Who brings everything into existence with His word.

3

Why is water the metaphor for blessing?

Our world is an orchard. Everything and everyone in the world has potential that needs to be nurtured in order to grow.

The “water” that stimulates this growth is what we call “blessing.”

A perfectly good mango seed, even if planted in perfectly fertile soil, will never become the mango tree it was capable of becoming without enough water.

So too, a child might have perfectly good genes, and be surrounded by opportunities, but if his potential isn’t watered with love, encouragement, health, financial resources, and the right opportunities to succeed, he won’t grow to his potential.

A loose translation of “blessing” into more familiar, secular language is “luck.” If a person opens a business, others will whimsically wish him or her “good luck,” with the understanding that aside from hard work, success depends on serendipitous factors outside of the entrepreneur’s control. The big difference is that whereas the notion of luck is giant roulette wheel, blessings flow intentionally and lovingly from the One Who runs the universe to arrive at the right recipient, in the right place, at the right time.

The Hebrew word for a prince or president is Nasi-נשיא. It’s first used in the Torah when the Hittites greet Abraham with the honorific title “N’see Elohim-נשיא אלקים, “prince of God.”

It’s later used to refer to the “N’siim-נשיאים,” the leaders of the twelve tribes.

The title of Nasi was later used from the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE for the most prominent rabbinic sage of the generation who would lead the supreme court of the land (the Sanhedrin), and would also serve as the official intermediary with Roman authorities. The most famous of these N’siim were Hillel the Elder, Rabban Gamliel I and II, and Rebbi Yehuda “HaNasi.”

The official position of Nasi was abolished in 429 CE by the Byzantine government who was concerned about Jews having too much power and autonomy.

The term has been used more informally since then for certain Jewish community leaders, and was reestablished as a formal, non-partisan position in the Modern State of Israel who presides over certain important appointments, national ceremonies and is meant to serve as a balancing, moral voice. The position is currently held by Isaac Herzog, whose father Chaim Herzog was the 6th Nasi of the Modern State of Israel, and was named after his grandfather Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State.

At first glance, the term Nasi-נשיא would come from the word Linso-לנשוא “to uplift,” ostensibly since the president is lifted above everyone else in order to lead.

The problem is that if this were the case, the grammar would be wrong. If the meaning of “Nasi” were “lifted above,” he should be called “Nisu-נְשׂוּא” in the passive voice.

Rather, “Nasi-נָשִׂיא“ more precisely means “one who uplifts others.”

Nasi-נָשִׂיא“ more precisely means “one who uplifts others.”

A leader is defined not by his position over those he leads, but by his positive impact on them.

The founding fathers of the United States were concerned when they established this great country that its government could become taken over by career politicians, who are perpetually campaigning to preserve their elevated status. They understood this dilemma of the inversion of leadership that defines itself by its position instead of its true impact. They set term limits, checks and balances, and tried to imbue the people with the values of public service to combat this tendency.

We may not be able to fight City Hall, and certainly not the White House or the Capitol. But in whatever position of leadership we find outselves in, whether as managers where we work, teachers in the classroom, or as parents at home, we should remember that our leadership is defined by our willingness, commitment and success in elevating those who look to us to be uplifted.

According to Kabbalah, the inner wisdom of the Torah, the final week before the holiday of Shavuot (which begins this Sunday night) is saturated with an energy of royalty, nobility and leadership.1

Maybe it’s just me, but the word “leadership” has become woefully trite in modern times. Just about everything seems to be about “inspiring future leaders,” “networking with other leaders,” and “bringing out your leadership potential.”

In a culture of corporate climbing-to-the-top, the image of leadership tends to be exclusively drawn as a rigid, determined figure at a podium, boldly addressing a crowd of thousands. While there is, of course, a place for this sort of leadership-from-the-front, it is, no doubt, only one kind of the many sorts of leadership which our communities and our world at large need.

We should invest in future leaders, but pushing for only this narrow archetype will leave us perpetually searching for the guidance and unity we so desperately seek.

There are many words in the Holy language for leadership (as we saw that there are for happiness) each one refracting a different nuance in what leadership is about. However, the word that most encompasses the essence of leadership is malkhut-מלכות, “kingship.”

Most of us have only mythical conceptions of what a king or queen are. Even those of you reading XL in the British Commonwealth know only figureheads paid by the state to preserve a nearly forgotten notion of royalty.

On the other hand, those individuals today who exercise great power over their people, like Kim Jong Un, Khamenei, Putin and others — are dictators, not kings.

In the Hebrew language, there is a clear distinction between a moshel-מושל and a melekh-מלך.

• A moshel is essentially a tyrant, who rules unilaterally because he can. The tyrant wields a monopoly on power and uses it to control the state.

• In contrast, a melekh rules in the interest of the people, and with the people’s consent.2

It is for this reason that the same root .מ.ל.ך is used to mean “to seek counsel.”3 In other words, a true king or queen — a true leader — rules not simply through an exercise of their own power, but is empowered to lead through the trust of the people, who seek their counsel.

“…a true king or queen — a true leader — rules not simply through an exercise of their own power, but empowered to lead through the trust of the people, who seek their counsel.”

Understanding this distinction helps us grasp the pushback of Joseph’s brothers to Joseph’s heavy-handed speeches about his prophetic visions of leading the family, in which his brothers would be subservient to him:

Bereishit 37:8

וַיֹּאמְרוּ לוֹ אֶחָיו הֲמָלֹךְ תִּמְלֹךְ עָלֵינוּ אִם־מָשׁוֹל תִּמְשֹׁל בָּנוּ וַיּוֹסִפוּ עוֹד שְׂנֹא אֹתוֹ עַל־חֲלֹמֹתָיו וְעַל־דְּבָרָיו׃

His brothers answered, “Do you [really think] that you will successfully reign over us (as a melekh-מלך) by insisting on imposing your rule over us (as a moshel-מושל)?” And they hated him even more for his dreams and for his talk [about them].

These two concepts of leadership are analogous to the research by psychologist Diana Baumrind in the 1960s that created a schema of 3 different parenting styles: 1) permissive, 2) authoritarian, 3) authoritative, (and a fourth type of non-parenting called “uninvolved parenting”).

“Permissive” parenting refers to parents who permit their kids to do whatever they want — a sort of populist-anarchy.

“Authoritarian” parenting is a “Because I Said So!” Dictatorship — governance with an iron fist as a moshel-מושל.

Finally, “authoritative” parenting is through a bond of trust of a melekh (king) and his malkhut (kingdom). The child trusts the counsel of the parent, and learns to listen not because his parents raises their voice, or threaten punishments, but because what they say has proven to be loving and wise guidance time and time again. This typology has been studied and applied since Baumrind’s research on parenting, across the board, from business management to teaching to sports coaching.

True leadership is not getting people to do what we want.

True leadership is cultivated through the development of trust, which, in turn, is developed through guidance that is consistently given in a way that is proven to be helpful to those being led.

This is the malkhut-מלכות — the leadership we seek for ourselves — and the leadership we should strive to embody towards those who look to us for much-needed guidance.