When people thank me for producing my podcasts, I always feel that I should be thanking them! It has been a true blessing of a lifetime and immensely gratifying for me to be able to teach Torah on a global scale and to become friends with so many incredible and talented and amazing people. Our nation is composed of such wonderful people, and it is the greatest honor that I get to witness a slice of some of this brilliance and genius and wonderfulness firsthand.

This joy and delight reached a fever pitch this past week when I was honored to officiate at the wedding of David and Chana Borowsky.

David was a listener of my podcasts when he, together with other members of his community in Harrisburg, PA, invited me to deliver a series of lectures in December of 2017. Over the course of my 24 hour visit, I gave three lectures (you can listen to them here, here, and here), and David and I really became close friends. We maintained our relationship afterwards, and began studying together over Skype. David is a brilliant young man, and I proposed to him to consider spending some time in yeshiva in Israel for a couple of months, explaining that the marriage between his incredible brain and advanced Talmud study would be absolutely symphonic. David ended up at Machon Shlomo, a yeshiva for the best and the brightest young minds of our nation. After spending a few months there, he emailed me and told me how there were a bunch of the students there who were also listeners of my podcasts (the yeshiva is full of bright and talented students, after all) and asked if I would be willing to give them a lecture over FaceTime. I agreed, of course, and we had a great discussion in which I shared with them reflections, stories, and lessons of my grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe. (it can be found here). After the discussion, I snapped a screenshot from my iPad.

Fast forward a couple of months. COVID hits, David returns to the States, he gets engaged to Chana, and invites me to officiate at the wedding.

People who know me know that I have an unfortunate weakness for microphones. When I saw that gorgeous microphone under the Chuppah, I just couldn’t stop talking! I hope I didn’t pontificate and drone on for too long! Thank you so much for inviting me to your wedding and for asking me to officiate. It was a true honor!

Mazal Tov David and Chana! May you share a wonderful life together and experience only happiness and joy and harmony and prosperity, and may you build a beautiful Jewish home together!

I always view the podcast audience as a big, globally distributed family. When there is a celebration in the lives of one of us, it is a joyous occasion for us all!

In addition to David and Chana, more podcast listeners got married this past week: Mazal Tov Michael and Daniella Rosen! May you share a life of nothing but joy and happiness together!

Things I am thinking about – Modern Insights in the Ancient Literature

One of the things that always intrigues me is when scientists, sociologists, and scholars in the greater world discover truths that are found in the Torah and ancient Jewish literature and have been part of the collective knowledge of our people for many centuries.

We believe that the Torah is the Almighty’s wisdom and the rules of nature and physics are His handiwork. Both the Torah and the world originate in the same source and it should come as no surprise, therefore, that they are going to mirror each other in all kinds of ways.

When we look at this week’s Parsha and the encounter between Jacob and his brother Esau, we find some examples of this. When Jacob sent his gifts to his brother as a bribe to quell his violent plans, he didn’t send them all at once. Instead, he divided the gift into many parts and spaced them out. Rashi explains that he did that in order to maximize the impact that it would have on Esau. You receive a gift, and it seems like that’s it, but then something else comes! And then something else and then something else! The way it is processed psychologically, Rashi tells us, is that the impact of the spaced out gift is amplified because each part of the gift creates a new excitement.

Whenever I read this I think of the study that was made recently with respect to waiters. Waiters of course always try to maximize the tips that they receive. They are thus incentivized to treat the patrons well in order to elicit a larger gratuity. So someone made a study that showed that when the waiter delivered a mint or a candy with the bill it raised the average tip size by 3% over the control group. When there were multiple mints or candies then the tip size grew on average by 14%. But here is what garnered the largest tips: when the waiter gave one mint and then left and then came back with a second one – when the gift was spaced out. Apparently, Jacob already knew the results of this study when he gave his gift to Esau organized in a way that’s most likely to bring about positive reciprocity

When Jacob prepares for conflict, he splits his people into two camps, saying that if Esau decimates one the other will survive. To me the sounds like the principle that we used in modern times called diversification. You don’t want to expose all of your assets to risk. Interestingly, the Talmud (Bava Metzia 42a) describes the ideal asset allocation of a diversified portfolio that is still today used by money managers the world over.

Obviously, these examples are two relatively minor ones, but something I am thinking about is how Torah is much more than ancient wisdom; it contains all the secrets of the world. We can discover truths about the world both from the Almighty’s mind and His handiwork.