Computers are so prevalent that it’s hard to remember life before them. And for many younger people it’s impossible to imagine life without them.
Recently, when I asked a bar mitzvah student who looked tired, ‘how did you sleep last night’ he looked down at his watch and pressed a button. He proceeded to give me a rundown. He was in bed for nine hours. Of those hours there was some better sleep, some less quality sleep, his heart rate was steady, all of these myriad details measured by the small watch he wears. Incredible.
I took a stroll down memory lane to my bar mitzvah. When I celebrated my bar mitzvah (besides for the Sifrei Kodesh – holy books that I received and still use to this day), the most memorable tech gift I got was a calculator watch. Tiny buttons, a small screen, hard to use, but a full-on calculator. It was the coolest thing you could imagine.
Once down memory lane I reminisced about our arrival to Thailand in 1993. When we first got to Thailand Mrs Myra Borisute bought us three very memorable and expensive items. A top quality, full-size American oven and stovetop for Nechama. A mobile phone ‘so we can reach you when needed, a rabbi needs to be reachable’ and a computer for making flyers and writing newsletters.
With these ‘tools’ Nechama and I were able to start our work with full power.
Nechama’s oven and stove produced challas, cakes, chicken soups and all of the other goodies that builds family and communal life.
I started to get my ‘feet wet’ in (pre-internet) computer usage and started to use it for community programing.
For example, one of the ways I used my computer was as follows. When Pesach came, it was up to me to figure out how many kg’s of matzah, how many bottles of wine, how many chickens and how many dishes we needed to order.
For those of you who remember the olden days, there was pen, paper, calculator and using your mind to figure things out.
Now that I was becoming computer literate, I was introduced to the Windows program called Excel.
The beauty and power of the spreadsheet was that once I put in the formula, I just needed to update the amount of people, and all those calculations were computed automatically.
A rabbi can use spreadsheets for community events planning.
A chef can use it for menu planning.
A business can use it for earning forecasts.
And an army general could use it for soldier deployment planning.
If a general were planning how many soldiers would be needed to drive the invading enemy away from your borders the formula may look something like this.
If the enemy has one hundred soldiers positioned to attack; what is the number of soldiers needed to drive away the enemy.
Once that number is established, the greater the number of enemy forces, the larger the army one needs to assemble to vanquish the enemy.
In this week’s parsha the Torah says that if the people of Israel study Torah and listens and fulfils G-d’s commandments they will be blessed with peace.
If someone tries to upset that peace, if an enemy rises against them, five Israelite soldiers will be sufficient to repel one hundred enemy troops.
That sounds like a miraculous and blessed formula.
Five ‘good guys’ are stronger than twenty ‘bad guys’.
If you take that blessed supernatural Torah formula and put that into excel as the basis of computing security need you wouldn’t be wrong if you called for five hundred troops when faced with an enemy buildup of ten thousand troops.
If five are needed to repel one hundred, five hundred are needed to drive off ten thousand.
One hundred divided by twenty is five.
Then thousand divided by twenty is five hundred.
It’s uneven but G-d will make it work.
This is an incredibly miraculous promise in terms of the power of Jewish soldiers when armed with G-d’s blessing.
It gets much better than that.
The continuation of the verse throws this computation totally off the predicable mathematic charts.
The full verse in the Torah (Vayikra-Leviticus 26:8) reads: ‘five of your soldiers will drive away one hundred of the enemies. One hundred of your soldiers will drive away ten thousand of the enemy forces’.
This does not compute using a mathematical formula.
The mathematical based spreadsheet would compute: five can be victorious over one hundred, one hundred can be victorious over two thousand.
Our Sages introduce a concept that is powerful and empowering.
‘The combined power when there are ‘many’ who follow in G-d’s path yields incomparably more blessing than the power when there are but a ‘few’ who do G-d’s bidding’.
When five are jointly committed to G-d’s path, they can miraculously be victorious over one hundred enemies.
One hundred who are jointly serving G-d, are assured victory of ten thousand opponents.
This is Divine ‘compounded’ Mathematics.
This is awesomely uplifting.
Think about it.
You may say to yourself, what is the big deal if I don’t join the ranks of my fellow Jews in doing the mitzvah available to me.
Of course, I don’t want to harm anyone, certainly not my Jewish brethren. I want to be community minded and do what is best for my people, you think to yourself.
But sometimes one can get dispirited and think ‘how much difference will my one lone action make’?
One more or one less, how important can that be to the collective?
First of all, the power of one deed cannot be underestimated. As the Rambam summed it up as if the world is totally balanced and your one good deed can tip the scale.
And then there is this weeks Torah portion that injects yet more power to the deeds of each and every one of us.
The Torah teaches us that our one good deed is not just one more deed. When added to the mitzvahs that others are doing, it equals compounded and collective power that is much greater than the ‘one’ that was added.
This reinforces in the most powerful way possible the critical importance and the immense power inherent in Jewish unity.
The divine miraculous power that Jewish unity injects into our collective journey is our ‘secret weapon’.
During these turbulent and unpredictable times, when our people are under attack in countries that one never would have imagined, we need to access and ‘power up’ our invincible weapon.
Jewish unity.
It is easy to call on ‘them’, the government, the ‘leaders’ to foster peace and unity. One can choose to point fingers and blame this one or that one for debilitating disunity among our people.
The real truth is that it needs to be a grassroots effort. You and I have the power to ‘keep our eyes on the prize’ and highlight, generate and promote our unity.
Not just that we are all equally hated by our sworn enemies. It is true that in the eyes of an antisemite we are all one group. But that is a depressing way to think of Jewish unity.
Rather we ought to think about the things that bring us together and unite us in a positive way.
Our joint past.
We all stood together at Mount Sinai and received the Torah united ‘as one person with one heart’.
In the present, although at the surface it may not always be obvious, at our core, we all love each other and each and every Jew, we all love the Torah and we all love G-d!
And G-d loves us all equally and unconditionally.
And we ought to project the way it will look in the glorious Messianic future that we await.
The Prophet says in the name of Hashem, that in the future Redemption, NO JEW WILL BE LEFT BEHIND.
We, each and every one of us will be redeemed by Mashiach as a united people.
Let us strengthen our resolve to act in a unified way, and add – even if they are small steps that we start with - in mitzvahs of loving kindness between each other and strengthening our connection to G-d.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yosef Kantor