Shah, Malaysian, Welcome to Start Tank.
My name is Jacob Wolf. Dark Tank is a weekly
conversation about the challenges and opportunities of
being a Bentura in the workforce.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure to join our Quiet
WhatsApp group where we send exclusive bonus content and
updates. The link is in the show notes.
Today's guest is Dean Noam Wasserman, the Dean of Sci.
Sims School of Business at Yeshiva University.
Before taking up that role in 2019, he was a professor at
Stanford, USC, and Harvard Business School.
He wrote two best selling books, The Founder's Dilemma and Life
as a Startup. And as we'll hear in the
interview, he learns a lot of Torah.
We discussed Torah, business and the intersection between the
two, and at the very end of our conversation, he threw in a
story that blew my mind. And now it's time to dive in to
the stark tank. Shalom alaikum.
Dean Noam Wasserman, thank you so much for joining us today.
Now that comes Shalom Yanka Wolf.
Before your current role as the Dean of SCI Sims, you were a
teacher at Harvard Business School, and we're not going to
go into discussion as to what we think of that institution today.
But it's certainly a prestigious Business School and now you run
a different prestigious Business School.
Could you explain the main differences between SCI Sims and
Harvard Business School or the broader business education
world? Sure, absolutely.
It's big, important differences between the two of them.
One of them, this was about three years ago.
I was walking out of the main administrative building at Yu
Belford Hall, and I was walking out with my usual Gamora under
my arm and saw coming across the street, YU's general counsel,
the chief lawyer, walking along with Ravi Joseph Kolinsky, who's
the Dean of undergrad tourist studies and two gentlemen,
obviously not Jewish, Very distinguished though.
And they grabbed me and they introduced me Dean of the
Business School and Rav Kolinsky said, what's under your arm?
And I talked to them about, you know, like the Gamora's, you
know, things like that, the role that it plays in in our day and
stuff that I thought they might not know about.
Turns out, I mean I think I confirmed this afterwards.
Those are the two lawyers who were helping Yu and it's Supreme
Court case and they were trying to get their arms around what is
Yu. In some ways they were asking
that same question about is there anything unique about it
compared to that. And when they asked, essentially
what I said is it's like the excellence of HBS, but with
values that a lot of what we do is grounded in our masura, the
longtime millennials, old Millennium olds of wisdom that
we have across the generations. The Torah as the centerpiece,
but then it drives the way in which we look at the world in
which we interact with people beyond the Arba Kanfo, the Arba,
the Dalamos of of Yiddishkite. And so the values piece is
definitely a big part of that. There's other things that turn
into like other parts of the education, like the practical
orientation of the education. You learn something in the
classroom and you immediately apply it, and then you're able
to learn better the next time around.
When you walk into the classroom, you do a variety of
things where we try to make sure that it's going to be the depth
of knowing, doing and being. Not just the knowing that gets
shoveled into you with a with a lecture, but also the very
topless, the very hands on things that you'll be able to
learn within the classroom. There's definitely a difference
in the culture. I remember my first week, it was
very formative. There are other ways it might,
which it might come up during our discussion the first
Wednesday morning, I had a faculty member stop in and say
guess what I did last night. Turns out he'd gone to a wedding
of as soon as he had taught about four years before.
That would not have happened at Harvard Business School, and not
have happened in the other other places that I've taught at
Columbia, at Stanford, at USC or anything like that.
To have the depth of that connection between the students
and the faculty, that years later at your key milestones of
life that they still want to be able to involve you and have you
there to be able to celebrate a market with them is another
remarkable part of the the culture, the way in which it is
lifelong relationships, not just one off you are a face in a
classroom and then you never see each other again.
That the smaller classes. Also.
It's one of the things just it seems like a very logistics kind
of thing about what is the class size has fundamental
implications for the relationships that can be
developed in the student to student relationships.
When you're a smaller class, you're going to get to know each
other a lot better. But also the faculty being able
to mentor the students, being able to guide them because it is
a faculty member with two dozen students rather than a couple of
100 students. And so you can really have a lot
of the deeper things that can happen that is very much
rounding out to the full person, the 24 hours of the student, not
just the nine to five of the student, and really being able
to prepare them for life. Can you tell us about the
mission of Sci Sims as you articulated it as the Dean?
Well, we coalesced it once I came on board as a Dean.
But the the mission of Sci Sims is to develop Torah grounded
professionals who excel in the workplace and in the community.
And one of the key things about that mission is it drive just
about everything. It helps us understand what
curriculum to create, whom to hire, like all of the things
that we want to put in place to be able to coalesce.
In addition to classroom experiences, the other
enhancements that we want to be able to do for the student
experiences and other things like that.
And there's all sorts of ways in which we actually had in April.
We had our every five years accreditation, review, and when
the reviewers, 3 Deans from other business schools would
come in to scrutinize you, we're sitting down the end of it
together with me and the president, Rabbi Berman and the
Provost. The first thing they called out
was the distinctiveness of the mission.
They said that we review other business schools.
You can just take the name of the Business School off of the
mission and plug in any other business schools name and it
looks the same. Said no one else would be able
to put their name on the Sci Sims mission because it captures
the uniqueness and the power of what we developed.
With NYU, you have the Tora OH business.
You have the way in which the OH of connecting the two of them is
fundamental. Being Torah grounded in the
workplace. The broader impact of the 24
hours of the students that we're talking about before, a lot of
times 5:00 PM to 9:00 AM, taking your Business School skills and
being able to translate them into being OSA quit.
Sorry, I see. Or contributing to the community
as being a critical thing of being able to develop that.
That is the excelling in the community part of the of the of
the mission statement. And so we actually had the
report that we gave to the accreditation body.
We have 9 standards that you're supposed to speak to curriculum,
faculty and things like that. Every one of those sections
started off our mission statement is this and this is
how this part of it is able to attend to it.
And that helps everyone understand what is inside of
scope, outside of scope, what kinds of things should we be
doing, what are the holes we have to fill, and what are the
things that are already strong but should get stronger.
And those are a lot of things that we've been doubling down on
over the last five years. I want to dive deeper into that
mission and how it expresses itself.
But before that I want to tell you just take a couple steps
back and hear from you your personal background.
You know, Toronto Business is a great slogan that I think
basically what I know of you really describes you very, very
deeply. So can you tell us briefly about
how you ended up becoming so passionate about the connection
of Toronto business? I.
Think we could always trace a lot of it to the upbringing,
being able to take a look at the role models, the people who kind
of like set the tone influenced us and everything.
Part of it is also the education that we go through of knitting
the two of them together. By my Zadie in New York he had a
shul he his kids, you know one of them, the oldest one Kaya
Wasserman that's all long time rough in Passaic.
And so you've got the very deep side of the Torah part of the
family. My father almost became a rob
also but then ended up becoming an orthodontist, but would learn
it was a leader in the shul, leader in the community and
other things like that. And my mother also was a key
player when it came to Osak Gutzark like Seabor and the
Flesosorchium that we learned and things like that.
And so that's where we're seeing that a key part of what we have
to build is being able to bridge world's Torah business.
Torah medicine. You know, my wife, a doctor, you
know very much also that kind of a role model of Torah medicine.
And the same kind of thing that we try to raise within our kids
of. For instance, my oldest is the
only one who didn't go to Yu. All my other kids have gone to
Yu. But the oldest went to the base
Yakov and then went to MIT. And so being able to have that
bridging of the world's taking the best of the two and now
she's knitting them together to be able to being raising her
family and being able to have the same kind of impact of
stressing that we have to be able to be the unique that
brings together the. Oh, and if we can have deep
grounding in each of them and then be able to find the unique
ways that we can be able to have the power that comes from being
able to move across those worlds and be able to bring the best of
them. That's what we want to be able
to do. In terms of like the evolution
grew up in LA, went to even though it didn't really have
that, how much of relationship with YUI went to YULAI, went to
EULA for high school then I went to RT Strell, went to Shalavim
and then undergrad. It was you know continuing to be
able to try to have as we're developing like the excellence
in the in the secular, if you will, about being able to how
much can we learn at how much can we be.
The Hevra in the the Hillel started life as an engineer and
came into college as an engineer but then added on the business
part of it. And again it's bridging even
within the if you will, the the the Mata part of it doing both
business and engineering is bringing those together in a
different type of oh and then if we can be able to have our
Yiddish, Skype be able to inform it a variety of the other things
that has definitely given me a different lens on it.
I'll just give you one example. So after working for five years
going back from my MBA and then had some people, a couple of
professors who convinced me to stick around at Harvard and get
my PhD after I got my MBA there, then studied for now it's going
on 25 years The early decisions that founders make that get them
in trouble. And when I would be, I developed
a course at Harvard that we called the Founders Dilemmas
course. When the first day that we would
be teaching about founding teams, I would be bringing into
it Azer connecto because that was a lens that I got on
founding team relationships that shaped how I look at them and
thought that we'd be able to benefit from being able to
discuss founding teams through that kind of a lens.
So I'd be saying they're in the Harvard classroom.
Does anyone know who the founding team of the world was?
Does anyone know what is the two word relationship that the Bible
describes as what they should be having there?
We got into Azerkandegdo and about the tug and pull.
We didn't explicitly get into Rashi versus the Nativ and the
Mythologus that they have about what it means.
I'm very much a deceive type when it comes to that About the
connecto. The pushback is the ultimate
Azar that someone's helping you be able to see where you can do
better and things like that. But bringing into the classroom
that first day, the last day of the semester when we're talking
about entrepreneurial failure and resilience, those students
will be hearing about Ravi Akiva as our case study.
They will be hearing about Gamzo Latova.
I would be having these non judicious walking out of the
class with Dom Gamz Latova on their on their lips.
I still get an update e-mail on a regular basis from Dilip Rao,
one of my students and founders, Dilemmas, who talks to me about
the bumps in the road as he's founding and the ways in which
he is finding ways to get stronger from the new
perspective that it gives him and other things along those
lines. And so that's we're trying to
bridge the world's, bring the uniqueness, what do we learn in
the Torah and the Masara? That then gives us some added
insights that we can bring into the other part of life.
And so it's bringing all those together that's been like the
the upbringing and then the now seeing the power of it
throughout the last few decades. And with regards to Talmatura,
you are involved very deeply in Talmatura, in addition to
bringing the Torah values outwards, but there's also the
inwards Torah experience. How do you view those muscles of
being a Bentura, learning Torah while also being busy with
either a business or career and all the other things that life
throws at us? No, I think there's one of the
critical things that right now, I mean, there's Israel giving a
bunch of talks at yeshivas and seminars and things like that
about building your foundation for the next decades of life.
And we talked about like the excellence in the content part
of it, how when you're studying finance or marketing and things
like that have been able to raise the game in terms of the
strength of the people and the courses who are developing that
in the students. But we also talked about the
intangibles. Intangibles are going to be the
values. They're going to be building the
integrity muscles and things like that, but also the habits
and the other things that are going to be setting you up for
life. Unfortunately, if you don't do
it during college, then you are going to find it even tougher to
build the Covea E2 muscles. The how to be able to carve out
key pieces of your day to be able to do davening and learning
and other things like that. And so it's actually at Yu that
students are building those types of muscles.
Some of the recurring questions that I get is how do people fit
in everything. That's what the students who are
here who are hearing about all the things on campus and the
dual curriculum and the clubs and other things like that, like
how do they have time to do that and learn and do everything
else. And I said, this is how it is
helping prepare you for those decades of life.
You learn time management, you learn prioritization.
You learn all of the things that go into what you're going to
have to face out there. You're practicing it in the
easier environment now. You're building those muscles
and going to continue strengthening them throughout
life. And that's one of the things
that actually employers praise Yu students about.
They say that when they hire students from other campuses,
that at 2:00 in the afternoon their tongues are dragging on
the floor. They're exhausted because that
was when class was ending for them.
They said the Yu students, they're looking at them.
They're still going strong. Yu students look back at them
and say, I was just starting class at 2:00.
I was going until after night, Seder at 10:00 PM and then I was
starting to do my homework. Well, how could you do that?
Well, this is how I built my work ethic.
This is how I was able to understand a bunch of the things
I was going to need for the workplace and being able to
manage all those things for me. My going to Night Seder is one
of the key blessings that I have on campus.
That's part of my Covey Etim. And being able to make sure that
every night that I don't have like a why you conflict in it
that I can be with the with that in the guys there during the
window. It's not always the entire two
hours, but being able to do the 8 to 10 of being able to do
Night Seder, be able to do some learning in the morning before
Nate's minion, being able to carve it out with that.
And to me one of the key things we also have to have people
appreciate is that you don't start out doing deep Dafyomi
like you have to. You have to get to it over time
if you see someone who's doing so.
Blei and Hara. I just had my third see my shots
that I did right before Rosh Hashanah had pushed to do to
doppum a day what we call double DAF because it would enable me
to finish shots this past cycle when it was the 100th
anniversary of the founding of of Dafyomi.
For Mayor Shapiro, Rosh Hashanah 1923 started it off world
changing innovation and that meant that Rosh Hashanah 2023
was going to be the CEO. And so I was doing doubled off
to be able to complete that. My first round of shots I could
not have done even close. To doubled off you have to start
doing it smaller, doing the regular pace, being able to do
as much as you can. Then the next time around.
And this is a very formative thing that Rabbi Fran talked
about about 3:00 or so Seema shasas ago about having to go
Mikhail Akhile. Each round that you don't just
do the same doff over again. That if you read through it in
30 to 40 minutes this time around, then start going to a
sheer. If you went to a sheer, then you
know each time around you should go Mikhail Akhile.
And so over time, as I was going through each of the rounds,
that's where you get deeper. You get stronger at being able
to do it. But don't from the beginning
swing for the fences at being able to do all of it, because
that's going to be a much tougher hill to do if you
haven't built the muscles on the way to it.
And so college is a building on the muscles.
When you get out there for your first job, you will hopefully be
able to build on that and get it even stronger and the same kind
of thing as you go through each round of doing shots.
I really love that. And I also appreciate the fact
that it sort of flips a common misunderstanding on its head,
which is that some people think of yeshiva as like their climax
and the rest of their life is sort of a slow decline.
But you can actually look at it as like it's a new building that
starts low but then can build up, up, up, up, up.
And it's not The momentum is upward and not downward
throughout your career as a Bentura.
So I really appreciate that as well.
I love that take that you just had on it.
It reminds me of sometimes I get some of the students come by.
I meet just about every day with some of the students and
sometimes one of the comments that I get from them when I
asked them about the biggest surprise that they've had about
college, they were expecting them when they were going from
learning full time in yeshiva that was going to be stepped
down on the Torah side. And the biggest surprise to them
was was that they were able to step it up, that they were able
to have their Torah game upped at the same time as they were
adding on the Sci Sims courses and things like that and even
the SCI Sims curriculum. There's a bunch of things in the
OH that we bring to them to be able to have them be able to see
a lot of the new ways in which they're going to be able to
bring their tour into the workplace and deepening the
Taklas side of what they're learning and things like that.
But to have them say that they got even deeper in their Yiddish
kite and in their learning by coming to college is a great
example of that interim stage about going Michael Ohio that
you were just highlighting. A couple years ago, you felt the
need to introduce a Jewish values curriculum into scisibs.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you felt was missing
from the Jewish business world, that you were trying to fill
that gap and how someone who's maybe not inside Sims can fill
those gaps in their own life? Sure.
So sometimes it came from personal experience, but also
talking to lots of other people. When you come out of college,
you are not ready for the workplace challenges that you're
going to test. You're Yiddish, Skype.
And the more that we can build those muscles also during
undergrad, be able to understand a bunch of the things that we
have to be prepared for and then prepare for them, the much
better we're going to be able to be, to be able to to to deal
with them when they hit. It also has some fundamental
implications of if you know more about those challenges, you
might decide to go on a different career path.
And so there's, you know, some other fundamental things that
come from it. But overall, like my own
experiences, interviewing, having to deal with, when do I
tell them about Shabbos? When do I have them realize that
they're not going to have me for 25 hours a week?
How do I prepare for the mandatory orientation lunch
that's going to be in a Tref restaurant or the holiday
parties, And should I be going to them?
And if so, what could Durham should I be building around
that? The classic ones of kipa in the
workplace, shaking hands in the workplace, all those things,
those are things that typically from Jews who went to college
are not ready for when they get into the workplace.
And that is where they're going to be.
Real tests of your values, real tests of, you know, your
adherence to oloka and other things like that.
The more that we can prepare you for that, the better.
And so that's one of the courses that we developed that we then
deployed 2 and a half, 3 1/2 years ago.
Now, when we created the Jewish values curriculum and introduced
it, we had an Eloy in the realm of practical workplace oloka, a
guy named Aubrey Wasserman who developed that course for us.
And in it you see the Marma Comos.
So you're familiar with the Halaka, the Eskafa, and all the
other things that go into it. You see the role models, people
who have faced this and one of the solutions that they've found
in it. You are able to both learn about
those and also what we're deepening now about even being
able to practice those difficult conversations, doing a role play
with your boss about Shabbos being ready for what they're
going to throw back at you as. But if you have a really strict
deadline, midday Saturday. I mean, I can't even call on you
on then you know other things like that that you're going to
be able to be a lot better prepared for the unexpected when
it comes to those types of things.
And then going down like each of the paths within that course on
its own about this is the next challenge you're going to be
facing. Here's the Mario Mccomas here.
The role models here are the topless practices that you have
around that type of stuff. If you go back to the SCI Sims
mission, it's core to the mission.
It is where you are going to make sure you're being total
grounded that you're going to be able to excel during the other
24 six in the workplace, but they're going to be able to make
sure you can adhere to those values and then other pieces of
the Jewish values curriculum that we have.
There's a when we look at the mission statement again back to
it, informing everything excelling in the community.
So Reb, David Bashefkin developed a course for us called
Jewish Public Policy that he teaches along with Rob Daniel
Feldman that enables you to see how to be OSA, Goodsar, Fate,
Seybour, among other things. Take your business skills and
translate it into communal thinking, contributing to the
shuls, the schools, the seductive organizations by being
able to have during your 5:00 PM to the 9:00 AM serving on their
boards of directors, or being the executive director of those
organizations and other things like that.
Where you're being a key bridge about being able to make sure
that you're contributing not just to your household, not just
to your company, but also to the rest of the community.
And then several other things that we have within that
curriculum to be able to prepare the other parts of it.
One of our most recent, two of our most recent professors that
we added to the Jewish values curriculum.
One is a gentleman named Moish Bain.
Moish was a senior partner at Ropes and Gray, a major law
firm, and for the last six years, the head of the OU.
And when he retired from each of them, he came on board as a
science Sims professor. He teaches a course that Ari
Wasserman developed. By then, Moish has created his
own flavor of it, called Designing Your Jewish Life,
about being able to make when it comes to decisions that are
going to change. When you make that decision,
it's going to change the trajectory of your life.
Key inflection point decisions, how to make it in an intentional
way. So about choice of career,
choice of the community to live in, choice of even your spouse.
About how to be intentional about being able to do those
types of things. And one of our other ones who
just joined last semester is a woman named Erica Brown, the
head of the Jonathan Sacks Center at Yu, who teaches when
it's on the women's campus. Women's leadership through both
our Smarum and also through modern management readings like
you're able to see the Bridge Toru business and be able to see
how it's going to shape you as a leader.
And now on the men's campus she's teaching a, you know, the
non gender specific, if you will version of it of being able to
see a leadership course and being able to learn from among
the best in the field about this.
And typically, especially in the practical workplace Alafa course
it is people who have worked in the real world and are have
gotten rabbinic calls and that's where they can be that bridge
about being able to be the oh and bringing it together for you
to have you be prepared for it. And for those who don't have the
blessing of studying in your school, what were the best
resources that they could tap into to be able to improve
themselves in these areas, specifically halaja and the big
inflection points that really drive so much of what our life
looks like? What?
What should they be doing? So two things come to mind.
One of them is do it carefully, But Asela Kharov, make sure that
you have someone who, when you hit a shyla, they'll know how to
be able to go to them to do it carefully.
Part is make sure that that person is the same type that we
tap within the curriculum of being grounded both in, you
know, rabbinic walls and the business world.
Make sure they have a context for what goes on when you say to
them, can I go to this holiday party that's not going to be
serving alcohol, that they can relate to?
What other kinds of things go on at corporate holiday parties
when you're talking to them about you know the other forks
of the road that we've talked about that they can relate to
that but they can bring strength in halakhah and you know all the
other things that go into that. And so assail khara would be the
first of those. A key part of it is also
learning when to go to a Rob with a question.
And so that's one of the other key things we do within the
course and so being able to tune into that but brings up to the
second one. So Ari Wasserman has written
multiple spar him in this realm. Making it work is the Bible, if
you will, of being able to be prepared for these types of
issues. It's the core of what he then
left off into into the course women in the workplace he
co-authored with his wife, who is a Sci Sims grad who
experienced it herself when she was working.
Making it all work is the book that they did in that realm for
the women's side of it. So that's where you can be able
to get a bit of the taste of it. Not to the same depth, not with
them in front of the classroom shaping you, but that's where
you can get at least they pass through those.
OK. I want to transition a little
bit to the business world and the way you see it, there's a
conception out there that says that because of various factors,
Jews are driven to very high income fields and high income
professions at the expense of maybe devoting themselves and
their careers to higher social capital and nonprofit work.
What's your take on that? So to me, I can give you a
little bit of an insight that I got back when I was at Harvard
and about how business has to be socially oriented and even the
nonprofit's have to be business oriented.
And so at Harvard they have a, each year, a business
competition where people are pitching, pitching their, you
know, their startups, having a judge team that is, you know,
judging which are the best ones of them, getting feedback from
them and things like that. They'd have two tracks.
There was a classic business track, and then there was what
they called the social enterprise track.
And remember I seen one slide that they had put up with the
names and brief descriptions of the five finalists from each of
those tracks. And what I realized was if you
just take off the label at the top of it about which track they
were on, I really could not tell which they were in.
The social enterprise ones knew that they had to be sustainable
businesses. You know that even if you're a
nonprofit, you have to make sure that there's a business model
that has enough cash coming in to be able to have you sustain
pursuing your mission. And the business ones should
always make sure that they're having some kind of social way
that they are contributing to the world.
And so either way, you need your organizational skills.
Either way, you need the communal orientation.
When you bring the two of those together, that's where you can
rent make, you know, a lot of the key contributions, a lot of
the impact, a lot of the magic happen in that realm.
So I'm very much prefer if you can give it another example of
an antithotic pill until now. But the ultimate oh also, you
know, the oh between the sustainable organization and the
social mission, bringing the two of them together, not having it
be an either or is to me a critical part of that.
Beautiful. That's beautiful.
I want to finish off with taking a look at the pipeline.
You have young men and women coming into size Sims and they
go out into the community as they come into size Sims.
What do you see are the biggest misconceptions that young people
have about the world of Business Today?
So one of them is that there's a very limited, short list of
things they can go off and do. They've heard of recurringly
maybe a handful of things that you can do and one of the key
things that we have to do is force them to explore.
I have them realize that there's lots of other things.
They know about 1 forest, see if they're coming in and they're
saying I have to major in finance because I want to be an
investment banker. And we have to pull back on the
reins and say it's very possible you should major in finance, but
investment banking is only one tree in that vast forest.
Let's introduce you to a bunch of the other trees.
Or on the flip side of it, sometimes they say I wanted to
major in finance, but I don't want to be investment banker, so
I can't major in finance. Well, let's introduce you to
wealth management. Let's introduce you to
commercial banking. Let's introduce you to a bunch
of the other ones that will enable you to maybe have that
better life to be able to have the balance be able to have the
values that you want to have. And so being able to expand
their scope, being able to have them realize that there's a lot
more out there that they should put toes into those waters that
they might want to dive into other pools and they've
anticipated. That's one of the key things
that we find in the curriculum. It's structured to have them not
have blinders on about what they're going to be doing.
A lot of times the unexpected is where the gems are.
A lot of times you find like the match for your the Co host that
Hashem gave you is not in anything that you heard until
now. It's not been any of the things
that people in whispering in your ear that you should be
doing. And so we have in the first year
of the curriculum is having them take courses across all 5
majors, one to two courses in each of them.
And a lot of times, magic happens in the unexpected ways
of they're finding that this is a better fit for me than the one
that I anticipated or that there's more than one of them
that's going to be a better fit for me.
We very much encourage the students to pull from all of Yu,
regardless of which school it's in, and to maybe do multiple
things. So something that we call duels,
dual majoring, majoring and minoring.
Other things like that. Four years ago, 54% of our
students did duels. Now 74% of our students are
doing duels because a lot of the best jobs, a lot of the most
rewarding ones. A lot of the ways in which
you're going to have a lot more of an impact is if you build
multiple pillars. And so it's expanding their
vision to be able to see beyond what the initial set of things
is. So that's one of the the key
parts of it. Another one is that they think
that you can't have the, oh, you're going to have to choose
between Torah and between excelling in the workplace.
Have them see the role models. A lot of times it's the
professors in front of them. A lot of the professors are SCI
Sims alumni or Yu alumni who come back to teach them.
They're working during the day, doing amazing things in the
world, a president of a healthcare company, a senior
venture capitalist like a a managing director of evaluations
firm, and things like that. These are some of our key
professors who are in front of them every day throughout the
semester, teaching them about the core content and ending each
of the days with a Devartura that's connected to what they
learned or where they're talking about their experiences in the
workplace and things like that. And so having the students see
those role models who are able to knit it together, we're able
to build those muscles over time.
That is one of the other key things that we have to have the
students aspire to and be able to have a road map by being able
to learn from those people about it.
And as students that you train go off into the workforce, you
mentioned before that the mission is built on getting them
ready to join the community. So there we can make a
distinction between joining a existing community and fitting
in. And then there's also
influencing, improving, developing and even changing the
community in certain sense. Are there any areas that you
really love to see your students going out?
And I guess changing is a is a strong word.
Are there any areas that you'd love to go see your students go
out and really make a big impact within the world of the Jewish
business professionals? I think there's so many
different flavors that we have of how the students are already
doing it, even while they're at school, let alone when they go
out. I remember like a little bit of
a surprise that I had when I came to Yu.
I'd be going around to different communities.
They'd be taking me there to get a feel for the lay of the land.
It did not surprise me that the ROV who was the ROV of the Shul,
or who was the the head of school or the benign things like
that, that they got to Yu. The surprise for me was that as
I'm meeting the Chairman of the Board of directors of the Shul
of the school or you know other people who are key members of
the community, they were also from Yu, from a lot of times,
from Sci Sims and things like that I think already.
And this is actually captured really nicely by the prior
president of Yu, Richard, Joel, I think he was the one who
coined this is what I've heard. It's attributed by shame Omro
about Yu is turning out the clay Kodesh, but it's also turning
out the lay kodesh. So the people are going to be
able to bring those business skills into the community even
though they have a day job. They're the lay leaders who are
going to be able to bring Kadusho to everything that they
do. And that comes in so many
flavors that it's hard to be able to boil it down and give
you 1 little example of it. Last month I went down to Tampa
to an annual conference at the OU Does of executive directors
dominantly of schools, day schools in the US And I was
stunned by how many of those key players in the day schools from
that executive director position were SCI Sims alumni.
Like just one after the other, people coming by and outing
themselves as having gone to Sisims and things like that.
We got into what things you tat like so many ways in which they
were having a unique impact that if you don't have the business
training, you're not going to be able to be as pointed, not as
ready to be able to do that and things like that.
Being able to understand organizations, how to read
budgets. Some of them had been accounting
majors as Sisims. Now they were able to really
excel at being able to fill in the holes of the Menahel, could
not read the budget, think about the strategic marketing of their
schools, think about the processes within it that they
can put in place and other things along those lines.
And so those are just some of the flavors.
There's so many different ways that I'm hoping that our
students aren't going out, you know, as soon as they leave,
immediately impacting and whatever of those flavors as a
whole, wherever they are. For a final question, I wanted
to broaden the lens a little bit.
It could seem that it's so difficult just to worry about my
own Daladamos, my job, my Dafyomi, my family, my Shoal.
So it's hard to think broader the broader Jewish community,
but we are in a moment where we are sort of united by this fight
against anti-Semitism, this fight against those who want to
destroy the Jewish people. Do you have any parting thoughts
about how we, despite being so busy and working so hard to just
take care of our own smaller circles, how we can be connected
to the broader Amisal in this time?
I think one of the key things that we've learned since October
7th is about the critical role of unity and that each person
has a role they can play even if they are thousands of miles away
from Eritis Row. And one of those, let's give you
one example, I'll give you a couple of personal examples.
The big DC rally back in October, why you sent down the
biggest contingent I think of anyone to their 44 buses, 2500
people going from New York down to there.
I was. So of those 44 buses to be the
bus captain of bus number 1414 is Yad.
When we talked about on that bus was you deed, what is you deed,
The beloved where is one of the things that we can see it coming
from yad be yad walking hand in hand, two people coming together
to be able to do things very powerfully.
And it's only through the unity that they bring to it that it's
going to be able to really become magic.
And we talked about on that bus that all of us are yad be yad,
you know going down to DC and then we are going to join
Claudius Rail more broadly beyond, beyond walking with all
the flavors of Yiddish, Kite and Unity to be able to support
Eretz Israel. And then when we got down to
there, they talked about one of the speakers very powerfully
talked about we have what's been estimated as 300,000 people here
right now, 300,000 Israelis who are being called up from the
reserve put the two of them together, us over here, the
300,000 of them across the ocean, we are fighting together
in the same direction. And by the way, that is the
600,000 that you say a special bracha for in fact on the bus on
the way up in, I mean when I was doing my urushalmi doff for that
day, I'm not on cycle with everyone.
So I was doing that out of the blue was that bracha and bracha
was urushalmi that I was talking about.
And so on the way back we talked about we cited that speaker
about the six or thousand, we talked about the bracha and some
of the insurance and outs and things like that.
But that was the unity of it all coming together.
Even if we're here in the States, when we are there in our
tistro, we can all play some kind of unique role on the way
to it. My parents who made Aliyah 2 1/2
years ago, every day at the beginning of the war, it was a
new story about which Hassid they were going to the next day
for them to be able to be doing tying Sitzis, packing lunches,
you know, all these kinds of things that everyone had their
unique thing, even if they weren't putting on green that
they were all being able to support the people were putting
on the green. And so that unity as being a
critical piece of it. The second of the personal
stories when I was at that OU conference I had mentioned
before down in Tampa, we were short of a minion and so they
were able to find another three Yiddin who would be able to
complete the minion that we had just before the conference
started and after we finished that davening, you know there
were three guys who were like standing there very nice in the
corner. I went over to one of them,
turned out to be someone named Ellie.
And I said, Ellie, would you like to put on my Trillin?
Something I'd never done before? But I've been inspired by some
of the stories that were coming out from Eric's Israel about
putting on Trillin in the plains and the slits of the soldiers
and things like that. And he said, yeah, he was
willing to do it and put on the film.
He found six things for him to say and davening.
And then afterwards, as we're wrapping it up, I said, Ellie,
that was so inspiring that you were willing to do that kind of
a thing right now. I told him like a little bit
about the stories that there are soldiers have been called up who
can't put on the film themselves and people doing that for them.
And Ellie said, I have a cousin who's been called up and is in
that category. And said, Ellie, you just
connected with him the unity that you brought across the
ocean of being able to put on the twill in for him.
Do you want to do that again tomorrow, the next day?
He did it the next day, the third day of the conference when
the 3rd, that conference when it was ending.
I said, Ellie, we're not together the next day.
Do we want to try to be able to continue doing this?
And he said essentially in the close of my of my of his cousin
that he would try to keep doing that the next morning.
What we did was we decided in order to be able to encourage it
a little bit that we would become Trillin buddies.
Essentially, this is taking a page out of the entreal mindset
training that we give our students, how you develop new
habits and having an accountability buddy is a
powerful way to be able to instill that.
And so I said, Ellie, let's exchange pictures of us putting
on our Trillin each day and see how many of these that we can
keep going, see if we can be able to keep it up.
So next morning, I was in Staten Island.
I was going to be giving a keynote at the Triber conference
there, in the youngest of Staten Island.
I took a picture of myself and my trilling and texted it to
Ellie Bogota. Ellie and you know, have a great
day. An hour later he texted me his
picture of him and Trillan. Next morning I'm back home in
Boston and I'm in Hayadam. I said take a picture.
Greetings, Ellie from Hayadam in Brighton, MA and he says back an
hour later his picture. The next morning I take my
picture and before I can send it to him, Ellie sends me his
picture. And this is where he was
continuing to connect, to be able to see the new ways in
which he can be able to take on some new things in Yiddish Kite,
do it in the scuse of someone who is on the front lines, and
be able to connect with him across that across the first
couple of weeks. He only missed a couple of days.
The end of that, we actually created for him a little one
pager that all of his pictures that he had texted to me with a
picture of a khael in front of the Israeli flag, sent it to him
to mark, like his remarkable, you know, contributions that he
had across the ocean and, you know, across the Yiddish kite to
be able to contribute this. And I think he might have shared
it with his cousin and I suggested also sharing it with
his parents and stuff like that. Give him now, two months later,
Ellie's still in the routine. Ellie's built those muscles and
he's still bringing that back. We also, I shared with him
there's a weekly compilation of Defray Torah that I've been
doing for the last 20-6 years. And I said to him, Ellie, one of
the other things that your cousin probably isn't able to do
is learn on Shabbos. Let me send you the compilation
of Debray Torah and find one thing in it to maybe read over
Shabbos and keep him in mind. And so we've been able to
broaden it, be able to have him do more of that stuff.
There's just a story that I heard in shul on Shabbos here in
in your shall. I am just that one of the long
time subscribers in that Torah Norman Stark.
He was telling me that he had shared it with the family.
That's not from if I'm understanding the.
The story right and they got off the Derek and like we didn't
really have any cashier to to Yiddish kite.
Sure they had seen him reading in shul I think it was and
they'd asked him about it and he shared it with them and he had
me add them to the distribution list.
And they each week on Shabbos, it's like the only catcher that
they have, they will read a part of that that net Torah, the the
compilation of the D Ray Torah. They are contributing to the
community in possibly ways they don't even realize about being
able to bring the Yiddish kind into their lives and deeper ways
than it would be otherwise. And so all of us in our unique
ways that we can find a way that we can do it consistently or a
new one each day and things like that.
That's where the clock comes together and the power of being
able to have everyone wherever they are in the world as Yiddin,
being able to bolster the the Medina and the arancisto, That's
one of the key things for us to find now.
Wow, that is really a beautiful message.
I also just parenthetically I love the Khayadam shout out
because that was where I dive in as a young boy.
That's a really beautiful message.
And thank you so much for joining us today.
OK. It's my pleasure, Jacob.
Thank you so much with everything that you're doing.
Thank you. Thank you so much for tuning in
to starting. If you're still listening at
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team, Yoni, Schwartz, Yitzuk Ribbon, and Yossi Book.
Until next week, keep on stagging Cobra.