I described it over time as almost a little bit of a
personal mourning period because it had been a dream of mine or
an idea of mine that that was going to be my career and that
was. Do you think of that experience
as a failure? No Fomalism.
And welcome to Stark Tank, the podcast for the challenges and
opportunities of being a mentor in the workforce.
This week, we sit down with Benny Merillis.
Benny started out as a rabbi, but after some embarrassing
mishaps, he realized it was time to change course.
Already close to 30, he had to reinvent himself professionally
while staying close to his values.
My name is Jacob Wolf, and this is starting.
Benny Miralis, welcome to starting.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
I'm glad to be here. So you start out your career
originally as a rabbi. Can you tell us a little bit
more about what drove you to that path and what were your
early roles in that career? Yeah.
Well, actually I started in teaching because before there
were jobs available, let's say in the rabbinate, there were
more jobs available in teaching. And so as much as I wanted to go
into the rabbit, I needed to be in a position to interview for
those jobs and maybe get those jobs.
And so I started in teaching Judaic studies at my alma mater,
where I went to school at Yeshiva Flavis High School.
And then as opportunities presented, presented themselves
either as senior rabbis or assistant rabbis or whatever,
I'd start to apply for those roles as they came up if they
made sense for me. I had a good relationship with
the team at Ishib University where I'd studied in terms of
placement. And then when the right
opportunities would come, we would talk about perhaps
interviewing, and I started to interview for those jobs.
My first job in the rabbinate officially was the assistant
rabbi at the Indigital of Hollis Wood for Rabbi Menachem Penner.
I was, we were in, my wife and I were in the community Kohl out
there. And so we both had savrusas and
we're learning with people in the evenings.
And I was also the assistant rabbi in the in the shul.
And so I got the chance to not just time with individuals
one-on-one, but also to give Shigerman to speak and to be
around him, which was an opportunity towards the future
potentially if an opportunity presented itself to become an
act the actual senior rabbi in the shul somewhere.
So I was with him first for a couple of years as the assistant
rabbi. He's phenomenal.
So I learned a ton from being around him, and the assistant
rabbi position is like the best of every world.
You have all the opportunity to teach them to speak and none of
the pressure of having to answer any of the questions that are
being asked to deal with any of the situations that are being
presented. But you get to be a family on
the wall for a lot of those conversations.
Even before that when I was in yeshiva, I interned at the
Ingazol Flatbush where I grew up and the Rav there by Aaman who
was my rabbi growing up let me into a lot of rooms that I think
a lot of 23 year olds, 22 year old guys don't necessarily get
into. To hear him interacting with
Balabhatam, to hear him interacting with the rub on him,
to be in the room to ask him questions as things were
happening and how to handle them and how he would handle them.
So those those opportunities that what you would call
shemush, which was sort of apprenticeship for lack of a
better term in English were great.
And then at some point after leaving the assistant rabbi
roll, I, I wasn't teaching, I wasn't actually working in
finance, but I was still interviewing for a bidding
positions and I landed on the roll at the in gizzle of North
Woodmere, which was on some level unheard of to sort of get
a senior role in a shul in the New York area, let alone in the
Five Towns area. That was a like a good
opportunity. And so we moved from Holliswood,
which we loved, to North Woodmere, and we were in North
Korea for 10 years, but I wasn't in the Ravenet for 10 years.
So before we get to that transition out of the ravenet,
what were the big values that were driving you to become a
rabbi at this point? What was it that that called to
you from that mirror perspective?
What was it? Yeah, it's a good question.
So I I think about it a lot because it still informs the
work that I do, just in a different way.
I was, I would say a couple of things.
One, I, I felt like I was good at the teaching and the
speaking, like I had sort of an ability for it and an affinity
for it as well. And I like the prep for it too.
Like just sitting and learning and working through content and
material was always interesting to me anyway.
Making it work from beginning to end was always was always good.
And I just enjoyed that, that space, the interaction with an
audience in that way. And there weren't a lot of roles
or a lot of opportunities that I felt like existed in the world
where you had that kind of impact on people's lives
day-to-day, week to week, month to month, year to year.
Then the rabbinet and teaching in the classroom.
I did it, but it wasn't exactly the same vibe and energy for me
that I was looking for. And so the Rabbinet seemed like
a great Ave. for that dream to be fulfilled.
And I had, I would say on some level a little bit of a naive
approach to how that worked and what that would mean and what
you would be responsible for and that what you'd have to do.
But it just felt like the right way to go about having long term
large impact on the world and on a lot of people's lives.
Can I ask you to maybe drill down a little bit more on the
distinction between the rabbinate and teaching children
in the school system and the education system?
Because I think it's saying that a lot of people, myself
included, thinking about a lot, which is that there's obviously
a lot of parallels, a lot of overlap, but also some big
differences. And some people could make the
case that the bigger impacts to had by teaching kids who are
more impressionable and at the age where they're really forming
their identity. So can you try to unpack that a
little bit more? Yeah, I never really wanted to
be in a classroom. So like I ended up in a
classroom because I needed professionally to have an
opportunity to work and to get paid and to make a living.
And if I wanted to end up in the Raven, that seemed like the
right Ave. to go. I also was, I felt pretty good
at it, so it made a lot of sense.
But the classroom for me as a student, as a kid was not
something I enjoyed. It just felt like it was very
strict and very formal, and then I felt like teaching was also
more formal than I wanted from a structure in terms of the way I
wanted to have impact on people. I wanted it to be a little bit
more free flowing and informal. I wanted it to be a little bit
wider than just content focused. At least that's how I understood
and how I thought about it. And in the context of community,
felt like you're involved in way more than just teaching
material. You're involved in the
day-to-day of their lives. There's the this I would call
the spiritual side of it as opposed to the context side of
it and the material side of it. And so you're in every part of
their being from the moment that maybe they have a child to the
moment that they're going through something that's really
difficult in their lives. And you're also getting the
chance to teach and to speak. I felt like it covered more
areas of ground. Then there was the communal
environment where you're dealing with other maybe other
synagogues and other ribundum or other faith communities or the
larger world. And I didn't think that I could
get that in the classroom. And so they just felt very
different for me as places of opportunity and work and the
rabbit. It seemed more like the one.
I would say. The other thing is there was an
influence to some degree as well from having studied and learned
at Yoshi University very much. I felt like at Reit's, which is
the rabbinical college there, that there was an emphasis back
then, which is 25 years ago on the rabbit over teaching.
Not that they didn't have people becoming teachers, but the, what
they talked about and what they focused on and who they
highlighted and who ended up speaking at the Hayagas.
Mika, let's say as an example, we're abundant guys in in the
field, guys in small communities, guys out of, you
know, out of New York and the wider world.
And that's who they highlighted. And some degree I wanted to be
that, even though I probably had no right or reason to think that
way. I'll give you just a great
example. I sat once with every lamb, and
every lamb is a cousin of my father.
And so he and I had a chance once in a while to sit and talk
about stuff. And he asked me once, you know
what's on your mind? And I said, I'm having trouble
choosing between the rabbit and teaching, and I don't know which
way to go. And he said, why do you have to
choose? Let it choose itself.
And I thought I never, I didn't know that that was an option to
let it choose itself. And it just, it became apparent
to me over time that even though in truth, I spent many more
years in the classroom than I did in the rabbit, that that
where my interest lay was actually there.
Amazing. So you ended up getting this
amazing role for someone your age and in the, you know, the
five towns, a rabbit, your own Shoal and you'll leave it to the
fact before that it didn't really work out, maybe the way
you dreamed or didn't last the whole tenor.
So what happened there? What was the breakdown and why
didn't it work out? It was hard.
It was really hard, much harder than I thought it would be,
transitioning from the assistant rabbi roll to the rabbi roll.
I don't think I was as well prepared for it as I thought I
would. I was, there were, I would say,
some mechanics and some things that going on in the community
itself that I simply wasn't as well attuned to that maybe a
more senior veteran rap I might have been attuned to at that
point. I think it was 28 years old at
the time. And so there's a, there's an
experience level that I think is really important that I just
didn't have. But more than anything else, it
just didn't work. I what didn't work for our
family, my wife was working full time as a lawyer and we had two
little kids at the time we moved and I was teaching full time in
this in a local high school and I was a little bit working in
finance at this. I had like 3 jobs at some point
in the course of it and I couldn't juggle them.
And those were hard. And then the truth is I wasn't
good at it, which hard to admit out loud, but I've said this
many times to a lot of rabbis over the years.
There was just certain aspects of it that are really important
to it that I really wasn't particularly good at then that
maybe now closing on A50, I might be better at than I was at
28 or 29. And at some point, you have to
be really honest with yourself and say, this is not working.
This is not working for me. This is not working for the
community. It's and then besides the
community, it's just not working for our family.
And you have to prioritize and, and choose.
I think in those spaces. And for me, there was no, it
wasn't even a choice. I'm going to choose family and
I'm going to choose me over staying in a role in a position
and then figure it out and try to figure out what that's going
to be and whatever role that's going to be.
And so just to give you an example, like I always had sort
of viewed the rabbit from the standpoint of teaching and
speaking. Those were my areas of interest
and those were my areas of focus.
The empathy part being the really compassionate human
person who embodies the spiritual for or is, you know,
that person who embodies Torah for a member of your community
in those spaces, in those moments, I was really not good
at. I don't know that I hadn't
prepared for it. I just, I just, it wasn't great.
So an example, there was a member of the shul was a distant
member of the shul. So she didn't come on a regular
basis. I didn't really know her
particularly well. And she lost a parent.
She's like an older member of the community and she lost a
parent. And I, I had no connection with
her per SE. And I just admittedly, I simply
forgot about the Shiva. It was horrible.
You know, afterwards she called me out on it and I apologize
profusely. And then I called her Aryam
Kippur to apologize again. And I asked for Mehila.
But like, that's a like a sign. I feel like, you know, Hey, man,
you're, you're not paying attention here the way you need
to. And you have to get honest with
yourself. Either you're going to burn out,
you're going to flame out, you're going to destroy your
family. Or the harder part of it maybe
is you figure it all out and you get it together and you're able
to do all those things. And that was not going to be me.
So I had to shift gears and I shifted, excuse me?
It shifted into organizational work at that point because they
still wanted to stay in what I would call holy work, right?
But I didn't want to work on Chavez anymore.
And the way to do that, I felt it was an organizational work.
So it shifted from teaching and the rabbit into organizational.
So approximately how long was this?
Do you hold that position in North Widmere and when did you
like? What was the time frame?
Yeah. So I was there.
I was the rabbi of the shul for three years.
I think it was O4 to O7. It was probably the years that I
did it maybe there like straddled into O 8.
And then before that I had been the assistant Robin Hollisford
for for a few years as well. Same idea in the terms of the
time frame. And then I moved on in 2007,
2008, I moved into organization. Got it.
When you're talking about transitioning out of the rabbit,
leaving that role. So there's a lot to that and you
obviously had a lot of good reasons to do so.
But I'm curious about the identity factor.
You know, when you are the rabbit of a Shoal, you have a
very clear identity as as a rug, and that forces you to behave a
certain way and to act a certain way, dress a certain way, and
you're leaving that. So you're leaving that identity
behind as well. Was that staying hard for you?
How do you manage that? Yeah, I, I described it over
time as almost a little bit of a personal mourning period because
it had been a dream of mine or an idea of mine that that was
going to be my career and that wasn't.
And so you go through this period of change, figuring out
now, OK, now who am I? And when you talk about a
person's identity, I talked about this with a lot of other
people as well, a lot of professionals too.
You sort of have, I would say three, maybe 3 or 4 different
spaces in which your identity is defined.
There is your home life, you know, there's your communal
life, there's your professional life.
And if one of those things is pulled from you, then a good
portion of your identity on some level goes away.
And that's really hard. And when it's a public space
like that is, it's even harder. And, and another level of it, we
stayed in the community. So I didn't, I left this, I left
the role, but for a year, the shul didn't have a rabbi and so
I stayed on in some unofficial capacity with them.
So certain simplest came along and I officiated at a simpla or
there was a funeral and I officiated a funeral.
I spoke a couple of times and I even stayed in Davin there.
But imagine I was no longer sitting in the rabbi's chair,
was sitting in one of the rows in the shul, and that was
exceptionally hard. And so we stayed in the
community for another seven years after I left the shul.
And the rub that they hired after me, phenomenal.
Stayed for 15 years. It's amazing, amazing, amazing.
You really right for the role where I was really not right for
that role. Who was that would be a good
acceptimist. Terrific rabbi, terrific,
terrific rabbi. And he and I had a great
relationship, still do. And so so you're mourning that
to some degree and you have to figure out where what that's
going to. What does that mean?
Like what's it going to be now? And I would say some of it stays
with you because I think certain certain ways which you handle
yourself and certain ways in which you hear and show up and
events now even or when you're actually still giving a talk or
giving a sheer, whatever it is that still comes with you, that
doesn't leave you. I think maybe it's glossed over
or it's covered over in dust at some point because you're not
doing it as much. But when you when you shake off
the dust and you and you and you Polish it a layer and so you
have to on some level reimagine yourself or re identify yourself
for what that next thing is going to be.
And you can't force it. I think you have to let it sort
of play itself out. And over time, I realized that
the larger thing that I was interested in was impact.
And there was less about ultimately the role.
I had to convince myself by that, I think initially, but
also come to appreciate and realize that that was true, that
I was much more interested in having as wide and as large and
significant and as meaningful an impact as I could possibly have.
And that could be in the rapid it and that could be in
something else entirely. And you know, I think that's,
that's where I'm at now. And do you think of that
experience as a failure? No, I think if you simply look
at that inside the prism of those few years, they might look
at it as a failure. But nothing exists inside the
prism of those few years. It's part of the longer journey.
I mean, it's a much, much bigger picture and a much, much longer
story. And if I had stopped at 31 when
it was over, maybe I would think that.
But I learned a ton from being there.
And to me, that ultimately was the biggest thing learned to
talk about. I learned just a lot about
myself. I learned a lot about family.
I learned about my priorities, and I learned about just sort of
handle these kinds of situations.
And the organization work that I moved into at the time was
synagogue related, shul related, and then national related.
And so handling myself in those kinds of rooms and larger rooms
with, you know, bigger players and more impactful figures, I
was still, I was prepared for because I had been the guy in
the suit and had been in those rooms and had to learn how to
control emotion and how to handle just the energy of a
situation. And so no, I'm still benefiting
from it. The network, I mean, just as
another aspect of it, the network of people who I
connected with in the rabbinet, especially there because you're
living in a very large Jewish community.
And even though it was the rabbi of a smaller synagogue, it's a
large Jewish community. And so you got around to a lot
of people and a lot of different rabbis, a lot of different
shules and organizations within the community.
And so you got to meet and know and grow with a lot of people.
And those people stay with you because you did stuff for them.
They did stuff for you. And so, no, it felt like a
failure at the time. And while it was mourning it, it
was a failure. But I think over the long term,
I'm so much better off as a person for that not having gone
well. I always talk about the, I talk
about this with coaching clients, the blessing of the
thing that didn't happen for you.
And you sometimes have this idea that a certain role or a certain
thing is the thing you absolutely have to have.
If you don't get it, it's a failure.
And then you realize that not having that or not getting that
is actually the blessing. And to me, that not working was
a massive blessing because of where I am now and what I do now
and where I live now and my family and their happiness.
And so no, absolutely. OK.
So you made reference to the fact that you transitioned to
organizational work. Can you give us a little more
specifics, more details about what your next move was after
you realize that your dream of being a Shoal rabbi was not
going to be long term? Yeah, you say that and it hurts
still, OK. But yeah, so I at the time,
because of the network that I had and the friends that I had
in a lot of different places, organizational work and
community, community work. So when I made it known to some
friends that I was looking to to move to a different, just a
different vertical in this in in communal work, you know, sort of
the feel is we're out for opportunities.
And I ended up at the Orthodox Union.
You know, the OU was looking to revamp and rebuild their
synagogue services, a program. This is why it was a benefit
having served as a community rabbi for a number of years,
having gotten around to speak and to lecture and to talk on a
lot of different subjects and having built some programs for
the shul and having done some a little bit of fundraising in the
shul. At the time, that role as
leading this new revised program at the OU, which the Synaptic
Services team, which had sort of been gone dormant for a period
of time, was the right opportunity for me.
And so, and the expectation level and the build level was
such that, OK, we're restarting this so we can appreciate that
year one's going to be X and year 2's going to be Y, and it's
going to take time to get there. And so it was just the right
role. So I ended up at the OU for for
three years and then I bounced a little bit, a little bit back
into Hinof for a short period of time.
And then I ended up at National Council of Young Israel where I
played the role of the associate executive Vice president.
And so I was coming into the other large Orthodox synagogue
organization in a very senior role at a very young age,
meeting with a lot of top great people at the world's best
Jewish organizations. And I got to hang out with them
and be in the room with them. And it felt like I had peered
inside, you know, the great halls of Jewish communal
leadership. And I was allowed to be there.
And I got to just learn and see and talk and ask questions of
the best that there was in Jewish communal life and to see
what could be and what was, you know, the opportunity and what
was where I was going to go next.
And so I was there for a couple of years as well.
And I moved on from there. It just, and it, it sort of
rolled until we ended up here in Israel.
And so things shifted during that time, but that's where that
was the trajectory was Jewish communal life, Jewish communal
leadership from the organizational standpoint as
opposed to the educational or the synagogue.
Right. I mean, another way to to think
about it and to frame it, as you've been mentioning before,
is that you started out as a rabbi, but you also had this
finance role and experience. And so maybe the two tracks of
one being someone who wants to make an impact and inspire and
be a source of holiness and help to the Jewish community on the
one hand. On the other hand, there's the
level of the business skills, the management, the leadership,
all of those things. So did you think of that latter
category as a just a means to the ends of making an impact or
was something more about your personality, your skills, your
passions that really wanted to express those sort of a more
secular business minded skill sets?
Yeah, I always liked business. I just, I just wasn't working in
it, let's say and, and I didn't see myself being able to work in
it on a consistent day-to-day basis.
And even though I had, I had when, when I, when I left
teaching and I was working in finance.
So I was working, I was working at IDT in, in Newark, NJ at the
time and I was on a very small team in the finance group and I
liked it. But like there was some sort of
nagging vibe that something was missing.
But I liked it. I liked the business.
I like the interaction, I like the people, I like the thinking
and the numbers are always interesting to me on some level.
Even when I was in the rabbit and I would ask about, you know,
the shules finances, that was like crossing the line a little
bit. But I was, I was always curious
about how we were doing financially and it's always
interesting to me. But it didn't come out per SE
until I moved into more of a space of the fundraising world
and really appreciated what it takes and what it was necessary
for things to actually happen in the world.
I had LED teams at the OUI, built A-Team at the OUI, had LED
the team at National Council. I had a small team when I was at
Shiba Chalavima as the fundraiser and I had a small
team when I moved into into Tech in the coaching.
So that leadership piece was always sort of something around
me. And so it was interesting to me.
It's still something that I talk about, think about, you know, on
a week to week basis basically at this point.
And so they were all interesting to me all the time.
They just didn't know how they all fit together.
They didn't always seem like they fit together.
They really felt like they were two disparate parts of my being.
The ability to find a way to make those things unite in some
way and to get sort of a congruence between all the
different aspects of myself made life much, much easier.
And so that happened only years, years later, but it was, that's
how I sort of thought I was like, OK, so I'm interested.
And so when I talk to people at a shop this table, I can ask
some good questions and it's interesting to me and it's real.
But at the same time, like that's not what I do on a
day-to-day basis and I'm happy not doing that on a day-to-day
basis. Right.
It's interesting because a lot of people listening to this
podcast, a lot of Benito, so there are, there is a maybe I
think a smaller minority group who they'll say the only thing I
care about, the only thing I want to do is to learn and to
teach and to be a rabbi and, and nothing else matters to me.
I don't care about any of these other things.
But a lot of people, they do have an interest, a love, a
passion, connection to the world's of business, the world's
of finance, the world's of marketing, all these things for
those people. So to find sort of role like you
have in the Jewish organizational role could be a
really perfect synergy of combining those two aspects of
their life. So who should or shouldn't be
thinking about such a move? Who Who is going to do well and
such a role? Who's not going to do well?
Yeah. So I would just on your point,
just to add on to that, I, I think you're right.
And it's hard to, for some to find the Sepa con nephesh in
quote, UN quote, just being in finance or just being a lawyer
or just being in tech or whatever.
That is because they want to be learning and they have to learn
how to, to balance that. Remember for years when I was
working at Shala Vim as the fundraiser, So one of their
band, the Revyomer talked a lot about the idea, what he called
the broad life, the idea that all those things fit in some way
into, into Torah. And you have to figure out how
they fit in and how you can make those things feel right for you
as opposed to feeling uncomfortable every day of your
life when you go to work, when you want to be ready and Yoshif
or whatever that is, you have to find any.
And I have this conversation a lot with rabbis and Mahankin who
are looking to make aliyah to figure out how they're going to
make it work financially here. And maybe that's not going to be
their, their focus. And how do they work through
that, that problem or that struggle to be able to make that
balance work. And I think what I, what I think
with, with people, younger people in that space is they
really have to be honest with what they're going to be OK with
and where they're going to thrive as human beings.
And so I have some really good friends who are, you know,
they're business guys and their, I mean, their paradigms and
paragons of excellence in every aspect of their lives.
And worst case scenario that a person should live their life to
be like that kind of a person who learns and is, you know, is
always involved in the community and is doing mitzvos all the
time and, and, and loves life and loves Torin, loves the
cutters Baraku. And at the same time they work,
you know, 12/14/16 hours a day in law and finance and real
estate and all these other things.
And they think there's a, there's, there's just that long
struggle with yourself to figure out how that works.
And at the same time you're paying attention to, OK, what,
what am I good at? And what is interesting to me?
And what do I want to spend some time focusing on?
And obviously knowing that you're not, you don't know now
what you're going to know in five years from now about it.
And so there's a process and the progression that you're going to
get to over time. But I think that piece of it
also is hard for people is, is to pay attention, to really pay
attention to themselves as to what what they're doing, what
they're focused on that's best for them.
That's not best for somebody else who's trying to live
vicariously through them. And to give you an example on
that, when I was the rabbi in the Shield, there was a family
there that had a son who went to yeshiva and he wanted to just
sit and learn for a little while.
And the parents were adamantly, vehemently opposed.
And this was one of the moments that I wasn't a great rabbinic
moment, but it really worked out for them.
And I had a conversation with them and I said, the reason you
don't want to sit and learn is because of him, because of you.
And no parent wants to hear that from anybody, let alone their
rabbi. And, and, but it was, it was.
And I, I often struggle with having the nuanced conversation,
which I'm better at with coaching now.
But, and they realized that it was them, not him, that for him,
this was the best thing. For them, this was not.
But those two things are not the same thing.
And they're all very happy together now as a family.
But like, this was what was right for him.
So let's, and for ourselves, we have to think about what's right
for us. And yes, sometimes it doesn't
work. You have to do with something
you don't want to do. You take a job you don't want to
take because it pays the bills. And yes, but it's always hard
because you're in flux or you're uncomfortable at every moment in
the work. And sometimes you know why and
sometimes you don't. And that, I think, is really
important for anyone in any field to figure out what that's
going to be. Got it.
And as far as the life in the Jewish organizations and how
that works out. So what are your summer
takeaways as to who would be a good fit for those type of roles
and who is not a good? Fit.
It's a really good question. It's funny because I, I, as I
said, I didn't end up in it like I would say organically or
naturally in the sense that I wasn't like my target from the
beginning. I know one or two guys who from
the start in their time sitting and learning, we're going to be
organizational guys. But it was like unheard of at
the time that a person would go and be, you know, sit and learn
for five years, get SMIFA and then not be a teacher and not be
a Rev, but go into organizational work.
And now it's more, it's more of that.
And I, and I think that that's part of that is earlier on, if
you're able to identify where your strengths lie and where
your weaknesses lie, what you're OK with, what you're willing to
work through. It's not different than anything
else that I think a person is going through where they're
putting their time and their efforts into something new that
you're trying to study and to learn.
You know, is it interesting to me?
Is this something that I want to pursue?
Is this, you know, am I over my skis here?
And this is too far afield for me and I don't get it.
And the ability to learn some of those things early and figure
that stuff out early, A, saves you a lot of pain later on, and
B, gets you on a path that's better.
There was a friend of mine in yeshiva who spent a year as the
assistant rabbi in shul in New York City and after like 3
months realized this isn't for me.
And so before he had finished Smith up, he had already known
that he was shifting gears. And I think he saved himself
years of heartache and pain and difficulty and stress and
struggle, which I'm not saying I needed to avoid, but in his
case, he definitely needed to and wanted to desperately avoid
it. And he is a very successful
human being and did not have to go through that and didn't want
to go through that. And I, I jokingly used to tell
someone at UC University, like, if you have a guy who's on the
fence about his career in terms of the rabbinate versus
education versus organization, send in my way.
I said, because we'll have that really, let's have a really
honest, open conversation about all the things that no one else
wants to say to you and ask you. And that's why for me, coaching
works as a professional standpoint because I ask a lot
of the questions that nobody else wants to ask that make
rooms incredibly uncomfortable, but get out the answers and the
conversations that need to have happen.
I've done that with guys and who either were looking at a
different aspect in the in communal work and whatever work
that was going to be. I had the conversation with
people about making a Lia in terms of and then ultimately
deciding maybe now is not the time.
I even had it when I was at one of the organizations with a shul
that was considering going Orthodox.
It's a crazy story. Years ago.
This is a shul that was in flux somewhere in the Northeast.
They weren't sure what to do it themselves, what direction to go
in. They realized that
strategically, from a real estate standpoint, they were in
a good place. It was affordable to live there.
They were close enough to enough kosher amenities, whatever they
needed for religious people. They were considering going
Orthodox. And someone sent me to them to
have a conversation. I had a conversation with the
entire shul, everybody in the everyone.
And I asked them some really hard questions about what they,
why they wanted to do that, what that would mean.
And then to play it forward, like what does it mean in five
years from now for you? What does it look like?
Play this out for me 5 years from now.
What is your Shabbat morning look like in this shul when you
go Orthodox, right, as an example?
And they did that and they realized they didn't want to do
it. They didn't like, from their
perspective, they didn't like how that image looked and what
that would mean for them and how that would make them feel inside
their own community after building this place for 50-60, a
hundred years. And they didn't do it.
But it's because they had a really hard, honest, open
conversation that was not naive, that was uncovering the muck and
the dirt and the difficult. And those are the best
conversations to have out front. And I do that now on a
consistent basis and go to. So I do want to hear a little
more about your coaching, but before we get to that chapter, I
wanted to ask you one more question about one of the very
interesting roles that you've held in this organizational
phase of your life or, or part of your life, which is Cosmatch,
which is a obviously these platforms are quite ubiquitous.
And maybe we're even seeing signs that that people have a
little bit, you know, trying to maybe there's even a shift past
that because it's maybe already getting to be too much.
But maybe just tell us about your role in building Cosmatch.
At what point did you did you come on and and how did that,
how did that develop? Yeah.
So cost match for people who are not paying attention necessarily
in the Jewish community perhaps is an online fundraising
platform that helps organization raise more money using tech and
using smarts around how to raise money, particularly in what's
called peer-to-peer, which is getting people on board to help
raise money to widen the network of the audience of the
organization in terms of potential supporters.
And I joined the company at a fairly early stage.
I think I was maybe employ 10 or 11.
We were around, we sat around one table in the building and
mass challenge in Jerusalem. And I joined after having been
at a couple of organizations here already.
And it felt like I was on a hamster wheel that I was going
to be an executive director at 1:00 and then an executor at
another and then another. And it was never going to end.
And I was I was going to be miserable.
I needed to stop and say like enough.
And but like, how do you transition out of the nonprofit
world or the organizational world at that stage of your
life? And so I started to interview
for business opportunities, for profit opportunities.
I was trying to spin my resume to have it make sense to people
in specific roles. And I found that I had already
been pigeonholed into a specific box.
And like how you get out of that and one friends with you goes,
you just need one job, one job that gets you out and gets you
across. And so at the time, I had a
friend who was going to cause match in this role.
And he said to me, come with me to cause match.
I'm like, in what capacity? He's like, I need someone to
play the role of coach and like, I don't even know what that what
did that even mean? Like I didn't even know what
that meant at the time. The term didn't.
The only coaches I had known were sports coaches, right?
People who had like play head coached or I had coached or
whatever it was. I coached Little League in
America. I had, you know, I had coached
like something else, but like I didn't know what a coach was.
And so I was like, OK, I don't know how to do this, but let me
look at the job description. Like the job description.
I met with leadership and I came in as a coach on the team.
My role was was like sort of a perfect role.
It was my role was to explain the technology to leadership at
organizations and help them through the process of using
these kinds of tools to be able to raise more money for their
organizations. There was a, at the time, a lot
of hesitancy and there was a lot of discomfort around tech, let
alone this kind of tech and their fundraising.
They knew what they knew, they knew how to do it, and this was
completely different. And so having a person who lived
in the space between the tech and the organization, which is
where I lived in the coaching space at the time, was really
meaningful to people because I would walk into a room or onto a
Zoom or a conversation and they felt OK.
This guy had been in the rabbit and he had been in education, he
had been in fundraising. He had done the one on ones, he
had done the events, he had done capital, he had done
operational. He knows us and we know him.
And so that conversation was not.
So there was a comfort level there right away.
And so for 4 1/2 years, I was at the company and I started as a
coach. There was no coaching team.
I was a coach and then I became the head of coaching in the team
and then I started to write curriculum at the company for
outside people who are learning how to coach.
And so I coached coaches and I coached organizations.
And in the course of four and a half years, on some level it
shifted for me professionally. I wasn't like paying attention
to it, let's say. Now I can't say that viewed as a
nonprofit guy, let's say, because it's point, I'm not
independent and I work for myself and have clients in the
nonprofit space, but I have my own sort of niche that I'm
working on. And so I spent 4 1/2 years
there. I worked on I think 200 or so
campaigns for organizations over the 4 1/2 years and you know, it
was in the neighborhood of like $50 million between those
campaigns and organizations, all walks of life, all places around
the world, multiple languages, and really helping to make that
process work for a lot of people.
And it's still a real source of pride for me when I see
organizations still using the technology, we're using my
terminology and language to help them succeed because it means
it's still sort of paying itself forward on some level.
The term I use is compounded impact.
The impact is still there and it's still growing, even though
I'm no longer directly involved in and on a day-to-day base.
But you did mention that now your main focus is on coaching.
And you also mentioned that, you know, originally you thought
coaching was for the local football team or baseball team.
And now we seem to come to a place where coaching is almost,
I don't know, it's gotten pretty cheap.
Like you see almost anybody who can call themselves a coach
these days. So how do you think about that
dynamic? Who should or shouldn't be a
coach? What type of problems should
people be approaching coaches for and not be approaching
coaches for? So what's your take on that
landscape? Yeah, it's a it's a great
question. And the truth is, yeah, there's
no formal official thing that you need to call yourself a
coach. It's at this time, unless you
really want to study to know it. The the best coach who I've ever
read about is a gentleman named Bill Johnson, who was known as
the trillion dollar coach. And he never.
He was a football coach who ended up in business and then
ended up coaching the world's greatest CEOs of all time.
I don't think he had any formal training in what you might call
executive and leadership coaching, but he was a football
guy. But and hit the book about him
is unbelievable called the Trillion Dollar Coach.
I recommend it anyway. So yeah.
And and when I started, I wasn't trained as a coach either.
I had no idea what I was doing. And then I had a conversation
with someone who was my coach and he put it into a frame,
which was he said, you don't realize you've been coaching all
along. You just didn't call yourself a
coach. And so when you're teaching in a
high school or you're the rabbi in a community or you're an
organization, a leader, and you're sitting with a leader
from another organization, they're coming to you for advice
and they have a question and they're thinking it through.
They're relying on you, not simply as a an advisor, as a
counselor. On some level, there's a
coaching piece to it. What I say a lot of the time,
and it's not a nice thing to say, but I say it a lot is most
people who call themselves coaches don't actually coach
because it's not the same thing. And I'm a little bit of, I don't
call myself a snob about it, but a little bit of a snob.
I did spend some time studying and I did study with some
coaches. I did take a long formal program
in coaching to get certified as a coach.
They thought it was important to have a sort of a pathway in how
I think about these things and how I work with people.
And at the same time, they couldn't begin to appreciate the
nuance difference between a coach, consultant, a trainer,
things like that. And they're not exactly the same
thing. So I when I was at Costnet to
one of the things I did, I was, I was coaching potential other
coaches. They had a program, partnership
program, people outside the company who were consultants in
their day-to-day who wanted to learn coaching for non profits.
And since I was the guy in the team was the head of coaching, I
was training them to be coaches. And there was one or two people
who I was working with who couldn't be a coach.
They needed to do the work. And what I mean by that is when
I'm doing coaching, I'm asking all the right questions and I'm
pushing people maybe to do things they don't want to do.
I'm not actually the one doing the physical work, the tasks
day-to-day. And if you feel like you need to
be the one doing the work in the project, then you're not a
coach. You're either a contractor or
you're a consultant or you're a trainer, but you're not a coach.
And if you're providing them with the answers all the time,
then you're an advisor and a counselor.
You're, you know, Yetro in, you know, in terms of Moshe in that
space, but you're not a coach. And so like there are real
differences in that. And I think it's important for
people sometimes to appreciate that the person that they're
speaking to isn't a coach. It's someone who they're going
to for advice. If you're going to for the
person for advice, they give you advice, they're not coaching
you, they're counseling you. That's a completely different
thing. And I think it's important.
So a lot of the work that I'm doing is helping people pull out
the answers from themselves. I'm putting them into the frame
of the conversation. I'm laying out options for them.
I'm not deciding for them and I'm helping them elicit the
answers that they feel like they need.
And at the same time, I'm a bit of a cheerleader because I'm
trying to get them to do things that they're not comfortable
with, to push themselves to do things that they're not not not
willing yet to try so that they can get to where they want to be
and to be the most successful version of themselves.
And so, so it's not for everyone.
I think coaching, I think if you still want to be in the
day-to-day work of it, then do multiple things, coach and also
consult or contract, which is what I do.
I do a mix of the three. The fourth thing also, that's
the mix. So I coach, you know, individual
leaders and groups of leaders. I consult on projects for
organizations and I'll, I'll give you the, the quip for it in
just a second. And then I also do contract
work. I'm actually in the day-to-day
work of an organization doing specific things and tasks for
them to help them get to where they want to be.
Those three things are very different.
So what I always say is you coach people, you consult
problems. That's the that's and that comes
from that book. That's the like the main thing.
You coach people you're working with, the person you consult,
the problem. There's a problem, there's an
issue, there's something that there's a struggle.
Whatever it is, that's consultant and those are not the
same. Got it.
So in this to all other things, you also have time to do a
podcast. So do you want to just give a
quick pitch for your podcast? What is it and who should be
tuning in? Yeah, I actually do too.
I just started another one a couple weeks ago.
So the first one is called Coaching the Bible, which is a a
mix for me between learning Torah and learning leadership at
the same time. And they've been doing that for
now in season 5. This is Year 5.
So it follows the weekly parsha, basically a week to week and
trying to explore the origins of a, what I call a leadership
principle or business principle from its Torah biblical roots
and to apply those things, they're timeless.
It started with the idea that I was, I was getting a little bit,
I don't know, I would say bored is not the right term with, you
know, Schneider on a week to week basis.
And I needed something that was going to drive me.
It used to be I would pick another safer every year and I
had an interest in starting something I needed, I felt like
I needed to get some content out.
I don't know what it was. So something internally I just
needed like on a weekly basis to produce.
And so the podcast was the avenue.
And so on some level the people who listen, they're benefiting
mostly me. I don't know that I'm benefiting
them at all. And so, you know, so over the
course of 200 plus episodes at this point, recovering anything
from empathy to compassion to strategic, you know, business
approaches at the last this year.
So all of Bracia this year was about decision making, different
aspects and thinking about how people make decisions, you know,
using the characters in in brace sheet to understand how they
made the decision, why they decided what to do what they
did, why they decided not to do something else.
And appreciating that not just from the inside the store, which
maybe is in in and of itself interesting, but also from the
standpoint of you as a leader in your community, your home, your
business, whatever that may be. So that's still going.
That's one. The second one I just started a
few weeks ago was a more of a professional pursuit with a
former colleague of mine at Cosmos named Remy Rubin.
And we talked about everything within the world of good.
So we're looking at the different ecosystems and
different aspects of the world of good philanthropy,
fundraising organizations, leaders, founders, stuff like
that. And we're just talking about a
lot of the issues. We're going to start bringing on
guests to talk to them about their experiences as leaders and
as founders, their struggles, their pains, their winds.
And so that's been really interesting in the last few
weeks just because we both felt like that was what we wanted to
do. There's obviously potentially
professional benefit in starting something like that at this time
in the world. And we felt like there was a
niche that we could perhaps speak to.
And so I'm doing 2 at the. Amazing.
OK, so let's wrap up with our lightning round, where in the
winter we have these long Friday nights.
So what's your favorite way of using that long time after the
Friday night soda? So I have to say the first thing
I do is I do all the dishes. So it's an important thing to
mention here is, and I want to say so though, when my, my
family listens to this, they know that I know that every
Friday night I'm the one who's doing dishes and I've been doing
for years and the dishes Friday night.
So that's the first thing I do is that.
And then typically speaking, it's if I'm inside a good book.
So I'll, I'll do that for many, many years.
Or just it was a long night that I had for myself hours and hours
within, you know, either it was partial, most often with partial
related swarm, just, you know, nibbling at a certain issue or
we're trying to understand something.
And so it's hours and hours of learning.
I do most of my learning on Shabbos and I get a lot of, I
feel like a very fulfilled and filled up with that.
So yeah, love along Friday night.
Amazing. And you mentioned before your
favorite coaching book, The Trillion Dollar Coach.
What's your favorite parsha Safer?
Is there one that has a particular relevance to your
coaching and your leadership roles?
No, not none of that. The the the one that I would.
I knew that this was a question that was coming.
I had to really think about it because for a long time I used
to do when I was in the rap, when I was in the rapid and I
would do one new pay rush a year.
So I would do the parsha, I would do Rashi and then I would
add on another. And when I was in the rap, I
initial so every like short fartorial that I would give
before landing was from that new safer so that over the course of
many years, I would get through a lot of Maharsh.
And how else are you going to get through them?
Right then I hit on 2, so I'm getting, I'll give you 2.
One was the Berry Ossif Rabbiosif Salant, which Rabbi
Ari Leibowitz introduced me to many years ago.
And just love, love, love that safe, fair.
Just the the weaving and the mixing of content and creativity
and both on The upshot level and on the drift level, phenomenal,
phenomenal work. And then the other one which
I've been learning I think consistently for 30 years at
this point is in the city of Shalom, which is just working on
a different plane for me in terms of, you know, the Hasidic
and the spiritual plane. And looking at those same took
him from a completely different vantage point.
So those two have sustained me for a long time.
And then I'm always looking at something new.
So the last couple of years Steinfeld has a great work on
the weekly parsha. There's one called the Nephis
Shella Shella parsha. I think it's called Reflagai
London, which is like a set of them and you might have it on
yourself. You're looking for it.
Nephis Shella parsha, I think it's called.
So it's like four or five different volumes on on parsha
and then also on some of the Megillahs.
Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah.
Parsha, Shella Nephis. OK, got it wrong.
OK, Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing.
So that has been and I and I love that sort of new ish
Russia, Shiva, Israel vibe, which is new to me.
And so I've been really interesting.
Amazing. And final question.
If you were forced to choose a job, any job, in a role in
industry that you haven't yet been in, what would it be?
It would be probably coaching basketball, I think to give you
these. My son, my son played one of my
one of my sons plays a lot of basketball and he always jokes
that like I'm a different person when it comes to to basketball.
When I'm at his games and I'm talking basketball with him,
it's just a different aspect of my being.
I'm not not a crazy rowdy, yelling at the refs kind of a
fan and I'm not yelling at him either.
That's not me as a person. But, but in terms of just paying
attention and following the game and being interested in the game
in the instead of the coaching, if I could coach basketball at a
high level, I think I would enjoy that.
OK, amazing. Benny Marilis, thank you so much
for all your insights today. Thank you.
Pleasure being here. Thanks so much.