Sermon: Terumah: From Garage to Googleplex
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 27 February 2014
Great things start small. They grow, they have to adapt and transform or they die but in their transformation those which are worth experiencing hold on to the values which made them worthwhile in the first place.
In 1996 two young men at Stanford University in California embarked on a research project to work out a better way of searching the Internet. They worked out that links on a page back to other material was a better and quicker way of finding the information that people needed than simply looking for words on a page. They called their invention “Back Rub”. The name didn’t catch on.
There was a word which referred to vast numbers, like the vast numbers of internet pages which can be searched if you use the fast technique of back links – the number 10 to the power of 100. The word is googol – spelt g.o.o.g.o.l. The man who thought of this name for a search engine, Sean Anderson, misspelled it when he did a search to see if anyone had registered it for a domain name. No one had and so his friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered their innovation under that name google.com.
Like many internet sensations the firm started in a garage, in their case on a computer with a frame built out of lego bricks. At first it was pioneering and gung-ho but when they needed to borrow $25 million in 2001 to expand the company the founders had to change into a regular corporation and hire a chief executive, get real structure and function as a large scale business. Now 17 years later the business is one of the largest in the world, more or less succeeding in staying true to its founding philosophy “don’t be evil”.
The early stories of the Children of Israel similarly begin small. We start in Genesis as a single family, Abraham and Sarah’s family wandering the land of Canaan. It is a family which appreciates the presence of God in their lives and interactions. When this happens they stop and set up an impromptu altar wherever they may be, much like you or I might be wowed by an experience anywhere at any time and pause to appreciate it. Abraham’s mode of worshipping God was to take stones from any place, lay a fire on top of it, slaughter an animal and burn it in honour of God. It’s a bit like running the company from the garage!
Abraham does it when he first comes to the Land of Canaan, when he first enters into the Covenant at Hebron, chillingly when he feels commanded by God to offer up his own son Isaac. Isaac sets up an impromptu altar when he solves a dispute over water sources. Jacob does so when he feels settled in the area of Shechem and when he finds himself back in the place where he had had his dream of the angel’s ladder, in Bethel.
When we start the Torah portion which Zoe read for us today, the Israelites are no longer just one family. The children of family of Israel have grown over hundreds of years into twelve tribes of thousands of people. Impromptu worship of God won’t help to keep them together as a people. It’s time for a system, with times to gather, and a place for them all to come to be built by them all together. That’s the background of the transformation which is recorded in the Parashah Terumah. You could see this as parallel to the couple of guys in a garage setting up a corporation with human resources department, finance, marketing and all, the Children of Israel, as they build their mini portable Sinai, complete with the ten commandments in an Ark, an altar, the grand Ner Tamid a system of festivals and Shabbat create a new formal way of worshipping God which underlies our Synagogues today.
What makes it worthwhile though is that at the heart of the Mishcan, the desert temple which will occupy all the remainder of the Book of Exodus, are the same values which caused Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to set up their altars, a search to feel God’s presence with them and a place to pause and appreciate the wonder of life.
The State of Israel too is on a similar journey from pioneering first steps to where it is now as an established country among the nations with a place in the world as a technological leader and an ever more complex society. Israel’s first decades were about the foundation of a state of equivalent status to any other nation state in the world. Now that State is firmly there Israel’s challenges are much more about the kind of society that it is and will become.
With the death of Ariel Sharon it is as if a generation has moved on. This was the generation of warrior heroes whose clarity of purpose made such an obvious contribution to Israel’s foundation. Their actions were undoubtedly controversial but the mission was clear – to ensure Israel’s survival as a State amongst unfriendly neighbours. These were the people who founded Israel’s original political parties, who founded her cities and towns, who fought in her wars for existence in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Because of them we have a State with the 39th largest economy in the world and with the 25th wealthiest people in the world and the 15th highest score on the Human Development Index which takes together statistics about health, education, economic and cultural well being. This generation of heroes and heroines are no longer running the country.
Israel’s challenges now are unlikely, thank God, to be to her very existence. Her challenges now are more internal – what kind of society will she be? It means that our support for Israel as Diaspora Jews should now be concentrating on helping that society to deal with its challenges as Israel struggles to be the homeland of Jews from so many different origins, with deep inequalities of wealth and education, with a million or more Arab citizens still struggling to find their place in the State, with the four hundred Yeshiva students of David Ben Gurion’s time at the foundation of the State of Israel having turned into more than 100,000 studying in Yeshiva at their fellow citizen’s expense, challenging religious pluralism.
For Alyth to be a serious participant in the Jewish world we also must be a serious supporter of Israel in her current reality. It can no longer be about just celebrating Israel’s existence and pretending that it’s all a simple matter of Israel right or wrong. We need to be with Israel in her challenges.
The next two months leading up to Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day in early May will include at Altyh two events to help us to do so. The first will be an evening on 20th February with David Janner Klausner, past programmes director of the UJIA, called “No More Heroes” where we will consider this transformation of Israel from the founding generation, signalled by the death of Ariel Sharon. Is Israel different now that its leaders are career politicians? Does it mean that the way we Diaspora Jews relate to Israel can legitimately change as our Jewish state matures?
Then on March 6th Alyth is hosting Merchavim, an Israeli organisation dedicated to building a fairer society in Israel – they will be bringing a panel of speakers for a robust debate including an Israeli Arab civil rights leader from Nazareth, an Ethiopian Israeli Academic, a Haredi woman activist who works to link ultra-orthodox Jews with secular Israelis who assume they have nothing in common. As Merchavim says: “Israel’s state building acheivements are remarkable. But no state can be stronger than the fabric that comprises it and in this regard Israel’s 7.8milllion citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, face exceptional society building challenges, among them great diversity. Deep disagreements, low social cohesion, a still short democratic history and the unresolved regional conflict.”
Like the firm that struggles to stay true to its values though massive growth and transformation, like the Children of Israel whose search for God needed to stay constant as they grew from a family into a people, so the State of Israel, to be compelling for world Jewry, needs to share its societal challenges and seek our interest and our support whilst remaining true to the democracy and pioneering spirit which made us so proud of what our people had achieved in the land of our spiritual ancestors.
Once it’s no longer about the founders of the firm, the founders of a people, the founders of a State, once it’s about something greater and truly sustainable, the real work starts.