After 7 years of grueling exams and a year-long wait for a committee's approval, I became one of the youngest people in Israel to receive a municipal rabbinical ordination — at age 29.
I won't be serving as a rabbi, and I feel a quiet sadness as I place this certificate in a drawer.
It will lie there in silence and darkness, folding 7 years of effort into a few lines of ink, crumbling and fading like life itself.
Some of my employees know me as an entrepreneur behind groundbreaking software.
Others know me as a storage server specialist and e-commerce solutions expert.
Some clients know me as a hardware expert and certified network technician.
But no one knows me as a rabbi, because I'm not one.
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In those magical years of youth I gathered friends of every kind, from every corner of the world.
I learned to love people, and I learned that good and bad people exist everywhere — regardless of the beliefs they were raised on.
Alongside my Torah studies, I immersed myself in theoretical physics, economics, and English.
Physics taught me how the world works; economics taught me how human beings work.
English opened the door to knowledge, made the world a smaller place, and turned the people living in it into friends I love.
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For some of the people I love and admire, rabbinics is a concept they encounter almost exclusively in negative contexts. For them, "separation" is something to be applied between religion and state — not between genders.
I find that sad, for two reasons: first, because a "rabbi" in the news, in the vast majority of cases, holds no rabbinical ordination whatsoever — a fact that is enough to make him a fraud — and second, because bad people exist everywhere.
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On a personal level, I believe the only thing that truly matters for a healthy society is protecting each individual's freedom to do as they see fit, so long as it does not infringe on anyone else's freedom.
A simple, clear principle — yet one that contains everything.
At White Tiger Technologies, the small microcosm I built and that is growing rapidly, I apply this principle with pride.
White Tiger serves clients from every segment of the population: right-wing and left-wing, ultra-Orthodox and secular, Jewish and Arab.
White Tiger also employs people of every background, and our holiday greetings to staff include holidays from the Islamic calendar as well.
When White Tiger becomes a leading international brand in its field, it will carry forward those same values of fairness, respect for others, and love of humanity that I believe in.
To me, that will be the greatest success of all.
*Pictured: myself with the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi David Lau, upon receiving my previous ordination as a neighborhood rabbi.*