The Hummus Manifesto - Part 2

Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments and retweets on Part 1 of the Hummus Manifesto. I received notes from representatives of our government as well as a note from someone who said they showed it to the Governor of Oregon! Most importantly, entrepreneurs read it and they are the ones who make a difference and together we can all make a difference.

In Part 2, I want to focus on the role the government has played in fostering incremental technology advancement as opposed to disruptive innovation and how by ignoring the success of the past (or resting on laurels) we have let this wave of innovation and greatness pass us by. If that was not enough, in addition to stopping technology at customs in Ben Gurion airport, we have MKs who are actively shackling the tech industry while letting the Israeli Tycoons escape Knesset scrutiny, despite their grip on our economy (read my colleague Izhar Shay on this topic). Were it not for the great and talented young entrepreneurs in our country and incredible development teams at our startups, we would be in worse shape.

I wrote this piece almost two months ago and have edited it somewhat recently. But, the heart remains the same. Given the current battle between the Finance Minstry, Chief Scientist and the CEOs of ECI Telecom, Elbit etc, this post is a bit like throwing powder keg into an already tense situation but I think the point needs to be made.

The Chief Scientist has invested our tax money in an unfocused manner for over a decade and looming unemployment is the result.

The Lavi was a visionary project that spawned countless engineers with bleeding edge tech experience. The project failed but the technology economic engine that was created by government investment in bleeding edge innovation persisted. That is what happens when the government invests in deep research and very advanced technologies for the future. However, the last 10+ years of government investment has reactively sprayed our money around into companies with no hopes in the market (like the incubators) or they have plowed it into big companies in order to preserve jobs on projects that are not really financially viable.

When government bureaucrats, who have not been in the market for years, are asked to invest your tax shekels in technology, their vision and, hence, choices are limited. They either need massive strategic direction from the top/outside to make focused bets or they will react to proposals in a democratic manner. They have chosen the latter. Democratically spreading the wealth of investment shekels neither creates industries nor changes the trajectory of our national technology competitiveness. It simply sprays money ineffectively. But this is what the Chief Scientist's Office has done for much of the last 15 years. The end result is a pile of technology companies who did not receive VC funding and then get insufficient Chief Scientist funds to make a difference. Said differently, these technologies were rejected by the market but somehow the government decided to give it some of your taxpayer dollars, in insufficient amounts and with strings that make it harder to exit. This is backwards and it does not enhance our national technology competitiveness.

Then we have the Chief Scientist's investment in larger companies. Somehow Google is able to develop Android, Google TV, Google Apps etc. without an American Chief Scientist investment; struggling Apple (circa 2000) invented the iPod, iPhone, iTunes and iPad without Chief Scientist funding, but ECI can't develop a next gen product without it. Same for Tower Semiconductor. I don't get it. If it is a commercially viable opportunity or the next great market for your publicly traded company then go finance it from cash flow or raise equity. Why does it make sense for the taxpayer to fund public company projects that company management itself does not deem worthy of a balance sheet investment? And what are the odds that they will take that government money and spend it on disruptive innovation? It flies in the face of Clay Christensen's core thesis in the "Innovators Dilemma" that has been proven accurate time and again.

So we have the Chief Scientist investing dollars in projects that management deems unfinaceable basically in order to preserve jobs at larger companies like ECI, Alvarion, and Tower Semiconductor. This is the recipe for incremental technology improvement malaise that we are in now as an industry. It is a job preservation strategy rather than a job creation strategy. And job preservation strategies ultimately go awry and lead to the opposite, job destruction, when the music stops. That is what is beginning to happen right now.

Despite the Chief Scientist's current approach, or, more accurately, because of the Chief Scientist's approach, I fear we will see a situation where the companies of yesterday, many of whom are Chief Scientist grantees, will start laying off high tech employees in droves. Motorola Arad and Alvarion are but the first shoes to drop. Tadiran has been laying off employees and the overly large grantee in Migdal Emek called Tower Semiconductor has hardly paid for its taxpayer dollars. In start up nation, we could have many of yesterday's companies' engineers out of work, all with the help of government preservation incentives. It is astounding to think that despite what I describe as a dearth in tech talent, we would end up having thousands of tech employees laid off by these ossifying companies. This is not fair to these talented tech employees and it is not fair to our economy. They and we deserve better. In effect, the CEOs of these companies admitted as much last week when they warned of looming massive unemployment from their companies. I agree. It is coming if we do not do something dramatic.

Chief Scientist Eli Ofer took a step in the right direction with his Medical focus (reasonable people can argue about whether biotech is the right focus) but it is too small of an investment. The lion's share of taxpayer money still gets scattered in a non-strategic manner. And, it comes with too many strings attached. In fact, if you ask any venture capitalist, they will tell you that OCS money is a big negative in any investment. We advise our CEOs against taking the money from the Chief Scientist (for full disclosure, I have one company where OCS money pre-dates my board membership). A VC colleague and friend with inside knowledge told me that the Chief Scientist nearly killed the Dune acquisition. So the market actually selects out the better companies from taking Chief Scientist money and the Chief Scientist then invests taxpayer money in second tier companies with lower chances of returns. To be fair, there are cases in very capital intensive industries where this may not be true but I question whether those are areas the Chief Scientist should spray taxpayer shekels into.

My colleague at JVP, Erel Margalit is absolutely right in stating that it is outrageous to cut the OCS budget and instead we should be increasing it. In fact, we should massively increase government investment in improving our technological competitiveness. However, if we increase it and continue to use that money in a misguided manner, we might as well keep it in the taxpayer's pocket.

Again, The Ministry of Finance and Haim Shani gets this, which is why they are proposing the $100MM revenue test for Chief Scientist grants. However, former Chief Scientist Carmel Vernia, is also right that we should not be giving money to companies just because they are small. As I mention above, spraying the money to hopeless small companies is not a winning strategy either and is why the $100M revenue test is ultimately not the right filter. We need a new strategy for the Chief Scientist and/or maybe we need a new role (more on that in part 3).

We forgot the old playbook

The last wave of innovation was kicked off by attracting National Semiconductor, Microsoft, Intel and Motorola in their heyday. With the exception of Intel, these are not the new guard of growth companies and future technologies. Even as Motorola tries to right itself by charging into Android-supported smart phones, that is not what the Israeli arm is working on. Microsoft keeps coming...but it is not the growth engine it once was. And, it is downsizing. Israel has done little to attract this generation's growing companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. Even Broadcom and Google only have small outposts here. Companies like Facebook, Google, Salesforce etc. create entrepreneurial networks and spin out the next generation of startups and innovation, trained at the leading companies and armed with human networks to build a new company. When you are not part of that virtuous circle (which we are not), you miss the next wave of company creation. We forgot what worked in the past and did not work to attract these companies so we are missing the cycle.

And what have we done to attract the growing Chinese technology companies? Is anyone looking East? If we were R&D centers for great US companies in the past then why not Chinese companies in this decade? But, again, we have done little. (Calcalist reported that Huwaei is rumored to be operating here as Toga Networks but nothing is confirmed.) How did we forget this playbook to create training grounds for our best engineers inside tomorrow's growth companies and leading edge technologies? Who fell asleep at the Ministry of Industry and Trade?

Here is another example: Google offered communities to build ultra-speed broadband as a test. 1100 communities turned up. We have a whole country that is the size of an American community! Did we lobby Google to wire all of Israel with ultra-highspeed broadband. No! Could we have? Yes!

The ever-rising shekel (and it will rise more) makes us even less of a low cost provider. The truth is that we were never a low cost provider but now it is glaring on every CFO's budget projections so we need incentives to attract these new leading technology companies. It also means that we need to be a center of dramatic innovation. We need to make the coolest, most cutting edge, revolutionary,awe-inspiring productsfor the next century but we can't because our engineers are trained in the wrong technologies, our universities are under-funded, our post-docs go abroad and our talent is spread thin, our money is being sprayed around, we have not attracted new leading companies and we are under-investing in disruptive innovation. Oh, and the cutting edge technologies we smuggle in are stopped by Kahalon at Ben Gurion. What we have innovated is through the absolute genius of our Israeli entrepreneurs who beat all odds to do amazing things.

Investment capital is drying up
Many VCs (including ours) have come to the conclusion that Israel cannot support dedicated funds. We all want to continue investing in Israel and we continue to because the greatest entrepreneurs live here. However, Because of what I describe above, there are simply not enough opportunities to build companies of venture scale in Israel and fill out a regular-sized venture fund (for a slightly different perspective, see Yaniv Golan'sexcellent response to my post and his comment on feature companies). One of the senior VC reporters in Israel told me a few weeks ago that there is currently not a full time job in the field covering VCs. Correct. We are a country that over time will likely rightsize between $250MM - $500MM of total start up investment per year. If that scares you, it should. It should scare not only the technology industry but anyone who cares about jobs in Israel because the tech industry generates jobs in restaurants, office furniture, hospitality and many other areas of the economy and this will ripple through.

We have never had late stage capital and that is a big problem. Again, Haim Shani, the new CEO of the Finance Ministry has his sights on solving this problem that also causes companies to sell early but I am not sure he has a full view on the incentives or scope of the problem. The Prime Minister's Chief Economic Advisor Professor Eugene Kandell has been working on this for a year now and has made a number proposals. But his proposals were probably stopped at customs by Kahalon. He and his team at the National Economic Advisory Council are trying and are aware of the problem and I agree with them that we need more than one lever. Insurance to the local insurance funds is not enough. The local insurance companies and pension funds are at least honest enough to say that. Here again, we should remember the old playbook that Yozma delivered on so well. Ireland seems to have learned from it. We need to bring late stage expertise from abroad because we do not have it in Israel as best as I can tell. That requires a Yozma-like approach.

Well Michael, enough describing problems....try to be productive and make some suggestions. That will come in Part 3 of the Hummus Manifesto. This is a crowd-sourced document so please keep the comments coming so that the great people of Israel and the tech economy can bubble up the problems and bring forth the solutions that seem to be so elusive to "decision makers."

The Hummus Manifesto - Part 1

This is the first in a multi-part series on the challenges facing the Israeli High Tech Industry and How We Can emerge stronger from both the global economic downtourn and the challenges facing our tech economy.

We are fortunate that the two leading players in Israel's budget discussion, Professor Eugene Kandel, Chairman of the Prime Minister's Council of Economic Advisors, and Haim Shani, Director General of the Ministry of Finance, are so focused on the challenges facing Israel's technology industry. However, lost in the debate about how to best jump start the liquidity issues in the high tech industry is a focus on the core root of the problem. As the budget topic is hot now, I would just weigh in and say that dealing with the liquidity issue is insufficient. The fix needs to come through massive investment and not through re-allocating budget. It is the only way to build critical mass and turn the ship. We need to change the way the government looks at and invests in technologies of the future. Oh, and one last thing, kicking the can down the street through insurance will not change the dynamic on the investment side. More on the pressing topic of the budget in a coming post but now on to the Hummus Manifesto Part One.

Part one - Tomorrow's Technology

I love what I do. I consider myself incredibly lucky to get up every morning and meet incredible entrepreneurs in Israel. I am inspired by the innovation and opportunity to create jobs. We are the start-up nation for a reason. Our national chutzpa gene is incredibly strong and our will to win against the odds is insuperable. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer point out in Start Up Nation, Israel has excelled at multidisciplinary technologies and entrepreneurship in a way that many countries have not. We have created an entrepreneurial climate that is second to none and we have an esprit de corps that is infectious. We have turned military technologists into our core national asset and aspired for greatness. Heck, even our government in the late 80s and 90s contributed to the growth of this industry from canceling the Lavi Fighter jet and freeing up hundreds of bleeding-edge engineers and then launching theYozma Program that kick-started venture capital. For me and many others like me in our great country, this is exhilarating.

However, all of these great attributes, are fast becoming irrelevant, as the world of technology is rapidly changing around us and we are not doing enough to address the challenges. We are in need of a wake up call, a call to arms to fundamentally retool our technology industry from the ground up. It has atrophied at all levels. Deep down, we all know this. However, it is tough to say and the implications may be painful but, without it, our industry is at risk and unemployment will follow. Here is why:

We have a dearth of talent
Huh? A dearth of talent? How could that be? Well, we have tons of smart people and tons of entrepreneurs. We have lots of engineers. However, many are misplaced, scattered and focused on the wrong technologies. Here is why:

Firstly, there are too many start ups in Israel. We are a small country whose plethora of large angels, individual investors and even VCs have seeded a ton of companies. In Israel, the two man start up is not a path to building the next Facebook but, rather it has become a path to a 5 person company who will try to sell its feature quickly. This is scattering our talent and preventing our more successful and growing startups from finding and hiring the talent they need in order to scale up to be big companies. The two man feature-startup creates unrealistic equity expectations, as these founders own 80% of their little companies (their angel owns 20% for a few hundred thousand bucks) and the founder asks himself "why would I go work at company X for 0.2% of equity when I own 80% of my own company"). This is a problem. Israel's great startup companies cannot find great talent to recruit in ways that Google and Facebook have recruited in Silicon Valley because too many great engineers are scattered in tiny start ups. Based on conversations I have had, Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley have taken note of this.

Second, our talent is focused on the wrong technologies. I can't believe I am saying this but, as a country, we are developing yesterday's technologies or, more accurately, we are developing on yesterday's technologies. No internet-scale start up in Silicon Valley is developing on Dot-Net and C#. Yet, in the Zionist republic of Microsoft, all of our engineers are Dot-net addicts. The Israeli Army is a Microsoft colony.

This is what last week's New York Times has to say about today's engineers.

But the recent crops of computer science graduates and start-ups have tended to move far afield from Microsoft, Mr. O’Reilly said.

The vast majority of technology start-ups today rely on open-source software, distributed by Microsoft competitors, for the core parts of their technology infrastructure.

And so the technology-minded people coming out of college have started learning their craft on free software and betting their careers on non-Microsoft wares.

“We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,” acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft’s business software group, in an interview last year. “And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.”

The loss of access to start-ups has already proved damaging to Microsoft as companies like Facebook and Twitter that rely on free software have grown from fledgling operations to Silicon Valley’s latest booming enterprises.

Don't worry Mr. Muglia, in Israel Microsoft smartly trains our soldiers in Army intelligence units on Microsoft technologies who then take the Dot-net gospel to the halls of government and start ups. In other countries, the universities like Stanford, MIT and Cambridge are the main source of engineers so you can just open different courses. But not here. Because of our unique structure of army-bred entrepreneurship, the technology decisions made in the Defense Ministry and in the halls of government, dramatically impact the expertise of our developers. The Government is responsible for this problem and since there is no tech visionary in the government nor Chief Investment Officer with a holistic view of opportunities and challenges, this mismanagement will continue. Director General of the Finance Ministry Haim Shani gets this, I think. I hope...

The Army-led structure is why we excel at wireless and it is why we are a Microsoft-beholden tech industry. And that is not good news in 2010 and is why Israel's tech industry is starting to mirror what Techcrunch has said: that Microsoft's ideas are not the future. Try asking Seeking Alpha (one of our companies) or Fiverr what it is like to recruit Ruby on Rails programmers in Israel. A nightmare. Our government is a Microsoft addict. This year they canceled the paltry 1M NIS budget to fund the open source office alternative translation to Hebrew. Nobody in the government computer department can even spell open source. They prefer the Bill Gates or Steve Balmer Photo-op rather than advancing technology. Ask Minister Micky Eitanwhat it is like to get an open source project done in the Government computer center, otherwise known as Redmond-East. Italian strikes and immense pressure not to let open source inside the government cathedral is what our elected minister got. The bureaucrats and politicians don't want to miss that photo-op!

How about scalability? well, since so many engineers are at two-person start ups that never scale, we have scant few folks who have ever scaled big data centers or large numbers of customers etc. in an online environment. When scale is the name of the game in cloud computing, Saas, internet and software development, we are a country of midgets. One of our companies, Conduit, needs to hire tens of internet engineers and is getting there because of their growth and size but it is not easy! It is a rate limiting factor on the scalability of a very high growth company and Conduit are the best at it in Israel. Facebook can hire at will in Silicon Valley but in Israel, we are talent constrained. Conduit's hiring success is very very hard work and it is the outlier and not the norm. Avishai Avrahami, CEO of Wix (another of our companies) told me "My business grows at over 10% a month but my competitors will catch me because I cannot find Java and Ruby on Rails talent in Israel. I cannot find any engineers with experience in scaling big data centers for many customers. I am willing to pay top wages but I cannot find the talent. I am flying to Russia to find or buy talent."

Thank God that the tax authorities did not drive the online gambling companies to Gibraltar or there would be almost no scalability experts around. Frankly, with the exception of the semiconductor industry, we are falling behind in cutting-edge engineering talent. And this should scare us. You see, the reason we have not created big companies here in the last 10 years is because of all of the big companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce, etc were built on non-Microsoft technologies and were built to scale massively and we are not in that game! My former partner and the best tech HR Person in Israel, Sigal Widman (Currently at Gemini) told me last week that she has pulled out half of her hair looking for a VP R&D for scaleable web and cloud companies. "There just simply is not enough talent in Israel for this role," said Sigal.

How bad is it? I met a few weeks ago with a senior engineer who left Google to start a company. He is Israeli. I asked him: Are you setting up R&D in Israel. He said flat out "no." I asked why and his retort is shocking but not surprising: "The talent for core scalability and software platform development does not exist in Israel. Too few C++ programmers and no experience in scaling internet apps. I can even find more in New York(!). They (Israeli engineers) can prototype stuff in VB and Dot-net but cannot build scalable internet apps. Franlky, even side projects are not worth doing in Israel any more because it is not cheaper." There you have it in a nutshell. We are going to miss this internet boat.

Our investment in Yesterday's technology is also what is making it diffculy for great people that were laid off by Alvarion and Motorola to get jobs in Israel (more on this in part 2).

Speaking of new technologies and next generation, ask yourself how come there were no Israeli companies or entrepreneurs with early apps on the iPad? Why were we not represented on those Apple ads for the iPad and its apps. It is because our Ministers and bureaucrats block advanced technologies at the border rather than welcoming them with open arms. Dear Minister Kahlon, here is a different idea for you: How about going to Apple and asking to buy 10,000 pre-release iPads. You could give them out to entrepreneurs so we can be first to market with iPhone apps and offer to be the first country on the planet to convert its educational curriculum to the iPad. Now that would be forward thinking and visionary. But you, dear Minister, are incapable of that and, our industry, the growth engine of the Israeli economy, is paying that price.

And, by the way, why the hell are there so many damn lawyers here? We need engineers and not lawyers. Why has the government not focused some attention on creating incentives for our smart young people to become engineers and not lawyers? I digress.

Coming Next - Part 2: Israeli Government and Private Sector Investment In Tech

*With Apologies to Brad Garlinghouse :) And thanks to Yaniv Golan.

HaRav Yehuda Amital - Yehi Zichro Baruch

I sit now in Los Angeles with a heavy heart. One hour ago, I received news that Rav Amital, founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion had passed away. For the last hour I have been withdrawn, struggling to deal with the loss of someone who made such an impact on my life and that of my family while also struggling with the reality that I will be unable to attend the funeral to mourn together with others who were so profoundly influenced by Rav Amital. My thoughts are somewhat messy but I felt a need to write at this late hour and to pen some of what I, thankfully, have said publicly and some of what I feel privately.

The hespedim (eulogies) in just a few hours will, I am sure, cover Rav Amital's broad sweeping knowledge of Torah, Halacha and Psak. I am certain some will touch on his non-consensus political views and his uber-sensitivity to preventing Chilul Hashem (desecration of God's name). Others will speak about his infectious personality, the singing he led, his humility and his remarkable ability to tolerate and, dare I say, foster, dissenting opinions in Yeshiva and outside. I still find it remarkable, 20 years after leaving the Yeshiva, that he took in Rav Lichtenstein as Co-Rosh Yeshiva and lived in amazing harmony for almost 40 years. I am unqualified to write about those topics so I want to share a few personal stories that, in my mind, tell the story of an uncommon man, whose innate common sense and wisdom, made him the perfect mentor and Rav for the common man.

The first story takes place in 1991, shortly after the end of the First Gulf War. Rav Amital was graciously answering questions from a gathering of about 25 students in the Yeshiva Auditorium. It was a relatively intimate gathering. Truthfully, even though it was my second year in the Yeshiva, I did not have much of a relationship with Rav Amital at the time (today, I am embarrassed that I wasted 18 months before getting to know Rav Amital). There were some standard Halachic (Jewish Law) questions asked and I decided to ask something a little different. I sheepishly raised my hand and asked Rav Amital, "Is there a bigger mitzva (commandment) to live in an unpopulated place in Eretz Yisrael (Israel) such as the Galil or the Negev, Yehuda and Shomron or does the same level of mitzva apply to someone who chooses to live in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem." The truth is that I had only cursorily contemplated making aliya at that time but Rav Amital's answer literally changed the course of my life. He answered in his characteristic charming bluntness, "That is all nonsense (שטויות), come to Israel and set up a factory that will employ 10,000 people who can then earn an honest and decent living and that will be the biggest mitzva of settling the land of all!"

I was shocked by the answer. For the first minute, I thought he did not answer or understand my question. Here was a Rabbi, a Rosh Yeshiva, giving counsel on business and economics as the foundation for settling the land. Then I rethought it and realized the deep wisdom. Man can only live on ideals for so long. Not that ideals are not important. They certainly are. But people need to eat and to work and earn a living so that they can settle the land and we can attract enough people to Israel to fill the land. It is absolutely the Jewish ethos for people to work and for others to provide work for them. At it was an out of the box an answer and unconventional thinking and it was inspiring. At that moment, I resolved to move to Israel and open a factory that would employ 10,000 people. And at that moment I resolved to spend more time getting to know and to listen to Rav Amital as well as to understand his unique common sense Torah wisdom.

The post-script to the story is that I was asked to tell it over at Rav Amital's 80th birthday. In characteristic wit, when I finished telling the story, Rav Amital asked "Nuuu...did you hire 10,000 people yet?" Embarrassingly, I had not and have not, but will redouble those efforts in his memory. I was hesitant to talk publicly about the story but the organizers insisted. However, in retrospect, I am glad that I had the opportunity to thank Rav Amital publicly. That hakarat hatov was another hallmark that Rav Amital imparted.

The second set of stories relates to my attempts to spend more time around Rav Amital. After making Aliya, I resolved, like many other talmidim (students), to go visit him on Purim and Sukkot and I routinely brought my children, who I would encourage to ask questions. On one Sukkot, after prodding one of my sons to ask Rav Amital a question that my son had asked me a day earlier, Rav Amital turned to me and said "leave him alone, let him eat the pretzels."

Again, the common wisdom. Having the kids enjoy themselves in Rav Amital's sukka was better chinuch (education) than pushing them to ask a question and feeling uncomfortable. On every Purim, with many talmidim in his house, he would invite the kids to come sit or stand near them and ask them questions about their costumes. Not what they learned in school and not the megilla but about their costumes. Rav Amital talked to the children about what they wanted and not what he or I wanted. That is a lesson I carry with me in rearing children. It also explained another situation that I once witnessed in yeshiva. Some children were making noise during one of Rav Amital's sichot (speeches) in the Yeshiva. The kids were located in the upstairs women's section and a number of the men downstairs kept shushing them. The kids' noise grew louder and the shushing grew louder until Rav Amital said strongly "I am not bothered by the children making noise. They are doing what they are supposed to do. But I am bothered by the adults turning around and making noise to quiet the children." As I said, common sense. But common sense is really in short supply these days.

The last story of many more I want to tell relates to something that happened just a few years ago. I was asked to join the board of the Yeshiva during a time when the financial situation was challenging. I was very intimidated to sit with Rav Amital and Rav Lichtenstein at these meetings. At one of my first meetings, I took a look at the budget and became worried. Even very worried. I voiced that concern with some level of trepidation. I noticed as I was speaking that Rav Amital cast a disapproving glance at me but was not sure why. After the meeting, he came over to me and said, "You think this is bad? I have seen worse situations and not just financial ones. We need to have emunah (belief) in the derech (way) and the educational framework because if we alter the product (the educational approach), we will not achieve the same results nor will we be true to ourselves." Wow! I thought. Rav Amital had seen worse. He had come through the holocaust, the War of Independence, the loss of students, the building of the biggest Hesder Yeshiva, a stint in politics etc and he was determined to maintain the quality and commitment. To me, this was a lesson in leadership from someone who had decades of perspective and was prepared to stand up for quality and perseverance in the face of pressure. And it was infectious. It was not that Rav Amital was blind to the financial issues but he understood עיקר וטפל. And he was prepared to lead forward. Common sense for common people from a very uncommon man.

I have so much more to say and many more stories. Maybe I will add more later to the blog in comments. Rav Amital was unique in everything he did from leading dancing at hakafot to ensuring succession in the Yeshiva while he was still alive, something that is unheard of in the yeshiva world. He made a tremendous kiddush hashem and blazed a trail in shalom bayit (peaceful relations) for hopefully many more institutions. He taught us all to inquisitively ask questions but, even more importantly, to also live with questions. The ability to live with questions in an era when everyone thinks every answer is at their fingertips in an instant is a life-skill none of his students will ever forget and they will be forever indebted to Rav Amital for endowing this approach.

And today, as Rav Amital is brought to burial in just a few hours, I am sure, we all have more questions than answers. We all have more questions that we would like to ask Rav Amital so that we common people can get common sense answers from a very uncommon man. I will sorely miss his wisdom. We all will.

Yehi Zchro Baruch

יהי זכרו ברוך