Photo Credit: Stephanie Sicore, Flickr
To change the world, we first need to flip it. To take what and who we think to be bigger than ourselves, and think the opposite.
When confronted by one seemingly large conflict after another, there is a tendency to diminish ourselves; to skirt away from reality.
But then we peek outside to hastily see if perhaps the world has changed yet. To see if the news has gotten any better. To see if someone’s figured out a solution.
As explained recently, we don’t go to movies to escape. We go to hide in the hopes that someone will soon knock on our shells and welcome us outside; inviting us past the big screens filled with action-packed drama to an epic life filled with meaning.
Malcolm Gladwell is right to speak about the David and Goliath story as a metaphor for our times. It was an epic battle filled with drama and intrigue. But we mustn’t leave out the most crucial part of the story. That while it seemed as though this lad stood on shaky ground, he was firmly anchored in his faith and trust in God.
But we’ve been trained to view these stories as fanciful, and headlines as real. We’ve been trained to think that giants can only be created using computer graphics, and that faith is acceptable as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the storyline.
And so we retreat. We retreat to fictional realms of heroes battling villains, men battling robots, heroes battling heroes, because we’ve forgot how to answer the threats that stream into our news feeds. We retreat to the big screen, because we’ve forgot of how to battle.
It’s Time to Remember the Art of Giant Fighting.
Photo: Adrian Parnham, Flickr
How Do We Slay Giants?
To slay a giant we need to learn how to rise above the challenge. To take a counterintuitive quantum leap to a higher level or dimension of reality.
Where’s the Slingshot?
In our case, we’re not talking about a physical slingshot whose pebble pierces a hole through the giant’s head. We’re talking about answering and confronting conflicts and challenges head-on by countering with an answer from a higher reality.
It is taught that The Master of the Good Name, The Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidic movement, could counter any innovation from the sages.
What he meant is that every theory that is proposed by any authority on Jewish tradition is a thought experiment in the realm of a particular world. But, in the middle-most point of that reality, there lies an essential nothingness.
Why is the story of David and Goliath so timelessly epic? There is no shortage of enemies ridiculing the Jewish people and ridiculing what is true and moral. There is no shortage of darkness. What is the answer to darkness? To identify the zero-point.
To Slingshot a Hole Through the Ridicule and Reveal the Light Behind the Evil.
The Surprising Upsides of Being a Loser
This brings us to a recent Malcolm Gladwell interview entitled, “Malcolm Gladwell on the Surprising Upsides of Being a Loser.”
Even before discussing the interview itself, right away we can view the title as helpful to our discussion. To slingshot reality means to rise above the situation by pivoting or pole-vaulting in the opposite direction.
But the end result is not that we are now a loser that defeated Goliath. Instead, we were always the winner, the future king of Israel in the story of David; but neither King Saul nor David’s brothers were convinced at first.
The surprising upside of being a loser is the realization that we were never a loser to begin with.
Shaky Bridges
Yehoshua Wiseman- Prints and Gallery Here.
There is a Hasidic aphorism that: “You can’t always go on an iron bridge.” That is, you don’t always have the opportunity to confront challenges from a firm or comfortable place. The definition of this world is that it is a world of challenges and trials. And to overcome obstacles, you must be willing to travel along “shaky bridges” if you are to achieve your desired objectives.
This topic of shaky bridges or “insecurities” was one of the primary themes in the above-referenced Gladwell article; that standing on shaky ground leads people to outperform and succeed.
Presumably, David was standing on very shaky ground, and his objective was indeed ambitious. But he desired to succeed not for himself, but for God. And so while he walked on a most “shaky bridge” towards the giant, his faith firmly grounded him to achieve the desired objective.
A Most Famous Commercial
Gladwell was not the first in the modern-era discuss the David and Goliath story. David is the underdog that we root for in countless movies and sports matches. And it was also the theme of perhaps the most famous TV commercial of all-time:
When Apple successfully marketed themselves as David, and IBM as Goliath, as explained here.
More on David and Goliath
For those interested in the subject, I wrote a more light-hearted series on Gladwell’s book David and Goliath, and foldable cell phones.
Part One: The David and Goliath behind Foldable Phones
Part Two: Kabbalah of Folding Your Cell Phone into Outer Space
More on Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell’s Spaghetti Sauce TED lecture and the secret of all consumerism. If you’re one of the 5.4 million people that’ve watched this video, then you’ll want to read the behind-the-scenes take here. And then there’s:
Hacking Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule
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