Limmud eFestival

 A plague results in the sudden exodus of all the Jews from a place in which they know how to be Jewish to a new geography in which it’s not clear that anything they knew makes sense anymore. Whether the plague we are talking about is the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Inquisition, the Cossacks, or the original 10 Plagues, it’s happened to us many times, and it’s just happened to us again in shocking fashion and incredible speed. Those who are saying, “We don’t have a playbook for how to deal with this” are wrong. Our ancestors left us messages in bottles as to what to do in just such a time.  We have at least two playbooks — the Torah and the Talmud — whose stories are vehicles to pass on Judaism’s “Wisdom of the Wilderness.” Hint: Don’t look back or you will turn into a pillar of salt. This session will help you kickstart your exploration of the Jewish mythic canon for the Jewish Wisdom of the Wilderness through a combination of text exploration, historical analogies, and application of that wisdom to the case study of the launch of jewishLIVE as a new startup, specifically designed to help navigate the Digital Wilderness and without an expectation that we will “return to Egypt” when the pandemic ends.