#43 - Attaining vs. Maintaining w/ Adi Neumann

Adi Neumann

to raise the vibration in the environments where tech was created, especially in Tel Aviv where it's touching a lot of tech all over the world. And there are amazing people, amazing people doing great work. within my work in the spiritual realm and a pretty decent amount of time exposed to the Orthodox community, I just kept being exposed again and again to people who are really holding that spiritual space within the religious practice.

And obviously for years, know, maybe people in America are not as aware of it, but in Israel, you're very aware of the fact that a lot of people from the Orthodox community, if later in life they decide they want to join society and they want to give back, they're limited because of the amount of theoretical schoolwork that they did. Basically, they study mostly the Torah and the Bible from fourth grade and on. And also they have a very big lack in English, which is a really big gap to close if you want to be in the tech world.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

So I started a company where I spent eight years really training Orthodox men to be working in the secular world but without giving up the Orthodoxy and maintaining a very spiritual energy around it as a focus, which yes, which really, really brought me forward into taking my personal experiences which were mostly in the realms of psychedelics for the past 25 years and yoga.

for the past 15 years and bringing both of those worlds into the Jewish spiritual experience, which kind of out of that was born this new podcast and just teaching and I think.

being able to touch the lives of people, having received the trust that I've received in the last couple of years has been really, really empowering and we're seeing where this is taking us.

Jeff Albaum

That's incredible. I have a thousand questions. How, like, because as someone from the outside, like, I think we run in somewhat similar circles in the sense that, like, it's actually not so unusual to bridge the gap between Orthodox Judaism, psychedelics, and yoga. That's actually a fairly, like, normal thing, which I think is one of the coolest parts.

Adi Neumann

We are very lucky. We run in a very, very privileged, very blessed circle when I sometimes tell people about our great sessions, our mind boggling explorations. Everyone's just like, where do you sign up?

Jeff Albaum

Yeah, a hundred percent. so if, if you're like, think before I joined this, this, and for those listening, we're talking about, like the zoom call that we join every week and we study Torah together. and so it brings people with similar kinds of backgrounds and ideas and philosophies. But if you weren't part of that, hearing those two things or three things, I guess, would be super counterintuitive. So do you want to just break down like how you think about blending all three of those Orthodox Judaism, yoga, psychedelics?

those worlds.

Adi Neumann

Definitely. So before I would say breaking down, I would say it's more, it was just an observance. And you know, the more you do any one of those fields or any field, anything in your life, right? The more it shapes the way you think in the language that is specific to that realm. So I've been doing psychedelics for 28 years, 25, 43 since 16. Okay.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Adi Neumann

And then I started to have the speech, you know, of the things that you see, how everything comes together in psychedelics and how everything, you know, seeing the connection and really feeling it and having a validity or feeling validated, sorry. And the fact that we're all part of a big, energetic network really takes out a lot of the guesswork and needing to believe. And then 19 years ago, I was exposed to Kabbalah and I started to go really deep into Kabbalah.

And I had a lot of things which maybe for people who are new into the stock process, they'd be like, yeah, but maybe I don't believe that all of this is connected and let's see where this path leads me before I like jump to believe it. But when I was meeting these kabbalistic terminologies for different things, all of a sudden I was like, yeah, I've felt that. Or like, that is connected to that. I've been in a conversation where I've noticed that change of energy. I just didn't have the words for it. So all of a sudden I was like, wow, all these.

Kabbalah explanations really sit on the things that I've experienced and not known a wording for them. And then a few more years down the line, started my yoga experience. And also at the time I was really, I was very rigid. I was carrying a lot of stuff in my shoulders. I'd gone through a lot of things personally at the face. So I really needed a deep physical practice. And the more I fell into it, the more I was like, wow, but there's a whole world.

here of knowledge and terminology that goes behind it. And there's a real practice of like moving the energy with my breath work, not just breathing. So it's easy to go from one pose to the other. And then all of a sudden I would have another psychedelic experience and I'd be like, wait, all these realms are coming to life in my world. And all of a sudden having these extra languages is really helping me make things relatable also for the people around me. You know, there's an example which I'd like to give.

about algebra, right? So when you look at the ancient Greeks and the way that they were planning cities, there is a huge jump and obviously there are people who this is their realm, written much better and deeper informative text about this if you want to go, if people want to go and look for it online, but basically there was trigonometry and they were doing everything by studying shapes and they were building buildings and they were building arches and they were building certain kinds of things. And then...

Algebra and calculus were born in ancient Greek and all of a sudden they had a second language with which to explore the same problem and Having a second point of view being able to see it from a different side which trigonometry could never explore really deepened their understanding of the relationship of the amount of pressure that's being applied of how different shapes can support each other of how Things that have to do with the earth of movement or of this forbid earthquake or things like that could be mediated by the structures that they built

Jeff Albaum

Hmm

Adi Neumann

resulting in aqueducts that are still standing in places that have, you know, seismic activity and the like. And so it's really amazing what we can achieve when we have more point of views that are really coming from different sides. And to me, the wholeness of spirituality that I experience is being viewed from three different places and hopefully blended in experience.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Wow, okay. What a foundation. Did you always associate with, like have you always felt Jewish? Like have you always associated deeply with Judaism or like what does that mean to you?

Adi Neumann

Yeah.

Yes, but I've had the easy way out because I'm Israeli. So in Israel, it's different because it's really taken for granted as a child growing up in Israel isn't simple. I grew up on a kibbutz in the Gaza development. There were a lot of things that were complicated that had to do with that. The second Intifada was while I was a child, know, the Gulf War, things like that. So obviously all these things are happening to you.

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Adi Neumann

because you're Jewish, right? The reason why we're even in this situation is because we're Jewish and why we're in Israel is because we're Jewish. So it's very much a core part of your identity. I moved to New York when I was 16 years old with modeling and all of a sudden my Jewishness got something else. Like when I moved to New York, I wasn't keeping kosher. I wasn't as aware. I didn't grow in a uber secular family, but like regular Israel.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

traditional. I know my mom would go to synagogue only on Yom Kippur. We obviously kept Passover. We wouldn't eat Chometzan Pesach. We went to our family for every Shabbat dinner and for all the meals and for all the holidays. But except for that, it wasn't very existent in our day-to-day life. And when I came to New York, a lot of people wanted to help me because I was Jewish. know, first of all, I'm talking about the Jewish industry, the fashion industry of 1999. So it was...

Jeff Albaum

Sure. Sure.

Adi Neumann

still very strongly the Jewish presence from the days of the shmata industry moving into the fashion industry. think we're even more felt back then than they are now. you know, there was the owner of my agency, the people in accounting, some of the clients, everyone was like really trying to help this 16 year old Israeli girl like fresh off the keyboard. It's like, how can we help her?

sort of take a foothold or make things a little easier. 12 girls were put into one model's apartment. I got a tiny studio apartment because they didn't want to expose me to whatever the other girls were doing. There was this very protective feeling around me. And that was the first time that I started to feel like, okay, I need to do something back. I need to earn this somehow. My first move, I was 16, I started keeping kosher just because that was an easy thing that I knew how to do. Not like the super, you know, glad kosher that people keep.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Yeah.

Adi Neumann

the American night kosher style. But it was still a big change for me. And I think slowly, slowly, the longer I stayed far away from Israel, the more I felt inclined to make my Jewish identity something that is present in my day-to-day life.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. And so did you experience that mostly through keeping kosher? Were there other things that you started doing? How did you incorporate Jewish identity? Especially, it's very young too, like 16 is, you're a teenager.

Adi Neumann

It was very young, it was very fun. There were no parents, so at least there had to be some adults around me. So I very soon, I think by the time I was 18 more or less, I became connected to Chabad. And then I would take still even a few Kabbalah classes with a Chabad Rabbi, and we had like this whole group that would meet to study at night once a week. And I think it was more of a novelty than anything. But...

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Mm.

Adi Neumann

Later, I started going to the Kabbalah Center and that was at a phase in my life where, let's see, I was 24 when I started going to the Kabbalah Center and my family in Israel was dealing with some health issues and my mother was going through stuff and I was very torn between, you know, am I supposed to go back home now and be there because that's what you do in this kind of situation. But my whole life and my career that I've built here is here and I had a lot of guilt and I had a lot of...

It was coming out in a lot of self-sabotaging ways that I needed to work through. And at that point I met the Kabbalah Center and there I think I really fell into the practice or fell, well more like head-dove rather than fell deep into practice. And it's when my Jewishness turned from just a thinking and an understanding to a doing.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

was when it really became an anchor for my identity, for my state of mind, you know, the acts. Acts are good. Acts and ceremonies and traditions.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. And so.

And so what did that look like? What were the acts that you were doing?

Adi Neumann

Hmm, I think interesting the holidays very much and also making making an effort Always to come here the Torah on Shabbat was a really big one that really connected to me very fast So it doesn't matter if I went I wasn't keeping Shabbat until very recently actually, but you know, so whether I went out to like 7 in the morning or Made it to Shabbat at 11 a.m. still talking about you know early 20s of a model life Like I had not many but I definitely had a few times

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Sure.

Sure, sure.

Adi Neumann

that we went from the club to someone's apartment and at 11 a.m. I was like, I'm half an hour late to the Torah reading, gotta go. But it was a real anchor for me because it really, it was that turning point, ending every week, starting every next week, segmenting my life into, I don't know, spiritual, like little spiritual capsules.

Right? With every week and its energy. So you know what the parasha, parasha at the Shavua, was really, I would say, my first strong anchor in Judaism. I would try to also study it in the middle of the week, but I didn't always make it to my class in the middle of the week. But then I would come and hear the class on Saturday and hear the Torah portion. And also just reading the words was always a big thing for me. And again, here I'm lucky because, you know, I'm Israeli, so I came with maybe more of a Hebrew knowledge than some of your listeners may have, but you can always read.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Sure.

Adi Neumann

the words in English next to it and somehow even when they don't make sense and you don't understand why this is the story you're reading right now, they stay in your head, right? You go out to the rest of the day and you're thinking about something you encountered.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. Wow. And so...

Adi Neumann

So think that would have been the big one for me first for years that was holding me on.

Jeff Albaum

And then over, over time, over time, you were just continuing to like dive deeper and learn more and go to the Kabbalah center and get involved with your local Chabad. Like those were the things that you were doing.

Adi Neumann

Yeah, so nowadays I even study more with Chabad than with the center. I love the center, but I would say there were 11 years where I was a big student and then I kind of deviated on a different path. Now I like to mix the two, but I guess it also has to do with right the way I'm experiencing the world now. I like to mix the two. The center is very structured and is very...

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Adi Neumann

an intelligent approach to the knowledge. And I love that, right? I love the details and I love getting into it. And I love the relief that I can get by knowing everything is connected and it makes sense. And we're not just doing it because we're doing it. There's actually a reasoning and an explanation. So that side of it is very important for me. But I think that in my grownup years, I'm a mother, I have two children.

very amicably divorced for the last three years, but that's also been a huge state of growth, know, doing all the family holidays every time, sides of the family together and like everything. I've really needed to bring the spiritual knowledge more into my heart place. And for me, Chabad or Hasidut in general really holds that sort of comfort zone of being able to just wallow in the presence more than need to understand how and what.

And you know, and I shift, I shift between the two. It changes.

Jeff Albaum

That's so interesting. So, okay, I'm gonna ask a couple of maybe naive beginner questions. I've heard of Kabbalah. I could kind of give you probably a layman's term of what it means, but I actually don't know what it is or what it means. I'm pretty sure there was a book written about it called The Zohar. I think that was the start of it, but I don't even know that story. So if you had to explain Kabbalah to me and I'm a third grader, what is it? Why are people fascinated by it? And then what do you do with it?

Adi Neumann

you

So first of all, if you don't mind, since I have a third grader, let's just make you a seventh grader. I think you can handle the seventh grader level explanation. You know, the Zohar is very famous as being one of the main, main manuscripts of Kabbalah, but it is very important to say that the book of creation, which is attributed to Abraham, whether or not it was written by Abraham, it's definitely more than 2,500 years old and maybe even older than that.

Jeff Albaum

Amazing.

Amazing.

Adi Neumann

Is considered the first Kabbalistic text? So it's even older than the Zohar What does it mean so? There are two ways to look at there are two ways to look at it that coexist as one on the technical side Kabbalah is the structure behind it is the structure behind reality. It is the structure behind realms and has formulas it has

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Adi Neumann

very specific structures, light travels this way from here to here, it bounces off from here, it reverberates to here, this allows creation, this allows for souls, this allows for growth, this is constriction, this is expansion, you know, very specific, like, technical details where, you know, I would say if you're building a house, okay? Let's say you're building, not a house, you're building a building, a huge building, and you also want this building to be green.

Okay, one of those buildings that gives back and uses energy and generates its own water maybe from the foliage and cleans the air of the neighborhood around it. Great, wonderful green building. So the structural sense of it is the blueprints, but the spiritual side of the blueprints is that it enables the building to give back.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Adi Neumann

And it's both of those sides, which are like two different ends of the spectrum, held in one place. Now, I want to go for example, I want to go to a more classic explanation of Kabbalah. They talk about the Pardes. Pardes means orchard in Hebrew, but it's the four letters, P, Re, Sh, Dal, and Samach. You may have heard about it. And the Pardes are the four levels, you we love separating things into four layers. It is also a Kabbalah structure, always about the four levels of creation, but without getting too much in it, Pshah.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

So everything you read in the Torah has the pshat, which is the simple meaning of the words Moses went here, he went there, he did this, he lifted his hand, that happened. Okay, ramez means hint in Hebrew. The story hints at, if Moses did this and he did that, then Hashem wanted, then divine light wanted, and Moses' will to come through because otherwise how did this magic happen? It hints at more parts of the story, but these are still technical parts of the story.

The next one is drash, which is the lesson. What is the lesson that we can learn from here? We can look at it, Moses had to overcome this sensation, which he must have felt in that moment, and the people must have looked at him this way, so he had to overcome that, or he had to channel this for them and channel that for that. What is the lesson? And the fourth layer of the paradis is the sod, the secret. And Kabbalah is what holds the secret. And, you know, let's say, just for a second, we'll give the example of the building, but let's take it.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Adi Neumann

to a story without getting into a specific one, because it applies to any parashat ashevot. You have the story of this week. So you have the story of what happened. Then behind the story of what actually happened, you have some hints of like, well, for this to happen, that had to happen, for this to happen, that had to happen. That's so cool. Now I see a bigger picture. Then you have a lesson of how I can really learn from this in my life. And then you have the secret. Oh, in this week, in this parasha, there's a special energy in the world which helps us.

to cleanse more of my negative habits. So if I have negative habits that I've been trying to cleanse, maybe this week is a good time to think about them or to write them down, because I'll get an extra help in removing them. And that's the layer that exists within Kabbalah. So it's the secret and the structure, because the structure enables the secret to operate, basically, the blueprint.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Wow.

So maybe this is a silly question, but if I'm reading the Torah and I'm reading, I'm starting at the first level where I'm just taking it literally, I don't know if I would, and then kind of, that's option A. Option B is I'm reading a book of just the secrets. I feel like I wouldn't actually get a lot of meaning from the secrets if I hadn't gone through all three levels prior to get there. Does that make sense? So how,

Adi Neumann

100 % which is why obviously for many years I obviously is a bad use of the word but it's which is why it was inherent into the study of Kabbalah that for many many years they didn't start setting it before it was men in their 40s because it was assumed but there's also the meaning of the full cycle of 40 but without getting into that a man and a religious man in his 40th year of study has been studying the simple layers of the scripture from

Jeff Albaum

Right, right, right.

Adi Neumann

when he was in the second grade and he's been studying the deeper layers of the scripture from the seventh grade and he's been studying the lessons you know from the twelfth grade so he's already had all three of those layers over and over and over again and he's deepened his knowledge getting there. The thing is nowadays the world has changed. A. we can encompass more like it used to be said about this Pardes this orchard which is these four letters

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

that four people went into the Pardas, right? They didn't all come out. One came out. And the reason that this knowledge was dangerous in the past is because when you see behind the veil, right, you may misuse the information.

Or on the other side of that spectrum, if you see too much of how things work, you may sort of lose motivation to do the hard work. well anyway, if this energy isn't here this week, then it's not available to me. So why should I even bother to be polite to that person? Or why should I, you know, it could create negative effects. And in our modern world, we come with a lot more point of views, right? People didn't used to travel, didn't used to that. So they lived in their small village.

Jeff Albaum

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

Nowadays I've learned a lot of these spiritual lessons from a lot of different ways people have interacted with them even in science fiction TV shows or even in Game of Thrones or Things like that. You've had to ask yourself a lot of these questions. So because we consume so much more content we can deal with a more intricate level of content and we can apply critical thinking to it and I think that this thought is a lot of what was behind, you know leading

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

first the Kabbalah Center and since then many other Kabbalah teachers in many other circles around the world to be like, okay, people are ready to handle this information. But of course, once that if you read it without knowing anything, then you have to read the simple story too, right? You learn the lesson of what's the secret to this Shabbat, but then you sit there and you read the actual simple words from the books. And the more practice you have at dealing with the secret, the easier it will be for you, or not easier, but the more natural it will become.

Jeff Albaum

Right, right.

Right, right.

Adi Neumann

to look at the simple words while you know the process and be able to fill the layers in between.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. It's it's so fascinating and I think one of my favorite parts about Judaism is I'm also very close with my the local Chabad rabbi and I live in Austin and We're very close. He's been on the podcast. We hang out very regularly but I one of my favorite things about him and just I think rabbis in general is that Every time I ask him what he's you know, hey, what are you doing? Like when you're not with people he goes, I'm learning. I'm learning together. Do you want to learn with me?

And I always think that's so cool because in my mind I'm like, dude, you're the master. Like you've got it, but he's always learning. He's always trying to grow and improve. And I I love that idea. Like I just love the idea of like, I want to learn. I want to be a lifelong learner. I want to grow and always get better. And it's so true. Like every time you read even the same story a year later, like it's coming up on, this is Passover, right? This episode is going to come out the Friday after, the Friday during Pesach. Like we read the same story every year.

But it's not the same story because you're different, right? And like, I think that's so cool.

Adi Neumann

So, and I love that you took it to that. I was thinking something while you were saying it. It's A, the biggest part of it is like you said, it's not the same story because we're different. So we can see different things in the story. We can see different layers. B, this knowledge is fickle. It has a tendency to run away from you grasp. Like you really, really understand it one year. And then you know how many times this has happened to all of us in much simpler things. Like you've learned a lesson. I should listen to my instinct in this and that moment.

And then six months later that moment comes up and again you didn't listen to your instinct and an hour later you're like

And sometimes the deeper and simpler the lesson is, the harder it is to actually hold on to that knowledge. It's like really takes a process of ingraining. I can say that in the last, I've been studying for almost 20 years, but in the last two and a half years, this is what I've been doing. You know, I quit my day jobs and I'm studying full time and I'm teaching and I'm this, and I am preparing a PESL class for tonight.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Adi Neumann

that is based on the whole structures of fours in the Haggadah, right? First of all, four cups, there's a lot, you can teach about the four cups, but there's the four boys, the four children, the four sons, there's the four questions that we ask. The structure of fours keeps coming back throughout the Haggadah, and it's always a call and reply structure. our conversation with Hashem, our conversation with our children, changing the role constantly between being the influencer and the influencee, there's a whole...

Jeff Albaum

Hmm

Adi Neumann

process of what's structured into Daugada. And last year I did a two and a half, like two and a half hour master class with like 20 women and we went really deep. thought it would take 90 minutes, but they kept asking questions. We have this whole huge thing. And this year, the group of women that I'm working with and teaching weekly, I was like, let's do this, let's do the for this. And everyone was like, yeah, we'll beat your house the day before Pesach, let's do this. And then today I was looking at my notes and I was like, oh my God, I have to restudy this whole thing today.

cancel all my plans, this is all I'm doing, I thought I really grasped it, cause last year it was so amazing, then I repeated some of it in the stator and I recorded some of it and sent some away. No, this is all I'm gonna be doing today, is going and re-studying from the text, not re-studying from my notes, cause when I was looking at my notes I was like, no, I have some big missing gaps here of understanding that I held last year.

Jeff Albaum

Right.

Wow. So what do you think that is? your, yeah, what do think that is?

Adi Neumann

think it's fickle knowledge. I think there's some quality to this knowledge of the light where it's not, okay, have a good way to, it's, there's a very big difference between attaining and maintaining. This is like, actually, this has been my words of the last two weeks, right? And I love it when, you know, we were used to doing the game words in Hebrew, but all of a sudden, sometimes,

In English it just falls into place in a way where we're like, maybe it's not where the word comes from, but you know what? It works. But it's really hard to attain something. And we work really, really hard to attain it. And then once we've attained it, we relax, right? But when it has to do with spiritual progress and with spiritual presence even, the place to be is maintaining it.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

It's constant work, we all know this, right? You go out of a yoga class and you've attained this level of peace. You woke up, it wasn't a great day and you were irritable and things were just touching you the wrong way and you come out of yoga and it's totally not there for the first half hour, nothing can touch you. Right, but then things keep coming in and if you're not constantly throughout the day maintaining, I lost it a little bit, you know what, let me take a break with a chamomile tea and like, you know what, I'm gonna.

Jeff Albaum

Yes.

Adi Neumann

not look at my phone for the next 30 minutes and just hang out or go to the bathroom and breathe with my eyes closed while I pretend to be doing something else because I feel that I've come out of that zone. But we don't have the luxury to do that year round. And I think maybe part of what the rabbis are doing when they're studying so much, and I really felt the difference in these last two years, is by maintaining the study, you're also maintaining that place of understanding. So every week I'm studying other stuff, but...

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

you know, maintains a certain level of accessibility to study. But yeah, as I was proven just this morning, it didn't actually maintain the knowledge that I had acquired last year.

Jeff Albaum

Right, right, that's really interesting, the attain versus maintain. I think that's really cool, I like that framework. Do you find, because I think you mentioned earlier, like when you started learning Kabbalah, you started going to the Kabbalah Center, it said, were like, oh, you were noticing similarities and you had this feeling, you were like, oh, this is, really, like, there's something here. How do you recommend people who haven't felt that?

Like people who read the text and like, I get nothing. Like I get nothing out of this. These words don't feel like they're moving me. Find a different writer. Okay, say more.

Adi Neumann

Find a different writer. If this is what you're feeling, there's so many different aspects of people that are writing. There is a writer out there that has experienced it in your language. If you're reading the text and you're not finding what you're this, don't battle yourself to be like, no, but I have to, I wanted this, I wanted this. And forge yourself in something that is obviously not working, right? And this is who we are as Jews, right?

Jeff Albaum

Mm, okay.

Adi Neumann

Without the... I don't want this to sound like it's Judaism on any other version of monotheism. It isn't. It's just I feel like Jews do variations within monotheism spectacularly, right? In Christianity, they have many variations, but some of them have found the need to completely separate the way they practice. And in Judaism...

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Sure.

Adi Neumann

There is something about probably about the fact that we didn't have a homeland and we were attacked and we had to stick together that no matter the variations in how we each practice our Judaism, we still understand that any Jew is welcome in my synagogue and that we're all coming to this thing together as an approach. as part of this huge monotheistic, I don't know, collaboration of moving forward, of deepening our Jewish practice, there have been

Jeff Albaum

Yeah

Adi Neumann

People who have written about the text in a humorous tone and people in a critical tone and people in a victim mode and there have been women that wrote it and there have been men that wrote it and there have been gay men that wrote it and there have been like, find the language that speaks to your thought pattern. It is out there.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm. Interesting. I like that. I like that. you you have like who are the writers that spoke to you?

Adi Neumann

Wow. So first of all, my biggest ones are from the Kabbal Center. I love the Michael Berg books. And if I'm watching recorded classes, I love Eitan Yerdeni from the recorded classes. Obviously there are many other great people, but these are like my two go-tos. Chabad, it's Rabbi Dov Ber Pinson. lot of people are familiar with Rabbi Pinson. And you know, with Rabbi Pinson, it's very, very interesting because he

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Adi Neumann

In his books, he does something miraculous where he really simplifies it in the book that you read through a few pages. You're like, I know this stuff. I know this stuff. I know this stuff. Whoa, how did we get here? Like, you don't even notice how he, like, takes you in. But if you feel like you want to get your mind blown, go to one of his YouTube videos, because there you're like, OK, wait, I mean, you know, it takes me an hour to make it through a 20-minute video because I just have to, like, go back and go forward and may have to do with...

Jeff Albaum

You

Adi Neumann

not being my first language, but it's very, very heavily laden. So you get the two different versions of his brain. And then I have to be honest that I do a lot of my work with perplexity, you know, like chachapiti, whichever thing people have their account on. And what I created about a year and a half ago that's really helped me is I created my list of rabbis, right? So whether it's the ramchal, the ramak, the arizal, the rambam, you know, have perplexity nose.

Jeff Albaum

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Adi Neumann

Which are the rabbis that he's allowed to reference when I ask the question? If he wants to give something that's from outside of my list, he has to tell me specifically like, I also found something, but it's not one of your rabbis. Am I allowed to share? know, Rashi, of course.

Jeff Albaum

Wow.

have you ever asked it to give a new insight based on those teachings?

Adi Neumann

Not allowed to give insights. He's only allowed to give me direct quotes specifically not allowed to connect the dots for me.

Jeff Albaum

No, no, but like, you know, like, I'm pretty sure the the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Chabad Rabbi, Rabbi, he was known for like, being so innovative without changing any laws, like he didn't like like the idea of going on TV or radio at the time was like revolutionary, but didn't break any laws. Like that's why he's known as like this crazy innovator. Is there anything that you can do? I think that's just like an interesting question, like with AI to ask it.

Adi Neumann

Right.

Jeff Albaum

within the confines of these rabbis and thinkers, like what is a new insight? I don't know, that's just kind of fun.

Adi Neumann

I'm sure you could. To me, that's an intimidating place. I'm sure you could, but to me that's the role of the rabbi or that's the role of the student. And that's also why specifically my AI knows, because in the beginning it was doing that. And I was like, no, no, I'm connecting the dots. If there's a creative process that's going to happen in my interaction with perplexity.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

and

Adi Neumann

I want to hold the creative process and perplexity is my access to information. But in a lot of ways, know, part of when you're saying what do you like to read? like I'll read something in Rav Pinson and I'll come across that he references a rule, know, Rasha used to say this. So then I'm like, but what did the other rabbis, you know, from my list obviously means, think about this rule. And then only five out of the 10.

Jeff Albaum

That's fair. That's fair.

Adi Neumann

will have a specific reference about it. So I'll go through all those references and one of them will interest me and I'm like, well, what book was that published in? okay. So give me the whole chapter that that was published in. And then I go on the other app, right on Safari to find like the whole chapter and not just the quote that chat GPT brought me. And it's sort of like, it's a guided study process, but because chat has all that information, it's as if you have, you know.

some lovely old geezer just going and getting you another book from the shelf. Oh yeah, why not? I'll open this book for you at just the right page out of 1,700 pages. This is the thing you want to read.

Jeff Albaum

Right, right.

It's kind like you've made your own Talmud. Like you've made your own commentary, no?

Adi Neumann

I don't even know what it is or what to call it, but it's definitely been fun. it's allergy season in Miami. Yeah, full time.

Jeff Albaum

Allergy season.

Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. Okay. So have you always, and you said you've always found Judaism, your Jewish identity became stronger when you moved to the States. Was there ever a point where you studied other spiritual practices and like what's made you come back to Judaism throughout your life?

Adi Neumann

So I've studied, I don't think it's about coming back. It's been my anchor for really long time. I was lucky enough to take it for granted. We lived for two years in America as kids. I did first and second grade in Indianapolis, Indiana. My mom was doing her residency as a doctor there. And you know, she put us in the Hebrew Academy because that's what you do when your kids come from Israel, right? Because if they wouldn't do first and second grade, what would happen when I came back to Israel in third grade? Like I wouldn't know how to read Hebrew.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

So I think it was really ingrained into us that it's like, okay, now you're going outside of the country. look, our cups match colors too. Our shirts match color, our cups match color. There you go. And so I feel like, so to go back, it wasn't a getting back to Judaism, but the only thing I really, really explored deeply, I would say, is Hinduism.

Jeff Albaum

We didn't even plan this.

Adi Neumann

and Ayurveda in general. And I've been to India three times and the first time was more like vacation but the last two times I've been to India were very specifically spiritual journeys and knowledge journeys.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

And they were always empowered and motivated by my connection to Judaism. They were never, it wasn't like a going from one to the other for me.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm and and do you take because this is the thing that I sometimes struggle with with Like the orthodox community is that it seems at least in encounters I've had is that there's a little bit of a hesitancy to bring in other Religions other spiritual practices and so it's a little like like my rabbit will always say like well What are you getting from that? Like well Judaism has that already like what do you need that for like Judaism has that Judaism has meditation So it's like it feels a little bit like

Adi Neumann

Thanks.

And I've encountered that for sure. So I'll say two things. I'll go to both sides of the answer here. First of all, you really need to understand the Orthodox community because they come out of being the gatekeepers. The fact that Judaism managed to maintain being its own unique practice with a consistent continuation of how it was practiced 2,000 years ago. admittedly, there have been changes, but the consistent like...

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Sure.

Adi Neumann

growth and continuation of this one, you know, I don't know, one way of expressing belief and one specific way of connecting to divinity throughout 2,000 years of diaspora has to do with the fact that they were really, really tight on the reins, right? And they had to make sure that people wouldn't get lost, otherwise we would have never made it so many years down the path to where we are now.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

So I think in many ways they are, you know, they're still coming around to loosening up, to finding ways. And also this was a very big thing in the business that, you know, the company still exists, but I'm not running it anymore. bless. It's a lot of work, a lot of work this stuff. It's really, you know, bringing Orthodox people who want to stay Orthodox and are

not giving up any part of the orthodox lifestyle but work in secular communities surrounded by secular people because now we live in a world that also holds so much more of the other, right? Like before we lived, people lived in community and these people were in that community and those people were in that community and they didn't mix. Now it's everything. Everything was in the movie, everything all the time, everywhere. It's like it's really the experience that it is out there.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adi Neumann

when we're meeting people. So that's already one thing to say about the Orthodox community. And I think they are loosening up just in the last 20 years that I've been exposed to working with them and more people are open-minded and I can, I experienced it more from the side of the women. Whereas 20 years ago, you would talk to an Orthodox woman about her Shiduch, an Orthodox girl, I would even say, you know, like 16, 18, early twenties.

They wanted only a very specific kind of guy and only studious guy and only that. And I get to mix with a lot of young women in the orthodox community. And nowadays they're very open to it. it's okay if he has a job. It's okay if he has, you know, dreams, if he wants to work in tech or in one of these environments. Like that is a really big harbinger of change. And then the other thing.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Adi Neumann

that I would say about it is...

There's always been or still is a really great fear of idol worshiping. And when you don't understand something, it's scary to you. So I think for a lot of times when they're like, why go there? We have it in Judaism. We have it in that. if you're going to find another way to connect to divinity, you're idol worshiping. But our terms of idol worshiping are good and bad, right? We have a good way to connect to divinity, and that's a bad way to connect to divinity.

Jeff Albaum

Mmm.

Mmm.

Hmm

Right? That's so true.

Adi Neumann

Right? Like bad word doesn't even work or it's gonna connect to the negative forces of divinity and that's not what you wanna connect to. And that's how idol worshiping has been taught to us in a for a protective way. But we are in the days of Messiah. People are saying that it's not just me with my like woohoo wanting to live in the golden age of humanity. But sorry, I didn't realize it. We are in the days of Messiah.

Jeff Albaum

Right.

Wait, we're in the days of what? did you say? We're in the days of...

Adi Neumann

You know, it's being said in the religious circles too, not just in the woo community that wants to live in like, you know, our wonderful future age. And in the days of Messiah, we need to treat Messiah as a state of mind, right? Yes, there will be a person that will bring it in one way or another because human beings need a person, just like we needed Moses and just like we needed that. We need someone to see the connection and to see it happen. But the person...

Jeff Albaum

OK.

Adi Neumann

that brings on the state of mind of Messiah is not Messiah. He will be dubbed as Messiah, but the true thing, the days of Messiah is a shift, it's a conscious shift. It's sort of like the crown that the king's with. The crown is not the king. The crown lets you know that the king is here. But it's not the power of redemption is in the crown itself. It's just a symbol. And the man that will be Messiah will be a symbol and we will need him as something to focus

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. Sure.

Sure, sure.

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

our inspiration on. But at the end of the day, the days of Messiah are a shift, a true shift to love thy neighbor as they self-consciousness, to us being able to live in what it truly truly means to be community. And in order to be community, whether you want to look at it from the very strict version of Oblaguyim of the Jews needing

to share the site with other people or if you want to look at it from a higher version of, know, we've all had many incarnations and you don't know which soul was what religion in past times and, you know, and who we are now. At the end of the day, if we want to get there, this community has to encompass everyone.

So I lost myself because I really enjoyed the imagery in my mind of this whole huge loving community of encompassing everyone. Help me? Where were we before the days of Masah?

Jeff Albaum

days of Messiah, like that's where we're in. so, other question, I also kind of forget, I forget how we get, adding, bringing in from other, like idol worship. So like.

Adi Neumann

What was your question?

yes, yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. So we're in the days of the sad. This is where we're at. It has to be everyone. It has to be brought in. So these things of idol worshiping, as I was connecting it before to idol worshiping having the negative effect. But nowadays what we see is that a lot of other people, a lot of these other ways are actually true connection to divinity. know, whether it's from...

what we all know that we can experience, right? I'm going, sorry for yoga for the easy experience, but you do it and you have a better day. Whether it's even body practices and homophatic medicines that can connect you to a place of being in a true coherence so that you can heal yourself, so that you can allow for these things. Whether it is medicine work that is coming from a completely different...

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

part of the world. They're not recreational, not anything, but really deep medicine work which can affect your state of being and your level of connectedness to the world around you. So there's a lot of ways to connect to divinity. And a lot of stigma of idol worshipping, I think, is really, really being removed in these days. And I think that the ultra-religious people, they're the ones that know that it's the days of Messiah, even though they're not saying.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Hmm

Adi Neumann

So the understanding is that this has to happen.

Jeff Albaum

Interesting. Okay, I kind of want to like when you say the ultra religious community knows that it's the day's Messiah. I love the imagery you just said where it's like everyone comes in and that we're in like this one big loving community. It kind of feels like the opposite though when it comes to especially the ultra religious community like it and it kind of feels like they're and to your point, I think that the best argument like in the most positive like like they do have this continuity of history.

to hold on to the reins really tightly. like, that is an amazing thing that they've done. I don't know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Like something I think about a lot is like, what is, like if I think about my grandparents, so two generations ago, they were all religious. They all worked, because they came from Eastern Europe and they lived in the shtetls and like, that's just what they were. And if they could see me two generations later in America, doing this fundamentally, like I don't live a very religious lifestyle.

what's gonna be in two generations from now? Like we just had our first baby and so like his, God willing if he has kids, if he wants kids, like what are his kids gonna be doing? And like I think about that, I'm like I don't know, like what's that world gonna look like? How do you think about that?

Adi Neumann

So, okay, there two things that you said that I want to answer. The first one is you were saying that it doesn't seem that way from the Hasidim community and it can be explored from both ways, but I will just say it's always darkest before dawn. And you have to remember when talking about your grandparents and they do want to come back to what it would look like maybe for your child and for his future life, but...

Jeff Albaum

Hmm

Adi Neumann

It's very important to remember that the Judaism that came to us after World War II from Eastern Europe, you know, the Judaism that we see nowadays were like, not from Eastern Europe, from the Sephardic Jews. We had all these, you know, the Telamon de Bavli, we have all these things that stayed that had very spiritual practices, but the Ashkenaz Jews were very strong and very strict and very like rigid.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

But the truth is the Ashkenaz Hasidic communities all over had a lot of very, very spiritual practices, but the habit was not to put them on paper. The spiritual things were the things that were taught by the rabbi because the minute you put them on paper, they can get taken out of context. Or the minute you put them on paper, like we said before, it's that layer of secret, which then now people know the blueprint to how the energy works. So they're gonna use it to manifest things in their life, even if they didn't do the work.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

to earn that specific manifestation. There are a lot of negative ways that you can go there where you will become so full of yourself or you know, will, there are dangerous paths there for the true spiritual seeker. So the practice was not to write these things on paper. And what happened was that in World War II, entire communities were completely wiped out.

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Adi Neumann

entire communities that had very spiritual ways of connecting and what was left from them was the very technical thing and the laws and the arguing over if this happened there and I cook this under that lamp while the sun was moving there and the moon was reflecting from the third star of Venus. No, this is the stuff that stayed because they weren't worried about writing that stuff because it's the simple stuff of the back and forth even though it holds a lot.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Adi Neumann

the secrets were a really big part of how we practiced for many, many, years. So I think that this, your grandparents, or at least your great-grandparents, they had a knowledge of this. They had experienced this, but they had experienced this in ways which are only in Hasidut, and maybe a big part of why so many people in the young generations in Judaism are looking at this, because we don't have this spiritual practice in...

Jeff Albaum

Interesting.

Hmm

Adi Neumann

our Jewishness anymore. And we live in a world where there's no reason for us to give up on having a spiritual practice. We see people around us balancing knowledge and spiritual practice and you know in day-to-day life. Now taking it in

Jeff Albaum

Wait, say more. What do mean by that? We see people who are balancing because I, that's it. That's an interesting perspective. Like what

Adi Neumann

Because even when we look at the, it's called social capitalism, right? The rise of companies as being the places that will actually form and shape the communities of the future, right? Whether it's the decentralizing of government, how soon will that actually happen? Right now when the whole world is thrown into war? I don't know, like.

you know, six months ago, looked better than it's looking right now. But these things, the changes, the big changes take time while the day-to-day goes up and down. But at the end of the day, the leaders of these global companies, the biggest speakers online that people are actually listening to, they're talking about spiritual practices. They're talking about, you know, for some of them, the spiritual practice is just a physical practice, but it keeps their body, soul.

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Adi Neumann

you know, their body, mind and soul connection strong because whether it's staying healthy, whether it's, you know, surfing, whether it's meditation, which is actual talk about spiritual stuff, right? Actual focus and focal points. It's becoming an understandable tool of the maintenance, of the maintain, right? We're constantly working hard to attain all these things, but we have to maintain them or it doesn't matter or it's just great for the time being. And

Jeff Albaum

meditation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.

Hmm.

Sure, sure.

Adi Neumann

When I said we see people around us having a spiritual life, it's becoming more more common. I don't want to not have a spiritual practice because I believe in a Jewish way of connecting to divinity. I deserve to have both.

Jeff Albaum

Sure. Interesting. Okay.

Adi Neumann

And in some ways, to get back to what you asking about your son, I hope that some of the awakening that's happening in the Jewish community right now and some of this new age thinking that's happening in the Jewish community right now means that by the time your son will be in his teenage years, his after school Jewish program will be teaching him these things. And he will have already ingrained the solutions

Jeff Albaum

Hmm

Adi Neumann

to having a meditative practice, to having a spiritual existence, and to having a strong Jewish identity all rolled into one experience.

Jeff Albaum

So as a mom, how do you, I'm gonna ask for some parenting advice, how do you do that? How do you ingrain Jewish identity into your children? Or how do you think about that?

Adi Neumann

guys

Well, I'm very lucky. My kids go to an amazing school called Soulful, which is an abbreviation of Student of Life for Life, but obviously Soulful. And it is a Torah Earth School.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

What is that? I don't know what that is.

Adi Neumann

It's a it's a it's well, you don't know what it is because it's a new thing But there are all sorts of new things popping up all over. So basically It involves Montessori Torah study and an earth school, you know, which is from a lot of the sciences being structured around general earth arcs and

Actual farming like they have a farming block every day that they do farming and then like for example They do the girls are doing challah every Thursday But then on to be shot they use the vegetables that they grew themselves to make like this bread with the it was it's Really really cute they come up, you know They come home with like mud up to here and paint on their clothes and sit see out sticking out of like, you know everywhere It's it's it's very special we're very lucky

But you know new things are starting to come up I mean I in the last two years have been exposed and we don't know if you she wants to be named or not but from our group and I keep hearing about these Yom Kippur ayahuasca ceremonies I don't know if you know about these that they're doing in upstate New York and they're going up for 48 hours and they're fasting and they're doing the ayahuasca ceremony like before and into the fast and on the way out of the fast and they're singing

Jeff Albaum

Mm-mm.

Adi Neumann

all the hymns and doing all the prayers while on ayahuasca and fasting in nature. It's like there are some really new age Jewish things happening out there. So I hope we're shaping a future.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Wow. Okay. And so, so you talk about schooling is a big one. And then like, what about at home practices? Like, what do you guys, what do you do at home to instill Jewish? I'm sure also like speaking Hebrew is a big one, or I would imagine speaking Hebrew is a big one.

Adi Neumann

Right, speaking Hebrew is a big one. And both me and the father of my children are Israeli, so obviously that's a big one for them. And I think a lot of it comes from school, because when they talk about what they did in school or when you're talking about the program of next week, gives it like, of course you can do it. So many people have done it, just generating it from home.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

But I think putting the kids in a Jewish environment, would never be important for me if I was living in Israel for them to have a religious environment in school. But I totally understand my mom and why she did it when we were kids, because they spent so many hours there every day. And at the end of the day, they come home and they want to talk about what happened at school, because this is their action, right? They have a big science project that they're going to do. have it like, this is what we're around. We try to make Shabbat fun.

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Right.

Sure.

Adi Neumann

But you know, now the days are getting longer and the Shabbat can be a little crazy. Like my son can be walking around at 6 p.m. like, wanna watch a show. And I'm like, sorry, Shabbat's out at 8.20. Two and a half more hours, mommy loves you.

Jeff Albaum

That's amazing. you it like on the on the other side of that? Do you think about like how to make sure that your kids still have an like access to I'm going to say like the secular society, right? Like we live in a secular world. We live in a secular society. So like how do you think about balancing those two things?

Adi Neumann

But it's really scary.

Right.

So I think it's really important to be aware of the balance. After school activities, I make an effort to do them outside of the school or the Jewish community, right? Because you could go to the JCC and get everything there too and everything there, but then it's all really like of the same. So like my son's basketball and my son's, you know, the classes that they do around, I try to do it from externally. My kids personally have already been to six burns. Sorry. So I know that's not.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Wow.

Adi Neumann

It's not very fair, maybe not very achievable, but that really keeps them meshed into the secular society. were, know, and I haven't, never taken them to Big Burn because the Big Burn is, you know, my thing to do with my friends, but we've done Love Burn here in Miami three times and Mid Burn in Israel. And so last year when we were at Love Burn, there's an area where clothes are not mandatory and we saw a few people like walking over and they were holding some clothes in their hands and they were like walking.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Adi Neumann

And my daughter goes, where do you think they're going? She was nine at the time and I was like, they must be going skinny dipping. The beach is right over there. And then this year we passed a group of like fully naked joggers and she goes, my, they're in a hurry to go skinny dipping.

I was just like...

Jeff Albaum

That's wild.

Adi Neumann

So you know that that does keep them but I understand that's not a solution that's that's for everyone But yeah, you know if you can take them to some festivals that'll keep them very involved in life and in general doing involving your kids in Whatever you find inspirational

Jeff Albaum

Sure, Holy smokes.

Mm-hmm.

Mmm. I love that. Thank you.

Adi Neumann

Maybe they're gonna do it, but separating, right? It doesn't mean that they get to come with you everywhere. You need to have your own places where you grow and you and your wife get fulfilled again with that thing that makes it work for you. Like you need that. But see how and where you can share it with them too.

Jeff Albaum

Right. Right. All right. For sure.

I know you've mentioned that over the last two and a half years, especially that it's been like a period of intense like growth and learning. I'm curious, is, there anything that you've changed your mind about recently? Either it doesn't have to be from the last two and a half years, but you know, just in, in recent memory, like what's something you've changed your mind about.

Adi Neumann

So I can tell you, interestingly, I may have answered that question differently on a different conversation, but with everything we're talking, I only started keeping Shabbat two months ago, two and a half months ago. It's very new for me. I'm still not fully, fully keeping to the point of like, you know, I'll cook my son something to eat and I'll do something like that. I won't touch the phone or a screen or get in the car. Sorry, or get in the car, but I will do some of these other things around.

What had changed for me, I was performing the wedding of a really good friend of mine. And I knew that the crowd was very secular and the people that were going to be doing the Jewish roles in the wedding were also very secular. And I really wanted to explain to the people who were the two witnesses, what is the importance of a witness in Judaism. And just to go in it.

lightly without going too deep, but basically the idea of a witness, especially in a wedding or even first of all as Jews, we perceive ourselves to be witnesses of Hashem, witnesses of divinity. That is one of our greatest roles as Jews. And being the witness is being a bridge to spiritual energy in the physical realm. So by seeing divinity everywhere we look, we bring divinity into everything we experience, right? Which is a different version of, you know, see the positive side and then it'll have a...

positive effect, but it has a few different meanings, but it's always been considered the role of the Jews to be the witnesses. And when you're a witness at a wedding, it's very, very important. You're really supposed to see the spiritual connection between these two people. And by witnessing the moment that the ring goes on and the moment of the cup breaking, you're witnessing that, you're really like...

allowing their spiritual bond to move through you and through your eyes into reality. Now we all know the eyes have power, right? I'll give one of my favorite examples for this. It's a very small example. It really grows from that. But even, you know, in physics, they know nowadays, right? That if you look at a science experiment, you're going to affect its results, right? Like when they try to measure the location of a particle.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

then they can't measure the location and the speed at the same time. Cause if you're measuring the speed that affects the location, measuring the location affects the speed, or even an easier example that all of us can connect to when someone is looking at you from behind, right? You know that feeling. So all of a sudden you get it in a big room, someone's looking from behind and you turn around and you look right at them, right? You don't turn around and you start scanning. You turn around and you feel them. How did you know exactly where to look? It's cause you feel it.

Jeff Albaum

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I'm getting chills. that's such a question. Okay.

Adi Neumann

Because you feel it, so there experiments on it online which are really cute, which you can see with kids, kids are really like, they get nine out of ten. They're in room and someone is looking at them from behind and they just need to push the red button whenever someone comes into the room to look at them from behind. And the grown-ups only get like three out of ten. Because we've become a little desensitized to us, I guess, because a lot of times we're in public places and maybe someone that doesn't even know us could be talking about us from afar or could be mentioning something about where we're at, what we're that, so you slowly desensitize.

But kids always know. But when you do know, even as a grown-up, when you have that feeling and you know, you turn around and you're looking right there. Because something happens. The energy can actually somehow, I don't know how, move out through the eyes. And this is the role of the witness. They connect in their mind, they connect in their soul to the spiritual connection that they're feeling and they bring it into existence by viewing it.

Now I was explaining to them that about being a witness at a wedding. And then I was at Shabbat two and a half months ago and I teach a little class at Armenian every Shabbat. It's just a short 10 minute like class to get people in the right energy before we start everything and to connect somehow to the secret of this week's portion. And while I was teaching this class, someone came up a soldier from Israel who's done a lot of military service and without getting all the details, he was telling the story. was this, he was that.

And we started talking about witnesses between us and how in actual in actuality, if you're very religious, you have to keep Shabbat to be considered a proper witness for a wedding. And the as we him and I were talking about in front of everyone, I was like, wait, I want to explain to the people, know, because, we say witness, but I want to explain to them just what it means. And I explain how keeping Shabbat, being able to see divinity

Jeff Albaum

Hmm

Adi Neumann

in every Shabbat, being able to, not just to be a witness, sorry, being able to recalibrate our instrument, right? Keeping Shabbat is a way to, it's 24 hours without idol worshiping. We all have idol worshiping in the modern world, right? Even if we don't mean to, because idol worshiping, by the strict, strict definition of it, is anything external.

that has the ability to decide how I feel. Anything external that can affect my spiritual state. So it can be things from my phone and messages I got from my friends. So if a message from my friend is now in charge of how I believe, so my choice is a reaction to their choice to be rude or nice or whatever. It's not my own choice anymore. Boom, idol worshiping, my relationship to money can be boom, idol worshiping. Like so many of these things turn into idol worshiping in any way.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Adi Neumann

is a tool to recalibrate ourselves from that once a week. And I was explaining how important the recalibration is because the tool of the witness is to be a channel and like any instrument, when you play it, it will come out of tune. It's not a bad thing, it's just a maintenance thing again. You have to maintain it, maintain it in order to be able to attain the ability to be a channel. And as I was explaining it, it became really important for me to keep Shabbat.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Right, it's...

Adi Neumann

And I turned around to my brother who was sitting next to me in the middle of talking. I said to him, my God, I just decided I'm gonna start keeping Shabbat and he's been keeping Shabbat for a decade. So he's even stopped trying to convince me to keep Shabbat for the last eight years. But for him, that was like amazing. And I said that just quietly. And at the end of that service, three different people came to me and told me that they decided to keep Shabbat while I was talking. And since then I've heard of two other people that have started to doing a technological Shabbat, just no phones and no screens and no cars from.

Jeff Albaum

You

Adi Neumann

that specific time. And the magic was that while I was speaking, was witnessing my own words. I was learning while I was speaking, which is the most potent way to actually teach someone without coming above because I'm teaching myself and then someone else. I was witnessing the understanding that I was having. They were witnessing my lesson and they were learning from my lesson, not from my preaching to them.

Jeff Albaum

Wow.

Sure, sure.

Right.

Adi Neumann

And so it's been two and a half months that I've been keeping Shabbat. So this is going to be the 10th week. And it's been a new thing, but now I'm really connected to it. And before it just seemed to me like, you know, it was okay for the days of old, but I go to synagogue every Shabbat and I do my des, and I pray and I do Shabbat dinner with my kids. And it's okay if we need to take the car to like go have some fun on Saturday afternoon.

Jeff Albaum

Wow.

Right, right, right. So do you live walking distance from your synagogue? Okay, nice. Wow.

Adi Neumann

Yes. Yes. And we're in Miami, so you know, it's very, it's very comfortable. We don't have your weather.

Jeff Albaum

Sure, Wow. Yeah. And I think you've kind of mentioned it with some of the readers that you read and listen to and consume, like what are other like maybe non-spiritual, non-religious, like what are things that you like to consume? Like what media do you like to consume?

Adi Neumann

So would say first of all non-religious, but yes spiritual, is after school. I don't know if people are familiar with after school. School is spelled with a K. After school, one word on YouTube. He's an illustrator. I don't know a lot of details about him. I've been watching it for like two years. He's an illustrator and he will take stuff like an Alan Watts, you know, 15 minute lecture and illustrate to it.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Okay.

Adi Neumann

while you hear the lecture and it really like holds you in and then acts it and he chooses great, great, great content. And I love after school. It's great. It's great. Especially if you're like.

Jeff Albaum

Whoa.

Adi Neumann

at the end of the night and you wanna watch something, but you're not gonna commit to a whole show and you don't wanna just scroll on your phone, you just open, you put on After School and when that one episode is done, you're good because it's so much content that you're like, you get your satisfaction without lowering your vibration by going to the phone. Because sometimes at the end of the night, you need a little in between, but you don't wanna lower your vibration. So After School is really good.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Mm-hmm for sure for sure

Adi Neumann

And then other content, don't know. mean, right now I'm really, I'm having a really big guilty pleasure moment. Re-watching Deep Space Nine from the beginning. I'm a big Trekkie. I grew up being a huge Trekkie, but somehow Deep Space Nine came out in the years that I started traveling to New York and I was modeling, so I like missed it. I never really had the whole arc of the story.

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Adi Neumann

And so I think, but again, it is spiritual. It always surprises me how spiritual it is. Like you get the action, you get the spirituality, you get a certain level of deliverables. And what else do I like? I don't know, to be honest, I've just, started this rabbinical program, which is really long and it's six years and it's gonna take a long time to accomplish, but it's a lot of reading and I haven't had time to read anything that's not related to the program.

in recent times.

Jeff Albaum

I know we didn't even touch on this, but yeah, do you want to share a little bit more? Like you're studying to be a rabbi, which for anyone listening to you makes total sense. And they probably think, wait, you're not already a rabbi?

Adi Neumann

Thank you dear. Thank you dear. I don't know. don't know. I don't know where I stand with it yet. I'm really happy with the school that I found because it comes out of Salma Shekhtar's teaching and it's a program of Jewish renewal. I'm really happy with the school. I'm really happy with the mixture of students that are meeting in the class. But I can't decide yet regarding

The role of the rabbi, I think the role of the rabbi is really, really important. I belong to a Jewish community. I have several rabbis that I associate myself with, but I don't know if six years down the line, that's exactly what I see myself doing. What I do know is that I was really, really craving the grounding. Like we were saying before, even like your question, right? Like if you study all the high level stuff and you don't have the grounding. And even though I come from, you know, reading and understanding and knowing the simple stories.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Adi Neumann

I wanted lot more of the halachic grounding as my spiritual process has gotten much deeper as I've started to teach more and more groups and I feel that, you know, in some ways I take responsibilities that are like responsibilities of a rabbi and I wasn't trained to do them and you know, a woman has maybe a fight with her husband and she comes to talk to me about something or someone has something with their kids and they come to ask me a question and I'm like, wait, like I don't want to leave them hanging on the one hand and I don't want to also...

be lightheaded regarding the, or be light regarding the responsibility that is sometimes put upon you when someone actually comes to you for advice. So this seemed like a good way to start to figure out how I am gonna put the things together.

Jeff Albaum

Sure.

Hmm. That's beautiful. The first time I, we ever met on a call, I actually, I did think you were, was like, who's this rabbi? Like who did, like where, did she, this is awesome. and I think that that's a, that's a really cool, like I think you have an amazing background to do it and whether, if you choose to pursue it or not, think anyone in your quote unquote congregation, whether you're actually a rabbi or you're in your current role as a

Adi Neumann

Yeah.

Hahaha

Jeff Albaum

invite like a wise person within your community. think anybody in your community is very lucky to have you.

Adi Neumann

Thank you, we are blessed to be a part of this amazing, amazing time in Jewish history.

Jeff Albaum

Well, Adi, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with the listeners here and with me. I really appreciate you and I'm looking forward to seeing you at our, I don't think we're having a call this week because it's Passover, but next week.

Adi Neumann

Mmm.

No, it's Fesach Bad. Thank you, Jeff. And I hope that by the time this airs next week, this war will be history and we will be celebrating just peace for people all over the Middle East. And lower oil prices, because, let's celebrate that too. Why not? It's got to be all the layers. It's got to be all the layers.

Jeff Albaum

Amen. Amen, amen.

That's right. worldwide community. Amazing. Thank you so much, Adi. I'll speak to you soon. Bye everybody.

Adi Neumann

Exactly.

Thank you dude.