Parashat Bamidbar

This is #Snapchatorah for where Hillel Fuld takes the Torah portion, learns some lessons and apply them to entrepreneurship and startups.

The Torah (Old Testament) has five books, today we start the fourth one Bamidbar; the book of numbers. The literal translation of Bamidbar means in the dessert.

Why is a book, one of five books, which I would say pretty significant thing named in the desert? What is the significance of that?

To answer the question why it is called in the dessert and what the lesson is a little bit of history. The Jews walked the dessert for forty years to enter the land of Israel. But why isn’t the book called the land of Israel? Why is it called the desert, the answer is… commitment. The importance of commitment, the importance of hard work. Even in my little world a lot of times people will look at success and they think that was achieved overnight they don’t realize the amount of hard work blood, sweat, and tears that went in to that success.

You know the Talmud tells us

Rabbi Yitzchak said: If a man says to you, I have labored and not found, do not believe him. If he says, I have not labored but still have found, do not believe him. If he says, I have labored and found, believe him

–Talmud Megilah 6b:

So the book is called in the desert because it shows the importance of commitment. Yes, they entered the land of Israel at the end, but it’s not about the end it’s about commitment, it’s about the hustle. Yea I went there. And one more thing about commitment and the way it works. You work hard at something and you achieve success the level of enjoyment is exponentially bigger than just achieving success without that commitment. So do people get lucky in startups? Yea they do, for every one lucky entrepreneur nine out of the ten other successful entrepreneur worked their butts off for years.

So the book is called in the dessert because it is crucial to remember the walked in the desert for forty years before they got there.

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Hillel is a Co-Founder at ZCastApp, mentor at Google, Microsoft, and many other accelerators across Israel. Add Hillel on Snapchat and Twitter