By Penina Lis on
Before we arrived in Israel, before the cohort met in person, before the connections, memories, and discussions, The Nachshon Project Cohort 5 owned Like Dreamers. During a conference call on a December afternoon, Rabbi Zeff and Rabbi Cohen informed us fellows that they had taken the liberty to send an early Chanukah present to our homes. That present, I would discover as I returned home for the holidays, was two books: Like Dreamers by Yossi Klein Halevi and Startup Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
And, while the thirty of us had prepared to discuss Like Dreamers with the prolific and revered author Halevi, the creator himself had different feelings towards the discussion. For him, Halevi began the discussion by explaining, As Dreamers belonged to another incarnation of his. It felt remote and strange for him to revisit a book that no longer belonged to him.
With that surprising start to our highly anticipated meeting with Halevi, our hour and a half of life lessons began. Writing, Halevi explained, is a maddening process in which the writer stirs in the privacy of his own thoughts. The book took eleven years to complete. He was obsessed with the failing of his project, he recalled because he “really was failing.”
This notion of something so incredibly poignant and famous as Like Dreamers almost failing pierced my thoughts and has remained in the back of my thoughts since our interview with Halevi.
Which of my own endeavors have I lost faith in or thought of as a failure because of its not-yet acquired success? I applied this question to my physical and numerable endeavors as well as traits and personable goals that I’ve been striving towards.
Had Halevi given up three, four, or eight years in, the book that has and continues to inspire tens of thousands of Jewish readers, would be lost to the ether?
As The Nachshon Project comes to an end, I look back at not only my successes but also my goals that I am still striving towards, that isn’t completed yet and remain currently as failures. With the help of mentors, friends, and experiences that I’ve gained over these last few months, whether it takes three years, eleven years, or thirty-three years, I aspire to turn as many of these current failures into successes.
