Back in 1999, I was in charge of sales and marketing for an Israeli technology startup that had developed a breakthrough magnetic welding process. They could weld metals while they were cold, enabling a solid-state weld between aluminum and steel (which normally cannot be welded together).
This created a buzz in the welding and manufacturing world at the time. As part of my sales effort, I visited Detroit every other month to talk to car and parts manufacturers. Eventually, I got GM to sign a development contract, and they embarked on designing a whole new line of vehicles based on this breakthrough technology. What was particularly exciting to GM was the ability to have a composite car frame made from both aluminum and steel. You wanted heavy steel for the more critical structures, while it would be much lighter and fuel efficient to have aluminum for the rest of the frame.
This gave me a bit of a behind-the-scenes view of car design. Classically, the differences between one model year and the next are usually cosmetic and superficial. We know this pretty well from the parts business, as often the same parts will work for a long stream of model years, usually until there is an overhaul of the platform, and then again, we’ll see the same parts working for another successive stream of model years.
What was thrilling about the GM deal was that they would be starting entirely from scratch, with the very design of the manufacturing plant and workflow. You see, car manufacturing is an insanely capital-intensive effort. You need to invest gargantuan amounts of money in buildings, equipment, labor, management, raw materials contracts, and parts and sub-assembly deals before one car rolls off the assembly line. As such, utilization of the factory and optimizing the design becomes vitally important for the manufacturer.
I loved walking their factory floors and getting such an incredible insight into the car manufacturing side of the business. Unfortunately, the technology did not have the production reliability that was suitable for a manufacturing line and that doomed the project and eventually the company.
The first book of the Five Books of Moses is the Book of Genesis (called Bereshit in Hebrew, meaning “In the Beginning”) which is also the name of the first weekly portion of the Torah reading. We will read it this Saturday, October 18, and here is a link to several other articles I’ve written about this week’s reading: https://ben-tzion.com/category/genesis/bereshit/
In Bereshit, God designs and manufacturers our universe. Light and darkness, day and night, the earth and the heavens, the Sun, the Moon and the stars, land and ocean, vegetation, animals, and finally Man. What is interesting is that the design and manufacturing of the universe, a process that may have taken billions of years, and was literally the foundation of our entire reality, only gets one chapter of attention. It is compressed into a paltry six “days” (which some rabbinic commentators explain to mean six epochs or eras that could have taken billions and millions of years each).
The Torah’s main focus is on the story of Man (I mean “man” in the generic “human” sense, like mankind). Another deep and somewhat esoteric tradition is that before God created the universe, He “looked” into the Torah. There is something primordial that predates the creation of existence itself that is contained in the Torah. Quite literally, before Time and Space came into existence, there was some fundamental value enclosed within the Torah that was given only about 3,300 years ago to the people of Israel, who then shared it with mankind. So even though Man is the last element of Creation, he is the central cause of the existence of the universe. A related tradition states that if the people of Israel would not have accepted the Torah at Mount Sinai, the universe would have reverted to its primordial chaotic state.
God created the universe to bring into existence a being that was self-conscious and possessed free will. A being that could know God and strive to connect to Him. A being that can choose an ethical, moral, blessed existence, or one of material self-indulgence.
That might have been the test of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Can man restrain his desire and obey God’s directives, or would he give in to his cravings? Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden demonstrated that deep-seated human fallibility. In that early interaction with God, our earliest ancestors failed. Ten generations later, we would see how far the depravity of early humanity would reach and bring down God’s cataclysmic wrath. But we’ll talk more about that next week.
