Read Online Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin - Free Book Online

knew that so many Jews, whether they wore their Jewishness on their sleeves or not, had died just because they were. But I never really took the time to put any of it in perspective. I just hadn’t felt a need to.”
    That changed when he was seventeen years old, in 1973. His parents, who he says always came up with “inspiring” summer adventures, suggested he work on a kibbutz in Israel—a farming collective where families live and labor together for the benefit of their shared community. “When I search back for one experience in my life where I learned and came away with the most, I think it might have been that summer,” he says. It was harder work than he was prepared for. “The ritual essentially was: You woke up at four-thirty in the morning, had a quick something to eat—a piece of bread and a glass of juice—and you were in the fields by five picking peaches. And you worked three or four hours
very
hard and then you had your big meal—or the big breakfast—at about eight, nine in the morning. And then you got back to work, until about twelve o’clock, and then you’d rest.” (His rhythmic, run-on cadence has the unmistakable feel of a rabbi telling an ancient parable; I can tell there’s a lesson coming.) “And then you’d sleep because you’d worked hard and it was very hot and that was the most productive use of your resources and that was the way you were expected to contribute to this community—this idealistic settlement which was socialism in its purest form.
    â€œSo during the hot hours of the day, everyone took naps and rested. And then they woke up, exercised—usually soccer—and had a light dinner, and there was a little socializing and then eventually you’d go to bed.
    â€œBut for me it was different: When everyone started picking peaches, I would find the biggest peach I could and hide behind the biggest tree I could find and essentially napped, and picked one bucket of peaches for every eight or ten of everyone else’s. And I thought that I had found the way to realize the same rewards as the next guy while doing far less. (Not uncharacteristic of much of what I did in those days.) And then, at the end of the day, while all the others rested, I would go off to look for excitement, young people, Americans, and maybe trouble. Because I
wasn’t
tired.
    â€œMaybe two-thirds of the way through the summer, I realized one day that I hadn’t fooled anybody. That everybody knew what I was doing but nobody really cared. And in the end, the only one I was
really
fooling and shortchanging was myself. So I started working because I realized that I had to; I hadn’t been ‘carrying my weight.’ And immediately everything improved—especially my relationship with my peers. In many ways, I grew up that summer. I realized you can usually find shortcuts, and that in the end, they rarely work. You get out what you put in.”
    It feels like he’s told this story before, perhaps to his daughters as a kind of cautionary tale. The success of his company and his punishing schedule over the years are testament to his work ethic. But when I ask if he considers his stick-to-itiveness to be a Jewish trait, he shrugs. “I’ve always been very determined and ambitious, which has manifested itself on a baseball field or a ski slope, or even the desire to finish reading a book before the other guy starts it.” He describes this drive as a “compulsive disorder; I don’t know if it relates to my upbringing.”
    A housekeeper has brought in coffee and cake on white china, but Cole doesn’t touch it. The phone on his desk rings intermittently, the cell phone vibrates, his Blackberry moans, the fax purrs, but he ignores them all. I can’t help but appreciate that he’s decided to keep work out of this meeting, but I’m aware of how persistently it intrudes. Without