The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes courage as “the ability to do something that frightens one.” Iâ€d give it a slightly different definition.

Courage for me, as Iâ€ve discovered over the past year coping with chronic cancer, is not about choosing to jump out of an airplane or bungie jump off a bridge near Katmandu. Rather, itâ€s doing something you really donâ€t want to do but know you have to.

It was courage I needed when my next immunotherapy appointment came close.

I finished four months of chemotherapy for my follicular lymphoma earlier this year and am officially in remission. Now I need to go in every other month for an IV of biologic “maintenance” treatment to keep the cancer at bay for as long as possible. Iâ€m supposed to do this for two years. Itâ€s not as bad as chemo, but it still comes with side effects.

As the day approached, I became acutely aware of my resistance to going back under the needle. Part of that was just not wanting to feel uncomfortable – not so much the hospital visit but the fatigue and aches and pains that come after. Part was that each trip to the hematology daycare ward reminds me that I have a chronic, incurable cancer that will be with me for the rest of my life.

But thereâ€s also a lingering uncertainty about whether maintenance treatment is worth it.

According to Dr. John Leonard, a lymphoma specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, only 16 out of 100 patients will see an improvement in PFS (thatâ€s “progression free survival,” the number of years before the disease returns) as a result of the kind of maintenance immunotherapy Iâ€m supposed to be getting.

“Moreover, it makes no difference in overall survival,” Leonard adds. He advises most of his patients these days to skip maintenance and simply “re-treat” when necessary – even if thatâ€s sooner than it might have been if youâ€re in the lucky 16 percent group.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg, chief of hematology-oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York, puts it more plainly. “Maintenance therapy is probably over-treatment.”

I asked my own doctor at Hadassah in Jerusalem. She admitted that “we really donâ€t know what maintenance therapy does or how,” but she still recommended it. “Sixteen percent is not insignificant.”

As my appointment became imminent, I tried to think of other examples of courage that fit my definition, to see whether any of those might provide clarity for the decision in front of me.

The first thing that came to mind was perhaps the complete opposite of healing: war. No sane person ever wants to go to war, but sometimes you have to do it for the health and survival of your nation.

Divorce also is a form of courage. Resistance to this kind of major life change can be overwhelming, but if youâ€re in the wrong relationship, you know deep down that sometimes the only way to get healthy again is to get out.

Making aliyah takes courage, as well. My wife, Jody, and I planned our immigration to Israel for seven years. Making a life in the Holy Land was part of the shared values we brought to our marriage.

But when the time finally came to move, I kept delaying. My career was in full swing: I had a great job at a software company, I was teaching at San Francisco State University, Iâ€d just finished a term as president of an international professional association. We had friends, community, two cars and savings.

I knew that aliyah would be the healthy thing for our relationship, for our children, for the Jewish people.

“Making these kinds of monumental decisions takes a special kind of faith,” a friend once told me.

“Faith is not something Iâ€m big on,” I joked in return.

“Then call it a ‘leap of faith†– making an important choice with imperfect information. Gather data then reevaluate. If it doesnâ€t work out, you can always go back.”

Melanie Greenberg writes in Psychology Today about six kinds of courage: feeling fear yet choosing to act, following your heart, persevering in the face of adversity, standing up for what is right, letting go of the familiar, and facing suffering with dignity or faith.

At least four of those six are part of my personal definition of courage. (You guess which four.)

In the end, though, it was not my cognitive deliberations, an appeal to faith or a pithy article in a pop psychology journal that shone a light on how I should decide.

It was an episode of the TV show “This is Us.”

One of the main plot points of the popular NBC series is that the father of the family dies when his kids are teenagers. The harrowing experience of losing their father at such a young age impacts much of how they live as adults.

My own kids are all in their 20s but thatâ€s still young enough that I wouldnâ€t want to bequeath to them any avoidable trauma.

Sixteen percent may not sound like a lot statistically, but I owe it to my family to do whatever I can to stick around as long as possible.

I might feel like crap, temporarily at least, but I know, too, that my long-term health and the health of everyone around me depends on me mustering up that courage – however I define it.

I first defined courage at The Jerusalem Post.

As thousands of high-tech executives and investors gathered in Jerusalem for this yearâ€s OurCrowd crowdfunding summit, the question of how Israel became the Startup Nation was never far from discussion.

How did Israel, a tiny nation, with no natural resources of its own and surrounded by enemies, come to have more companies on Nasdaq than India, Japan and Korea combined? How did we become no. 1 in the world in both R&D spending and venture capital investment per capita?

Why does every major technology company – Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Intel, General Electric and more – have an office here, developing some of the most cutting-edge technologies in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, autonomous driving and medical devices?

Thereâ€s no shortage of answers – heck, thereâ€s even an entire book (Saul Singer and Dan Senorâ€s bestselling “Start-up Nation”) dedicated to the subject.

Iâ€d like to offer 5 reasons of my own.

1. Innovation army. This is probably the most cited way that Israel is “different” than other countries, and for good reason. Israelâ€s mandatory conscription gives 18-year-olds incomparable responsibility.

Critical decisions that have changed the direction of wars can – and have – been decided by soldiers in the field. Hierarchy in the IDF can be surprisingly informal and privates who speak up are often rewarded not punished.

Thatâ€s something Ilan Regenbaum wants to see more of. The 27-year-old immigrant from Atlanta is serving in the Israeli Air Forceâ€s “Innovation Unit,” which has as its goal transforming the army from a bureaucratic machine to something more Google-like.

Regenbaumâ€s unit runs an in-house “accelerator” (the first internal army accelerator anywhere). Think Y Combinator or MassChallenge but for military entrepreneurship. While itâ€s just Air Force for now, the aim is to eventually change the culture of the IDF as a whole.

2. Immig-tech. From its very start, Israel has been a nation of immigrants and that has contributed immeasurably to the proliferation of new ideas, increased economic demand, and brought an infusion of tech talent looking for a home.

Immigrants have played an especially strong role in Jerusalem, my hometown. According to Startup Genomeâ€s 2017 Global Startup Ecosystem Report, Jerusalem startups have the 7^th highest rate of immigrant founders in the world, at 34 percent. Thatâ€s double the percentage in Tel Aviv. It makes sense: Immigrants donâ€t fit neatly into Sabra-led organizations, so they create their own.

3. Chutzpah. When you live in a neighborhood like the Middle East, and especially when youâ€re young and idealistic, nothing seems impossible and Israeli entrepreneurs will try just about anything, fail and try again. Sometimes this leads to great success. But chutzpah can be a double-edged sword.

Israeli electric car startup Better Place, the subject of my recent book TOTALED, is a perfect example. The companyâ€s CEO, Shai Agassi, was truly motivated by a desire to wean the world off oil. His often brash behavior helped the company raise nearly a billion dollars. But Agassiâ€s audacious style also alienated many of the partners Better Place would eventually need to succeed.

Still, even though the company has now gone to a better place, Yaron Samid, who founded the TechAviv Founder’s Club, told me when I spoke to the group in December that we need more people like Shai Agassi, not less, and now more than ever. “Only people who dream so big can truly change the world and inspire others to do the same,” he said.

4. Argue like an Israeli. Roey Tzezana is a futurist and author of the Israeli bestseller “Guide to the Future.” To solve the worldâ€s biggest problems, tech leaders and entrepreneurs need to “argue more like Israelis,” Tzezana says.

“We need to create a culture and a society where people arenâ€t afraid to disagree” like they are in much of the overly polite West, Tzezana told me; “where they arenâ€t afraid to fight over intellectual dominance, and will really shout at each other – and later get up, shake hands and give each other a hug.”

5. People of the fix. Jewish sources are full of apparent contradictions, where it says one thing and then later another thing entirely. Sometimes thatâ€s a story that doesnâ€t make sense. (Did the Flood described in the book of Genesis last for 150 days or for 40 days and 40 nights?) Other times itâ€s a minuscule interpretation of Jewish Law. (When can one eat from the new harvest? From the height of the day or only after a sacrifice is brought?)

The rabbis in the Talmud canâ€t stand cognitive dissonance. And so much of their back and forth bickering is really working over areas in dispute, until they come to some type of harmonic resolution.

Our tradition – and our thinking today – is filled with this type of “fixing.” Indeed, the Jewish brain seems hardwired towards Tikkun Olam (“fixing the world”) from the very act of studying our foundational texts.

Do high-tech entrepreneurs think about this when theyâ€re researching a cure for cancer or building an Iron Dome? Some do.

Prof. Zvi Bentwich founded NALA, an NGO that addresses “neglected tropical diseases” like schistosomiasis (snail fever) in Africa. “Tikkun Olam was very much a mission in our family,” he told me in a recent interview. “I volunteered early on as a student. So I feel that itâ€s kind of an obligation.”

Gal Salomon, the CEO of CLEW Medical, perhaps says it best. “The Jewish mind is always coming up with new ideas.” Israelis, he adds, “just wonâ€t take no for an answer.”

I presented my 5 reasons Israel is the Startup Nation first at The Jerusalem Post.

Driving past the “Buds and Roses” storefront on Los Angelesâ€s Ventura Boulevard, youâ€d be forgiven for surmising this must be a fan shop dedicated to all things Axl Rose. The friendly but firm armed guard out front, however, suggests that whatâ€s behind the locked door might be somewhat more circumspect.

Which it is: Buds and Roses is one of hundreds of medical cannabis dispensaries now dotting the California landscape, all in plain view and entirely legal. On a recent trip to the U.S., I decided to pay a visit. I had a legitimate medical need: to determine if any of the vast array of tinctures, vapes, pills and edibles on display could help me with my chronic insomnia.

When I walked out of the store an hour and several hundred dollars lighter, I had also gained first-hand insight into how different Californiaâ€s medical cannabis business is from Israelâ€s – and how those differences will be even more glaring in the near future.

To gain entry into a California cannabis dispensary, you first need a medical cannabis card. Itâ€s shockingly easy to get one. You simply go online to a website like HelloMD, enter your credit card details and a doctor promptly calls you back.

“How can I help you?” the voice on the line said.

“Well, I suffer from insomnia and I wanted to try…”

“Youâ€re approved,” the doctor cut me off.

“Wait, donâ€t you want to hear about what Iâ€ve tried in the past and any medical history?”

“Nope, youâ€re all set up,” the doctor continued, clearly eager to move on to the next call. “Iâ€ve already sent you an email with your certificate. Anything else today?” he added, like he was selling me a pair of pants at the Gap.

It was frustrating but also liberating, especially compared to Israel where, while itâ€s possible to get a medical cannabis license, you have to jump through so many hoops that too often patients just give up. And insomnia is not even on the approved list yet.

Once my card arrived in the mail, I drove to the Buds and Roses, where I was ushered into a windowless back room filled with what looked like clear glass jewelry stands – except that instead of diamonds they were filled with all kinds of cannabis.

I explained to Jen, my “budtender,” what I needed.

“Insomnia responds best to a formulation with a higher amount of the cannabinoid THC (the psycho-active component of cannabis) than CBD,” Jen explained.

“Really? Thatâ€s a surprise,” I told Jen. In my previous research, Iâ€d learned that the more benign CBD, which addresses auto-immune and inflammatory conditions, was key to curing sleep problems. But who was I to argue with a certified budtender?

Jen recommended a high-tech disposable vape pen from Nature and Bloom that automatically shuts off after delivering a precise 2.5 mg dose. It was named one of TIME magazineâ€s top innovations in 2016.

“Is this your first time here?” Jen asked as she was taking my money.

“Yes…” I answered, a bit hesitantly.

“Great, then you get a free gift!” she crowed, motioning me to a case full of edibles. Did I want the chocolate with hints of blueberry or a granola bar?

That night, I tried the vape. I quickly felt something – but it wasnâ€t sleepiness. I was nauseous and my stomach hurt. The next night was even worse: I was up until 3 am pacing, praying for the pain to pass.

Maybe so much THC was not the right mix for me.

By now weâ€d left Los Angeles for Berkeley. I easily found another dispensary where Rick, my new budtender, suggested I try a more balanced 1:1 THC to CBD tincture.

“Is it your first time here?” Rick asked.

“Yes,” I responded, this time more confidently. Out came the edible goodies.

The tincture didnâ€t make me sick but it didnâ€t get me to sleep the way Iâ€d hoped either.

But it doesnâ€t really matter. This was more an experiment; an exercise in data collection. All that legal medical cannabis is in California. Iâ€m now back in Israel where there are no dispensaries next to the Aroma on Emek Refaim Street.

Nor will there probably ever be.

Israel is going down a very different path. Instead of standalone shops, changes coming to Israeli policy aim to bring medical cannabis to the local SuperPharm.

Over the summer, 81 doctors completed an official medical cannabis course from the Ministry of Health in order to be able to prescribe pot for specific ailments.

The differing approach is not surprising: Unlike California, where come January 2018, cannabis will be available for sale to anyone – no plastic card required – there are no plans for legalizing recreational use in Israel. So the focus has been on utilizing traditional medical infrastructure.

On our last night in California, we were invited to a launch party celebrating the imminent legalization of cannabis sponsored by Atlas Edibles, a company founded by members of the Orthodox Jewish synagogue my wife and I used to attend when we lived in Berkeley.

An unlikely pairing? Not really. Thereâ€s already a new Jewish tradition emerging in the U.S. called Chai Havdalah (chai is pronounced “high”) where participants greet the new week by smoking and eating cannabis-infused cookies.

Me, I just want to get some sleep. And it would be really helpful if I didnâ€t have to fly all the way to California to do it.

I started my search over at The Jerusalem Post.

Israel may have finally figured out a way to stop BDS. Weâ€ll get the leaders of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement so stoned they wonâ€t be able to demonize us anymore.

Thatâ€s a joke, of course, but the truth – at least about the means if not the ends – is not so far removed.

When the Knesset returns for its winter session shortly, among the bills members will be asked to consider is a law opening up the countryâ€s booming medical cannabis business to international export. Itâ€s a market that could bring in as much as $4 billion a year in revenue. Health Minster Yaakov Litzman is behind it, as is Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon.

Israel has in recent years become a world leader in the research, production and growing of cannabis for medicinal purposes.

Israel actually pioneered research into the plant when in 1963 Prof. Raphael Mechoulam, then a young scientist at the Weizmann Institute, strolled into a local police station and asked if the cops had had any spare cannabis laying around. They did and Mechoulam took an Egged bus back to his lab with 5 kilos of Lebanese hashish in his bag. The following year, he became the first scientist to successfully isolate the THC component in cannabis.

Fast forward to now, where some 50 American companies have established R&D operations in Israel or partnerships with local firms such as Tikkun Olam, One World Cannabis Pharmaceuticals, and ICAN. Nearly 700 Israeli entrepreneurs, anticipating the expected approval of the export law, have applied to the Ministry of Health to grow or sell cannabis-related products.

In 2016, more than $250 million was invested in cannabis research in Israel. Cannabis may not rival Israeli high-tech (yet) but it is clearly big business.

Which is how, a few weeks back, I found myself on a tour with some 20 journalists to the Breath of Life Pharma facility in the center of Israel. BOL may very well be the largest medical cannabis operation in the world: Thereâ€s a 35,000 square foot production plant, 30,000 square feet of grow rooms and labs, and a million square feet of cultivation fields.

When we werenâ€t strolling the grounds, we heard lectures from a mini whoâ€s-who of cannabis experts. They included Dr. Adi Aran, who is studying the effect of medical cannabis on autism at Shaâ€arei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem; Dr. Itamar Raz, the head of the Israel National Diabetes Council who has found that medical cannabis can help both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes; and Yuval Landschaft, who heads up the Medical Cannabis Unit in the Ministry of Health.

It was during Landschaftâ€s PowerPoint presentation that a particular slide caught my eye – a page from the 1899 edition of Merckâ€s Manual (“a ready reference pocket book for the practicing physician”) which listed over 50 “prescribed uses” for cannabis.

One of the ailments on the list: insomnia, which regular readers of this column know has been the bane of my too wakeful life.

My hand shot up during the question and answer period. “Have there been any clinical trials with insomnia yet?” I wanted to know.

BOL CEO Dr. Tamir Gedo answered. “Not yet,” he said, “but we plan to start one in 2018.”

It makes sense. Anecdotally, at least, the non-psychoactive “CBD” component in cannabis (there are 140 different “cannabinoids” in the plant; THC is the one that gets you high) has been used for insomnia since … well, Merckâ€s time. A key 2006 study showed that CBD has a positive impact on the sleep mechanism of rats.

But other than several studies from the early 1970s that have been dismissed for having poor controls, and a 2016 investigation using CBD oil to address PTSD-induced sleep disturbances, no major human studies have been conducted yet.

BOL isnâ€t the only cannabis company in Israel looking at plant-based alternatives to Ambien and Lunesta. ICAN is partnering with the American pharmaceutical company CannRX Technologies to develop a precise sleep formulation.

ICAN and CannRX announced their intentions during this yearâ€s “CannaTech” medical cannabis conference in Tel Aviv. The medication, dubbed “ICAN.sleep,” will be delivered using a metered inhaler – similar to the ones used for asthma. “You take a puff or two, depending upon the dosage, and basically within ten minutes youâ€ll be drowsy enough to sleep,” explained CannRX executive chairman Bill Levine.

I called up ICAN founder and CEO Saul Kaye to ask if I could get on the trial. He was interested. Itâ€s hard to find test subjects in Israel who havenâ€t used cannabis recreationally, he told me, not entirely kidding. Israel, it turns out, has the worldâ€s highest ratio of cannabis users: 27 percent of the population aged 18-65 smoked or vaped in the last year.

Kaye said that because Israel has focused on “medicalizing” cannabis rather than legalizing recreational use, “we have destigmatized better than other places.”

An example: Netafim, the pioneering Israeli drip irrigation firm, has been developing greenhouse systems for growing cannabis.

And why not? This part of the world has an ideal climate. “Israel is blessed with 340 days a year of sun, and cannabis flowers thrive in a warm climate,” Gedo told the journalists during the BOL tour.

My BDS cannabis wisecrack might not have been the pithiest, but I have high hopes that Israelâ€s medical cannabis industry could revolutionize healthcare in general and insomnia in particular. And thatâ€s nothing to joke at.

I first wrote about the coming high times for The Jerusalem Post.

I also covered the medical cannabis market for Israel21c.

Picture courtesy of Breath of Life Pharma

The period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur presents an opportunity to reflect on how the last year went and what we could do better in the year to come.

In that spirit, I need to come clean: Iâ€ve got an addiction problem … to social media.

Sure, we all are hooked on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram to a certain extent. But lately Iâ€ve seen the other – some might say the darker – side of Facebook, and my obsession with the platform has grown increasingly unhealthy.

If this is the time of year to make a New Yearâ€s resolution, then my soul is calling out for an intervention.

I have long been a frequent Facebook sharer and Iâ€ve accepted that the dopamine hit of excitement I feel whenever someone “likes” one of my posts is just a part of being a digital citizen of the 21^st century.

But in the last few months, Iâ€ve been using social media in a new way: to publicize my recently launched book.

The problem is that, once Facebook knows you have something you want to sell, it comes at you doggedly with offers, suggestions, nudges and analyses. And in my experience so far, Facebook has proven to be very good at extracting both my time and my money.

This is not to say that Facebook is doing anything wrong. Itâ€s a business and this is how you support a platform that has some 2 billion members: by selling advertising.

It starts when you open a business page. Facebook helpfully “suggests” what it calculates would be your best strategy.

Would you like to “boost” a post that youâ€ve written? “For just $5, your post could be seen by up to 2,000 more people.”

Wow, all that exposure, you think. I can afford $5.

But Facebook is as rapacious as it is relentless. After the post goes out, the site tells you how well it did, and assembles strikingly detailed demographics of just who saw it – where, when and for how long.

And then: Would you like to do another? And another? Each time the suggested price and duration seems to rise just a bit.

I dutifully followed the bait. And it seemed to be working. My page was being liked and shared; people were buying the book. But personally, it was taking a toll.

I was sleeping even less than I normally do. I was constantly looking at my phone, heart pounding, checking how well my ads were doing.

It was just at this moment that Manoush Zomorodiâ€s new book, Bored and Brilliant, was released.

Zomorodi, host of the popular podcast “Note to Self,” proposes that we have lost the capacity to be bored. We are never without our mobile devices with which we fill our every spare second with something to read, watch or listen to. But itâ€s during the moments when we are bored that our most profound thoughts come to us.

Now, my issue isnâ€t boredom. But Zomorodiâ€s 7-step program for breaking our tech additions might help me, too, I figured.

One point spoke to me in particular: Take a “fakecation,” she says. Thatâ€s where you go incognito for a certain period of time – maybe a day, maybe only an hour – while not actually going out of town.

Now, the Jewish people have a weekly “fakecation” day: itâ€s called Shabbat. And last week, it was Rosh Hashana – essentially a triple length Sabbath.

For the observant, turning off the computer on Shabbat and holidays is a given. For someone less pious like me, it meant Iâ€d need to voluntarily decouple from social media.

Could I do it?

I was OK for the first part of the holiday. Iâ€d reach into my pocket to take out my phone – but it wasnâ€t there. I gazed longingly in the direction of my office computer while remaining steadfast, sitting on the couch reading The Jerusalem Post in – gasp – print.

But by evening, I began to falter. Iâ€d sneak a peek at a screen – surreptitiously in some cases, with guilty deliberateness in others. By the second day of Rosh Hashana, Iâ€d given up entirely and was checking like it was a regular weekday.

But where willpower waned, Facebook prevailed.

The social network had helpfully suggested that I “invite” my friends to like my new page for the book. So I started clicking. At a rate of one invite per second, I should be able to get through everyone on my list in under an hour.

And in came the responses. “Great job.” “How exciting.” Multiple thumbs up.

And then a message I hadnâ€t expected.

“It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast,” Facebook informed me. “Youâ€ve been temporarily blocked from using it. Blocks can last a few hours or a few days. We canâ€t lift this block for any reason.”

Facebook had done a better job at booting me off social media than Jewish Law.

“Your phone is like a baby,” Zomorodi says. Sweet and yet also incredibly time-consuming. “They want your attention all the time and the minute you leave them alone, they squawk and yell and drive you absolutely bananas.”

My baby, apparently, had decided to take a nap right then and there. I had no choice but to accept it.

And that, ironically, is how I made my High Holiday resolution come true. Will it last? Probably not. But for a few hours I had a happy, Facebook-free New Year.

I first wrote about Facebook addictions in The Jerusalem Post.

Here’s my first article about Note to Self’s Bored and Brilliant program from 2015.

Former Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan had one of the most unusual titles in Silicon Valley. His business card read simply “Jolly Good Fellow” followed by the tag line “which nobody can deny.”

Tan earned his title in part by developing a course at the search engine giant in meditation and “mindfulness” – what Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, describes as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Tanâ€s seven-week class became so popular that there was a half-year long waiting list to get in.

Tan went on to write the best-selling Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), before leaving Google to found a company of his own. His goal: to take the Google mindfulness-for-the-corporate-world approach on the road.

That approach – which Tanâ€s Search Inside Yourself organization describes as “a highly interactive course that blends evidence-based mindfulness, emotional intelligence and neuroscience” – came to Israel recently, courtesy of Yaakov Lehman, who has his own creative title – Chief Executive Integrator – at Wisdom Tribe, a local group that seeks “to build a bridge between ancient Jewish wisdom and the global mindfulness movement.”

On two warm spring days in the Wix Business Hub at the picturesque Tel Aviv Port, 70 people paid upwards of $1,000 each to learn how adopting the principles of mindfulness can turn them into more productive and better engaged managers at work.

As someone who has participated in half a dozen more traditional meditation retreats, I wanted to see whether Tanâ€s system could teach in two days what it usually takes a week (or a lifetime, really) to achieve.

The answer is mixed.

Search Inside Yourself (SIY) Tel Aviv was led by two enthusiastic facilitators who presented a kind of “Mindfulness Greatest Hits,” backed up by lots of scientific research and studies, all wrapped in the language of business.

The latter is deliberate. As Tan writes in his book, “Being very skeptical and scientifically minded, I would be deeply embarrassed to teach anything without a strong scientific basis.” But that worked to his advantage. “My engineering-oriented brain helped me translate teachings from the language of contemplative traditions into language that compulsively pragmatic people like me can process.”

Everything youâ€d learn in a week-long retreat is there – sitting meditation, focusing on your breath, guided body scan, gratitude, mindful eating. But with time so limited and with most of the participants new to mindfulness, everything was compacted into short-attention span bites.

So instead of a half hour silent sit, the instructors would give a 30-minute lecture, complete with PowerPoint slides, followed by a mere five-minute practice session.

There were also activities that seemed more like something youâ€d learn in a self-help workshop – or maybe in a marriage counseling session. Like “mindful listening” (where one side talks for two minutes while the other says nothing). Or “mindful conversations” (where your partner adds a few key phrases at the end, like “What I heard you say was…” then the two sides switch).

The traditional “loving kindness” practice, where you silently envision people to whom you want to beam good wishes, was transformed into a kind of coupleâ€s exercise where you gaze into your partnerâ€s eyes while channeling blessings. Itâ€s effective but also unnervingly intimate, especially with someone you just met. Iâ€m used to the custom practiced by many on meditation retreats where people avoid any eye contact whatsoever.

All this points to perhaps the biggest distinction between SIY and a silent retreat – itâ€s not silent. Participants are encouraged to share their reactions with the group after each exercise. Lunch was burgers and networking. Phones are discouraged but not banned.

At a silent retreat, youâ€re exhorted not to read or write – even privately in your own room at night. At SIY, however, there was a “journaling” exercise where we were told to write down our answers to several prompts, like “my biggest challenge is…” or “things that give me pleasure are…”

None of this is right or wrong, better or worse – just different. As one of the two facilitators, Lori Schwenbeck, who flew in from California, said, “we are operationalizing mindfulness for business.”

It seems to be working.

Nathalie Garson, a Jerusalem-based strategist and business coach, debated whether to attend Search Inside Yourself. “I practice meditation and Iâ€ve been to India, but I found that it was disconnected from my professional practice. Google and mindfulness are two words not usually connected.”

Since attending the seminar, Garson says she has started integrating mindfulness into her consulting work. “Itâ€s really helped empower some of my clients with business decisions they had to make,” she says.

SIY is full of useful tips for business.

If youâ€re triggered by someone at work and tempted to respond quickly, practice “SBNRR.” Stop. Breathe. Notice where youâ€re at. Reflect on what you really want to say. Then finally you can Respond. It works in person and for email, too.

Want to develop compassion for a difficult business colleague? Hereâ€s another acronym: “JLM” for “Just Like Me.” Think to yourself: “This person has a body and a mind, feelings, emotions and thoughts, just like me. This person wants to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.”

When you arrive at a business meeting, encourage everyone to do a one-minute “check-in” before jumping into the agenda. One doesnâ€t automatically shed the lingering effects of a difficult commute, a contentious previous meeting or a tricky project just because the door has closed and the room has been called to order.

SIY has the potential to reach many more people than a traditional mindfulness program for another reason – and itâ€s a biggie: itâ€s the kind of seminar you can get your work to pay for – or bring in-house.

“Iâ€d recommend that companies offer Search Inside Yourself internally, more than as something offered for the public” as it was in Tel Aviv, Garson says. “It would be more productive if you do it with people from your own team.”

SIY founder Chade-Meng Tan says the potential goes beyond just work.

“I believe the skills offered here will help create greater peace and happiness in your life and the lives of those around you, and that peace and happiness can ultimately spread around the world,” he writes in his latest book, one of several self-help Search Inside Yourself titles.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist leader once said, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.”

Two days of “searching inside yourself” in a business setting is an excellent way to start the process of honing that quality.

I first compared mindfulness and meditation retreats at The Jerusalem Post.

Investor Mike Granoff likes cars. As the head of Maniv Energy Capital, he was one of the first to put money into Better Place. Following the high flying electric car startupâ€s collapse, Granoff turned his focus to the next big thing in transportation – the growing field of vehicle autonomy (i.e. driverless cars) and other ways to make driving safer and roads less congested.

Speaking on a panel about “Transport Technology” earlier this month at the annual investor summit sponsored by equity crowdfunding firm OurCrowd, Granoff – who is originally from the U.S. but has been living in Israel for the past four years – commented that when he was looking for companies to invest in for his newest fund, he hadnâ€t expected to find so much of what he needed right here in Israel.

Indeed, Israel is not generally thought of as an automotive powerhouse. Israelâ€s only real car maker, Haifa-based Autocars, which manufactured the boxy Sussita and the sportier Sabra until the end of the 1970s, has long been defunct.

But today, some of the coolest next generation car technology is coming out of the Startup Nation.

Jerusalemâ€s Mobileye is the clear Israeli leader when it comes to powering self-driving cars. While a high-profile partnership with Tesla fell apart last year after the fatal crash of an autonomous vehicle (Tesla tried to blame Mobileye for the tragic accident), Mobileye quickly inked a deal with BMW and says more are in the works.

Other Israeli startups with innovative offerings for cars were on display at this yearâ€s OurCrowd shindig. A common theme was improving safety in one way or another.

Take distracted driving, for example. Itâ€s not just a problem when youâ€re cradling a mobile phone on your shoulder or sneaking a peek at a text when your eyes should be on the road. Even hands-free conversations can cause problems. Thatâ€s made worse when you canâ€t hear what the other person is saying or they canâ€t understand you – a still common occurrence with car speaker phones.

VocalZoomâ€s technology dramatically improves sound quality by distinguishing between speech and background noise. The result, says VP of product Eitan David is that “you can carry on a conversation even with the window open.” VocalZoom was accepted into Hondaâ€s “Xcelerator” program and, while a development deal hasnâ€t been inked yet, Honda has been making invaluable introductions for the VocalZoom team.

Argus Cyber Security tackles safety in a different way – the company specializes in preventing your car from being hacked. “We all want our cars to be fully connected,” explained the companyâ€s CEO Ofer Ben-Noon – to the Internet, to GPS mapping, to cloud-based diagnostic systems. But that opens up the possibility of someone with ill intent taking control and, in a terrifying example, disabling your brakes on a hill. Argus works to prevent that. As autonomous driving goes mainstream, Ben-Noon pointed out, “the future will be less about traffic accidents and more about hacks.”

Engie addresses a more prosaic safety concern: keeping your carâ€s engine in tip-top shape. All cars manufactured in the last decade have a computer port where your mechanic can attach a device that downloads data about the vehicleâ€s performance, Engieâ€s Harel Meshulam told me. How is your gas mileage? Is the engine running too hot? Will your car pass the air pollution test?

Engie puts that power in the car ownerâ€s hands by selling a NIS 100 device that you attach by yourself. Engie sends the data via Bluetooth to a mobile app on your smart phone, then suggests repair shops near you that have the best price and relevant experience. Engie says it can save drivers up to 35% on vehicle maintenance costs. 100,000 users and 200 mechanics are signed up so far in Israel. Investors include Waze co-founder Uri Levine.

Sometimes the safety problem is not inside the car but with other drivers. How often have you wished you could send to the police a picture of a car parked illegally on the sidewalk or a video of that guy who cut across three lanes right in front of you and the cops could issue a ticket automatically? Thatâ€s what Capester does.

The Capester mobile app records a specially encrypted video – one that canâ€t be doctored with (“we do for videos what PDF did for documents,” CEO Ohad Maislish told me) – so that it can be used as legally binding evidence at city hall. Capester is piloting with a few Israeli municipalities plus a couple in South America. Itâ€s not just empowering for the user; cities like it too, as it results in more revenue (from tickets).

If youâ€re going to be tooling around town in your cool new car, youâ€ve got to look the part. Israeli startup pq has partnered with celebrated Israeli artist and industrial designer Ron Arad to make 3D printed glasses. They not only look and feel great, but they are custom printed for each person, so they fit perfectly. pq plans to sells its face scanning system to opticians. The glasses are then “printed” at pq headquarters and mailed back complete with the lenses.

Iâ€m not sure pq improves road safety, but my wife Jody said I was rocking a bit of a Howard Hughes Aviator vibe when I tried on a pair of Ron Arad specs. Just what you need when talking on your VocalZoom-enabled phone, clicking videos of offending drivers, while secure against hacks – all thanks to Israelâ€s surprising car tech scene.

I first wrote about the Israeli automotive powerhouse in The Jerusalem Post.

The growing phenomenon of Orthodox Jewish teenagers keeping whatâ€s been called “Half Shabbos” burst into the Jewish media several years ago. “Half Shabbos” describes someone who observes all of the Sabbath regulations except one: using his or her smart phone to send text messages.

Religious leaders reacted predictably to the revelation of what had been going on undetected right under their noses.

“It is universally accepted in the halacha-respecting community that electronics are off-limits on the Sabbath,” said Agudath Israel spokesperson Rabbi Avi Shafran.

Texting on Shabbat is “very distasteful and not permissible on Shabbos,” warned the Orthodox Unionâ€s Rabbi Moshe Elefant.

The phenomenon ”represents only the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper apathy with respect to Hashem and His Torah,” lamented Jonathan Rosenblum in Jewish Action magazine.

But what if instead of seeing Shabbat texting as a scourge to be fought, the rabbis considered “Half Shabbos” as a kind of glass half full. After all, kids using their phones on Shabbat arenâ€t leaving the fold. As one teen told the Jewish Week in 2011, “I was not driving” on Shabbat. “I was not eating non-kosher.” Just texting.

Moreover, there are fascinating, phonological reasons why texting on Shabbat has taken hold. Texting is, in many ways, more akin to spoken language than writing.

“We speak in word packets of seven to ten words,” Columbia University professor John McWhorter explained in a popular TED Talk. Texting is similar.

“Itâ€s much more loose, much more telegraphic” than the written word, McWhorter continued. Indeed, the very lack of proper punctuation, capitalization and conventional grammar in a text message reflects the speed and nature of real speech. ”Itâ€s an expansion of [peopleâ€s] linguistic repertoire.”

Shabbat, of course, is all about talking, of building human relationships because youâ€re not at work or sitting in front of the television. Is it any wonder, then, that this new form of communication is so compelling davka on Shabbat?

At the same time, thereâ€s been pushback against texting – and all use of electronics on Shabbat – from outside the religious world.

Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain is a member of Reboot, an organization which promotes the secular-friendly “National Day of Unplugging.” She opened her AOL web series “The Future Starts Here” with an episode advocating shutting down oneâ€s devices on the Sabbath.

Shlainâ€s point: Marking Shabbat as a “day of distinction” has immense value for Jews who want to bring the most relatable traditions from Orthodoxy into a secular lifestyle.

But what if you canâ€t – or donâ€t want to – entirely turn off and stop texting?

Perhaps itâ€s time to create some guidelines for “observant texting” on Shabbat. Guidelines that can help Orthodox teens feel like they donâ€t have to hide in the bathroom while “sinfully” texting their friends, and that the rest of us can use to balance between WhatsApp and whatâ€s for dinner.

First and foremost: no texting at the table during meal time. Itâ€s hard enough during the week to get members of our family to not check their phones for a few minutes between bites of tofu and rice. On Shabbat, itâ€s essential.

Second, no texting in public – even if all present are Shabbat texters. It creates a safe space where everyone knows face-to-face conversation is paramount. Thatâ€s not religious coercion: Everyone can do what they want in their own rooms. And because the rule is clear, thereâ€s no sneaking around.

Why not leave your phone at home while walking the dog or taking a Shabbat afternoon stroll? I admit this is a tough one for me and I donâ€t always stick to it. But youâ€d be amazed what a little mindfulness does when your attention is turned to your external surroundings, not the podcast voices of Jad, Ira and Sarah in your headphones.

Set “quiet hours” for texting. Just as loud music and outdoor ball playing is supposed to cease between 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm in Israel, try that with your phone. Tell your friends in advance: hereâ€s when Iâ€m taking a texting break.

No selfies: one day a week you can skip documenting (and sharing) who you met or what you ate. What happens on Shabbos stays on Shabbos.

If you leave your phone on at night at your bedside, put it on airplane mode once a week. Not only will you be spared eight hours of potential radiation danger, you will probably sleep better knowing you wonâ€t be woken up in the middle of the night by an “urgent” text from a friend.

Extend these guidelines to your iPad and other devices where it might not be texting thatâ€s the draw but checking the latest news. Sometimes thereâ€s really important stuff that breaks over Shabbat. More often than not, it can wait (at least until quiet hours are over).

As reading increasingly moves away from print towards eBooks, it seems unfair to cut access to your online library. Try limiting your phone or iPad use to your Kindle or iBooks apps if you have the willpower. Keep Chrome closed.

The future will see our phones and our brains become ever more enmeshed. Direct feeds, smart contact lenses, bio implants, automatic real time translation ala Star Trek are not just the stuff of far off science fiction.

Jewish Law today would exclude Shabbat-observant Jews from all that. Itâ€s time to start addressing not only our past but where weâ€re going.

It starts with a text on Shabbat.

These guidelines first appeared at The Jerusalem Post.

Picture of Klingon texting from istolethetv from NYC, USA (guest services) via Wikimedia Commons

Shir Friedman calls me a care-nivore. “Youâ€re someone who cares about not harming animals…but you still eat them,” she says with a smile.

Friedman wants to change all that. If Friedmanâ€s new company takes off – and judging by the rapid response to their Indiegogo campaign, I have every expectation that it will – I may be able to save some of the 50 billion chickens that are slaughtered every year for meat, while still enjoying my Shabbat schnitzel.

The company is called SuperMeat and itâ€s part of a growing ecosystem of “cultured meat” technologies where meat, be it a chicken breast or a hamburger, can be grown from a stem cell without ever hurting the animal itself. There are a variety of techniques being studied, from purely test tube chicken to research into 3D printing of living tissues.

The big idea behind SuperMeat is to take cultured chicken mass market.

Using technology developed by Professor Yaakov Nahmias of the Hebrew University, SuperMeat is inventing a kind of “oven” that can cook up my schnitzel from scratch on the spot – in a restaurant, supermarket or even at home.

SuperMeat would manufacture the oven and sell a special serum, powder or capsule containing cell samples, which you would inject into the unit. (In that way, SuperMeat becomes the “SodaStream for cultured meat.”)

“The oven makes the cells believe they are still inside the animalâ€s body,” Friedman explains – thatâ€s how they grow into real muscle tissue.

How long will it take to create my chicken dinner? Friedman couldnâ€t tell me. (Although sheâ€s hoping for somewhere between ten and thirty minutes.)

You see, this is all still in the concept stage. SuperMeat launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo just last week to raise $100,000. In less than 24 hours, forty-one percent of the total had been raised. As of this week, it was up to $78,000.

That should be enough to get to a prototype in the next year and a half, Friedman says. The full mass-market device will take closer to 5 years and require lots more money – up to $2.5 million.

How can Friedman be so sure SuperMeatâ€s super oven will work? Because SuperMeat co-founder and chief science officer Prof. Nahmias has done this before – with human liver tissue. Commercializing the technology for your local Aroma or my kitchen was a logical next step.

The cultured meat business is still in its infancy. The first cultured burger was created and eaten only in 2013. Google co-founder Sergey Brin funded the research, making that perhaps the most expensive fast food meal in history.

Getting behind cultured chicken is important for a so-called care-nivore like me. (Brian Kateman, innovation manager at the Good Food Institute, might call me a “reducetarian” – a term he coined on the TED stage for someone who aspires to eat less meat.)

I abhor the way modern industrial farming treats animals and Iâ€m well aware of the damage it does to the planet – in terms of water and land usage, not to mention the methane gas produced by those tens of billions of animals before they are brutally transformed into our dinners each year.

But despite my ideological affiliation, I just canâ€t bring myself to stop eating meat.

With a SuperMeat oven in my kitchen, I wouldnâ€t have to.

Israel has garnered a reputation lately as being a vegan hub. Tel Aviv has more vegans per capita than anywhere outside of India, Friedman claims.

Did that play a part in SuperMeatâ€s founding in the Holy Land?

Friedman says absolutely. In addition to there simply being more interest in meat alternatives in Israel – Friedman has been vegan for the last decade, company co-founder Koby Barak has eschewed meat for 15 years – thereâ€s patriotism at play.

“Imagine reading a headline in the newspaper saying Israel is saving the world from hunger,” instead of what you usually read from the Middle East, she says.

SuperMeat is focusing on chicken for now simply because there are more individual animals eaten. “For every cow slaughtered, 100 chickens are killed,” Friedman explains.

Perhaps the most interesting question about cultured meat for Jewish consumers will be: is it kosher?

SuperMeat interviewed three Orthodox rabbis – Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, Rabbi Dov Lior and Rabbi Shlomo Aviner. In a video posted on SuperMeatâ€s Facebook page, all said that not only would cultured meat be kosher, it would be parve.

That is, because the process of creating meat in a SuperMeat oven would be so different than the traditional raising (and killing) of live animals, cultured meat wouldnâ€t be considered fleishik (Yiddish for “meat”). In the video, Cherlow compared it with “the manipulative system that is used to make gelatin even from animals that are completely impure.

From there, it gets even wilder: You could conceivably create cultured pork in a SuperMeat device and it would be kosher and parve too.

Which leads to the biggest question of all – can I have a kosher bacon double cheeseburger again? (Itâ€s been 30 years, but my taste buds still remember.)

Although cultured pork would probably be banned due to its visual similarity with regular meat, from the point of view of Jewish Law, some liberal decisors might rule it OK.

Now thatâ€s something to chew on while youâ€re making your donation to SuperMeatâ€s Indiegogo campaign.

Hereâ€s a link to SuperMeatâ€s crowdfunding page.

I first contemplated a kosher cheeseburger at The Jerusalem Post.

Over the last three weeks, Iâ€ve been zapping my brain with small jolts of electricity. I bought a small device called a Thync. Itâ€s a triangular piece of plastic that looks kind of like a thinner version of the fried potato hors d’oeuvres served at Israeli weddings, only in white matte rather than greasy golden brown.

You attach the Thync to your forehead, just above the right eyebrow, using the medical grade adhesives it comes with and pair it via Bluetooth with your iPhone. The Thync mobile app then delivers a patterned dose of electricity designed to either calm you down or pep you up, depending on the setting.

The Thync is the first attempt at taking whatâ€s known as trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) mainstream. The Thyncâ€s inventors say that itâ€s safe – they point to a wealth of scientific papers with titles like “Transdermal neuromodulation of noradrenergic activity” – and add that because the power is so low, the U.S. Federal Drug Administration isnâ€t even testing it. (Itâ€s considered a “lifestyle product” rather than a mini-electroshock therapy kit.)

Still, administering electricity directly to my brain – am I crazy?

Well, not quite crazy, but sleep deprived for sure. Iâ€ve suffered from chronic insomnia for more than a decade and canâ€t get to sleep without pills. So when I heard about the Thync, my own thinking went: if this can induce drowsiness without the side effects of Ambien or Lunesta, why not give it a try?

Itâ€s not the first time Iâ€ve veered into the fringes of alternative medicine to tweak my body. In 2010, I took a dose of helminths – a type of intestinal hookworm – after reading that these therapeutic parasites, which co-evolved with the human body over millions of years (and which weâ€ve flushed away – literally – with modern hygiene), could help with auto-immune disorders like ulcerative colitis and Crohnâ€s Disease.

The treatment didnâ€t seem to make much of a difference, but it set me on a course of being a bit of a medical daredevil.

Which is ironic given that, in general, Iâ€m the biggest cynic on the block when it comes to most non-Western medicine. Iâ€m a regular reader of Skeptic Magazine and I was furious at Steve Jobs for trying to treat his pancreatic cancer with fruit juices.

But then again, science is making some remarkable discoveries about the power of the placebo.

Jo Marchant is the author of Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind over Body. Placebo painkillers, it turns out “can trigger the release of natural pain-relieving chemicals called endorphins,” she writes in Scientific American. “Patients with Parkinsonâ€s disease respond to placebos with a flood of dopamine.” Fake oxygen seems to help with altitude sickness.

To be sure, placebos are not going to cure cancer or help with heart disease. But Marchant emphasizes that patients are not being “fooled” by placebos either. “These are real, biological changes…itâ€s not all in your imagination.”

Perhaps most surprising is that placebos seem to work even when recipients know. Ted Kaptchuk heads Harvardâ€s Center for Placebo Studies. In a recent study, he found that patients suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome who were told they were getting a sugar pill reported twice as much symptom relief as those in a no-treatment group.

Is that how my brain zapping Thync works too?

If so, then I must have a pretty high level of resistance. In my first few days using the “Good Night” mode, I didnâ€t feel any benefit. If anything, it was the opposite – when the Thync ramps up its 20-minute cycle of electro-pulses, I felt an intense itching on my forehead where the device was sitting and a heavy pressure that gave me a whopper of a headache.

Thyncâ€s literature says thatâ€s normal. Still, why would I subject myself to that? My sleep didnâ€t seem to be improving.

It wasnâ€t until a few days later when, mid-afternoon, I tried the “Surge” setting – designed to provide “a rush of energy and motivation” – that I noticed a change. My mood felt brighter. I wasnâ€t tired. When I took the dog out for a walk, I had a desire to skip down the block, to sing and laugh.

Was this real or placebo?

Real, insists Thync co-founder Jamie Tyler. “Our brains already have the power to combat stress and achieve a calm state,” he says. Thyncâ€s electrical neuro-signaling, simply “invokes these mechanisms on demand.”

Dr. Roy Hamilton directs the Lab for Cognition and Neural Stimulation at the University of Pennsylvania where he says heâ€s produced some intriguing results using electrodes to stimulate the brains of healthy people. In one study, patients became more creative. Another helped them quit smoking faster.

But Hamilton wouldnâ€t give the Thync two thumbs up just yet. “Your brain is not just one cognitive function,” he said on the podcast Note to Self. “It consists of circuits modulating circuits interacting with networks. Itâ€s the most complex instrument in the known universe and weâ€re hitting it with electrical current in these pretty crude ways.”

That queued up a “surge” of a different kind – a return to my skeptical self. Sometimes you donâ€t want to be the first person beta testing an entirely new contraption.

Iâ€ve got a few more days to try out my Thync (thereâ€s a 30-day money back guarantee – helpful when youâ€re experimenting with your brain). I havenâ€t decided if Iâ€ll keep it or not.

Ask me in the morning after a night of deep Thync.

I first shocked myself for journalism at The Jerusalem Post.