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Mike and I sit down one afternoon a few weeks back at The Coffee Bar‘s downtown location, chatting about AI policy debates in DC, Adas Israel Congregation, Kabbalah, Mike’s side hustle as a creator of incantation bowls, and the magical relationship between causation and coincidence.
Samuel: What brought you to the DMV?
Mike: I came here just over ten years ago to get my Master’s at Georgetown. I was a Math major and Middle Eastern Studies minor.
Samuel: What has kept you here?
Mike: I work in policy, and that’s what really drives me. Being able to work in international and governmental contexts is what I’m really passionate about. People complain about DC all the time, but I think it’s a lot better than people give it credit for.
Samuel: You work for Third Way. What is that like, particularly at this moment in time?
Mike: It’s really interesting, and I love it. Politically, we’re Democrats, but believe that we need to understand the other side and find areas of cooperation, and that that is really essential to getting politics done. I focus on artificial intelligence – so it is a really interesting time to be working on that issue. There’s an appetite for it right now.
To me, the question of whether AI serves humanity is less a question about regulation and more a question of implementation. What is AI going to be doing, and who does it serve? There are definitely places for regulation – for example, around deep fakes. [Editor’s note: Interested in AI? Read this profile from November 2024 from Ben, Jewish Tech Ethicist of the Week!]
Samuel: What does your Jewish community look like?
Mike: I’m a member of Adas Israel. It’s been seven years now. I started going with one friend, and then one friend became a group of friends with a group chat, and then the pandemic happened. I started going again, and that group reconstituted in another form. I do like to switch it up sometimes and go to Metro Minyan or Chabad. I’m a big fan of Chabad.
Samuel: Ten years in, do you feel like you’ve built exactly what you’re looking for, or is there something you’re still searching for?
Mike: I have a really good, wide network right now. I’m basically just looking at continuously expanding and refreshing it, you know? It’s hard. I’m a naturally introverted person and, depending on where I’m at in life, I will be more or less inclined to go out to services and try new things. But right now, I feel like I’m in the prime of my career, my social life, my health, so I’ve been very active in Jewish life, socializing and networking and, of course, hawking my bowls to people.
Samuel: What is feeling particularly alive for you Jewishly?
Mike: I’m really into Kabbalah and mysticism and all the ways Kabbalah can overlap with other traditions. Like, in Taoism, there’s the idea that the universe used to be all undifferentiated, and then there was some sort of split that created the yin and yang, and it was that interplay between opposing forces that created everything else in the universe.
It’s actually very similar to what Kabbalah says happened in the beginning of the universe – that there was all God in the beginning, and then there was the contraction or tzimtzum where God had to be vacated from some places, and from there comes the possibility for evil, for free will, and it is the interplay between those opposing forces that creates everything in the universe. It’s a very, very similar story.
Samuel: What was your entry point to looking at mysticism as part of your Jewish journey?
Mike: We had an expression in my fraternity, which is obviously AEPi: You get out of it what you put into it. I think that’s really true of Judaism. If you’re looking for a lot of depth, if you’re looking for wisdom and meaning, it’s not hard to find.
Samuel: You mentioned bowls earlier – what’s the story there?
Mike: After October 7th, I was trying to unplug from social media and the news for a bit. During our winter break, I was playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, which is set in Baghdad, which I loved as a Middle Eastern Studies minor. I was in this vibe and going down Wikipedia rabbit holes and sort of shutting myself off from external stimuli. I’ve always had a special interest in niche Judaica because I grew up in a mixed-faith family and didn’t have any [Judaica] growing up.
So, when I discovered incantation bowls, I was like: These are so cool. They are magic, Middle Eastern, and Jewish…and I think I need to make these. I can now practice my Judaism in a really unique way. I donate ten percent of the sales that I make to the Jewish National Fund’s Israel Resilience campaign. It means a lot to me to take a Jewish tradition that’s been lost in the Middle East and use it to preserve life in the Middle East.
Samuel: In a religious or ritual sense, how are the bowls used?
Mike: With these bowls, the tradition was that they acted as sort of a mouse trap against demons. Writing has special power – you see this reflected in Judaism in the way that a mezuzah or tefillin has writing in it. The writing on the bowl makes the bowl a sacred object. Depending on what people wanted, it would be written in the bowl and then buried underground, face down, in front of their homes. This is likely why they’re preserved and we can study them now; people weren’t putting them on display in their living rooms, they were buried outside their homes. They probably weren’t thinking that people would be digging them up a thousand years later.
Samuel: How else has the research and process of making these made its way into your Jewish practice?
Mike: If it were not for [making the bowls], I don’t think I would have anywhere near the understanding and appreciation for Psalms that I do have [Editor’s note: Mike is referring to Sefer Shimmush Tehillim, or “the Book on the Use of Psalms”]. Otherwise, it’s some random number that’s coming up during Shabbat. Instead, here’s Psalm whatever, and I know it cures hives. The uses get very, very specific.
Samuel: How do you approach the idea of magic and whether these bowls and incantations are “real” or not?
Mike: I am Jewish, and have a really deep sense of spirituality, but I don’t really believe in the supernatural, you know? Do I believe that this writing has specifically actually changed things? Not really. What I find interesting is that someone put [the incantation] in a text thousands of years ago, and it gathered dust in different archives until it was translated, and then someone – me – saw these spells during a specific time in Jewish history and asked: What if I use this to try to get this done? And [if it works] – like, that is a description of objective reality. The question is causation.
That’s what I find fascinating about these magic traditions. Because they build on collective fictions – your religious beliefs, superstitious beliefs – when you do something that is “magic,” you are actually changing reality. It’s the literal physical reality on the plate, but also the perceived reality. People could look and say: That’s not a coincidence. How can that be a coincidence? I just find that power of magic to be incredibly profound and attractive, and just impossible to resist.
Samuel: A few to close. What’s something you’re bad at?
Mike: I don’t think I’m a naturally gifted public speaker. It’s something I have to work on, because I actually do it for a living. I have to navigate being self-conscious, and just always try to do better than I did the last time.
Samuel: What are you feeling proud about?
Mike: I feel very good about my career right now. It’s a good time and place to be, and I’m really passionate about being involved in AI policy-making for the Democrats in this environment with an eye toward bipartisan cooperation. There’s really nothing else I would want to be doing right now.
Samuel: You’re hosting Shabbat dinner and can invite any three people. Who are you bringing?
Mike: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. His career is really impressive. He had a lot of people, in the process of building OpenAI, who were like: That’s a joke, right? That’s not happening. But he said if we don’t have the mission to build it, then how do you expect it to be built? And he was correct. I admire that, as someone who has absolutely had points in my career where I was like: What am I doing? Where do I go from here?
For the second seat, I’d invite Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens and a few other books. I appreciate the lens he brings to studying history and civilization. He points out that we need a greater appreciation for the relevance of stories, for what he calls collective fictions.
Then, I want to say Rahm Emanuel. He was one of the first niche politicians I had a good awareness of early on. I was in Chicago for college. He got me interested in – in the same way I admire Anna Wintour – people who are sharp but also cut through some of the BS.
Samuel: Last one. Finish the sentence: When Jews of the DMV gather…
Mike: I’m going to ask to play my favorite Israeli music playlist on Spotify.
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