About

Retirement: Done !

Entering post-retirement, I found myself with enough time on my hands to start volunteering for political campaigns and causes I felt strongly aligned with. I built a prototype contact-targeting tool -- a Google Sheets extension on the Google Apps Script (GAS) platform -- for Dr. Butch Ware's California gubernatorial campaign. Although I never finished it (sorry, Dr. Ware!), pieces of it are now being decomposed into our GAS application development platform project.

Getting On the AI Highway

I took away two key realizations from this experience. First, although I was never very good with JavaScript and web UIs, I found that -- using AI -- I could now write code at this level of the stack faster, to higher quality, and better aligned with documentation than I ever could in my days as a low-level data pipeline plumber. What a rush! (And yes, I know: data centers, water, electricity, evil, bad -- a future post will address this.)

Connecting Work With Commitment to Community

Secondly, I realized how re-energized I felt doing this kind of work. For a software contractor who spent many years working on things like video game infrastructure -- while caring absolutely zero about video games -- I started to feel real motivation. A large part of that motivation was spurred on by my absolute revulsion at seeing my country being run by Epstein-class ghouls, and my tax money squandered and sent to fund the immoral slaughters of innocents in Gaza.

All of this really disturbed me as US citizen, and as a Jew (admittedly, not a very good one, but still a card-carrying member). I started gradually realizing that my identity had been -- in the phrasing of Rabbi Yakov Schapiro -- hijacked by Zionism.

Investigations and Decisions

As I saw Israeli Zionist Rabbis and political figures justify burning children alive by casting them as Amalek, I also saw increasing numbers of my fellow Americans turn against aid to Israel (good!) But at the same time, I saw many, especially on the right, broadly and falsely paint Judaism itself as inherently supremacist and evil. (On Israeli society itself, I won't argue with you.)

Always trying to keep an open mind, I decided to give figures like Candace Owens a fair hearing. The disturbing part was that she was right about one thing: certain sects -- Chabad-Lubavitch in particular -- teach that Jews are endowed, unlike Gentiles, with a special "Godly" soul (Nefesh HaElokit -- נֶפֶשׁ הָאֱלֹקִית) that non-Jews simply lack. Yup. Sounds pretty supremacist.

She's very wrong, though, to treat that as representative of Judaism as a whole. Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewry) is just one of many communities that reject that tenet outright -- as did Maimonides, the foundational Jewish philosopher who predated this supremacist strand entirely.

All this put me in a boat similar to the one my Muslim friends find themselves in. Just as they can point to teachings like Shia Islam's liberation theology ( لاهوت التحرير الإسلامي الشيعي ) as something genuinely progressive and pro-human, they also need to spend a lot of time explaining that their faith has nothing to do with the extremism that gets falsely projected onto Islam as a whole in Western discourse.

Set against all the Amalek talk and special-soul theology, I was also learning about the pro-humanity side of my own tradition: Tikkun Olam, the imperative to repair a broken world, and the whole Doikayt movement -- the namesake of this company.

So: I found teachings in Judaism that align with my conception of morality, and also stuff that I want nothing to do with.

Un-Retirement: Not Done !

Internalizing all that, and thinking about a way forward, I landed on the obvious answer for a developer: show product, don't argue. Continuing to code away, I decided to try to build something that puts my principles into practice.

Result: this idea of a software collective with a moral-activist core -- like-minded, kick-ass developers and product managers from different religious and cultural backgrounds, collaboratively building software that helps shift political and economic power back to individuals and communities.