This must have been back in 1998 or 1999. I got a call from R’ Yisrael “Jay” Bindell (a close communal friend and local businessman, who was instrumental in the early 1970s in bringing Chabad to Albany – more about him another time) that he was hosting a Pittsburgh friend, a prominent Carnegie Mellon research scientist in the field of Artificial Intelligence (back then it sounded like sci-fi – most of us didn’t have cellphones or laptops yet) and would be nice to arrange for him to speak to the college students while he’s in town.
There was the matter of figuring out timing. Dr. Sacks had a flight out midday on Sunday, and he was Shabbos downtown in the Jewish community and had some prior commitment on Sat Night. That left Sunday morning. I told Mr. Bindell that college students do not have the “Sunday AM” time-zone. But Bindell insisted, he said we should put out bagels and lox, advertise Artificial Intelligence and students would come. (This actually was the start our first monthly, then weekly Minyan Bagel Brunch).
J. was a student who slept in on Sundays, and in general wasn’t an AM person, especially on the weekends. But he came out to this. He was a Star-Trek kind of guy, into computers and such, and was especially curious about this new and exciting field of AI. He was one of the students who came that Sunday.
Dr. Victor Sacks came, and shared his own personal story of how math and the precision of the universe led him on a journey to rediscover his Judaism in a very profound way. He went into this in great depth, and lots of math actually. Now while advanced math is at the heart of AI – he did not mention AI at all, not once.
We got Dr. Sacks to the airport. One good outcome was that we decided to keep the Minyan Brunch on once a month, and about a decade later started to do it once a way (there are two stories and two groups of dedicated students that led to that, and an alum today who sponsors it each week – all that are interesting stories for another time). But J. who never gets upset, was a little upset: “I got up for a talk on AI, and he never even mentioned it!”
Two years later I was in the dining area near the Kosher Kitchen then on Dutch Quad where I worked as mashgiach-Kosher supervisor back then. I was sitting alone at one table, and a group of Shabbos House regulars were eating lunch at the next table. A snippet of their conversation wafted back towards my table. Usually they would just chitchat casual stuff but this time they were having a deep meaningful conversation! They were discussing whether Torah and Science are in conflict. I was amazed, what an unusual conversation for Dutch Quad DIning Hall!
And then Rani F. said something quite astonishing: “I wouldn’t how to to reconcile Torah and Science myself. But about two years ago Mendel had a guest speaker at his house that was undoubtedly a serious scientist, but also a very religious Jew. It’s obvious that he found some way to work out these differences.”
I couldn’t