Part 1:
The Business Case For Pattern Recognition
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, ?
What comes next?
Prime numbers: divisible only by 1 and themselves. The answer is 13. This is a standard question on the GMAT, the entrance exam for MBA applicants. But the question the GMAT is really asking is not about prime numbers. It is about pattern recognition.
The architects of the GMAT understood that business excellence is, at its core, pattern recognition. Every experienced operator, investor, and strategist will say the same thing: the deal that succeeds is usually one you have seen before, in some form. The MBA curriculum does not teach individual businesses. It teaches the pattern underneath them, so that when you encounter it again, in a different industry, a different country, a different century, you recognize it immediately.
One of the most powerful patterns in business is the network effect. Simple idea: some products and services become more valuable the more people use them. Not just bigger or more profitable. Actually more valuable to each individual user, because of the people around them.
The telephone is the clearest example. Imagine being the first person to own one. Who do you call? The telephone is worthless in isolation. Its value exists entirely in connection. Every person who buys one makes every other telephone slightly more useful. By the time millions own one, the original device is incomparably more valuable than on day one, even though the device itself has not changed. The fax machine worked the same way. Email worked the same way. Businesses resisted fax machines for years, not because the technology was bad, but because there was no one to fax. The moment a critical mass adopted them, the holdouts had to follow, and the value of every existing machine rose.
Modern platforms make the pattern unmistakable. Google improves the more people use it: every search tells Google what people click and what they ignore, making the next search more accurate for everyone. More users produce better data, better data produces better results, better results attract more users. Airbnb runs from both sides: more travelers attract more hosts; more hosts attract more travelers. Uber accelerates this in real time: more riders mean more drivers, more drivers mean shorter waits, shorter waits attract more riders. In a city where Uber has scale, you wait three minutes. Where it does not, you wait twenty. The difference is the network. Amazon added a layer its competitors have never replicated: user reviews. Every customer who leaves a detailed review makes Amazon more useful for every future buyer. That accumulated trust is itself a network effect, built not from transactions but from participation.
The common thread: a network’s value lives in the relationships the product enables. Once a network reaches scale, it becomes very difficult to displace. A competitor must replicate not just the technology but the entire web of relationships that makes it worth using.
In the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition course I co-teach at Reichman University, we recently studied a business no one associates with Silicon Valley: a waste brokerage. Unglamorous on the surface, a middleman negotiating trash-hauling contracts for multi-location clients like banks. A single bank branch has almost no leverage with a local waste hauler. A broker representing dozens of banks across dozens of cities has enormous leverage, and the more clients it adds, the more leverage it gains. More clients mean more volume, better pricing, which attracts more clients. The cycle is self-reinforcing.
When the students saw it, they recognized the pattern. This was a network-effects business, running the same structural logic as Uber and Amazon in a less glamorous wrapper.
That is precisely the point. Pattern recognition in business means seeing the structure beneath the surface, wherever it appears, regardless of industry. This is also one of the central purposes of Jewish heritage.
Part 2:
What the Haggadah Is Actually Teaching
Passover is not only a history lesson. It is also a pattern recognition exercise.
The Haggadah asks us to relive the Exodus: “In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he personally left Egypt.” This is a cognitive instruction. We are being trained to see ourselves inside a recurring structure, not as passive recipients of a story, but as participants in a pattern still unfolding.
The Sages make this explicit in their debate over how many miracles occurred. The minimum count is ten plagues in Egypt and fifty at the sea. One opinion holds that each plague was actually a composite of five distinct miraculous acts, yielding 250 miracles at the sea. The disagreement is really about vision. The Sages are teaching us to look past the headline miracle to the miracles nested inside it. To see what is hidden inside what appears.
The daily prayer of Modim reinforces this: we thank G-d for “His miracles and wonders that are with us every day.” Passover trains us to see the hand of G-d in historical events. The discipline is to make that vision habitual.
But the Haggadah encodes something beyond vision. It encodes responsibility. The central commandment of the evening is to tell the story, not simply to know or believe. Vehigadta Le’vincha: and you shall tell your child. The verb is active and relational. It requires a speaker and a listener. It demands transmission across a generation gap.
In that sense, this article is itself an act of haggadah. The goal is to point at what is happening around us and say: look, this is what the hand of G-d looks like in history. This is the pattern. This is what you need to be able to see. That obligation falls on every Jewish parent and teacher, not once a year at the seder table, but whenever history offers a teaching moment. And this year, history is not being subtle.
Part 3:
The Pattern, Applied to Iran With that lens,
consider the historical patterns in the current war with Iran.
(1) The Miracle Within the Miracle
Iran has launched multiple massive missile barrages at Israeli cities. The scale of ordnance deployed should have produced catastrophic casualties. By actuarial logic, the death toll should be vastly higher than it has been. Iron Dome is part of the explanation, but only part. The fuller accounting requires counting the miracles within the miracle: the missiles that misfired, the trajectories that shifted, the bomb shelters people reached in time.
A piece of a missile landed fifty feet from the shelter where my family had taken cover. Another fragment struck a house two blocks away, and the family inside was in their shelter and was saved. Each of these is hashgacha pratit, divine providence operating at the level of individual families in real time. These are the 250 miracles at the sea.
(2) Pharaoh’s Stubbornness as a Pattern
The Haggadah describes Pharaoh’s hardened heart as a sequence. Each plague tightened the pattern: damage, relenting, retraction, entrenchment. The Egyptians paid an ever-escalating price for a ruler’s refusal to release power and ideology. The Iranian regime is following an identical script. It will degrade its economy, exhaust its population, and absorb military setbacks before it releases its ideological grip. Pharaoh destroyed Egypt before he freed the Jews. We should not be surprised if Iran follows the same arc.
(3) Amalek and Irrational Hatred
Amalek attacked Israel after the Exodus without provocation. Israel posed no territorial or economic threat. The attack was ideological, a hatred that required no material justification. Iran shares no border with Israel. The destruction of the Jewish state confers no territorial gain on Tehran. The hostility is an identity. This is the Amalek pattern, and recognizing it matters: rational negotiation alone will not resolve it, because the hatred is not rational in origin.
(4) We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
The Midrash identifies Datan and Aviram as the Jews who returned to Pharaoh to report that the Israelites were fleeing. Jews undermining Jews is, tragically, a recurring motif. Today we see it in Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has used his platform to block military aid to Israel, and in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who has declined to advance Trump’s budget request, which would provide support for the Jewish state at a moment of acute need. Jewish leaders using national power against Jewish interests.
(5) The Erev Rav: The More Dangerous Voice
Datan and Aviram were identifiable known quantities, operating in open opposition. The Torah describes a more subtle and more corrosive threat: the Erev Rav, the mixed multitude that joined the Jewish people at the Exodus. They left Egypt voluntarily. They stood at Sinai. They were, by all appearances, part of the camp. When pressure came, they became the engine of the Golden Calf, using the language of the community to pull it in a destructive direction.
The modern Erev Rav belong to a different category than the Bernie Sanderses of the world. Sanders falls into the Datan and Aviram category: visible, nameable, operating in recognizable opposition. The Erev Rav analogue today is the Jewish intellectual, the Jewish academic, the Jewish organization that invokes the language of Jewish values, of tikkun olam, of justice and proportionality, to delegitimize Israel’s right to defend itself. They speak from inside the camp. They cite Jewish sources. They present their opposition as itself a form of Jewish commitment. That is precisely what makes them more corrosive.
This is a pattern worth teaching our children to recognize. Not with hostility toward every internal critic, but with clarity about the difference between genuine dissent and the use of insider language to advance an agenda that is, at its core, opposed to Jewish survival.
(6) The Silence of the Just
During Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the liberal world was vocal. Protest marches filled the streets of London, Paris, and New York. University campuses held encampments. Editorials demanded ceasefires. The charge was consistent: Israel, in targeting Hamas military infrastructure, was causing civilian casualties, and that was intolerable.
That critique deserves a serious response, and Israel has given one repeatedly. But set it aside and ask a different question: where are those same voices now?
Iran has launched waves of ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, area weapons aimed at civilian population centers and designed to kill indiscriminately, not precision strikes on military targets. The people of Rehovot, Tel Aviv, Beersheba, and Jerusalem have spent nights in shelters while munitions rained down on residential neighborhoods. By the logic applied to Israel in Gaza, this should produce outrage: marches, editorials, emergency UN sessions, demands for accountability.
It has produced silence.
When Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard University, was asked at a congressional hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment, she responded that it depends on context. She ultimately resigned. But the underlying principle she articulated, that the same standard does not apply uniformly, that context determines whether Jewish suffering counts, has not gone away. It has become the operating assumption of much international commentary on this war.
We have seen this before. The Western world’s silence during the Holocaust was largely the silence of indifference. Today, an Iranian missile landing in a Jewish neighborhood produces far less moral energy in progressive circles than an Israeli airstrike on a Hamas command center. The double standard is visible, measurable, and consistent.
The Haggadah reminds us that we have always been alone in a particular way. “Go and learn what Lavan the Aramean sought to do to our father Yaakov”: even those who appeared to be family, who housed us and broke bread with us, acted ultimately in their own interest. The world rallies to our cause when its interests align with ours, and falls silent when they do not. The justice fighters are present and active wherever the cause serves their framework; Jewish suffering falls outside it. We should not be surprised. The Haggadah told us to expect it. That silence is information. Read it accordingly.
(7) Protection and Responsibility: The Role of Human Action
The Jewish people were told to mark their doorposts and remain inside during the tenth plague. Protection demanded action. This is mirrored today in the requirement to enter bomb shelters. Even within a framework of divine providence, human responsibility remains central. Trust in protection does not replace precaution. The two operate together.
(8) Sleep Deprivation as a Weapon
The Plague of Frogs, in the Midrash, is partly characterized by the relentless noise it created throughout the night, an assault on rest and sanity. Israelis living under missile threat understand this weapon intuitively. The siren in the middle of the night is a psychological instrument as much as a physical danger. It degrades judgment, erodes resilience, creates constant low-grade fear. The Americans understood this when they blasted rock music around Manuel Noriega’s compound until he surrendered. Terrorization through sleep deprivation is an old pattern.
(9) “In Every Generation”
The Haggadah states explicitly that in every generation, forces rise to destroy the Jewish people, and G-d saves us from their hands. The Iranian regime is the latest iteration of a recurring pattern. We are not navigating unprecedented terrain. We are navigating familiar terrain we have navigated before, and survived.
Part 4:
The Two Generations: Who Actually Enters the Land
There is one more pattern from the Exodus that deserves careful attention, because it speaks directly to where we are headed and the Haggadah’s focus on imbuing the next generation with Jewish identity.
The adults who left Egypt had witnessed the ten plagues. They walked through the split sea on dry land. They saw water turn to blood and darkness cover the land. By any measure, they were the generation of miracles. And yet they did not enter the land of Israel. Their children did.
The reason is straightforward. The adults had been formed by Egypt. They knew what stability felt like, even oppressive stability. When they were hungry in the desert, they remembered the fleshpots of Egypt. When they were thirsty, they wanted to go back. When Moses disappeared for forty days, they built a calf, because the uncertainty of freedom was more frightening than the predictability of slavery had been. They were decent people whose psychology had been shaped by a world they could no longer return to, and that shaping proved to be the obstacle.
The Western approach to Iran today reflects the same psychology. The current arrangement, however unsatisfying, is knowable. Oil flows. The regime is contained, more or less. A nuclear-capable Iran is genuinely catastrophic, but it is not yet real, and the cost of confronting it is immediate and certain while the threat remains, for now, theoretical. So the instinct is to negotiate, to offer sanctions relief, to maintain the existing framework. In many cases this reflects the psychology of people formed by a world where the status quo felt manageable, the psychology of the desert generation, always calculating the cost of the journey against the remembered comfort of Egypt, even when Egypt was a house of slavery.
Their children had no such calculation to make. They had grown up in the desert. They knew no other world. When Yehoshua led them across the Jordan, they fought with the orientation of a generation that had no prior world to return to. They were formed by the journey, not by what preceded it. And they took the land.
Our children are being formed right now by exactly this process. They are growing up inside a series of world-altering events: the Covid pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, October 7th, the first Iran war, and now the second. Each has stripped away another layer of the illusion that the world is stable, predictable, and essentially safe for the Jewish people. They are not growing up with the pre-October 7th story about the Oslo Accords and making peace with our enemies. They cannot. They have heard the sirens. They have felt the tremors of exploding munitions. They have grown up knowing that the threats are real and that the defense of the Jewish people is not an abstraction.
That is a hard education. It is also a forming one. The generation being shaped by these events will not have the option of believing in managed deterrence as a permanent solution. They will not talk themselves into appeasement the way Western foreign policy establishments do, because they have skin in the game that cannot be negotiated away. They are developing, whether they chose it or not, the clarity of people who have no prior world to go back to.
We believe they will fight for this land with the tenacity and resolve of that generation of children who crossed the Jordan. They are learning to see the enemy clearly. They are learning what it costs to exist as a Jewish state. And they are learning it young enough that it will shape everything that comes after.
This is vehigadta lebincha in its deepest form. We do not tell the story to preserve memory. We tell it so that our children develop the eyes to see their own moment inside the pattern. So that when they face their Jordan, they will recognize it. And cross it.
Part 5:
What Pattern Recognition Demands of Us
In business, pattern recognition is only valuable if it leads to better decisions. Seeing the network effect in a trash brokerage matters only if you price it correctly, structure the deal appropriately, and invest with that understanding embedded. Recognizing the pattern is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.
The same logic applies here. Recognizing the Passover pattern in the current war demands action.
It means counting the miracles, not taking survival for granted. It means understanding that regimes with hardened hearts are unlikely to soften. It means naming internal undermining for what it is, whether it comes from open opponents or from voices inside the camp who use our own language against us. It means fulfilling our human obligation: entering the shelter, marking the doorpost, taking the precaution, even while trusting in divine protection. It means reading the silence of the world clearly, without illusion but also without despair.
And it means telling the story. To our children, at the seder table and beyond it. Not as a recitation of ancient events, but as a living map of the present. We are inside this story. The pattern is active. Seeiitamar frng it, and transmitting what we see, is the obligation.
We know how the story ends. We are obligated to see ourselves inside it.
Wishing you a happy Chag HaGeulah.