"That's a good idea, bringing things down to the local level, which is just what we're trying to do here," he said, helpfully. But there was another new guy in the crowd, sitting in the row directly behind me with his obvious friend, who was upset with what I said about the two parties being alike, and the aspersions I'd cast upon corporations, whose defense this guy leapt to like a loyal friend. He and his friend were both dressed in the casual downtime sharpness of guys who make a lot of money ordering pretty young women to type things.
"Aren't corporations people, too?" he asked. "Aren't corporations just collections of people?"
I couldn't believe that this guy had just given me an opportunity to ask one of my very favorite questions. I slowly turned completely around in my seat and fixed my gaze directly upon him.
"Are you familiar with the Jewish kabbalistic tradition?" I asked.
I didn't realize, until I was debriefing myself after the meeting, that that was the point at which several people had stood up, put on their coats, and left the building--a realization that gave me a chuckle of satisfaction. I didn't know whether they just didn't want to hear about anything associated with Madonna, or they thought I was going to leap up like some medieval wizard and turn them all into frogs. But the haste I remember is a funny indication of how scary the truth can sometimes be.
The guy gave the usual answer--"No," with a kind of nervous shaking of the head--so I settled into professor mode.
"The Kabbalah [sometimes spelled Qabala] is a Judaic mystical system based on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the language in which that ancient tribe of humans described their experience of God, in what Christians call the Old Testament. In the kabbalistic system, each Hebrew letter also corresponds to a number. These numbers have cosmic properties, and legends passed down in this tradition say that the ability of rabbis to understand this system gave them magical powers."
Those are unlikely to have been my exact words, but whatever I said, the audience was rapt.
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