In big countries, people want to feel important. In Israel, they are.

Everyday Israelis are the epitome of "big fish in a small pond."

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free and zero-advertising for all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

---

Several years ago, a friend visited me in Israel. We toured the country, north to south, east to west, hitting all the hotspots and more in about two weeks.

Toward the end of his trip, my friend remarked to me: “Israel is amazing, but it is too small.”

Small, indeed. Israel is the geographic size of New Jersey and, with a population approaching 10 million people, it pales in comparison to even countries like Chad, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Romania, and Ecuador.

But the Jewish state’s size is not what we in the hi-tech world would call a “bug.” It is a “feature” — an intended functionality that enhances the “user experience.” Hence why, whereas people in much larger countries merely want to feel important, people in Israel actually are. It’s this sort of “big fish in a small pond” mentality that routinely empowers people to over-punch their proverbial weight, regardless of privilege, lack thereof, or any other socioeconomic factors.

Just last week, Idan Amadi, a famous Israeli singer and actor, was seriously injured while fighting in Gaza. Most countries couldn’t fathom a celebrity enlisting to the front lines of combat. After all, if Amadi had wanted, he could have easily declined reserve duty or switched to a safer unit.

How bizarre these Israelis are. Indeed, there are few nations like them.

As the country deep-dove into trouble and distress on October 7th, Israel’s EL AL airplanes left Israel empty and returned full. Israelis living around the world, from New Zealand to New York, rushed to airports, eager to make their way back home after Hamas’ massacre. Other Israelis who were abroad for work or simply traveling also went out of their way to immediately return — to a war zone.

“Lone soldiers” (conscripts with no immediate family in Israel) make up more than 7,000 of the IDF’s manpower. Nearly half of them are new immigrants, coming from Jewish communities in some 50 countries. They could have easily enlisted in the armies of these countries, but they chose to come alone to Israel and serve in the Jewish one.

Israel is still one of the few countries that actually welcomes — and incentivizes — immigration, albeit Jewish immigration. Even then, the gamut is diverse, from Ethiopian Jews, to billionaires like Sylvan Adams and Hollywood superstars such as Quentin Tarantino (he married an Israeli woman) who live in Tel Aviv.

American-born Yehoshua Fass is one of the people at the forefront of Israel’s immigration charge. A few days before Passover in 2001, his rabbinic career in Florida took a sudden change of direction. It was the morning of March 28th, during the Second Intifada, and newly Bar Mitzvah’ed Naftali Lanzkrom — one of Fass’ Israeli relatives — was waiting at a gas station near the entrance to Qalqilya (about an hour-drive east from Tel Aviv) for an armored bus to take him and his fellow classmates to their high school.

A Hamas suicide bomber positioned himself among the students and blew himself up, killing Naftali and another boy, and injuring four other students. The tragedy naturally shook up Fass and his wife, Batsheva — ultimately compelling them to move to Israel.

Fass went on to co-found Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that provides comprehensive, direct guidance and facilitation of the immigration process for North American and British Jews. More than 65,000 people have moved to Israel with Nefesh B’Nefesh to date.

Dr. Ami Cohen also became a “big fish” in the small Israeli pond. After receiving his medical degree from the University of Virginia, he immigrated to Israel in 1992 and joined the staff of the Wolfson Medical Center just outside of Tel Aviv. Then, three years later, an African doctor contacted Cohen and asked for his help with two children in desperate need of heart surgery. Cohen agreed, organized flights and an approval from the hospital, and housed the children in his home during their recovery.

Cohen’s ethos, “If we can then we should,” led him to found an organization called Save a Child’s Heart, which regularly hosts children suffering from life-threatening heart conditions in Israel, while surgically treating and rehabilitating them. More than 5,000 children from 60 countries have benefitted from Cohen’s vision.

Simcha Blass is another everyday Israeli legend. He was born in 1897 in Poland to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was active in the Jewish self-defense units organized in Warsaw to protect Jews during World War I. His engineering studies in Warsaw were interrupted by the Polish-Soviet War, and Blass was recruited to the Polish Army, where he invented for the Polish Air Force a meteorological appliance, measuring the intensity and direction of winds.

In the 1920s, Blass moved to British-era Palestine and became the most renowned water engineer among the Jewish communities. He planned the first modern aqueduct in the Jordan Valley and served as the chief engineer of Mekorot (which became Israel’s national water company).

During the early 1930s, a farmer drew Blass’ attention to a big tree, growing in his backyard “without water.” After digging below the apparently dry surface, Blass discovered why: Water from a leaking coupling was causing a small wet area on the surface, while an expanding onion-shaped area of underground water was reaching the roots of this particular tree, but not the others.

This discovery provided the catalyst for Blass’ now world-famous invention: drip irrigation, which uses friction and water pressure loss to leak drops of water at regular intervals. In the late 1950s, with the advent of modern plastics, Blass worked with his son Yeshayahu to patent and commercialize drip irrigation, arguably becoming the world’s most valued innovation in agriculture since the 1930s.

Then there is Amnon Shashua, who wanted to do something about car accidents being one of the leading causes of death. In 1999, the Hebrew University professor evolved his academic research into a vision system which could detect vehicles using a camera and software algorithms on a processor — intended to keep passengers safer and reduce the risk of traffic accidents.

As of 2023, Mobileye products were installed in more than 800 vehicle models with 50-plus automakers worldwide, en route to a 70-percent market share in advanced driver assistance systems. The company’s technology could potentially revolutionize the driving experience by enabling autonomous driving as well.

There is also Tabea and Matthias Oppliger, both born in Papua New Guinea. Tabea and Matthias started their family in Switzerland, where they encountered many victims of the human trafficking and prostitution industries, who consistently told them, “We don’t need pity, we need jobs!”

So the Oppliger’s moved to Tel Aviv and built a studio to employ survivors of prostitution and human trafficking — providing them with a safe working environment and respectful living wage. They repurpose kite surfing products into upcycled retail bags. To date, survivors have made more than 42,000 bags from 20,000 kites, sails, and wetsuits.

Lastly, I want to tell you about University of the People, the first nonprofit, tuition-free accredited U.S. university. It was founded by Israeli educational entrepreneur Shai Reshef, based on the notion that access to higher education ought to be a basic right.

With programs in Business Administration, Computer Science, Health Science, Information Technology, and Education, University of the People features hundreds of thousands of students from more than 200 countries and territories. Some 16,000 of these students are refugees whose financial, geographic, political, and personal constraints would otherwise prohibit them from college studies.

Stories such as the ones above are just a few of the countless contributions that people in Israel make on a daily basis. Of course, there are many more tales of Israelis taking on some of the biggest challenges across the world and pioneering multidisciplinary innovations. And it is even believed that Israel produces more academic research than the rest of the Middle East — combined.

Sure, Moses may have led us to the only place in this region that doesn’t have any oil. Some might call it a coincidence. I call it a defining features of Israel’s secret sauce, a people that continuously do more with less in a tiny sliver of the Middle East.

---