Meet Hussein Jaber. He’s the manager of the Ramada by Wyndham Hotel in Jerusalem,
and every year, for eight days and eight nights, he becomes the owner of
every piece of bread in Israel. Why? Well, let’s talk about a little place called Biblical Egypt.
According to Exodus—which is the second book in what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews
call the Torah—Jews were enslaved in Egypt, and they weren’t loving that, so God decided that the
best way to convince the Pharaoh to let the Jews go would be to do plagues. And he did some
bangers—he turned water into blood, he made it rain frogs, made everybody get boils, and then as
his grand finale, God killed every firstborn son in Egypt. Seeing as the Jews, who God was trying
to help, wanted their firstborn sons to stay alive for some weird reason, God gave them what
today we would call an epic lifehack: if they put lamb’s blood above their door, their houses would
be passed over when the angel of death came to do the whole firstborn son murder thing. By following
this one simple trick that Pharoahs don’t want you to know, the Jews ended up freed from slavery
with their firstborn sons intact. The thing was, they had to leave Egypt very quickly—so quickly,
in fact, that according to many tellings, they did not have time to let their bread rise, or leaven.
All of which is why, each year, Jewish people celebrate Passover, commemorating their exodus
from slavery in Egypt, and commerorating the fact that God only murdered the sons of everyone else
in Egypt. And as part of Passover, to honor the fact that the Jews didn’t have time to let
their bread rise when they fled, Jews are not allowed to have any leavened food—also called
chametz—during the period of Passover, which is either eight days or seven days depending on
which flavor of Jewish you happen to be. This rule is specifically decreed in Deuteronomy,
with a speech given by Moses in which he says “Seven days shalt thou eat unleavened
bread therewith… and there shall be no leaven seen with thee in all thy borders seven days.”
Basically, not only could they not eat leavened stuff they also couldn’t have any leavened stuff.
The trouble is… leavened stuff is, like, great. And lots of Jewish people, like lots of not Jewish
people, keep a lot of it in their homes. And if you’re a Jewish business—say a restaurant,
or a hotel, or, god forbid, a bakery—you might have thousands and thousands of dollars worth
of chametz to unload. For a while, some Jews would—and some still do—destroy their chametz. But
this was wasteful and burdensome and all around not ideal, so over time, Jewish law provided a
different solution: Jews didn’t have to have no chametz in their home, they just couldn’t own any
chametz that may be in their home—which seems like a small, perhaps even useless distinction. I mean,
what are you gonna do, sell all the chametz in your house to a non-Jewish person, wait eight
days, and then buy it back from them, all without it actually leaving your house? Yep. That’s
exactly what you do. Now, let’s talk about Israel. Israel, as you might know, is a country located
around here—I’m not gonna pick an exact map to show because I don’t feel getting canceled
today—but I can confidently say that Israel is chock full of Jewish people, meaning that come
Passover, it’s chock full of chametz that needs to be unloaded—an estimated $300 million worth. Which
is why, each year before Passover, the Israeli Minister of Finance signs documents giving the
chief rabbis power of attorney over all chametz in the country—basically, power to sell it. But,
there’s the problem: who to sell it to? Who would want to buy $300 million worth of leavened bread
that’s sitting in random people’s homes and businesses? Hussein Jaber does. Each year,
Hussein, a non-Jewish Israeli hotel manager, signs documents legally purchasing all $300 million of
chametz. To be clear, the chametz does not move—it stays in the pantries and refrigerators and couch
cushions it was always in—but legally, Hussein owns it. Why does he do this? Seemingly it’s
just to be helpful—and maybe because it gives him eight days to have a really confusing LinkedIn job
title. Of course, this random hotel manager can’t actually afford to throw $300 million away buying
the sourdough in random people’s fridges, but there’s an easy fix: the government allows him
to provide a down payment of about $14,000, with the supposed intention that he will
ultimately pay the rest of the money later. But, inevitably, he can’t actually get $300 million,
and so after 8 days, he sells the chametz back to the people whose houses it never left, gets
back his down payment, and waits until next year to once again become an all-powerful bread owner.
While this country-wide system is unique to Israel, iterations of it exist wherever
Jewish people do. For 40 years, the same real estate broker, John J Brown, bought all the
chametz in New York City from a collection of rabbis whose congregants individually signed
documents giving them power of attorney over their chametz. Some other, perhaps less strict,
Jews may opt to have a friend venmo them one penny with the subject line “buying all the chametz in
your house,” and then after Passover, get sent back the penny, thus selling the chametz back.
Of course, there’s also another method for what to do with your bread, whether you’re Jewish or not:
spend it on a subscription to Brilliant. Recently, I’ve been using Brilliant to learn about something
I knew almost nothing about before: throwing rockets into space, using a course designed
by my actual real-life friend, Brian from Real Engineering. I started by learning about orbits
and rockets, then moved to centripetal motion, and finally to material limits, and it was
awesome—engaging and interactive, and in the end, I got to really understand something new.
And that’s what Brilliant is best at—whether you want a refresher on everyday math, or you want to
tackle machine learning, Brilliant has awesome, bite-size courses for you. I’ll often find
myself using stuff I learned in their statistics fundamentals course to try to analyze performance
on my YouTube videos, helping me better figure out how to pick topics and optimize their titles
and thumbnails. Whatever you want to learn more about in STEM, Brilliant is the way to do it—to
get started, click the button on-screen or go to Brilliant.org/HAI. The first 200 of you to use
that link will get 20% off a premium subscription, and you’ll be helping support our channel.