BRUCE LICHT
FOUNDER OF MY ELEVATOR PITCH FOR GOD, ENTREPRENEUR, AND AUTHOR
Bruce grew up in Lafayette, California and received a BA in Political Science from UCLA as well as a Graduate Gemologist degree from the Gemological Institute of America. After graduating, Bruce operated his family’s 100 year-old retail fine jewelry business for twenty-two years. Bruce had a passion for computers and graphic arts, so he changed careers and joined his best friend at a national technical publishing company for seventeen-years as the company’s Publisher, where they invented the modern labor law poster industry, including the first “All- On-One Labor Law Poster” and “Labor Law Poster Compliance Plan.”
Aside from being the Founder of this website, My Elevator Pitch for God, Bruce was the co-editor of the book titled, Elevator Pitches For God: Volume 1, and author of the cookbook titled, Immediate Chef: No Previous Experience Required.
Bruce’s goals for this website are: To introduce more people all around the world to God and strengthen the faith of those who already believe in a non-political and non-religious way, to bring people together, find common ground between different faiths, create meaning in people's lives, and start to move the world in a better direction.
You can help by sending this website to friends and family and posting it on social media!
You can also connect with the website project’s LinkedIn page below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-licht
To Read The Full Collection of Essays By The Founder, Bruce Licht
I Asked and I Received
BRUCE LICHT
I grew up in a Reform Jewish home. I went to Sunday School and Hebrew School. I had a Bar Mitzvah and was Confirmed, but in the end, it left me “empty” and I didn’t absorb a lot of it. My religion obviously wasn’t presented in a real inspiring, meaningful and memorable way. (1)
Then in September of 2019, my wife and I were traveling across Croatia with a group of twenty complete strangers, and on our last night, in an outdoor restaurant in Dubrovnik, at a large round table of ten people, someone asked this gentleman (2) sitting directly across from us, “Tell me about your religion, Judaism. I know absolutely nothing about it.” Of course, my wife’s and my ears immediately perked up.
For the next 6-7 minutes, this knowledgeable man eloquently said some beautiful things that really resonated with us. I remember my wife and I looked at each other afterwards and said, “Wow! That was so impressive!” because neither of us would have known where to start or what to say.
Soon afterwards, I started slowly reintroducing myself to my Judaism by taking a number of daily classes on the Old Testament with this new computer program I had never heard of before called “ZOOM.” (3) I kept thinking back to that night in Dubrovnik, and that knowledgeable man who so movingly talked about God and his religion. At one point, I started pulling together sentences and ideas from my notes to try to answer that big question for myself. (4)
Now I had sold my last business two years earlier, and was getting extremely bored. I clearly remember praying to God on January 5th, 2022 saying:
“God, please, give me a new idea that will provide more meaning in my life. And if that idea could somehow incorporate all of this new knowledge that I have been learning through studying the Old Testament, that would be really great!”
That same day, I left on a trip to Houston Texas. Now I’m a huge fan of Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe, from Torchweb.org, the #1 Podcast Rabbi in the world, and had a meeting set up with him the following day, on January 6th, to meet him in person.
During our meeting, I asked him, “Rabbi, what is YOUR Elevator Pitch for Judaism?” He articulately and effortlessly presented his pitch, and it was beautiful, (5) as you would expect. I then said, “What would be your Elevator Pitch for proof of God’s existence?” He said, “You know – I’ve been thinking about this question for a very long time” and he went on to give an incredibly unique idea for proof of God to him.
Well, it became immediately obvious that if 1,000 people were asked this same question, no one would say the same thing as his answer was so unique. This was an immediate answer to my prayer and it started this entire Elevator Pitch project rolling. I have never had a moment of boredom ever since. Just like the saying goes, “Ask and you shall receive!”
Footnotes:
1. I was interested in girls, my friends, sports, cars, etc. My head and heart just was not into it.
2. Leonard Jacobs
3. So I took lots of classes on Zoom, and I would write down a lot of the information that I heard. Pretty soon, this document, full of interesting information that resonated, and answered a bunch of questions for me, become over 500 pages long.
4. That’s not easy because “we” are a people, a religion, a land, a scripture, a culture, food, language, and much more. How do you boil that down into a few meaningful sentences?
5. Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe’s spontaneous Elevator Pitch for Judaism (presented on 1/6/22)
“We are the chosen nation of God. God selected us because of our illustrious antecedents to be His nation, and He will be our God. Meaning that we have a direct connection with the Creator of Heaven and Earth. We are the only Nation in history who experienced a National Revelation where He gave us the manual for living – The Torah. He gave us, and He continually endows upon us, the responsibility for all humanity and the guidelines for how to perfect ourselves, to become perfect people, to become angelic people, and how to become the people that are going to bring the world towards its perfection. So we are the vanguard, the navy seals, of the mission of bringing progress to humanity, of bringing universal morality, righteousness and justice to the world. We are the Almighty’s people and His representatives in this world. We have a direct line of communication to Him, and He is going to give us whatever tools we need to accomplish our mission. We are a Nation that lives and breathes meaning. Why was the world created? What are we here for? What are we trying to accomplish? What difference does it make if I live or die? We are the Nation that lives to the essence of what the world is all about. We are the only nation that had an Exodus from slavery, the only Nation that had a National Revelation at Mount Sinai, the only Nation that the Almighty hears whenever we cry out to Him, the only Nation that had great prophets like Moses among others, the only Nation that has the Torah. The only Nation that has mitzvahs which are direct instructions from God. The only Nation that has endured so much and preserved our core. The only Nation in history that has gone back to our land once, let alone twice. We are the oldest Nation on earth, that has and will be around forever. We are an eternal Nation. We are a unique people and we are bringing the rest of the world with us - dragging them all along with us. They don’t know it. They are coming kicking and screaming. We don’t even know it sometimes, but we are doing it.”