DAVID RENDELSTEIN
DOCTOR OF CHIROPRACTIC, AUTHOR, ENTREPRENEUR
David Rendelstein is a chiropractor and founder of ThinTech Weight Loss (thintechweightloss.com), a wellness practice based in New Jersey, where he lives and works. For years, his focus has been on the body—helping people lose weight, regain energy, and live with a renewed zest for life.
More recently, that focus has expanded to the mind, and to what’s coming for all of us. He is the author of Half of This Book Is Wrong: Reflections from the AI Inflection, written out of a concern that the rapid advance of artificial intelligence may be outpacing something slower and more fundamental — the human operating system itself. His interest isn’t in whether AI is good or bad, but in whether people will have the internal architecture to meet a world that’s changing faster than people generally do.
He has described himself, only half-jokingly, as part rabbi, part futurist, and part Luddite—someone trying to hold onto what’s worth keeping while reckoning honestly with what’s coming.
On Holy Ground
DAVID RENDELSTEIN
I am not the dramatic type.
I am not the type who feels the spirit whenever there is a draft in the room. On the other hand, I would like to think that I have been in touch with what many refer to as the still-small voice.
I have had insights and moments of gratitude. Camping in the Rockies. Watching the sunset over the Gulf. For some, that would be enough proof of God. But I am just not the dramatic type.
I cannot claim transcendence; however, I do claim a moment.
It happened in Jerusalem. I know how that sounds. It would probably be more believable if it happened at a truck stop in Iowa. But it was Jerusalem. It was an awesome experience. The plaza and the Western Wall were all lit up. I was grounded. Excited, but grounded.
And then I stepped up to the Wall, and suddenly, I wasn’t there. Don’t ask me where I went. There was a feeling of rising. There was a feeling of merging. I can’t express it in words. It seemed to only last about two seconds. Maybe not even that. I have never tried to minimize it, and I couldn’t deny it even if I tried.
My thought afterward was simply: I was standing on holy ground. A place with the ambient energy of millions of eyes and billions of prayers projected into a few square meters of stone. Monotheistic traditions say there is one God. They also say God is one. For that brief moment there did not seem to be any separation between... well, anything.
I have been handed many conceptions of God, and they have always seemed a bit simplistic—as if the metaphor was the thing itself, and not merely a tiny step toward understanding. What I experienced was not the metaphor. It felt like the full expression.
I have been back to Jerusalem several times since, hoping for a repeat—like when you will yourself back to sleep, trying to recapture the dream you lost in the waking. The last time, I drove south into the desert and sat on the edge of the Ramon Crater. I asked myself if the experience in Jerusalem was enough to prove God's existence. Not in any court, in any land, in any world. If there is a God, none of us is privy to His true nature—none of us can comprehend the “allness” of all. Not everyone gets a burning bush. But some of us are fortunate enough to get a moment.
I was asked to write an essay proving God’s existence, so here I sit—a molecule of water asked to prove the ocean. I dig absurdity, but come on. I'm sorry. I would love to, but I just can't.
I suppose people either believe there is a source to their energy, power and life—or they don't. As I said, I am not the dramatic type. But for a brief moment, I was the ocean.