Who are we with nothing? Who are we with everything?

August’s Shabbos Read: The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad

What remains when everything we build our identity on is stripped away?

This month I’ve been been reading the work of Suleika Jaouad.

What inspires me most isn’t simply that she survived cancer.

It’s the question her story leaves behind.

Where does our worth come from?

Is it productivity?

Appearance?

Career?

Being needed?

In Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika writes about her leukemia diagnosis in her twenties. She describes it as more than an interruption. It dismantled the life she thought she was building, and when treatment ended, she couldn’t simply return to who she had been before.

Life had asked her a question she couldn’t avoid...

Who are you when everything familiar is stripped away?

Her newest book, The Book of Alchemy, explores journaling as a way of staying in conversation with that question.

For the past few months, I’ve been writing the Behaiya Journal.

The more I write, the more I realize that journaling isn’t just a way of recording a life.

It’s a way of inhabiting one.

Not because it gives us answers.

But because it helps us notice what remains after all the noise falls away.

As I sat with Suleika’s story, another question quietly emerged.

If her life asks,

Who are we when everything is taken away?

I wonder if our generation may be asked something different...

Who are we when we have everything?

Lately there has been so much conversation about artificial intelligence and the possibility that our children—or perhaps even we ourselves—could one day live in a world of unprecedented abundance.

Whether those predictions come true isn’t really the point.

What fascinates me is the question beneath them.

If productivity no longer determines our worth…

If scarcity is no longer our defining challenge…

Who will we become?

Judaism has imagined a future of abundance for thousands of years.

The prophets describe a world where swords become plowshares.

Where peace replaces violence.

Where humanity no longer lives in fear.

The age of Mashiach, Olam HaBa, the world to come, isn’t simply a vision of having more.

It’s a vision of becoming more.

A world where external struggle gives way to inner responsibility.

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A few days ago I came across a post from a local farmer that has stayed with me.

She wrote that we don’t need to fear farming.

And we don’t need to fear AI.

Both are tools.

Regenerative farming can restore ecosystems.

Industrial farming can exhaust them.

The tool isn’t the moral agent.

We are.

I think the same is true of artificial intelligence.

It can amplify creativity.

Or it can diminish it.

It can deepen relationships.

Or distract us from them.

Every technology humanity has ever created has carried this same possibility.

To cultivate life.

Or diminish it.

The question has never simply been, What can this tool do?

The deeper question is,

Who are we becoming as we use it?

I think about my ancestors often.

Many of them lived with very real physical lack.

They crossed oceans.

Left their homes.

Worked tirelessly.

Built lives they hoped their children would inherit.

Their challenge was survival.

Their faith was forged through scarcity.

Because of them, many of us have inherited something extraordinary.

Not perfection.

But possibility.

Which makes me wonder whether every generation receives its own spiritual assignment.

Perhaps theirs was learning how to survive.

Perhaps ours is learning how to live well.

Not because our lives are harder or easier.

But because history keeps asking humanity new questions.

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Maybe that’s why Suleika’s story has stayed with me.

Her illness stripped away everything she thought defined her.

She discovered that identity built on the finite could not sustain her.

Perhaps abundance asks us to discover the very same thing from the opposite direction.

One through loss.

One through blessing.

Yet both lead to the same place.

To the question beneath every human life...

Who am I when everything external falls away?

Maybe that’s what journaling has been teaching me.

Not simply to record my life.

But to become the kind of person who can receive it with open hands.