To achieve any lofty goal requires great attention to detail. When I first became a principal, the school of which I was the head was in survival mode. It barely had the funds for payroll and enrollment was low. It was the first Jewish day high school in the city and did not have much community support. My job in part was to keep it afloat and help it grow. Thank God, the school grew numerically and financially and fulfilled our dreams.
There was another level of excellence that the school experienced. To compete with an array of exemplary private high schools, we had to go through an accreditation process. All the details of the school’s operation were scrutinized. Visiting members of the accreditation committee looked at our mission statement, our course descriptions, our teacher profiles, our student acceptance rate into college, and sundry other items.
After a thorough examination, we became accredited by our regional accreditation agency, which helped with our recruitment of new students. The overall results were very good, and we accomplished our goal because we buttressed all of our observations and reports with details that far exceeded what was required.
It is this kind of attention to detail that characterized the work of those laboring on the “man on the moon” project in 1969, which enabled the United States to successfully place a man on the moon. This event is celebrated in the fascinating documentary Apollo 11.
Apollo 11 tells the story of NASA’s historic lunar landing mission. Produced from newly discovered film footage, it depicts the days leading up to the launch, the launch itself, and Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon in which he declared that, by placing one small step on the moon, he was making a giant leap for mankind. The movie concludes with the return of the lunar module to earth’s atmosphere, and its landing in the ocean.
The central characters are the three astronauts: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. But the supporting players at Mission Control also play a key role in the achievement. These employees provided the detailed information necessary for the astronauts to be successful.
The film devotes equal time to them sitting behind their computer monitors, analyzing real-time data, and relaying radio transmissions. The detail is mind-boggling. In order for the lunar module to reach the moon, it requires 7.6 million pounds of thrust to leave the earth and it has to attain a speed of 23,000 mph to break free of the orbit around the earth. These numbers are impossible to comprehend.
This commitment to an overall goal and to the details required to achieve it evoke comparisons to Judaism’s approach to leading a holy life. For example, Rabbi David Wolkenfeld discusses the admonition “you shall be holy” that appears in the Bible. Wolkenfeld remarks: “It is a brief statement that can fit on a billboard, that can even fit on a bumper-sticker.” That succinct line is the mission statement of the Jewish people.
But what does it mean? The Sages tell us that to be holy requires observance of a whole host of commandments that touch every aspect of human life: determining what we can eat, how we pray, performing an array of rituals related to the Jewish holidays, and carefully evaluating how to interact with our fellow man. In all, there are 613 commandments, not just ten. God is truly in the details of how we lead our lives.
Apollo 11 reminds us that to achieve a worthy goal requires more than just sincere resolve. Rather, it involves a commitment to details and using them to support a worthy goal, bringing it from idea to reality.
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