Create Your Fate

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

-Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

I don’t want to tell you that luck doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Things happen that are beyond our control. We can’t be sure of any of the surprises waiting down the line. But we can create a fate for ourselves by making major moves and decisions. By marrying a particular someone. Or by changing countries, for example, as I did when I moved from Canada to Israel when I was almost eighteen. What would have happened had I stayed in Ottawa? I might have ended up a chemical engineer in Timmins, Ontario, married to a hard-hearted redhead (as I once dreamed). Almost certainly I would have had to endure 52 freezing cold Canadian winters and probably would have gone to synagogue 3000 times. But the moment I settled in Israel in 1969 I took some control over my destiny.

Four years later, in the fall of 1973, I had to get out of town. Out of Jerusalem. To run away from my bum years. To start over.

Many years later, in the 1990s, I was at a large scientific convention in Tel Aviv, listening to the Chief Scientist giving a talk about the future of technology. At some stage I recognized his voice. Hey, that’s Dr. Shuki Gleitman on stage! From my chemistry class at Hebrew University!

Two decades had passed and this talented army captain had gone on to become the chief scientist. I was very proud of him. So at the intermission I went over to say hello. He spied me among a group of two dozen well-wishers. “Do you see that guy over there?” He smiled at the crowd. “Twenty years ago he was the worst student in the history of Hebrew University. A bum. And look at him now. A professor. A professor!” People shrugged their shoulders in disbelief. “What is the world coming to?” was written on their faces.

Photo: In Jerusalem, 1973. The bum years.

Mercifully, Shuki changed the subject and I slithered away. He was partly right, of course. I was one of the worst students ever to set foot in the hallowed chemistry department of Hebrew University. Shuki might have told the crowd about the time I made a comment that caused one of our boring professors to quit teaching. He could have mentioned the time students saw me in the library and went to look for a thermometer to take my temperature. Or when I thought I had aced my physics exam only to find out that I had received a failing grade of 38. (When I complained about my mark the professor said “You are right. You don’t deserve a 38. You actually got 37, but that was the cutoff and I didn’t want to give you a zero.”).

In Jerusalem I was an undergraduate disaster. I broadcast disinterest. I brought my dog to the lectures. I sat reading Kafka in the front row of our thermodynamics class (prominently, so the teacher could see). As a sophomore I blew up a laboratory. The Dean blew up at me when I went to complain about how boring the lessons were. “Why should I listen to anyone with marks as bad as yours?” I somehow muddled through, studying biochemistry in my senior year. It was a new field, more interesting, and taught by professors with passion. I managed to graduate.

But what prospects did I have with my barely-scraping-through degree? Few. There were only mediocre positions open for the likes of me. One came from Tel Aviv. Professors Ilan Friedberg and Ralph Shine were looking for a master’s student to work on the cell membrane of an unimportant bacterium whose biggest claim to fame was a long name: Micrococcus lysodeikticus. (Mercifully, scientists shortened the name but only after I ceased working on the subject.)

I went for my interview at Tel Aviv University. A campus in the making with such large open spaces that I once got hit by lightning. My meeting with the professors went well. I thought that I had done a good job covering up my bum years. But in hindsight they must have been so desperate that they accepted the likes of me, albeit on probation.

A week later the Yom Kippur War broke out and it would be another four months before I moved to Tel Aviv, barely knowing a soul. I began studying for my masters. In earnest, this time. You are probably thinking that I ended up enjoying great success in the laboratory of Ilan Friedberg. I didn’t. I ended up discovering something that no one was interested in. But my biggest achievement was getting out of Jerusalem in the first place. And meeting the two mentors who would go on to change my career.

By moving to Tel Aviv I created a fate for myself. And it wasn’t such a bad fate after all.

Oh, and one more thing. I wasn’t a total bum in Jerusalem. I was a bum in all the regular chemistry classes because they were so mundane and uninteresting. In my senior year I had the opportunity to take an elective graduate course on how life started. “Wow,” I must have thought, “that’s an odd subject”. Of course if you’re religious, it’s open and closed. But if you don’t believe that the living world was created from scratch 5800 years ago then how on earth was it created? How did life come to exist? There was a planet earth for the last 14 billion years. During ten billion of those years there was no life that persisted to this day. But around four billion years ago, the first microorganisms appeared. How did that happen? That’s another story. And an unexpected course that changed the course of my life.