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“How did you go bankrupt?”

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“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

 

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point captures a paradox at the heart of change. We imagine revolutions – technological, social, or political – as explosions. But Gladwell’s central insight is subtler: change is often a slow boil. Beneath every dramatic moment lies an invisible architecture – small forces accumulating, conditions converging – until a threshold is quietly crossed. Then, and only then, the world appears to shift all at once.

In an era obsessed with virality and instant disruption, we tend to misread revolutions as spontaneous. But most transformations follow Hemingway’s trajectory: first gradual, then sudden.

Consider artificial intelligence. ChatGPT seemed to emerge overnight in 2022. In reality, its foundations were decades in the making: Geoffrey Hinton’s pioneering neural network research in the 1980s, the founding of OpenAI in 2015, and years of algorithmic tuning. The tipping point came when three forces converged: GPU-powered computing, the proliferation of data from the internet, and scalable cloud infrastructure. What looked like a leap was the culmination of long, quiet progress meeting the right conditions at the right time.

The same applies to geopolitics and war. The open nissim geluyi in the IDF’s precision and choreography of operations in mission Am Kelivi, can appear seamless and instantaneous. But such success stems from years of intelligence gathering, strategic planning, and logistical groundwork.

Bill Gates famously observed, “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” We crave quick results, but underestimate the power of compounded, deliberate effort. Tipping points are not magic. They are earned.

Gladwell explains how change erupts. Eric Hoffer, in contrast, helps us understand who fuels revolutions—and why. In his 1951 classic, The True Believer Hoffer explored the psychology behind mass movements. His unsettling conclusion: revolutions are driven not by the destitute but the dislocated. Mass movements rarely emerge from those at rock bottom. They are fueled by people who feel displaced – those who once had a role, an identity, a future they recognized, and now see it slipping away. It is not desperation, but disillusionment, that makes them ripe for revolution.

These individuals seek escape, not ideology. Movements offer transformation, turning resentment into purpose and disorientation into loyalty. Hoffer showed that people leap between ideologies – communism, fascism, religious extremism – not because of belief, but because these movements provide meaning and replace lost identity.

Post-World War I Germany was a nation in crisis – economically strained, politically fractured, and socially humiliated. Into this fertile ground of resentment and uncertainty stepped Adolf Hitler, offering a narrative of restoration, identity, and blame. His message struck a chord with a populace disillusioned by defeat and upheaval. It was this collective disillusionment, that gave Hitler the opportunity to channel grievance into revolution. The loss of national identity and pride in the wake of World War I created the psychological soil in which extremism could take root.

The Protestant Reformation followed a similar pattern – a movement by the educated, not the poor and powerless. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517 struck a chord with educated Europeans disillusioned by Church corruption. The printing press amplified the message, but the resentment was already there. The Theses didn’t spark discontent – they focused it.

David’s initial rise (l’havdil) followed a similar pattern. His first militia was formed from society’s margins: “Everyone who was in distress, and every man who had a creditor, and every man of embittered spirit, gathered themselves to him, and he became a chief over them; and there were about four hundred men with him” (Shmuel 22:2).

Analysts use Hoffer’s ideas to explain Donald Trump’s rise. His supporters were not destitute but felt abandoned – culturally and politically displaced by a changing world and disregarded by elite institutions. Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” What Trump offered was not ideology but a narrative: betrayal, reclamation, and blame. His appeal, like Hoffer’s archetype, was emotional, not rational.

We can see this pattern with haunting clarity in the story of Korach’s rebellion. On the surface, Korach’s critique was about equality: “All the congregation are holy… why do you raise yourselves above the assembly?” But beneath the rhetoric lay ambition. Korach, a Levite with status, was aggrieved over being passed over for leadership. According to Midrash, his grievance was rooted in being overlooked for a political appointment. Adding to this was a deeper humiliation: as part of the Levite induction, he had been shaved entirely. And his wife mocked him for being bald. His rebellion was not for the people –it was for his dignity.

His timing was calculated. He struck at a moment of collective disillusionment. The Jewish People had just been condemned to wander the desert for 40 years. Their hopes shattered, their morale low, Korach sensed an opportunity. His allies, Datan and Aviram from Reuven – a tribe with grievances. Their privileges had been systematically redistributed: the priesthood to Levi, the crown to Yehuda, and the double portion to Yosef. Reuven had heritage but no inheritance. Their alignment with Korach was ironic, even tragic. The very tribe that displaced them now invited them into revolt.

This is how mass movements form: personal grievance wrapped in public cause, private shame masked by collective righteousness. Korach didn’t offer a plan, just a question: Why them? Why not us?

The Torah goes deeper than Gladwell or Hoffer. It doesn’t stop at how or who – it demands we ask: Why now? Why were the people vulnerable? Why did the rebellion fail?

 

The Mishna teaches that any dispute not for the sake of Heaven will not endure. A dispute for Heaven asks, ‘What is right?’ A personal dispute asks, ‘Who is right?’ Korach’s words sounded principled, but his motive was ego. His followers were not true believers in his couse – they were simply disillusioned. And disillusionment, when paired with exhaustion, makes rebellion dangerously easy

Even after Korach was swallowed by the earth, the people remained confused, blaming Moses and Aaron: “You have killed the people of the L-rd” (Numbers 17:6). Even after the miraculous blossoming of Aharon’s staff, a divine confirmation, they cried, “We are dying… we are lost!” The rebellion had ended. The unraveling had not.

This is the essence of tipping points: the explosion is not the cause, but the symptom. The crisis is never just what happens. The true crisis is what happened that led to the tipping point.

The destruction of the First Temple was political on the surface—Babylonian siege, failed diplomacy – but the prophets point to deeper decay: idolatry, injustice, spiritual emptiness. The final blow came after the people self-destructed. As the Midrash says, “You killed a dead lion. You ground already ground flour. You set fire to a burned city” (Eicha Rabbah 1).

The tipping point is not where the story begins. It is where the truth is exposed. Often, it is not the enemy that brings us down – but the hollowness within.

Today, many are shocked by antisemitism on college campuses and the political rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani. October 7 may have marked a tipping point, but its roots run deep. These ideologies – antisemitic, anti-Western, anti-capitalist – have incubated in universities since the 1960s.

As early as 1964, James Burnham warned in Suicide of the West that intellectual elites preaching liberalism will lead to our society’s decline. “After all,” he wrote, “has not Satan always been known to be the most intelligent of created beings; and was it not by leading them to eat of the Tree of Knowledge that he drove Adam and Eve from Paradise?”

Because in the end, the most dangerous revolutions are not those around us. They are the ones inside us.


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Itamar Frankenthal is an electrical engineer and entrepreneur who helps professionalize and scale small businesses. Frankenthal spent the last eight years in San Jose, Calif., leading a small business and is making aliyah to Rechovot. He welcomes all Jews to come home.