How Fresh Is Your Coffee ?? - A Jewish Perspective

[music] I just spent some time in the city of Triest, Italy, a beautiful seaside city in the northeastern part of Italy, right by the border of Croatia. And here's something amazing about this city. This city changed the way hundreds of millions of people drink coffee every single morning. For over 200 years, ships from Africa, Asia, and South America have been unloading coffee beans right here in the port of [music] Triest. And from there, it found its way into cafes and kitchens all over the [music] world. In 1933, a man named Francesco Illy asked a question that nobody else seemed to be asking because coffee had a problem. The moment coffee beans are roasted [music] and ground, they're in a race against time, oxygen begins stealing the aroma and the flavor slowly fades away. And by the time that coffee travels across oceans and sits in warehouses and rides on trucks and finally reaches your kitchen, it isn't the same coffee that left the roster. And for hundreds of years, most people just accepted that. That's just how coffee works. But Francheso Ili refused to accept it. He spent years experimenting [music] until he developed a revolutionary pressurized packaging system that replaced oxygen with an inner gas, allowing [music] coffee to stay remarkably fresh during its journey. And that one breakthrough didn't just improve coffee, it totally transformed the global coffee industry. Today, Italy is served [music] in more than 140 countries and thousands of cafes and restaurants, hotels, and homes around the world. In fact, this hotel [music] serves it as well. And it's a life lesson. Creating something beautiful in life is only half the battle. The harder challenge is preserving it. Every Jew has moments when he feels on fire. A powerful young kipper, an inspiring sheer, a meaningful shabas. But then Monday comes [music] and you're back to the emails and the traffic and the phone and the routine. And little by little, the inspiration begins to leak away. Not because it wasn't real, but because it just wasn't protected. Just like coffee needs protection from the air around it, an ashama needs protection from the atmosphere [music] around it. Anyone can reach a great moment. The real question is, can you preserve [music] it? Can you carry it into ordinary life? Franchesco Illy didn't change the world by making better coffee. He changed it by making sure great coffee stayed great [music] until it reached the person who needed it. Maybe that's exactly what Hashem asks of us. Don't just have moments that inspire you. Become the kind of person who knows [music] how to keep that inspiration alive.