Parshat Bo: Throw Away Your Ritalin? - Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

today a prescription for ritalin is about as common as a prescription for reading glasses now when I was young there was no return in people tell you that have they been written in back then many kids would have done much better at school they'll tell you that a DD ADHD has been there it was just undiagnosed maybe the reason there's been a large increase in a DD and ADHD is that kids minds of processing information that much faster and his teachers and communicators we're just too slow and too boring for today's generation and rather than using medication to get the brains of our children to focus our presentation and delivery will have to be much faster and much more stimulated today even very young children grasp technology with a speed and comfort that terrifies their elders how can they understand the language in the interface of these machines Dibley maybe the answer is Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware the number of transistors and a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years in light fashion microprocessor prices memory capacity sensors and even the number and the size of pixels in digital cameras are all improving at roughly exponential rates as well Moore's law has been applied not just to technology but also to accelerating change in social and cultural progress maybe we can apply Moore's law also to the processing speeds of our minds one of the minds of our children process information are much faster speeds than say thirty years ago futurists tell us that we should expect more and more profound changes in the future leading to a point of what's called singularity where the pace of change becomes so accelerated that it leads to an apocalyptic event where the world as we know it metamorphosis into something beyond our imagination now this singularity event sounds very much like an event the Jews have been waiting for for a very long time indeed it's called beer Sam or Shia the coming of the Messiah it says in this week's Torah portion and you will eat it the Pesach offering the Paschal Lamb in haste the mystical sources explain that the exodus from Egypt was experienced as a moment of singularity a moment faster than time itself a total rupture with the past racing to meet a new reality as it was in the beginning so it will be in the end this world is accelerating faster and faster - its moment of climax a world of singularity quite literally when all mankind will proclaim Hashem Akkad God is one as it says in Shara Shara the Song of Songs the voice of my beloved behold it came suddenly to redeem me as if leaping over mountains skipping over hills [Music] [Applause]