Driving Along America's Most Historic Road

I am here standing on what looks to you as a regular road, but this, my friends, [music] is very much not a regular road. This is the famous Lincoln Highway. [snorts] The Lincoln Highway? What are you talking about? [music] Well, great question. Let me explain. In the year 1913, a businessman named Carl Fisher [music] had an absolutely crazy idea, and that was to build a highway connecting [music] New York all the way to San Francisco. Now, you have to understand something about America back then. [music] There were some cars, there were some roads. There was just one problem, that the roads were terrible. [music] They were filled with mud and dirt and potholes, and half the roads [music] barely connected to anything. Traveling across America by car wasn't a road trip. It was more like [music] a survival expedition. And so when Fisher proposed this highway, plenty of people weren't convinced. Who's going to pay for this? Did America really need a giant road stretching across the continent? What was the point of it exactly? But Carl Fisher was undeterred [music] because he and his partners understood something, and that is that a road doesn't just connect two places. It creates possibilities that didn't exist before. And so he was on a mission to make it happen. The problem was that he couldn't get funding for the whole project. So instead, he convinced people to fund little sections called seedling miles, just [music] enough road to show people what they were missing. And slowly, mile by mile, America began to understand. Suddenly, communities were becoming connected. [music] Suddenly, people could travel to places they couldn't before. Suddenly, businesses could and goods could move and ideas could spread in ways that it couldn't before. And before you know it, the highway took off and became the very first road, this road, the very first one that connected America all the way from the east to the west. And the man who at first was shown nothing but skepticism was celebrated as a hero [music] for the world didn't get any bigger, but people's worlds certainly did. And I think there's an extraordinary lesson here because sometimes without even realizing it, we build ourselves beautiful little islands. We get married, get a job, we buy a house, we establish a routine, we have our friends, our little shul, our [music] schedule, our familiar everything is comfortable, everything is predictable. And there's nothing wrong with any of it except that sometimes we get so comfortable on our little island that we forget that there's a whole entire world [music] beyond it, an entire world of Torah we've never explored, ideas that could completely change the way we understand Hashem, ourselves, the people around us. Sometimes we listen to the same three ideas from the same three people for 20 years straight, sort of naively unaware that there are extraordinary people out there we could connect with that could challenge us and inspire us and open our minds and our in ways that we literally never thought possible, new forms of [music] we never imagined we were capable of, entire parts of our we've never visited and why? Because we never built the roads. And building roads, it's not easy, of course. Sometimes we you have to leave your comfort zone, meet meet somebody different, open a safer you don't understand, start respecting a person from another group in so that you weren't necessarily trained in respecting or asking a question that makes you uncomfortable. I'm not [music] saying it's easy at all. Sometimes the first few miles are downright bumpy. But you know what happens when you finally build that road? Suddenly, you're making connections you've never imagined and you're discovering opportunities you never knew existed and you're seeing vistas you didn't [music] even know were there. Carl Fisher understood something more than a century ago, and that is that the greatest tragedy isn't always that there's nowhere to go. Sometimes it's that there's an entire world waiting for us and we've never bothered to build a road to get there. So build a road because you have no idea how far your Nishum can go until you give it somewhere new to travel.