Walk Out The Door

One of my most influential mentors is a guy named Joel and he’s developed the nick name Indiana Joel for a reason. His family and mine lived together in Jerusalem years ago. We were there making documentaries regarding archaeology and linguistics regarding the Bible and its history. And I’ll never forget one spring near Passover, we had heard a rumor that some Orthodox Jews were going to perform a lamb sacrifice, which, wasn’t something they really did publicly for a few thousand years as far as we knew. So that evening Joel just walked out the door with a camera and said “no idea if I’ll find anything but, here goes.” And he left. Hours went by and we heard nothing. Finally that night he burst back through the door with an insane look in his eyes, walked over set the camera in front of me, popped open the viewfinder and hit play. Apparently what had happened was he walked to the super ancient part of the city knows as “the old city”, through a labyrinth of stone and at one point he saw a bunch of Orthodox Jews go into a building together, so, he just followed right behind them, he said one guy was holding a little Metal brief case and he suspected maybe it had the knife in it. He continued to follow behind them until he found himself in a grassy courtyard in between apartment buildings. We’d navigated through the city countless times and never knew this place even existed. Joel kept his distance at first but suddenly he noticed a man holding a lamb in the middle of the crowd, so he moved in closer, no telling why they let him but if he didn’t try he’d never know, but Joel walked up within 2 feet of the lamb with his camera in hand and captured one of the most powerful land ancient traditions in human history. I was shaking as I sat there in our apartment staring at the tiny viewfinder of that camera. And a few years later that footage eventually became the centerpiece of a documentary we would later work on about sacrifice. This sort of thing with Joel didn’t just happen that once, it happened almost constantly. And the stories I have from that time in my life living with Joel are endless. It’s because he just tried stuff, he went for it, sure lots of things he tried didn’t work but even then they almost always led to an understanding that opened other doors he wouldn’t have known about had he never tried anything. You can easily spend an entire lifetime wondering about the what if’s and we talk ourselves out of so much. If you really want to move forward, grab your camera and walk out the door.