Every Friday for 25 years, no matter what was on his calendar, David Segal left the office before sundown.
Segal joined Rabbi Rami Goldberg on Biblical Money, the faith-and-finance podcast produced by Israel365, to talk about a career that took him from HR consultant to CEO of Investopedia and then Meetup – two of the most recognizable brands in American digital media. He wore a kipa through all of it, kept Shabbat through all of it, and will tell you without hesitation that one made the other possible.
The numbers are hard to argue with. At Investopedia, he grew the company from 20 employees and $10 million in revenue to 150 employees and $50 million. At Meetup, he inherited a dysfunctional organization, replaced all 12 of his direct reports within six months, steered the company through COVID – an existential crisis for a platform built entirely around in-person gatherings – and delivered an 800% return to investors. And he did none of it on Saturdays.
In 25 years, not one employer ever asked him to work on the Sabbath. Jewish and non-Jewish bosses alike would appear at his office door on Friday afternoons and tell him to go home.
“The more hard-charging and driven and ambitious a person is,” he told Rabbi Rami, “the more important the Sabbath actually is for them.”
What Shabbat gave him was not just rest. It was a full mental reset that his phone, his ambition, and his calendar could not touch. “I don’t wear a watch on the Sabbath because I don’t care what time it is. I’m in a totally different plane and a totally different mindset than all the rest of the days of the week.” The evil inclination – the internal pull toward distraction and compulsion – goes quiet. Family comes back into focus. The relentless internal monologue of a CEO simply stops.
This is not a uniquely Jewish experience. One of Segal’s employees, a religious Christian, came to him one day and told him that for the past three months he had been taking 24 hours completely offline – no phone, no TV, no technology of any kind. He called it transformational. And the trend is bigger than one person. Israel365’s Shabbat Table project is bringing that same experience into homes and communities across the country, giving people the tools to gather, unplug, and reconnect around a Shabbat table each week. For those looking to go deeper into the biblical foundations of Sabbath rest, Shabbat Revolution by Rabbi Elie Mischel offers a guide rooted in thousands of years of Jewish wisdom, written for Christians ready to reclaim this ancient gift.
At Meetup, Segal’s stated mission was ending the world’s loneliness epidemic. He created a platform designed to get people off technology, to pull strangers into the same room around a shared interest, a shared neighborhood, and a shared faith. The loneliness epidemic he was fighting at Meetup and the Sabbath he kept every Friday are not separate ideas. They are the same idea. Community, presence, and the deliberate choice to put down the phone and be with other human beings – that is what Shabbat is, practiced at scale, every single week.
The early Zionist Ahad Ha’am wrote that more than the Jewish people kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jewish people. Segal lives that line. And he believes it applies far beyond the Jewish world. “If all Christians, all people, ended up deciding to take on a seventh day of Sabbath, I believe how much more meaningful and happier their life would be.”
That conviction only deepened when Segal made aliyah five months ago, moving to Israel at 50 in the middle of a war. Since arriving, he and his wife have been invited to over a hundred Shabbat meals – every Friday night and Saturday for five months, almost never eating alone, surrounded by Israelis and newcomers alike who showed up at their door with food, warmth, and a place at the table. He has been hopping from community to community across the country, from Jerusalem to Zichron Yaakov, experiencing firsthand what a society built around Shabbat actually looks like from the inside.
The paradox resolves itself quickly once you try it. You think you cannot afford to stop. You stop anyway. And somehow, everything gets done.
To hear the full conversation, listen to the episode on Biblical Money, Rabbi Rami Goldberg’s podcast exploring faith, finance, Bible, and business.
