Rabbi Yonason Goldson

A rabbi walked into a bar (after hitchhiking cross-country and sailing up the eastern seaboard in a yacht seized by the Coast Guard for drug trafficking) to enjoy a private performance by a jazz band that cost him the price of a beer.

No, this isn’t a joke. This is a life. And it’s only one small piece of it.

Weaving together the ancient wisdom of King Solomon and modern research with a delightfully colorful personal narrative, Yonason Goldson demonstrates how the power of ethics and diversity can transform company culture by replacing distraction, disengagement, and conflict with passion, purpose, and productivity.

Through powerful stories of successes and failures, these keynotes will leave audiences with vivid mental models to help them navigate the waters of ethical turbulence and reach the safe harbor of prosperity and profitability. They will come away with an understanding of why compliance is often the enemy of ethics and how, by creating an ethical mindset, compliance laws take care of themselves.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson has circumnavigated the globe, seen the Taj Mahal, the pyramids of Giza, and the tea plantations of Sri Lanka. He’s hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and to the tops of the Sierra Nevada. He’s jumped out of an airplane and undergone open-heart surgery (but not at the same time).

He’s studied at the University of California and the University of Edinburgh, earned his rabbinic ordination in Jerusalem, and taught high school in Budapest, Hungary.  He’s a TEDx speaker, has published hundreds of articles and five books, raised four children, and has been married to the love of his life for over 30 years.

His eclectic background, academic discipline, and lyrical style of storytelling all combine to create an entertaining, educational, and inspirational presentation that can be found nowhere else but from the keynote speaker with 3000 years’ experience.