Ami Tobin on Losing His Mother, Finishing His Sefer in Miluim, and the Chinuch Career He Almost Chose
From Shtark Tank with Yaakov Wolff by Yaakov Wolff.
- Published: Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:10:00 GMT
- Duration: 00:36:35
- Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/e45c8048/podcast/play/121138262/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-5-7%2F425686728-44100-2-1a111937f74ac.mp3
- Page: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yaakov-wolff/episodes/Ami-Tobin-on-Losing-His-Mother--Finishing-His-Sefer-in-Miluim--and-the-Chinuch-Career-He-Almost-Chose-e3kfbkm
- TorahApp: https://torahapp.org/share/p/3P_shtark_tank/e/3e30b4e2-9ba4-4bff-9091-b67f331eebe4
Ami Tobin was faced with a descision: He had a week full of 8 hour shifts, guarding an outpost in miluim.
How was he going to use that time?
Watch the NBA Finals? Or something more meaningful?
He pulled out his notes. And by the end of that week, his sefer — Amech Dodi — was fully edited. Both Hebrew and English.
That story is a window into who Ami Tobin is. A Beit Shemesh kid who grew up watching his mother trade a PhD in psychology for a life of teaching Torah. A Givati soldier. A HiBob customer success manager. A husband of a wife who finished medical school during wartime.
And a young man who lost his mother, Dodi Tobin z"l, to cancer — and turned years of Friday-afternoon Divrei Torah into a published sefer in her memory.
In this episode, we talk about what nearly 300 days of Milluim actually costs you professionally, how Torah identity survives the grind of the tech world, and what it looked like to watch his mother face illness with a level of emunah that only grew stronger as things got harder.
Her message: Torah isn't just practice. It's the lens everything else passes through.
Topics covered:
- Growing up in Beit Shemesh with parents who were growing alongside him
- Yeshiva Ma'alot, Givati, and finding a Torah identity worth keeping
- Stumbling into tech via HiBob — right place, right time
- ~300 days of Milluim and what it does to a career (and a person)
- His wife finishing medical school during wartime — the real superstar
- Dodi Tobin z"l: her pivot from psychology to Torah, her emunah under pressure, and the Shabbat-vs-client-call story
- Writing Amech Dodi — Divrei Torah collected since yeshiva, edited on guard duty, published l'ilui nishmatah
- The women's Beit Midrash being built in Beit Shemesh in her memory
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