Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2019 by Or Mars
When the Holy One asked King Solomon to choose what he wished for himself, Solomon requested a lev shomeya לֵ֤ב שֹׁמֵ֙עַ֙ (I Kings 3:9), a “heart that listens,” which also can be read as “an understanding heart.” In his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Harvard Professor Howard Gardner lays out eight different ways that intelligence can manifest (he later added a ninth). Unfortunately, when we think of the word “intelligence,&r…
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Posted on Wednesday, August 07, 2019 by Jory Hanselman
February 27th, 12:18am, from the journal of a BaMidbar Field Guide: “Why on earth do I choose to do this? People have normal jobs. I could be working a 9-5 office job someplace and be home in the comfort of my bed right now. When things get rough, when students take three hours to pack up after setting a 30-minute goal, and all of a sudden it’s 11pm and we are still pushing through to find the campsite, when I feel I’m at the end of my line, and it feels like things could not …
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Posted on Tuesday, August 06, 2019 by Marsha Berkson
Emotional Intelligence is a hot topic in today’s workplace - especially for leaders. What is it? Do you have it? If you don’t, can you acquire it? Psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer first coined “emotional intelligence,” or EQ, in 1990, describing it as: “The ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions to assist thought, [and] to understand emotions and emotional knowledge.” Today, it’s come to mean anything from an aptitude …
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Posted on Monday, August 05, 2019 by Jennifer Goldsmith
I’m a perfectionist, a perfectionist who embraces the mess of change. The last time I taught an Immunity to Change workshop, I thought to myself, “I should really clean up my own Immunity to Change map – it is so messy.” What would it mean to clean it up? Well, if you know me, you might imagine that I would try to address an exhaustive series of questions – Should I rewrite a “perfect” version of my map? Do the words on it even make sense? Am I st…
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Posted on Sunday, July 28, 2019 by Karen Treiger
Bernard Offen, a spry 90-year-old, pony-tailed, Auschwitz/Birkenau survivor, stood under the burning sun and described how, as a boy, he watched his father walk down the long path toward the gas chamber and crematoria #5. It was outside the ruins of crematoria #5 that Bernard told a bit of his story. My heart broke as Kel Maleh Rachamim was chanted together and we recited the Kaddish. By the next morning Bernard and the rest of us (250 in total) were back at the iconic gate of Birkenau…
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Posted on Friday, July 26, 2019 by Yotam Dagan
Modern times. Charlie Chaplin’s figure in black and white, struggling with the accelerating pace of an industrial assembly line. Nearly a century after Chaplin’s iconic film, many of us are still trying to come to terms with the enormous changes that continue to unfold in our world today. Technology, communications, medicine, artificial intelligence: advances in all realms of human life and activity are increasingly contributing to health, wellness, quality of life and securit…
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Posted on Wednesday, July 24, 2019 by Shira Hammerman
Happiness + Apprehensive = Happrihensive adj. Afraid to pursue what one loves Skeptical + Optimism = Skeptimism n. restrained excitement for something good one anticipates happening Source: The Emotionary: A Dictionary of Words That Don’t Exist for Feelings That Do, by Eden Scher and Julia Wertz As I unpacked my daughter’s camp duffel this past week, an unexpected find piqued my interest: a small graphic novel containing a collection of imaginary expressions such as the ones …
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Posted on Monday, July 08, 2019 by Shoshana Meira Friedman
One night when my son was about five months old, I looked down at his round baby belly and felt distant from God. Exhausted and recently back to work, my ritual practice was more or less on hiatus. (When my husband heated up the waffle iron the day after Pesach, we found a whole waffle inside it from who knows when.) My prayer practice could be boiled down to “Please God, help me make it through the day.” (This may actually be the purest prayer, but still…) And most strik…
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Posted on Sunday, July 07, 2019 by Michael Emerson
After three years running the Wexner Service Corps (WSC) program and seven years of participating in our annual week-long service trips, I am stepping down as I make Aliyah with my family later this month. This moment of transition has given me time to reflect on the program and the significance of our approach to community service and Jewish education. Recently, I had the opportunity to meet our newest cohort of teens at their orientation event in May. We hosted 45 teens and their parents for t…
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Posted on Tuesday, July 02, 2019 by Cheryl Moore
Albert Einstein said, “I am neither clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious.” He was, no doubt, being self-deprecating, but his intent was clearly to illustrate the crucial role of curiosity. Indeed, a curious, interested and engaged person is driven to learn, problem-solve and discover. Curiosity demands that one has an open mind and the ability to tolerate experimenting with and delving into the unknown and even the disagreeable. Sometimes curiosity leads to the …
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