Posted on Friday, October 04, 2019 by Eyal Levit
Do you consider yourself a passive observer or an active participant in your life's destiny? That seems like a rhetorical question. Who would choose the passive role if they have a will, right? And yet almost every time I ask a question of someone about why things did not turn out the way they were supposed to, (for example, when an assignment or a job wasn’t done or the room wasn’t put in order,) the answer is that someone else is at fault. Someone else did not do their job and that…
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Posted on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 by Elisha Gechter
This past weekend, 125 Fellows at The Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard University gathered for a fall retreat in Cape Cod. The retreat was designed to provide a structured atmosphere for those in 11 different fellowships, including the Wexner Israel Fellowship, to begin the journey into CPL’s curriculum goals of self-awareness, cross-cultural competency, community and social responsibility, by connecting with their cohorts, peers and the full CPL community. List…
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Posted on Monday, September 16, 2019 by Maital Friedman and Ruthie Warshenbrot
Working together as accountability partners in chavruta study has been an incredibly humbling experience. If humility, per David Jaffe in Changing the World from the Inside Out: A Jewish Approach to Personal and Social Change, is ultimately about “finding the proper relationship between the self and the world around you,” what better way to do so than to more deeply understand someone in the world around you who sees the world differently than you do? As the first clas…
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Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2019 by Scott Harris
July 2016: It was our very first Wexner Heritage Program meeting in Snowmass, CO, and Rabbi Jay Moses told us, “Many of you may think that you do not deserve to be here or may be suffering from a bit of Impostor Syndrome. Let me assure you: We chose YOU for a reason and you have EXACTLY what it takes to make a difference in the Jewish World.” That may not have been verbatim what was said, but my takeaway was that Wexner was making a true commitment to prepare us for what was next. On…
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Posted on Sunday, September 08, 2019 by Or Mars
Last month at the US Open, Naomi Osaka crushed Coco Gauff decidedly in a 6-3, 6-0 loss. ESPN reports that after the loss, “Coco Gauff walked to her chair on the sideline…and desperately tried not to cry in front of 23,000 fans…(but) the tears started streaming down her face, no matter how hard she had tried to suppress them…Then, seemingly without a moment of hesitation, Naomi Osaka…came over to console her and tell her it was all right to cry.” Later Osak…
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Posted on Thursday, August 15, 2019 by Steve Rosenberg
In late May 2019, my wife Ellen and I traveled to the seaside town of Portoroz on the coast of Slovenia, just south of the old Jewish city of Trieste. There we joined with 46 Tarbut fellows from Budapest and Poland, along with their partners (and a few babies), in a scene that reminded us of our own Wexner Seminar in Snowbird, Utah, many years ago. And that was no coincidence, because the new Tarbut Fellowship program that we were honored to be part of was founded by Rabbi Michael Paley, one of…
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Posted on Friday, August 09, 2019 by Greg Neichin
I recently returned from two weeks in Israel. This would normally be cause for a witty tweet or a clever Facebook post announcing my new-found revelations. If I were a certain kind of person, I could share a picture of acres of burned land from Kibbutzim along the Gaza border, the result of fiery kite attacks, or a portrait of the Iron Dome installation sitting on the same land to protect Israeli families from regular rocket attacks. It would be easy to fit the well-justified security fears of t…
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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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