A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of interviewing Asael and Avital Lubotsky for our Humans of Netivot Instagram page. In too short a time I heard about his story of injury during the second Lebanon War, and his story of recovery. Afterward, they were kind enough to gift me the memoir about…
Category: Thinking Out Loud
Why Mission Matters
Schools talk a lot about the importance of mission and vision, though understanding the ways in which this matters in practice is more subtle, and frankly, took me quite a while to appreciate. Many schools I’ve seen can function pretty well without a clear mission or vision. Sometimes it’s because they have a legacy culture…
John D’Auria – Ten Lessons in Leadership and Learning
I was at a planning meeting for the Day School Leadership Training Institute, a program for upcoming or new Heads of Jewish Day Schools, where I am a mentor. We were doing some ‘get to know you’ questions, and one of them was, “What book have you read more than once?”. The person who chose…
Samuel Lebens – A Guide for the Jewish Undecided: A Philosopher Makes the Case for Orthodox Judaism
I took a first year philosophy class in university which went chronologically from the ancient Greeks to the modern Europeans. The medieval philosophers were very interested in God-proofs, which I found entirely uncompelling. This wasn’t because I was so sophisticated, or understood the weaknesses in their arguments (which I have since learned are many). It…
The main thing is to make sure the main thing is always the main thing
“The main thing is to make sure the main thing is always the main thing.” I heard this in an interview with Ravi Gupta, a partner at the VC firm Sequoia Capital, on the The Knowledge Project podcast. He was speaking about it both in terms of leadership, and in particular, family. They were talking…
Open Secrets – Alice Munro
Over Pesach, I picked up Open Secrets, a collection of short stories by Nobel Prize winning author, and Canadian, Alica Munro (note: Munro, to my knowledge, only writes short stories). Ever since I started reading her a few years ago, I’ve been amazed by how much she is able to pack into such a relatively…
Onward – Howard Schultz
I do love Starbucks coffee (just regular coffee with a bit of cream – nothing fancy), though that was only a very small reason why I read Onward, by Howard Schultz. Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, had stepped away as CEO in the early 2000s, only to return to that role in 2008 when the…
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up – Jerry Colonna
One of the genres I tend to read is leadership books, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are more prescriptive and researched based (e.g. The Human Side of School Change, by Robert Evans), others written from the experience of the authors (e.g. Onward, by Howard Schultz about Starbucks). Reboot: Leadership and the…
Finding Ruchniyut
On my recent trip to Israel I was privileged to spend a couple of hours with Rabbi Yishai Zinger. Rav Dov Zinger, his father, started a yeshiva high school in Israel that has a very intense focus on sparking religious commitment (Rav Zinger also does a lot of other interesting things, especially around tefilah, across…
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
One of my patterns is that if I like one book by someone, I’ll generally read one or two more in a short period of time to get to know the author better, their range of writing, and hopefully some continued enjoyment. This was the case with Emily St. John Mandel. After reading Vanishing Sky,…