Traveling in a Confused World
My wife and I have lived most of our lives 6,000 kilometers away from each other. Our meeting, unlikely as it was, has led to a close friendship which turned into a marriage. We are what you may call an interracial couple – I’m Ashkenazi Jewish and Oxanna is Buryat-Mongolian. But while many interracial couples have to cope with cultural differences, for us it isn’t the case. Continue reading “Why Marrying a Non-Jewish Woman Is The Best Thing That Happened To Me”
“Hi, I don’t want to live anymore”.
Sometimes these are the first words people say to me when they connect to the online psychological crisis line where I volunteer for the last 3 years. Continue reading “5 Things You Shouldn’t Say to People in Distress”
What do you believe in? There is never a more crucial time to understand this than when you think about your future child.
Bellow layers of disjointed opinions, personal life lessons and amusing anecdotes, realizing what is your life philosophy is crucial if you are to have kids. If you are honest with yourself, you’ll strive to raise your child with this philosophy in mind. Philosophy he will chew on, wrestle with and undoubtedly discard. But not before being affected by it.
At 32, it’s about time I wrote to you, my future child. Continue reading “5 Things I Want To Say To My Future Child”
My parents always wanted me to marry a Jewish woman. So when they found out that I’m getting serious with someone who isn’t Jewish, they were quite upset. I tried to understand their point of view, but was struggling to do so. I knew that their objection wasn’t religious – having lived all their life in atheist Soviet Russia, they are distinctly (but typically of their generation) secular people, and immigration to Israel didn’t really change that. So what was it that made it so difficult for them to accept? Aside from the usual caution we keep for strangers who don’t fit into our familiar world, there was something that disturbed them on a much deeper level. The answer lied in their past. Continue reading “Echoes From My Tribe – Story of Intermarriage In Israel”
In my last post I talked about the evolution of man – from the blindly ambitious traditional man of the past, to the cynical and bored modern man of the present to the examining and harmonious conscious man of the near future. Continue reading “The Rise of The Conscious Organization”
I never thought that turning 30 will be so painless. Just two years ago I dreaded this date, vaguely aware of the existential void it would unveil. Last year, having departed from most certainties of my life, I was coping with the realization that my life lacked any clear direction. Continue reading “Turning 30, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving”
Recently being discharged from the Israeli Navy after serving there for six years, most of this time as a team leader, I thought to take this opportunity to look back at my time there, and reflect on what I learned, if anything, about the job. Continue reading “4 Faces of a Team Leader”
Recently I have been invited to participate in a panel of MBA graduates to discuss and share our experience during Global Strategic Management project (which I took last year) with fresh students. The project was supervised by Sid Amster, a remarkable American businessman , with phenomenal enthusiasm for sharing his experience with the students. Friendly, open and informal, he made sure that we felt that this was the most important course in the MBA. Continue reading “The Anatomy of Group Effort”
