Approaching 40: Every Move is the Right Move If You Think About It
I can't regret anything really because I ended up here, didn't I?
Introduction
Yogi Berra a”h has many famous sayings. One of them is “when you come to a fork in the road, take it”. For most people, their lives are binary. At some point in life we need to make a decision about what profession we are going to choose and how we are going to spend the bulk of our adult lives. While not always (and I have spoken about this in the career post) it often means leaving a lot of other things behind or leaving them to be hobbies or interests. This applies even beyond jobs to where we choose to live, who we marry, what we like to do in our free time, etc.
A friend recently boiled it down more succinctly for me: “In our 20s, everything is theoretically possible, [usually] by 40 we already made choices and [have] probably gone deep down the path of something.” In this post, I’ll cover some of those choices for me and maybe it will get you to think of some of yours, but the important thing to note is that I am content, nigh, satisfied, and happy with where I stand today. Maybe you’ll be lucky and get a second chance at doing something you always wanted to do (plenty of stories abound).
Contentments
This is meant to be the opposite of “regrets” for which a word doesn’t seem to exist. It does not mean that I am only “content” with the outcome of the decisions listed below; in fact, I am very excited and proud of them.
“Making Aliyah” and moving to Efrat
For readers who are unfamiliar, Judaism holds in high regard (though it probably is not a Biblical commandment) the choice for one to make their lives in Israel. For millennia, this was not an easy thing to do, as the land was barren and those who occupied the territory were not favorable to Jews living in this area (though at the same time this land was never completely devoid of Jews). Since 1948, and even more so since the mid-90s this is less and less of an issue, and more and more Jews are choosing to live in Israel, the native homeland of the Jews. Moving to Israel is called “Aliyah” or “going up”, as Judaism holds that the land in Israel is of greater holiness than other lands in the world, so moving to Israel is “going up” in holiness.
I and my family made Aliyah in 2019, and, after marrying my spouse, is the best decision I have ever made. As I’ll speak more about later in this post, I take living as a Jew very seriously. In the diaspora, this can be difficult. You are a minority, but Modern Orthodoxy forces you to live in the real world and this inevitably comes with compromises. You need to pay to send your kids to private school, you need to live in a certain area near a synagogue, you can only eat at certain establishments, etc. Now there is nothing wrong with compromise and sometimes you end up on the winning side of them, or you can compensate with other things such as income or the ability to home-school.
In Israel, there are fewer compromises. Not to say there are none. Ashkenaz vs. Sefard, religious vs. non-religious, right-wing vs. left-wing. But we’re all Jews (almost). Kosher food abounds (even in Tel Aviv). Schooling is part of your (very-high) taxes. But you get to choose which kind of school your kid goes to. The choices are in your hands instead of being forced into them by default. Obviously, not everything is perfect, and like anything, there are tradeoffs.
Within Israel, the question becomes where to live. The way this has shaken out over time is that many communities in Israel have coalesced around relatively similar religious ideals. If you live your Judaism in a certain way, there is a flourishing community of people just like you living somewhere in Israel. The challenge now is two-fold: what is your religious identity and then trying to find where those people live.
I had known for a long time that I eventually wanted to live in Efrat. Founded in the late 1970s by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, a Talmud of Rav Soloveitchik, it has mostly stuck to the ideals of religious Zionism and modern orthodoxy that delineate a lot of the religious community in the rest of the world. So it feels at home from that perspective as it generally matches my outlook on life.
What you may also not know is that its location, in the hills of Judea, is the most beautiful place on Earth. In close proximity to Jerusalem, we get stunning sunsets and clean, cool air most of the year. It is no secret why Abraham and the rest of our forefathers chose this part of the country to settle, and the fact that Jews once again live here is nothing short of a miracle.
I first fell in love with Efrat in 1999 when my family took our first (and only) international trip to Israel and we stayed with family friends in Efrat for a week. Their house overlooked vineyards (any -yard was a big deal for this city-raised boy) and their street was pastoral (when I returned 20 years later to the same street - we actually almost bought a house on that very street - I barely recognized it because the foliage had grown in so much in that time). Visiting the same family many times during my studies in Israel cemented my love. It is an incredible zechut, honor/reward to be able to live in the place of my dreams and do a small tiny part in protecting this holy land (albeit from a “La-Z-Boy” as I like to say).
Yeshiva University
Another decision I am glad I made, and which my parents highly encouraged, was attending Yeshiva University. Even though this was 20 years ago, and the anti-Semitism found on campus may have been less pronounced, it was still very clear to me that living a fully-Jewish life on a college campus would be challenging (all the Israel Yeshiva prep not withstanding). I’m not saying it is impossible, but to me, if there was no trade-off in academics while still being able to continue my Torah studies full-timeish then there was really nothing to lose.
Was it perfect? No, in fact there was a point where I was considering transferring to Brandeis. Did I still make wonderful friends and achieve things I never thought I would? Of course. I ended up getting so involved that I became one of several student council presidents (two Jews, three shuls, you know). I met amazing people and got exposure to the leading rabbinic figures of this generation. Maybe I’ll do a post about many of the stories I have from my time at Yeshiva. Thanks to my parents for their encouragement to attend this school.
So with three contentments down on paper, let’s discuss some moves I wish I made, but that even without I am still happy with who I became.
Juuuust Missed It
Rabbinics
If I ever imagined to myself another career path for myself that is totally the opposite of what I do now, it would probably be that of pulpit rabbi. To me, it seems like they do lot of the things I like to do. Talking to people, sharing their ideas, and then merging those things together into making religion into an important and meaningful part of their lives.
So why didn’t I do it? There are a few reasons:
Competition
The market for Orthodox pulpit rabbis is small, with most of the high-paying (like support-your-family-without-struggling) jobs concentrated on the East Coast of the United States. The turnover at these congregations is low and when a position does open up, the competition is fierce. So since my heart wasn’t fully in it like many of my peers seeking rabbinic ordination, I decided not to pursue this path.Mental health
A lot of a contemporary pulpit rabbi’s job is to act as a psuedo-counselor for their flock. If you have a large congregation (and I presume even if you don’t) you still know a lot of problems you wouldn’t otherwise know about if you weren’t in that role. I imagine this is very taxing on Rabbis and other clergy and I praise their resilience, but I enjoy being happy and knowing what is making everyone sad didn’t seem like a good idea.
So I didn’t become a rabbi, but in the interim, I have sought out opportunities to fulfill this need. I teach shiurim (Torah classes), and I have also given the drasha/sermon several times both back in America and here in Israel. All the cosmic power, itty-bitty little tiny living space. If you missed the boat on something, try to find ways to incorporate aspects of that role into other parts of your life, or read about them and study them so that you can live somewhat vicariously through those actions.
Computer Science
I have always been interested in computers even from a very young age. I grew up during the period of time where PCs were just becoming mainstream in everyone’s homes. I have a few computer-related memories:
My father was among the few in his office who had a computer of his own. While I’m not sure why he did so, my father in the early- to mid-90s would bring his desktop computer home from the office (they gave him this huge bag to carry it in - it was a weird time). While he was probably doing it so he could complete his work (the same thing I am going to do on my laptop after I finish writing this blog post) he would of course allow me the courtesy of bashing on the keys for a few moments before I went to bed and he proceeded to continue working.
While my mother was in graduate school, she rented a computer (remember, weird times) so that she could do schoolwork. The thought of locking a computer was at the time still foreign since there really wasn’t an internet to connect to so one day I set myself up at the computer and proceeded to click around to see what I could find (we had a computer in the classroom at school so I had some idea what I was doing). At the time on MacOS there was some application that would allow you to assign values to certain keys on the keyboard (a macro of sorts, but with a UI) and I proceeded to make my first initial produce a string of gobbledegook (this seems to actually be a word). It took some time for my mother to undo my little hack, but today the story lives on in Vogel lore.
In 7th grade, one of the teachers taught a class in HTML, which at that time was just starting to take off. I really enjoyed that, and like everyone else who was a middle-schooler in 1997, started my own Geocities site (and my first newsletter - Adar Monthly). To have that site today!!!
So if computers were in my blood, why didn’t I pursue them as a career? Or did I? If I recall correctly, a major factor was that my university at the time did not have a strong computer science department. Additionally, I was also much more focused on a career in public health since it seemed to be way more impactful than anything I could do with computers.
So, I kind of followed the advice from the last section and I taught myself computer programming. I remember where I was when it all clicked and I understood how it all worked at a basic level. I am old enough to have learned how to program from a book, which to this day I still think is superior if you are trying to learn something well (there have been occasions even in recent times where I have printed out code to figure out what it does).
The issue with teaching yourself something is that you can learn it in a mistaken way and those mistakes will stick with you for a long time until someone comes along and corrects them. Because of this I still have a hard time wrapping my head around object-oriented programming, but my current project at work has me working with it and I think I am finally getting the hang of it. I partially blame the examples that come in most books where OOP is used to build a car program. I think this is a terrible example. Much better would be that the car is the sum of al the other object you build for the brakes, the steering, the wipers and everything else that is part of a car. I’ll stop here and make my rant against OOP examples in another post.
Today, I am privileged to be able to combine both passions health and computers in my daily job. I don’t take this for granted and I am incredibly thankful for everything that brought me here and to God for his guidance along the way.
Conclusion
So at the end of the day, do what you love, and don’t have any regrets. Think about things you may have done or would still want to do and figure out how to incorporate those into your daily life. As Bob Ross would say: “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents”. You are where you are because you are fulfilling your mission in life and hopefully helping others at the same time. Do good work and you will be rewarded accordingly.
Stickers are a great way to overcome regret: https://the-cholent.printify.me/
The All Sweat No Regret Sweatshirt is the perfect theme-inside-a-theme thing to buy after reading this post. Or just shop on Amazon.