my next move...

Hello friends and family! As many of you know, I’ve decided to move to Israel for a year. Why did I decide this and what will I be doing? First, I came to this decision after hours of contemplating if I should leave a job I love in order to pursue something I’ve always wanted to do. I absolutely love my job, but I’m not particularly attached to living in Minnesota. Since I was little, I can remember wanting to live in Israel. Throughout my adult life, I’ve consistently tried to make it happen but something always fell through. I finally decided that the older I get, the harder it will be for me to pick up and move to another country for a year. As the wise Rabbi Hillel said, “If not now, then when?” and who am I to ignore sagely wisdom like that? So, that led me on a quest for the perfect way to spend a year in a place that I love.

After several programs that were almost-right, the perfect program actually found me! After applying to the Pardes Year Course, they took one look at my resume and saw I was a Jewish Education junkie and contacted me, saying I should apply to this special program. It is an offshoot of their Educator’s Program (which gets you a Masters at the end of two years), but since I already have my Masters in Teaching, this is a program where I can fill in the gaps in my knowledge in Tanakh, Talmud, (for all my non-Jewish friends, this is Jewish texts - our bible, commentaries, laws, etc) and take a few classes with the Educator’s Program cohort. This is the perfect next step to help me realize my goal of becoming a day school teacher. 

I’ll start August 5 with a three-week intensive Hebrew class, and then my Pardes classes will begin September 2. All in all, I am a huge mixture of emotions right now. Most of all I’m excited, but I am also nervous (especially for how I will get all my clothes for a year in two suitcases weighing less than 50lbs each!!), thankful (most especially to my parents and grandparents who are so incredibly supportive), and bittersweet. As I said, I love my job and the kids I work with, and it will be really hard to leave my friends and family in America for a full year. However, this is an incredible opportunity and I can’t wait to see what this next adventure has in store for me. I’ll try to post every other week or so to keep y’all up to date with my adventures!!