1 week to aliyah – “What Really Matters”

I have seen a lot of activity on some of the discussion lists related to what people want to do in the days and weeks leading up to their aliyah. Some want to catch that last Broadway show and some want to hit some of the restaurants that they never had a chance to go to before. Some make sure to go to the cemetery for what might be the last time in a long while.

In the last few weeks before our lift went off, our schedules were very hectic. There was not a lot of time to do much of anything other than sort out our things and prepare for the move. Although there are still many items that need our attention, things have certainly calmed down quite a bit in the last week leaving us with a little time to do the things that are most important to us.

 

Pearl, Bert, Netanel, Ezra, Ernie, Mikayla and Jessica in Sesame Place

This past Shabbat we had a lovely time with Rachel and Yony and Yehoshua in Elizabeth and on Sunday, we went to Sesame Place with Ezra, Jessica, Netanel and Mikayla. We had some quiet time last night over coffee with some friends and this Shabbat we will be having meals with other friends. We’ve got a lunch date with a few other friends later this week and a large BBQ that yet more friends are making and are inviting practically everyone else. Although we are looking forward to seeing some of these friends and hopefully all of these relatives very soon in Israel, these last few days here that we are spending connecting with those who are so important to us will be remembered and cherished for many years to come.

"Shiv’a Asar B’Tammuz – Past and Present"

This Shiv’a Asar B’Tammuz brought back vivid memories of another one eight years ago, just after Rachel and Yony got engaged in Israel. Pearl and I arranged to arrive there shortly after their formal engagement and spent the next week or so with them and also attending our nephew’s bar mitzvah.

On Shiv’a Asar B’Tammuz we were up north in the Golan and Galil. Although it is a fast day and it was somewhat warm, Pearl and I felt strongly about taking advantage of every moment that we had in Israel and doing some activity that would have meaning for the day. We planned a trip to Gamla with my reasoning being that Shiv’a Asar B’Tammuz represents the start of the destruction of the 2^nd Beit HaMikdash and Gamla represents the start of the war that resulted in that destruction.

Everyone had to put up with my history lesson, explaining how Nero sent his general Vespasian since he was an older man in his 60’s and Nero was just hoping that Vespasian, being a bit calmer than the other generals, would quietly put down this pesky Jewish revolt. Vespasian chose his first battles wisely. He did not want to jump into the fray, going straight for Jerusalem. Instead, as he arrived from the north, he thought that he would get the message out by snuffing out some of the hotbeds of the revolt as he approached them.

Gamla was unfortunately one of the first to suffer. The battle was fierce and many of the Jews ended up jumping off of the cliffs to their deaths than risk being taken as slaves.

Rachel, me and Yony at Gamla in 2005 (Pearl is taking the picture)

Although Pearl and Rachel managed to get away with only my history lesson, Yony was not so lucky. My new future son in law knew that he had practically no choice and was going to have to take the walk over to the ruins with me. I assaulted him with more stories along the way, telling him how there must be thousands of arrow and spearheads lying along the path from the assault 2000 years earlier. I think he was hoping that if he found one, he could exchange that trophy for a “get out of jail free” card. No such luck.

This morning in the selichot we said “We rebelled against Him who dwells in the loftiest heavens, therefore we were scattered to all corners”.  “We were scattered without finding relief”. But we end the slicha with the lines “Turn to us, You who dwells on high, gather in our dispersion from the ends of the earth. May your hand once more acquire this awe-struck nation, and may You say to Zion ‘Rise!’ and transform the 17^th of Tammuz for us to a day of salvation and consolation.”

May we all merit returning to Zion, speedily in our days.

See you on the other side.

2 weeks to aliyah – “What is that voodoo that you do so well?”

For pretty much all of my professional career, people (including my family) have asked me what I do in the computer field. Of course, my role has evolved over the years so the answer to that question has evolved along with it. But now, especially with me being in this contest and so many of my friends and relatives passing along all of their networking contacts, I thought that this would be an opportune time for me to explain what it is that I do for a living.

Of course, if I were to spell out all of the gory details I would lose most of my audience in the first paragraph and thus not accomplish at least part of my goal. On the other hand, since there might be some potential employers reading this, it would be helpful to be at least a little specific. I will try my best to explain this clearly and concisely to satisfy the golden mean. Hopefully, all but the most ardent Luddites will be able to get some appreciation of what I do and maybe some of them might even say, “hey, I know someone who I ought to introduce to Daniel”.

Although my title is Information Security Officer (ISO), that title means different things in different companies here in the US, so when you transplant it to Israel, it practically loses all meaning altogether. The best way to describe my job is that I am responsible for 4 areas in the computer environment in the company, (or in Information Technology (IT)). They are:

• Security (אבטחת מידע),
• Compliance (ציות),
• Risk (סיכונים ניהול) and
• Audit (מידע מערכות ביקורת). 

(Have I lost any of you yet?)

Security is probably the most commonly known part of my job. It is like the lock that you put on your door or the bars that might go on your windows. They are designed to keep the bad guys out yet not impede your own access to your house. Similarly, a company makes strides to make the computer environment as secure as possible without making it too difficult for the people who do need access to the computer – either customers or employees – to do what they need to do. You can never make the environment 100% secure.

On the other hand, you can and should make your environment 100% compliant. Compliance means following the rules. For example, your auto insurance company might dictate that you have an alarm on your car or that you use seatbelts. If they catch you violating those rules, they might deny you coverage. Likewise, if an auditor discovers that you are not adhering to the regulations dictated by law or even just by the company’s bylaws itself, you can find yourself in trouble.

For that reason, in the US the focus tends to be on compliance whereas in Israel, they certainly concern themselves more with security. In general, it is best when the compliance regulations make sense to the employees. Otherwise, they tend to try to bypass the rules. It is my job to make the policies relevant so that they understand why it is important for them to adhere to them.

 

When compliance regulations do not seem relevant
to people, they often find ways to bypass them.

There is a great deal of overlap between the areas of security and risk. I would often conduct formal and informal risk assessments to determine how secure an environment is, where the holes are, and what can be done to stop them up. Risk assessment and management is an ongoing responsibility in which you are constantly determining the appetite that the organization has for risk vs new threats that are being discovered every day.

My involvement with IT Audit was primarily as a liaison between the infrastructure support people and the auditors. I would not conduct audits myself, but I would be the person translating the auditors’ requirements into meaningful terms that the systems people would understand and then reviewing the evidence that they would gather to determine if it was the correct information to pass along to the auditors. Although this sounds much like a paper pusher in some ways, this was actually a very important role. Just as you would not necessarily want to represent yourself legally – you would hire a lawyer – it is not wise to have the systems people dealing directly with the auditors. That would just be asking for trouble and at worst, might get the organization into legal hot water.

There are some aspects of all of this at which I am particularly adept and have enabled me to be very successful in making two large companies more compliant and secure. Much of that is attributable to my more technical background in Operating systems programming and administration than the average person in IT security. That has given me a practically unique combination of skills that has proven very effective in my dealings with both the systems people and the auditors.

Well, there is a very brief idea of what I do. There is of course a great deal more that I could say about what I have done but I think that I tested the limits of my audience already. So any hiring managers who would like to hear more, I still have some slots available for interviews.

Hopefully this will give you a better understanding of my job to help some of you to better describe my role to your contacts. And of course, it will give some employers a little insight into my background as an IT Security Officer.

3 weeks to aliyah – Pesach for a Month

I am writing this at the end of a long day, with my PC precariously perched on my aching knees. The house looks so empty even though it is filled from floor to ceiling with boxes. Most of our lifetime possessions have been carefully wrapped up, boxed and labeled and are ready to be loaded on the container tomorrow.

The planning for this was meticulous. What do we need for the next 3 weeks here and for the week after our arrival in Israel? Whatever we hold onto had better fit in our luggage or be disposed of, but whatever we send on the lift had better be something we can do without (like chairs, tables, blankets and beds). It seemed rather like preparing for Pesach, but this Pesach was going to be a month long and we had to separate not only our food and dishes but everything in our house. Not an easy task.

Pearl and I walked through the house when the movers left, assessing what is complete and what still needs to be done. Pearl took pictures and I marveled at seeing corners of the house that I have not been able to see in close to 27 years. It was bittersweet. I can’t help but reflect back on a time about 20 years ago after my father passed away when my mother decided to pack up and sell our family house in Maryland and move up to a small apartment in NY.

Granted, my mother’s 4 sons all lived far from her – two in the Philly area, one in NJ and me in NY. She was selling a beautiful house in a lovely, tree filled neighborhood and moving to a small, old apartment in a dirty city. She was going to have to start paying rent and get around in unfamiliar surroundings without the benefit of a car for the first time in decades. I thought that she would never pull it off when she first told me about it, but she did it and made the best of her new life by attending courses in Brooklyn College and participating in a few neighborhood groups. She tried every restaurant that she could on my restaurant website (http://www.nachas.org/BethYehuda/kosher.html ) and gave me her reviews practically on a daily basis.

Yet, it saddened me and my brothers to see her give up the comfort and security of a house that she and my father lived in for 27 years (funny how that is how long we lived here…). After today, I now appreciate a little more how our children are feeling about us selling this house.

The circumstances of my mother’s move and ours could not be further apart. Pearl and I are finally realizing a dream that we have had for over 35 years. I am embarking on a new adventure with my best friend. We are not moving into a drab, old space rather into a beautiful house that we plan on making into our new home. We are not preparing for the end of our lives, rather for a new start. This is exciting and fulfilling, adventurous and bold. We are beginning a new phase of our lives together and we could not be happier about it. I hope that our children will come to see it that way as well.

It is a little sad and scary to give up this house that we lived in all of these years. We threw away a lot of junk that was weighing us down. Sometimes you have to take on some risk in order to make some major strides forward. “To make an omelet you have to break a few eggs”. We are hoping to make one amazing omelet.

4 weeks to aliyah – “The Lord works in mysterious ways”

Some of you have been asking me to explain to them how this job contest works. The whole concept seems a bit odd and unfamiliar and they have been trying to figure out why NBN would want them to vote for me and what the purpose of all of this is.

Well, the simple answer is “I don’t know”.

Now don’t get me wrong – most of this makes sense to me on some level or another. I can see why NBN would want to generate traffic to their websites or have people provide their email addresses. It also makes sense to me that they would want the contestants to write blogs where they can express their feelings about aliyah more in depth and provide useful information to other potential olim. NBN might even want to see that the contestant has the support of his friends and family as demonstrated through votes and that he himself is taking this seriously for instance by voting himself. And of course, the potential employers can get a better picture of the candidate through his writing and how much hishtadlus (effort) he puts into this.

But our upbringing makes us see things in familiar ways and we tend to wonder why a company would care how many votes someone has, as opposed to only considering his qualifications for the position.

I don’t know how I will arrive at getting a job in Israel, but this contest has provided yet another example of hashgacha pratis. Although I believe that I am well qualified for the position that I put in for and in all likelihood, I am probably the only contestant interested in that position, I still feel that I must do all that is possible to secure my place in this contest. That is because positions in IT Security and Compliance are not too common in Israel. What are the odds of one of the 10 positions in this contest being a job that suits me so well. As some people say, “The Lord works in mysterious ways”.

Of course, I am pursuing other avenues to employment at the same time. I won’t bore you with the gruesome details of how I use LinkedIn etc., but I will mention that I have a wonderful advisor who almost makes me nervous with her relentlessly pushing me even though there is SO much for me to take care of with the move itself, but she is so right-on with her advice so I appreciate it greatly (thank you, Emi).

And the help, support and brachot that we get from all of our friends and relatives is overwhelming. Just to put a few numbers to this –

·        We get about 125-150 votes each week.

·        There have been almost 1100 pageviews for my blog and one person is following my blog (thank you, Ruti!)

·        So far, nobody is following me in Twitter (not that I have had much to say there) or “pinning” any of my photos in Pinterest, but perhaps if I fully understood the value of that and leveraged it properly then it would see more action.

Since I send out my blog email to 130 people every week, then on the average, everyone is voting for me once each week. Of course, that is not the reality (I vote for me 7 times each week, for instance) so if there are some of you who want to “unsubscribe” from my email, then please let me know. On the other hand, some of you have asked me to send you daily reminders. Perhaps it would be more 21^st Century of me to use Twitter for that. Just let me know what works for you.

And as always, thank you all so much for your ongoing support.