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.