My colleague and friend returns from five months of maternity leave. I am quite possibly the most excited about this and in honour of her return (yes I spelled honor like a Canadian) I decorated her office.
My lovely colleague has a beautiful new daughter, a daughter she said would never wear pink. I have only ever seen her in pink.
Rabbis know how to have fun.
It should be no shock to anyone that I spend time on facebook for personal and professional reasons. The best reason to date is that a classmate of mine from elementary school reconnected and he sent me a copy of my 2nd grade class poetry book. We’re talking the future Byrons, Kerouacs, and Lordes of the our generation people. Ok, I might be over dramatizing just a bit, after all we were all just eight. Nevertheless, facebook has brought people back into my life that I had thought long gone. Essentially my entire family is on facebook and for whatever reason, it is becoming a common way for us to communicate with one another.
Professionally I use facebook to wish my congregants a happy birthday (and with 5,000 of them I guarantee you they are not all my facebook friends… yet). I also use the group tools to coordinate information sharing with the confirmation (grade 10) students and other sorts of things. Obviously not everyone in the universe is going to use facebook, nor should they. There are also times when facebook might give me some information and a phone call or a face-to-face meeting is warranted. At this point, I do not find facebook to be an overwhelming part of my day. It is not a task that I see on a to-do list that makes my stomach turn. For many of my colleagues this isn’t the case. Whether it be their reluctance toward technology or the amount of things they are already packing into one work day, facebook isn’t a priority for them and I respect their decisions to refrain from this technology. The question I have is, when one doesn’t jump on the bandwagon with all of the technologies, when does it hurt and when does it benefit? Responses welcome.
As I continue to develop my rabbinate, it seems to me that there are more types of information increasingly available on the internet and that this is also a good forum for me to post things that I write, whether they be articles, divrei Torah or sermons. Throughout the week I also get many different types of action alerts and I hope to use this blog for that purpose as well. Please feel to comment and create a further conversation.
