Jewish Internship Report

Candidly, there are two main reasons why I am interested in this internship: because it will develop not only my own leadership skills, but even more importantly the Jewish community here in Canada. For me, this is personal – and the natural continuation for my work in Hillel as a student exec, in CIJA as a #Project972 intern, and in the AEPI Nu Kappa Chapter as a founding brother and Jewish chair. It is not a simple task to explain in words how deeply I have been accepted by the Ottawa Jewish community. Neither is this debt easy to quantify. From strangers, I was invited to Seders, Shabbat services, and ceremonies – even a bris. I learnt my alef bet and broke my first challah. Ottawa became as much as a second home as an avenue to forge my own – and distinctly Jewish – identity. What Judaism builds for communities, both overseas in Israel and here in Ottawa, is this sense of a deeper community. My own bar mitzvah was held in Ben Gurion Airport because a rabbi sitting beside me asked if I were a Jew, and when I responded yes, he asked for my age. “Thirteen,” I said. He asked me if I had my bar mitzvah yet. When he heard me say no, he asked me if I wanted to have it there and now – although, because this is Judaism, he first asked my mother. What followed was us two, in the busiest
However, in my perspective, there is too often a temptation to view leadership as exclusively a couple or a handful of skills. That’s a mistake. I’m looking to mature as a leader by more than a single skill – because leadership has always been more than the sum of its parts. What a leader should be able to do is to take initiative, adapt, navigate ambiguity, display ingenuity, think outside the box, plan inside it, take orders, give orders, solve problems, find questions, easily handle complexity, work in a team, work independently, lead. “Specialization,” Robert Heinlein said, “is for