It has been many months since my July 29th, 2009 posting where I put up a picture of a swine (no intuition there regarding the swine flu, which hit me pretty bad around Yom Kippur time) about the person that squealed my identity. Well, Yom Kippur has passed, and G-d has judged this person as righteous or wicked, and his judgement has been carried out. Chos v'sholom anything bad happen to him or her; I just wanted to point out that I received no apology and that is the path this person has chosen to take and so what happens is out of my hands. What I could say for myself is that I'm imperfect as well, as many of you can tell from reading my blog these past few years.
I have decided to take a different route and to refocus the blog in a new direction. I haven't figured out which direction that would be, but trashing my wife and using it as a venue to vent family problems is simply inappropriate. She's a wonderful, caring, and hard-working woman, and I should leave her out of my blog posts. I hope I am mature enough to keep our private life private.
Our new apartment in Crown Heights is suiting us well -- yes, Crown Heights, not California; we're private people to begin with, so the atmosphere is conducive to our personalities. The one thing that bothers me about being here is that there are so many rabbis, but I am not close to any of them and I miss my mashpia back home in Colorado. There's a lot of value in having a mashpia, and a phone call once every few months just doesn't cut it. He's busy, I know, and I've been aloof trying to get a job and stay afloat in many other ways, but I still miss him as he was also a friend and a father figure when we lived in the same state. Even when we moved around, we still made an effort to visit as often as we could, but with our oldest son now over two years old, the cost of a flight is now for three people rather than two, and my wife can't fly anyway since she's expecting our third child. Our daughter is now almost a year old herself and is walking and trying to speak; it's very cute. Either way, I need to make more of an effort to keep in touch with him. (I know his goal was to get to the point where I can function yiddishkeit-wise as a self-moving frum person, and he's achieved that goal as I am frum and self-sustaining in my yiddishkeit -- that being said, it was nice to have him stand over me and call me before a fast day just to remind me to fast and to tell me why we were fasting.)
Career-wise, I must admit that I'm still saddened by the advise of Anonymous some months ago which still rings in my head. To refresh your memories, he basically was pleading with me to let me know that even if I went back to school and became an engineer, because I didn't do it the right way -- going to college to become an engineer first and then going to law school and becoming a patent attorney -- I would never get a law firm job because I would always be an outsider because I didn't do it the right way. Well, when I moved to NY, I applied and was accepted into an EE program at CUNY, but I decided not to move forward with it; instead I decided that I was going to take the NY bar exam and open my own general practice law practice and practice as a patent attorney on my own without looking for support or a job from a law firm. I've been reading books since on how to do it, and I am certainly fearful, but every successful law practice started with one person joining forces with another, so why not start my own and build from there?
Lastly, as for G-d, I still firmly believe as a child would that G-d created the universe, and that he controls every aspect of our lives, and even though we have free will to do good or not, everything is still in his hands, and there is no reason to bend one's morality or to curb or hide one's religious practice in order to get ahead in the world, because why would G-d let me put him in the corner for my own advancement? It seems a contradiction, and so I would rather place my trust in him and believe that my plans will work out rather than doing anything that would sacrifice my yiddishkeit so that I can "fit in" to the real world and fit some partner's idea of what a lawyer should look like. "To hell with him" I think, although not literally. I will pass this bar exam and will start my own law practice and it will all work out and I will be thankful that I did.
4 comments:
Welcome back.
Have you talked to other frum lawyers in your area? I would assume that it would be infinitely easier to be a frum laywer in New York than it would be anywhere else in the country!
Taking the NY bar is a good idea, but I'm worried about your starting up your own practice. Starting up your own business is risky... particularly when you're new to the field. Your family is rapidly growing; don't you agree that it's important to have a stable income?
Welcome back - I look forward to sharing in your story.
Kudos to you with your faithful progress...I hope everything works out for the best.
No doubt this will be difficult. As soon as I take the bar and get admitted, I'll hit the ground running. We're all scared.
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