Seoul Man or Soul Man?

Today, I got an opportunity to do something I'd never done previously in all of my checkered employment history:

I turned down a job.

The job was at a school in Buncheon, Korea, which is right outside of Seoul. It was a school where, I was told, the kids would range in age from 5 to 13. Definitely not my cup of tea.

Nonetheless, I might have felt forced to take it, had my recruiter for Korea not told me she thinks she could finagle a position more suited to me, one where I'd have more opportunity to work at least with adolescents, if not with adults. But the discussion of this second school--I was told I would have the details of the school very quickly--gave me the opportunity to turn down something I knew wasn't right for me.

I have my doubts about whether Seoul, Moscow, or any other spot outside the dear old U.S. of A. is really right for me right now. Since coming home, I've done a bit of serious looking into graduate programs in ESL/EFL, as well as more general teaching programs. I've unearthed some good programs--at Boston College, at Boston University, at UW-Madison, at NYU.

Oh...and one at an institution a few of you might have heard of, called Jewish Theological Seminary.

Mucking around on JTS's website this afternoon, I found out that JTS has a dual master's program that enables a student to get a master's in Jewish education, combined with a regular master's degree in an academic subject. The program was described as being well-suited to students who sought to teach at Jewish high schools.

This may be right up my alley. And I may finally be in a place where this would be a good and realistic possibiliy.

Five years ago, a freshly minted religion and history double major out of Columbia, I chose not to pursue Jewish studies because I felt I wasn't in a healthy place spiritually. Religion had taken over my life in a way that seemed to shut out nearly everything else. I sensed instictively that something was off kilter and needed to change.

Unfortunately, I had no real plan B. I made a few half-hearted attempts, senior year at Columbia, to get a job from the smattering of things that came through Columbia's career website. Then I got hooked on the idea of becoming a paralegal, in order to "decide" if I really wanted to go to law school. To look for that job, I came back from Kansas and set about a grueling six-month tour through the big law firms of New York, until I found a job that, in the end, made me so miserable that I eventually did things that forced the firm to fire me.

During that hunt, however, I did meet with someone in the Admissions Office at JTS about getting a master's degree. At the time, my thinking was that I wanted the kind of education in Jewish sources I might have gotten had I been able to study at List, JTS's undergraduate school. Initially, I had inquired about the possibility of getting a B.A. from List, now that I had completed my undergraduate degree at Columbia.

I was told that such an arrangement was not possible, but was advised instead to pursue a master's degree in something called Interdisciplinary Studies. At the time, a few things made this path seem undesirable:

1) I was still hung up on getting "real world" experience. I felt I needed the experience of getting and keeping a job, and paying bills, before I committed myself to graduate school. And I had a misguided notion that the "real world" of working in an office would somehow be more exciting.

2) I didn't feel entirely comfortable investing time and money into a degree I didn't think would lead anywhere in particular. What was the point of going even more into debt for something that would leave me just as unemployable as I was already?

3) I still didn't feel ready spiritually for the commitment of study Judaism full-time.

Well, not one of these three problems really seems to apply any more. The "real world" beyond the ivory tower doesn't look so great or so exciting these days. I've made rent and paid my bills. I've gone on job hunts more times than I've cared to, and finally come to realize that my problem was that I was always looking for a job when what I needed to find was a sense of direction. The program I'm looking into seems to lead to a clear and stable, if not particularly lucrative, career path. And after some time "away" from Judaism--a few years of being a Jew who just went through the motions in shul but didn't really do much else, followed by a stint in Taiwan when I was really, really away from Judaism--I think now may be the time to come back.

All of this needs a lot of thought. And a bit more exploration. But as a possibility--whether right now, or after another stint abroad--it's looking pretty good.