Searching is something I’ve been doing my whole life. What do I want to be when I grow up? Where do I want to live? What kind of meaning do I want to give my life? Lots of searching.

Some of these questions have been answered in ways that surprised me. I’ve been living in Winnipeg for over 20 years, and it’s as much my home as anywhere else in the world. Israel has not been my home for a very long time now, if it ever was.

I’ve always felt much happier in the temperate zone, whether in Europe or North America. I remember visiting New Hampshire sometime in the early seventies, and looking at that cool green light and wishing I could live in a place like that forever. Winnipeg is not exactly New Hampshire, but it doesn’t have that harsh white light that so many people love in Israel, but I don’t. The cold doesn’t bother me, anyway.

A more interesting search has been for a meaning to my life and career. I’ve been a research scientist and a teacher, and while those have the potential to add a lot of meaning to people’s lives, for me they didn’t. The science was too detached from humanity, and I found that I hated high school just as much from the other side of the desk as I did forty years ago. Did you know that giving grades is much worse than getting them?

My mother and sister are both psychotherapists, and I’ve spent a good half-century trying to deny that my destiny lies that way. I’m not a therapist, and I don’t have a degree in psychology, but I’m a trained Life Coach, and I love that work very very much.

Asking people the questions they don’t know to ask themselves, to help them clarify things in their own search for meaning, makes me very happy. It’s just amazing to see people think about questions they have never asked – why am I doing this? Why do I react like this to this person? Why do I choose to stress myself out over this particular aspect of my job? What if I chose not to? What would my life be like?

What they choose to do with the answers to these questions is their business – it’s not my job to tell them what to do. But I have seen amazing shifts happen in people’s lives, with nothing more than thinking about these meaningful questions.

I sincerely believe that it is that search for meaning that makes us little less than angels, and in this holy time of Elul, it’s a good thing to ask ourselves some searching questions.