Mining the weekly Torah portion for insight into educational leadership. A few months back I embarked on a search for my next leadership opportunity in Jewish education - and soon afterwards I found myself at Mens' Wearhouse in search of some new suits. You see, for the last five years I have lived in Israel and South Florida, environments and cultures that tend to punish/shun suit-wearers. And in that time my suits had become obsolete (and outgrown), so I bought some new ones for my inevitable interviews elsewhere in the United States. Now I've been told by many people that I "clean up well" and I even had it as my personal tagline in my email signature ("Avi Spodek - He cleans up well"). But it was only after I sat through Skype interviews in a suit (at least the top half) that I became mindful of the impact that my appearance had on me and cognizant of its influence on those who saw me. Not ten minutes earlier I was walking around the house in shor
I've always been famous; people just didn't know it.