Seventeen Years Later

Hello World. It's been a while.

I wrote my first ever blogpost in the summer of 2008, at a summer school in Jerusalem. I was 15, and blogging seemed like a really cool way to let thoughts go somewhere. The first big question was where to post. For some reason I didn't like Blogspot. It felt too amateur to me. At the summer school there was a fellow talmida (heb. "student" — shoutout to my Duolingo friends) called Rachel. She was constantly on her iBook writing something, and at some point I figured out she'd been named one of TIME's top 25 blogs in the world. She was writing about being a future-rabbi (back then). One day I asked her how she did it and she told me about Typepad. And so it started.

For eight years straight I wrote about growing up, about learning a culture that was deep in my DNA, about the things I was figuring out along the way. Together with Chaim we were almost the only ones writing on these topics in German. We still get clicks on those posts today, which I find quietly amazing.

At some point I noticed the rise of micro-blogs. I met Jenna and we set up a small partnership for Limmud, an NGO I was active in, and even there I was blogging. To me my main blog was a kind of sacred refuge. I didn't want to mix it with anything else, so for the tech part I started a separate one. It didn't survive for long. But it was the moment I began collecting funny domain names. That blog's URL was tmrw.me.

I was always pretty naive about it. Almost never did spell checks or anything like that. It was only later, when I started writing proper white papers and blog posts at work, that I learned what it meant to have someone do proofreading and redaction. With that, a new voice was created. Together with that copywriter I produced some of my most relevant texts, and the working relationship carried across multiple job changes.

Having two completely different vocal colours was fascinating to me. I also think it's what slowly brought on a kind of writer's block. The polished voice started to crowd out the unpolished one. For the past 1.5 years I've been writing weeknotes, mostly internally, and they turned out to be exactly the safe space I needed to get comfortable with writing again.

Over the past few years my fingers have been itching to start something new in public. I've always followed a handful of weeknote and monthly bloggers whose writing inspires me, and eventually you just have to start. Today is that day.

This week has been turbulent anyway, and new beginnings can be an opportunity.

What I want this space to be this time around is the weird mix of all the things I'm experiencing. Not one topic. Just whatever's actually going on — good reads, inspiring talks, the rest of it.