Jewish Life Digital Edition April 2014 | Page 51

That’s not exactly the case these days. The first page (at the time of writing, obviously) of the “marketing and media jobs” section of Bizcommunity.com, for example, refers to an entire industry that didn’t even exist until relatively recently, and features such seriously strange job titles as: ‘gifting administrator’, ‘rental sales agent’, ‘mid level developer: PHP/HTML5’ and my personal favourite, “senior CaseWare working papers consultant’. Putting aside this weird new breed of political correctness where everybody and their great aunt have to be a manager or director of something, picking a career path is simply a perplexing and frustrating task. A simply absurd number of niche options and variables come into play when selecting a career, including but not limited to: monetary compensation, conduciveness to family life, fulfilment, enjoyment, working environment and, let’s not forget, trying to figure out which of these actually matter. It’s enough to give anyone a life-long migraine – and that’s not even taking into account how often and how easily you can get your head kicked in by recessions, depressions and the capricious whims of an economic system that has this very nasty habit of spinning completely out of control whenever it darn well feels like it. The working world is a weird old place and it’s only getting weirder. WHO IS MAKING MY MONEY FOR ME, ANYWAY? Considering just how contemporary these problems seem to be, you would think that something as ancient as Judaism couldn’t possibly hope to capture the complexities and intricacies of modern working life. You would, however, be wrong. In many ways, in fact, the working world has only just now caught up with Judaism’s conflicting, perplexing, nuanced and often difficult to