2 February 2001 (9 Shvat 5761)
As the two-month spring vacation started this week, I have a mixed feeling: on the one hand, I am happy as I have more free time for myself now, but on the other hand, I have to worry about the substantial reduction of my income as I am paid by the hour. Ever since I visited Jerusalem last summer, I was planning to revisit there during this spring vacation and study again at Ohr Somayach Yeshiva there, but I am afraid that under the present financial condition I will have to wait until the summer vacation for the chance to recharge myself with enough food for my soul to sustain myself back in a spiritual desert.
There are two things that seem to make Jerusalem so attractive to me as an ideal place for spiritual nourishment. One is its uniquely spiritual atmosphere, and the other is its human resources; of course, both are interrelated with each other.
I have visited quite a few cities in the Western world, but nowhere else do I feel so elevated spiritually as in Jerusalem, sometimes just by being there physically. This may be because of a high concentration of people who are engaged in the spiritual matters and the spiritual energy they emit around themselves. This special spiritual atmosphere has a tremendous effect upon my soul, and it reaches its peak on shabat/shabes ('Sabbath, i.e., from the sunset of Friday evening until about one hour after the sunset of Saturday evening'). As one has to get out of water to appreciate it, it was not until I left Jerusalem after spending five years there that I came to appreciate all this. One of the Orthodox rabbis I met in the synagogue in Kobe said that shabat/shabes is an island in time, and I cannot agree more though this may mean nothing for those who have not experienced it, especially in Jerusalem.
As the spiritual center of the Jewish world Jerusalem attracts many unique people from the four corners of the world. Some visit there for a while, and others decide to settle there. According to my experiences, those have made a conscious decision to live in a place other than the one where they were born are generally more stimulating that those who continue to live out of inertia where they were born. This seems to be the case especially with Jerusalem. Actually, almost all my friends in Jerusalem were born or spent a substantial period of time in the Diaspora. Just by living in Jerusalem for five years I made a lot of acquaintances who are scattered now throughout the world.
Until this very day I do not know why I have so many "chance" encounters with so many unique people in Jerusalem, and every time I visit there, this feeling is reinforced. Actually I get acquainted with more new people in one month in Jerusalem than in eleven months in Japan, and some of them I met this way "by chance" have become close friends. I am curious to know what new encounters will be waiting for me in the next visit there.
9 February 2001 (16 Tevet 5761)
Until I was in my late twenties, I used to learn a new language every year and kept on learning it - or at least reading it - in order not to forget it. Since I studied the last new language I still remember, I tried a couple of new languages, but after a short while I gave up my study because I had neither enough interest in nor need of these languages. When I was still new in my wandering in the forest of languages, I felt as if every new language had opened a totally new world before my eyes. But as I learned more languages, this feeling came to disappear gradually as a new language was not totally new to me in that it was related to one or some of the languages I had already learned, and I was neither interested in nor in need of a language totally new in this sense.
This week I started to learn Babylonian Aramaic, the language of the Babylonian Talmud, making the best use of the free time I have during this spring vacation. It is not totally new either as I have already learned Biblical Aramaic, one of the many "dialects" in the long history of Aramaic, but I feel that it is the key to a totally new world that still remains locked to me. The main purpose of the study is to understand the literal meaning (pshat) of the Talmud as the first step toward understanding its deeper meening (drash).
When I took part in a Talmud class for beginners in Ohr Somayach Yeshiva in Jerusalem, no one except me seemed to care much about Aramaic, but nevertheless they were more successful in following the shakla vetarya ('Talmudic discussion') and asking questions. Until the last day I was bothered by the linguistic aspect of the text. As a person trained in linguistics, I simply could not concentrate on the content without knowing the exact grammatical and/or lexical meaning of each and every word in isolation and not only in the given context.
One of the greatest difficulties in learning Babylonian Aramaic is the fact that the extant texts are written in a consonantal alphabet with no indication of vowels by vowel signs as in some other Semitic languages. So no one is certain about how the language was actually pronounced in the Amoraic period (ca. 220-500 CE). But as the Babylonian Talmud has been occupying the central position in the curriculum of traditional Jewish learning, every Jewish community has preserved its oral tradition of Babylonian Aramaic, together with that of Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. The Talmud is not a mere book of the past, but something contemporary in that the students virtually "live" it. I am trying to read the pages of the Talmud according to what is customary now in the "Lithuanian" yeshivot like Ohr Somayach, which is essentially the continuation of the Lithuanian oral tradition but is influenced in Israel more and more by the pronunciation of Modern Hebrew.
These days many linguists are emphasizing the urgency of documenting the so-called "endangered languages" spoken by the dwindling number of speakers, but they - with the exception of a very limited circle of Jewish linguists - fail to recognize the fact that the authentic oral traditions of Hebrew and Aramaic as were kept in the Diaspora are endangered. Biblical Hebrew, Mishnaic Hebrew and Babylonian Aramaic are no less alive in the linguistic repertoire of those who orally transmit the reading traditions of the scriptueres written in them. My teacher, the late Prof. Shelomo Morag, had a true vision when he initiated about four decades ago an institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dedicated exclusively to the documentation and research of these disappearing oral traditions of Hebrew and Aramaic. I still cannot pardon myself for not having finished my dissertation earlier to free myself and consult with him on the documentation and research of the Lithuanian oral tradition, which he enthusiastically encouraged me to advance before he passed away. No one can parallel him in the study of the oral traditions of Hebrew and Aramaic.
16 February 2001 (23 Tevet 5761)
If I had been asked several years ago whether I liked teaching, I might have hesitated to answer positively. But in the last several years I have come to really enjoy teaching and even consider it as my vocation. Not only subjectively inside myself but also objectively my teaching seems to have improved in the course of time as I notice, to my joy, more and more students enjoying in my classes. In retrospect, this change seems to have occurred in parallel with the change in my philosophy of social behavior in general and in my philosophy of teaching in particular.
Probably in every society the hidden, true aim of schooling is to socialize students by molding them into citizens abiding by the unwritten sociocultural codes. Many of those who pass through Japanese schooling learn unconsciously to censor their speech and behavior constantly in the light of how they are perceived by others. Such self-censorship imposes a tremendous psychological burden upon individuals and makes their behavior look quite unnatural and awkward not only to outsiders but even to themselves. It is not easy to free oneself from this social fetter as one is constantly afraid of being ostracized in society.
When I came back to Japan about seven and a half years ago after spending five years in Israel, this self-censorship, to which I was exposed again after such a long interval, was quite shocking to me, and even seemed a farce crippling the natural state of human mind as everyone spoke and behaved as if they were constantly afraid of something. Then I decided to behave as naturally as possible, disclosing what I am. Of course, such a philosophy of behavior is liable to make quite a few enemies, or to be more precise, it polarizes people with whom I come into contact into two antipodal groups, i.e., those who like me and those who dislike me, and there are few people in between. It took me a while to stop being afraid of being disliked. But now I believe that a person who is not disliked by anyone is someone who is not liked by anyone, and actually to have enemies is a sign of maturity.
When I apply this philosophy of behavior in class, most of the students are bewildered in the beginning as they have a preconception that teachers neither tell jokes nor interact with them in class. As they are naturally still censoring themselves in class in the first few lessons, they have no facial expression including laughter. But as time goes by, those who see that they can endure me and survive in class come to show emotions on their faces, and their speech and behavior also become more natural and relaxed. Although I am still examining the role of humor in class, it seems to be able to contribute tremendously to the learning process.
Many people would naively claim that the main purpose of teaching is the unilateral impartation of knowledge, often fragmented, by teachers to students. Although this may be important as one of the purposes of teaching, I have come to think through years of experiences as a teacher that it is far more important to instigate students to think independently and ask questions for themselves. Even according to my own experience as a student it seems true that once you forget fragmented items of knowledge, you are left with nothing, but if you are taught on your own flesh how to think, you never forget it and can apply it in new learning environments.
Of course, a single person cannot change the whole system, but I cannot resist the temptation in my daily struggle. So as a kind of protest to the conventional teaching system in Japan, which in my opinion sacrifices independent thinking too much in favor of the competition for the quantity of fragmented knowledge, I have come to shift the importance of my teaching to the instigation of independent thinking. I may sound rather elitist, but I consider it a greater success in the tertiary education to make one really good student and 99 banal ones out of 100 than to make all of them equally reach the average level. Although I have not examined if there is a correlation with my teaching, it is a pleasure to see that every year there are a handful of students who come to think independently and ask questions for themselves by the end of the year, and some of them even remain friends after the courses in which we studied together are over.
23 February 2001 (30 Tevet 5761)
I received yet another letter announcing the nonacceptance of my application for a research grant from a certain Japanese foundation. Unfortunately, I am too familiar with such a notice in Japan. Actually, since I came back to Japan from Israel, I have failed, except once, in all the applications for positions and research grants, while as a doctoral student in Jerusalem I succeeded, except once, in all the applications for scholarships and research grants. So I was not expecting too much, but nevertheless I cannot say that I was not disappointed.
I had a chance to have an old colleague of mine in my flat in Kobe and shmooze with him. Actually, he is probably the only one with whom I can still communicate of all the people I had been in touch with before going to Israel. Like me, he has no tenure yet, and that may be why he has not been contaminated by the system called university.
He told me, among others, what our two ex-teachers said about me in general and about a certain review article I wrote in particular. I was really sorry that they did not say anything directly to me if they found something wrong with me though I do not think I did anything wrong in this case according to my value system. I believe that when I find something wrong with someone, I should tell it directly to him or her though this is highly unacceptable in Japan. Most people here, including scholars, are not immune to any criticism said directly to them even if it is a positive one as there is no culture of confrontation here. Some time ago I directly criticized one behavior of one of my ex-teachers. I was sorry that he did not express his emotion directly to me as people who know both of us told me afterwards that actually he was in a thundering rage against my "chutzpah" to criticize him directly.
I simply cannot trust people whose speech and behavior are not consistent and change according to when and where they are, even if they are brilliant scholars. I know that my way of direct confrontation is not socially acceptable in Japan, but I cannot be a hypocrite deceiving myself. Hearing what my two ex-teachers said behind my back, I suddenly realized that I would probably have no future in Japan as a tenure-track researcher since those who do not like my direct way of speech and behavior may "warn" their colleagues scattered all over Japan not to hire me as I may disturb the "harmony" in their universities.