2 August 2002 (24 Av 5762)
I arrived in Jerusalem early this morning to spend my annual summer vacation here. Every time I visit Jerusalem, I resume the life I suspended here nine years ago. In the past nine years many things have occurred and changed both internally and externally, but there remains the same feeling as if I were a flower that blossoms once a year during a short annual rainfall in a desert.
No matter how I enjoy my annual one-month stay here, I am aware that it is not exactly a real life as some of my friends here have pointed out. Although I do not consider myself a tourist, my life is not based here after all with few or no social obligations. On the other hand, however, I wonder if my life in Japan, where I spend eleven months of the year, is more real. In a sense it is no less transient and illusionary, at least in my perception.
The more trips I repeat between Japan and Israel, the more keenly I feel that I may belong nowhere after all. A number of inner and outer factors seem to prevent me from having a sense of full belonging to a certain society or group. I even wonder if I am reconciled with myself in spite of all the efforts I have made. This may be my wrong impression, but everywhere I go in the world, many (or the majority?) of the people seem to be reconciled with themselves in that they live in the way predetermined by the society where they were born and live, taking it for granted. Since I was a child, I have always questioned the value of leading a life which is not my own choice but is dictated by the society. Ironically, this kind of question has not made my life happier and instead has left me frustrated and unsatisfied, at least so far, but I seem to have no way back and have to go further in pursuit of self-reconciliation.
9 August 2002 (1 Elul 5762)
Once you are categorized with certain tags, sometimes erroneously, it seems extremely difficult, almost a sisyphian labor, to get rid of them later, like removing yourself from a list of recipients of some junk mail. People who are not your closest friends do not cease to see you through the looking glass of one of these tags even when you have changed so much in the meanwhile and the original tags do not reflect any more what you are and do now, and even when they reflected some truth, it was not the whole truth about you but only part thereof. This is sometimes extremely frustrating, especially when those who see you this way with a kind of prejudice are not total strangers. These tags include your place of birth, things you were once interested in, events that made you famous, etc.
People seem to categorize others almost instinctively, for better or for worse, and have the illusion as if they understood them through the categories they already know. There may be people who remain and do the same as they used to be and do or are interested in the same things in which they used to be interested, but the more curious you are intellectually and spiritually, the more you tend to expand your horizons, thus change, while the tags stuck to you remain out of sync with what you really are and do now.
I may not be able to be totally objective about myself, but I seem to have undergone some drastic internal changes in my life, some of which are very significant in shaping what I am and do now. Of course, I do not have to announce to the whole world all the updates about my life, but I often become desperate when I meet people who still see me through the prejudices they have formed about me based on what I was and did at a certain phase in my life, even after I have explained to them what I really am and do now. I have no patience to explain everything again and again to these people unless they are important to me. Let them think whatever they want, as long as they do not harm me physically or socially. After all, they see what they want to see in me. This is not my problem any more but theirs.
16 August 2002 (8 Elul 5762)
It is said that in face-to-face communication the verbal component constitutes only a tiny part of the total message conveyed from person to person, while various nonverbal components such as body language including facial expressions, etc. are much more important. In the same way our first impression about someone we meet for the first time is determined not so much by the verbal aspect but by various nonverbal aspects.
These days there are more and more cases where the only way of communication between people is email with no face-to-face communication. In these cases we are forced to form our impression about those with whom we correspond mainly on the basis of the written words though there are of course other minor nonverbal clues such as the timing of response. The more we correspond with someone, the more established our image about him or her becomes, regardless of what he or she really is. In very rare cases various circumstances enable us to meet in reality someone whom we know only from correspondence. Then we have the change for the first time to check the congruity or incongruity between the image we have formed about him or her through correspondence and the impression we have in face-to-face communication. We have a very strange feeling, at least in the first few moments, because the person we meet for the first time is not a total stranger, but the medium we use now has never used before.
Every week I receive a couple of email messages from people whom I do not know, mostly through this website, particularly as a feedback to some part of this very web diary. But most of them remain "faceless" even though I continue to correspond with them further, which is quite rare. It is rarer to meet them face-to-face. Such a rare encounter occurred this week in Jerusalem, where I stay this month.
Several months ago I received an email message from an Israeli woman living in the United States now with her husband and children. This may be my prejudice, but according to my past experiences, many Israelis are very bad at writing letters if they write at all, in sharp contrast to, for example, new immigrants from Russia. Her message, however, impressed me both with the beauty of its language (Hebrew) and with the depth of its content. Thus we continued to correspond mainly about things Jewish.
Since we knew that we would be in Israel in August, we decided to meet each other sometime somewhere during our visit here. I met her and one of her children here in Jerusalem when they came to visit their relatives living here. I enjoyed shmoozing with her for the first time, first in my favorite cafeteria, then while I was shlepping them around in the city center. Now she is not "faceless" any more. In the future correspondence with her I will be able to see her facial expressions in her email messages as I do with those of my friends.
23 August 2002 (15 Elul 5762)
This was a very turbulent week with ups and downs in terms of interpersonal relationship. On the one hand, the relationship with someone whom I had not seen for 13 years was renewed, but on the other hand, the relationship with someone who was supposed to be close to me came to an abrupt end.
This website, which I started experimentally in October 1997, has helped me a number of times to get to know new people and renew old relationships which were disconnected for some reason or other. Several months before this annual visit of mine to Jerusalem I received an email message from a student of mine whom I taught Yiddish in the academic year 1989/1999 in the adult education program of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, my alma mater. When the program ended, I helped him continue his study of Yiddish by correspondence. It was really a pleasant surprise to hear from him after so many years in the first place, but it was more exciting to see him face-to-face this week. When he came to the place of our meeting, I immediately recognized him; he has not changed so much. As I spoke with him, I realized that surprisingly, all the intervening years did not constitute any obstacle to renew our old relationship, as if these were the period of fermentation.
Unfortunately, however, this joy was overshadowed by the disconnection of a relationship with a close friend of mine in Japan. Although we had problems in communicating with each other, both face-to-face and by email, I hoped that this period of not seeing each other for one month would help bridge the gap. I was forced to realize, however, that two people who experience problems in face-to-face communication fare no better in communication by email. On the contrary, since written words are the only means of conveying your thoughts and emotions, there are more dangers of misunderstanding. Unfortunately, the gap between us reached the point of no return. The inertia seems to make it difficult to put an abrupt end to a movement, whether physical or interpersonal. Now I am experiencing the aftermath of artificially stopping this interpersonal inertia. I am supposed to know it quite well from the past experiences, but every time I experience it, I cannot help feeling emptiness deep inside myself.
30 August 2002 (22 Elul 5762)
Having spent about four weeks in Jerusalem, I came back to my apartment in Kobe yesterday. Although my apartment is probably the only place in the world where I truly feel at home, I cannot help experiencing a kind of vacuum caused by lack of verbal interaction as it always occurs in every transit from Israel to Japan. After speaking quite intensively about various subjects with friends, I suddenly find myself in silence and seclusion with few opportunities to open my mouth. I myself must be responsible for this, but I have fully detected neither the reasons nor solutions for it yet.
This time this sense of emptiness is intensified by the fact that a relationship with someone close to me came to an abrupt end just before my return to Japan though it may have been a matter of time. With the help of books, which are the only interlocutors I have now in my physical proximity, I am trying now to be as objective as possible about what I said and did, and asking myself where I made mistakes in this failure, including the ones I had done before and repeated this time. One book I happened to find in a nearby bookstore and have just finished reading is full of useful insights into the nature of interpersonal relationship. On almost every page I found something I said or did which was exactly the opposite of what the authors of the book recommended (not) to say or do. I only regret that if I had read such a book before, I might not have made so many mistakes in my words and deeds and caused so much pain to the other person involved in this relationship.
However, I do not think that this relationship was a waste of time. Actually, I believe that as long as one lives earnestly, there is no moment that is wasted in vain. Unfortunately, we ordinary flesh and blood think about something seriously, be it health, interpersonal relationship or whatever, only when it really worsens, though we should have noticed the signals of the deterioration when the condition was not so serious. So was the case with me this time, or to be more precise, I only started reflecting about the problem only after it has reached the point of no return. Although I am still in the process of reflecting upon my numerous mistakes, I only hope that I will be able to learn some lesson from this failure.