4 October 2002 (28 Tishrey 5763)
One of the things that discourage and depress me more than anything else is the feeling that I and what little academic knowledge I have acquired by dedicating so much of my time and energy are not needed by the society where I happen to live. Having been rejected applications for Japanese universities for the past several years, it is not especially difficult to succumb to this danger. If I have not reached the lowest level of morale, and can still manage to keep a more or less healthy spirit, it is mostly thanks to the words of the wise I hear directly or read in books.
The rabbi in Kobe, where I live now, told me that one has to descend or recede in order to ascend or proceed. These seemingly simple words are actually quite profound, and seem to apply to many spheres of our life. When I came back to Japan at the age of 30 after spending five fruitful years in Jerusalem, I felt that my thirties would not be easy, and was prepared to be reconciled that this decade as a period of preparation for starting something productive in my forties. As I find my economic possibilities in the form of the number of university and private courses I am allowed to teach diminishing, I cannot help asking myself how much more I have to fall economically and socially.
I am aware that most of us are spiritually lazy in essence. If we are satisfied economically, socially, etc., most of us stop thinking about and developing our spirit. As out muscles need physical pressure to develop, so our souls need problems to develop. In this sense it may be able to say that in every problem lies a seed of development, and whether the seed will bear fruits or not depends on how one deals with the problem.
One of Napoleon Hill's books I happened to read this week has reassured me the power of the subconscious in self accomplishment and the important role autosuggestion plays in inscribing something positive in the subconscious. I know and have experienced this at least twice in my life - once in entering a graduate school inside Japan, and the next time in entering the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for my doctorate. At least for two years I imagined the scenes of my passing the examination and studying at the respective institution as a full-fledged student, and tried to convince myself that I would definitely be able to attain the goal. Fortunately, both dreams were fulfilled.
Having read the above book, however, I wondered whether I had ever done the same thing with finding tenure in a Japanese university with the same strength of desire and conviction. The answer seems to be negative. I could never really imagine myself spending my forties and fifties in a Japanese university even as a professor. So there may be no wonder that I have found no position here. Now I would like to try for the third time the power of the subconscious and autosuggestion for something really worthwhile, and perhaps it will not be to find a permanent position here.
11 October 2002 (5 Kheshvan 5763)
I thought I had mostly conquered the negative trait of caring about what other people think of me when I do what I think is right, until I recently encountered a certain passage from a certain classical Jewish source quoted and expounded in another classical Jewish source which I started to read bekhavruta with an Israeli yeshiva student who is currently staying in Kobe to help the rabbi here. I have realized that actually I still have much to work on in spite of the conscious efforts I have made, especially in the past nine years, to get over this trait.
It is true that I have succeeded to stop caring about what people who are not important for me and/or are not in my presence think of me as long as they do not harm me physically. But when it comes to those with whom I feel identified, I start worrying how I am perceived in their eyes and behaving in an awkward way. And worse still, as that young yeshiva student pointed out to me, your suspicion and lack of self-confidence are liable to make you believe that they are thinking badly of you even when they are actually thinking well of you.
It seems to me that this kind of worry is derived from some kind of shame. But the question is why I have to feel ashamed when I do what I believe is right. The answer seems to be that I feel ashamed because I may not be confident enough in that specific thing which I try to believe is right. And as a result, I am fettered by other people's opinions, whether real or imaginary in my mind, about me. There seems to be only one way to conquer this worry - to jump into the water without secluding myself.
18 October 2002 (12 Kheshvan 5763)
I wonder if an unmarried nonhomosexual man can continue to have a platonic relationship with an unmarried nonhomosexual woman who is not only not too older or younger than he but also sexually attractive. Although sexual attraction may be but one of the factors contributing to the attraction of a man to a woman or vice versa, men's sexual urge seems to be such a strong instinctive force that it seems to overshadow the other kinds of attractions.
Only once in my whole life I could have - and still have - such a platonic friendship with an unmarried nonhomosexual woman who is attractive not only sexually but also intellectually and spiritually. But in order to reach such an equilibrium on my part I had to spend years to "tame" myself. I had been passionately in love with her for several years, until I realized that there was no chance that the relationship would be a bilateral romantic one. That is, I had to pass the phase of love, though one-sided, to reach this platonic relationship.
When your love toward someone is unreturned, and she nevertheless continues to treat you nicely as a platonic friend, you basically cannot have a negative emotion toward her. But when it comes to your ex-girlfriend, the situation is different. It is most likely that you left her, or she left you because there were some reasons that made it impossible to maintain your romantic relationship any more. So generally speaking, you and she are liable to have a negative feeling toward each other. This makes it extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, to keep any healthy nonromantic relationship with someone after you broke up with her.
The memory that you once were intimate with her can bother you. When she was your girlfriend, you could express your emotional closeness in physical terms such as kissing and hugging. But now you are not allowed to do so, and if you cannot resist the temptation of doing so, you will only get a cold treatment from her, which you cannot help interpreting emotionally as a sign of her lack of interest to keep in touch with you even when you do not quarrel with each other, and you know at the intellectual level that your interpretation can be totally wrong. Unfortunately, I myself do not seem to have become mature enough not to react emotionally in this respect.
25 October 2002 (19 Kheshvan 5763)
According to the Jewish sages, a forty-year-old attains understanding. In English they say that life begins at forty. According to the Analects of Confucius, forty is characterized as the age of no doubt. There must be similar maxims about the age of forty in other cultures. It seems that in many cultures forty is considered the age when you have attained a sufficient degree of understanding and certainty about yourself and your mission in life.
I will be forty in half a year, but I have more doubts and less understanding about myself and my life than ever before. This lack of stability and certainty is not only internal but also social; I have no stable job and status, no wife and children, nor do I seem to attain any of them by the age of forty. Actually, I am afraid that socially I have not made any progress in the past decade, though internally I have had many precious opportunities to ponder upon myself and my life.
I am sure that if I look back at my thirties when I have become older, this decade will seem totally different. But since I am still in the vortex of this tumultuous period, I may be too myopic to see a greater picture. Anyway, the more seriously I think about my life, the more doubts I cannot help having about virtually everything essential in life.
When I was in my late teens and twenties, I could picture my future more or less clearly, but now just before the age of forty, which is supposed to be the age of understanding and certainty for many people, I simply cannot picture anything about the future of my life. This may be the price I am paying for having taken nothing social and cultural around myself for granted.