5 August 2005 (29 Tamuz 5765)
This week I attended the 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies organized by the World Union of Jewish Studies, held from Sunday to Thursday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and attended by about 1200 active participants from Israel and abroad. This was for me the fifth consecutive time to participate in this academic Olympiad of Jewish studies since 1989 and the fourth consecutive time to give a talk.
This time I could attend only six sessions, mainly on Hebrew and Jewish languages, as well as four ceremonies in total. There were of course much more sessions I wanted to attend, but because I could not come to the congress at all before late afternoon for some personal reasons and so many (more than 20!) sessions in parallel, I had to give up sessions not only on other topics that interested me, such as Jewish onomastics and music but even on Hebrew and Jewish languages.
Among what few sessions I managed to attend the panel session on Jewish onomastics with the writer Aharon Appelfeld and the closing session remain most clearly in my memory. Two things that were stressed by one of the speakers in the latter, Prof. Joshua Schwartz, who is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem like myself and dean of the Faculty of Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University, where I work now, are still echoing in my ears: the importance of Modern Hebrew as an academic language of Jewish studies, which many participants must have felt strongly during this congress, and the fact that a large proportion of the state-of-the-art knowledge circulates orally in the corridors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (and probably other important centers of Jewish studies, including Bar-Ilan University).
The emotional peak of this congress was a special evening held on Wednesday in memory of the late Prof. Shelomo Morag, who was also the supervisor for my doctorate at the Hebrew University. I had the honor of telling my personal memory about him as a teacher. Even while I was preparing the talk at home on the morning of that day, I started to cry. I could not help start sobbing during my talk in this ceremony. Strong emotion took over me and choked my voice. I barely managed to finish my talk. Afterwards many people who knew him well came to me to show their empathy with me. As I said there, I still cannot forgive myself for not having studied his oral teaching on the oral traditions of Hebrew and Aramaic in various Jewish communities, in the study of which he had been the undisputed authority in the world for many years.
There is only one thing I am sorry for in this congress. It is the fact that I missed the concert of Jewish music on Monday. According to what was written in the congress program, I mistook the content of the concert for some contemporary music on Jewish motives. I was glad that a friend of mine took me to a small concert of klezmer music where only musicologists were invited. One of the members of the klezmer band who performed there was Walter Zev Feldman, who is among the most important klezmer performers on authentic instruments. It is very ironical that in the Jewish state there are few concerts of klezmer music. It was only in this evening that I was told that actually they also played in the concert on Monday, but it was too late.
All in all I enjoyed this congress and was inspired a lot in spite of the fact that I could not attend so many sessions. I was glad that I could attend this important international gathering as a member of the faculty of an Israeli university. I was also happy to meet a number of colleagues from abroad and shmooze between sessions as I think that what was exchanged in the corridors is probably no less important than what was told in the conference rooms.
12 August 2005 (7 Av 5765)
I arrived in Japan on Sunday to spend a four-week vacation here giving two talks and meeting my parents, sister and close friends. Partly because I have already become used to traveling between Japan and Israel and switching between the two societies, and partly because I get up-to-date news about Japan online on a daily basis in Israel, nothing physical or sociocultural surprises me this time, except that I am pleasantly surprised to realize now that Japan, which I thought was one of the noisiest among developed countries, is actually even quieter than Israel, where I have been tortured by cell phones in public.
But it is still difficult or is even becoming more and more difficult for me to visit the place where I was born and brought up and my parents live. After spending three days in Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto, I arrived here on Wednesday. What makes it hard for me to visit them and the place is the fact that I have to face something I am spared when I live alone, i.e., the aging of my parents as well as the sense of guilt I feel for not supporting them financially and/or by living with them and for not giving them the pleasure many other parents have, the pleasure of having grandchildren.
In a sense it is more difficult to see people close to us become weaker with age than to see ourselves become older just as their death is harder to digest than the idea of our own death. What torments many people, including myself, about aging is probably not the fact that it is a process leading to death but the fear of losing dignity as a human being with weakening physical and intellectual faculties. Living without human dignity could be harsher than death. But we can probably train our soul in our present reincarnation only by experiencing such agony in our physical embodiment.
19 August 2005 (14 Av 5765)
I have always considered music and literature as the most and second most sophisticated forms of art respectively; other arts, i.e., visual and performing arts, simply do not appeal to me enough esthetically and emotionally. Films may be an exception as language plays an important part there, but I have almost always enjoyed novels than movies based on them. Therefore I have rather naively considered vision as a less eloquent form of communication than language. It is intentional that my website is character-based with no pictures.
As I purchased a digital camera last week and started taking pictures this week, I am starting to think that this may have been my prejudice. I realize that vision and language simply complement each other in communication. I am more inclined to abstract thinking, but I have to admit that there are cases in which seeing is believing. Vision can be more eloquent in describing to others something physical, especially when it is something they have never seen and their imagination based on your verbal description fails them.
I bought a camera mainly for the purpose of taking pictures of Jerusalem and showing them to my parents. But during this stay I took pictures of the place where I was born and my parents live and sent some of them to several close friends of mine. They may now be able to understand me more as they see what I saw in my childhood (the physical landscape here has not changed much since then); physical environment often influences us no less than sociocultural environment. I also realize that photography like other visual arts is actually your interpretation of the physical world around you.
I have decided to start a picture gallery, where I will put a new picture every week to share it with visitors to this site who may or may not know me personally. This is a kind of visual appendix that may be able to complement this purely character-based online journal.
26 August 2005 (21 Av 5765)
I realize how much I resemble my father in the way I think. He never taught me how I should think, but I must have absorbed it unconsciously by watching his behaviors in my childhood. Both of us are perfectionists professionally. Our perfectionism seems to manifest itself, e.g., in obsession about invisible details, intellectual quest for innovation, etc. From what I heard from him before, he must have been quite established professionally by the time he reached my present age.
During this stay I learned something new: throughout his career as a successful carpenter that extended over a period of more than three decades he built 83 new houses and expanded/rebuilt more than 90 houses mostly by himself, including planning and actual building. Building a new house may be parallel to writing a refereed paper in my profession; I wonder if I will be able to write so many refereed articles in my life.
Having had a very difficult childhood economically, my father had to teach himself the core of the knowledge and skills that made him win the confidence of his customers. Thanks to him, I was spared worries about money, but I was like him in that I mostly taught myself Hebrew, which has become not only the means of my livelihood but also my life itself in a sense.
Unfortunately, this perfectionism of ours seems to have a price - stubbornness. Only someone who is incurably stubborn will be able to be true to his ideal of perfectionism. But as it is not always easy to think differently in our private life, those close to us often have to suffer from our stubbornness. As far as I remember, this has been one of the main reasons why my father and I quarrelled with my mother and my girlfriend respectively. I am still wondering how I will be less stubborn in my private life so as not to cause others around me to suffer unnecessarily.