2 September 2005 (28 Av 5765)
My four-week stay in Japan ended with my return to Israel this morning. It was one of the most enjoyable trips I have ever made. It is ironical that I had to visit Japan as a resident abroad in order to enjoy my stay there. This may even be the first time in the past ten years or so that I could concentrate on good things Japan has to offer; I did not even have any culture shock I had been afraid of before the trip. Several factors seem to have contributed to this unexpected feeling.
First of all, as a person living and working in Israel now I had few social obligations there, including, e.g., paying income and municipal taxes and premiums. On a long-time basis you have to fulfill your obligations to benefit from your rights, but on short-term basis you can enjoy your benefit more as a tourist without obligations you have as a citizen. Second, a month is too short a period to be wasted in complaints about things that used to bother you. Surprisingly, even mechanical announcements from loudspeakers in public did not bother me much, partly because I realized that cell phone conversations in Israel could be a much worse source of noise. And most importantly, being a tourist, I could only do things I wanted, such as meeting people I wanted and visiting places I wanted.
In addition to my parents and sister, I would also like to thank all those friends and colleagues of mine who spared their time for meeting and shmoozing with me. Unfortunately, I had a very limited amount of time for each of them. I am sorry that I had little or no time to speak with some of the colleagues who took the trouble of coming to a talk I gave in Tokyo. But I felt that seeing someone in person even for a short while without exchanging any words could be emotionally more significant than corresponding every day. Even the advanced technology we have now, especially the Internet, is still unable to remove this physical barrier.
Although I was essentially free from social obligations there, there is one thing I considered my obligation to finally fulfill as a person who was born in postwar Japan. It is to pay homage to millions of soldiers who fought for the nation in the Second World War and other wars and were killed. So on one of my last days in Japan I visited Yasukuni Shrine, which was built especially for these soldiers, though I neither have sympathy with nor find much spiritual meaning in Shintoism. Recently I have been feeling that I owe my very existence to their self-sacrifice.
9 September 2005 (5 Elul 5765)
Although we can generally choose schools, work places and neighborhoods, we cannot always choose teachers and classmates (in elementary and secondary schools), bosses and coworkers, and neighbors. And it is precisely these people who often affect our life more than friends, whom we can choose, for better or for worse. If you know in advance specific people who may cause you trouble somewhere, you can avoid the place where they teach, study, work or live. But you can neither know nor decide who will move into your place. Good neighbors etc. are blessings, while bad ones are curses, and this depends on pure luck.
No matter how we may associate with our teachers, classmates, bosses, coworkers and neighbors, those whom we, or at least I, want to avoid have perhaps one thing in common: egocentricity. Self-centered neighbors etc. who move into our neighborhood etc. can turn our life into a hell, especially because you spend a significant portion of your time with them and you cannot leave your place so easily.
When I found this apartment in a good neighborhood in Jerusalem thanks to a nice friend of mine, I was glad as he would be my neighbor. But this joy did not last long. Soon afterwards someone moved into a vacant apartment on the other side of my apartment. To my great sorrow, she turned out to play the piano regularly, and pieces with bad taste at that. Since the only thing she cared about was her own pleasure according to what she told me, I had to find some solution to free myself from this torture without moving out. I did find one, and she did stop playing the piano. I seem to have underestimated her. During my absence here she started playing the recorder. So my return to Israel meant the start of a new hell. This time she seems determined to continue playing it in spite of my request.
If I were in her place, I would immediately stop playing it. Actually, I would not dare to play any instrument in an apartment house in the first place unless I make sure (e.g., by living in a big house with no neighbors) that I do not bother anyone else. I have been dreaming of learning to play the clarinet, but I have been unable to realize it for this very reason. What really bothers me is not the noise per se but the fact that it does not bother her and other egocentric people that they bother others around themselves and they can continue what they want without any remorse.
Personally I believe (and hopefully have behaved accordingly) that there are circumstances where we have to sacrifice our own desires for the benefit of others. This is one of the things I learned in my childhood when the Japanese society and educational system were still functioning for learning this and other fundamental rules necessary for the coexistence of different people in a single place. I am sure that this is one of the values in the traditional Jewish culture, too.
Unfortunately, however, consideration for others even by sacrificing oneself seems to have given way to egocentricity both in Japan and in Israel. Selfish behaviors in public are rules rather than exceptions in both countries now. Material affluence is meant to enrich our spiritual life, too, but in reality it seems to contribute to spiritual poverty among so many people in all walks of life.
16 September 2005 (12 Elul 5765)
This week I finally had a chance to experiment with Linux for the second time. My first trial was with (the desktop version of) Red Hat Linux (now Fedora Linux) about two years ago; it was a mixture of failure and disappointment. It took me another two years since then to feel like trying Linux again. This time I tried Ubuntu Linux, which seems to be acclaimed as a very user-friendly distro; the philosophy behind it ("Software should be available free of charge, software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.") and the fact that only free open source components, such as Debian, are used also appealed to me very much.
Ubuntu made a very good impression me, definitely far better than Red Hat, including multilingual support and hardware detection, but I have not been convinced to use it as my exclusive OS, at least at this stage, for a number of reasons. The first and most important reason has nothing to do with its quality per se. As almost all my friends, colleagues and especially students use Windows and will probably continue to do so in the foreseeable future, I have to keep Windows even after deciding to switch to Linux as my main OS. Dual-booting the two is not even a choice for me as it is extremely inconvenient, so I will have to wait until I purchase a new PC after the release of Windows Vista in a year or so, and check the following two points thoroughly by clean-installing Linux (Ubuntu or whatever) on a separate PC.
The first is the issue of Windows software. Although the main programs I use daily are crossplatform (e.g., Firefox, Thunderbird, Oxygen XML Editor, OpenOffice.org, etc.), there are and will be a number of programs that are available only for Windows (and sometimes Mac as well) and indispensable for my own personal and professional needs, especially the software for my digital camera. I have to check whether Wine or emulators are good enough for running unmodified Windows programs on Linux.
The second is the font issue. Because of its much larger base of users and the areas it is mainly put to use, Windows has a far greater number of (often more sophisticated) fonts. My impression is that native Linux fonts are generally less beautiful than their Windows counterparts. I do not think that there will be any problem in finding sophisticated fonts for Latin scripts, but I am not sure about those for Hebrew and Japanese scripts that are good enough not only for screen display but also for desktop publishing; I still have to check the quality of fonts available from, e.g., Culmus Project, as well as whether they support vowel signs (and cantillation marks) and position them correctly.
I hope that by the time I try Linux again on a separate PC in a year or so, the above two issues have been more or less solved if they should remain unsolved now. I also hope that Gnome, the default desktop environment of Ubuntu (I prefer it to KDE, another popular desktop environment for Linux), will have a more sophisticated look; as of now, it looks quite amateurish and unesthetic. In the meanwhile I continue to use my Windows XP as I have nothing to complain about it; actually this is the first version of Windows satisfying all my multilingual needs.
23 September 2005 (19 Elul 5765)
Now that Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) is around the corner, this may be a good time to ponder upon my first year in the land that is both old and new to me. I can say that academically this was the most fruitful year for me since I started teaching at the university since April 1994.
Being a non-native speaker of Hebrew, what more could I hope for than such a prestigious position as lecturership at Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, Bar-Ilan University, which is one of the world centers in the research and teaching of Hebrew linguistics? Although one year has already passed, I still cannot believe that I am actually working there as a faculty member.
Before assuming this position, I was a little worried about how my new colleagues and students there would react to me. Fortunately, this has turned out to be unfounded fear. They accepted me in a very friendly manner. I would like to express my special thanks to Prof. Ora Schwarzwald, my mentor in Hebrew and Jewish linguistics in general and at our department in particular, to Tikva Kahlon and Miriam Schwartz, the secretaries of the department, who have always been willing to help me, and last but not least to the students who took my courses and gave me the pleasure of intellectual interaction in class, especially because lack of reactions in class except in some very rare cases was the main source of my constant headache when I was still teaching in Japan.
What gives me the greatest academic satisfaction here is the fact that I finally have a group of people around myself with whom I can exchange ideas regularly in the university corridors and conference halls. A short face-to-face dialog with an eminent scholar can often be worth tens of books. Not only can I now talk face to face with world authorities in various fields of Hebrew and Jewish linguistics without flying all the way, but also is there an intellectual atmosphere here that has allowed me to get acquainted with researchers working in neighboring or totally different academic fields. To all of them my sincere gratitude and best wishes for a sweet new year.
30 September 2005 (26 Elul 5765)
The Hebrew poet David Shim'oni said that the greatest and rarest talent is to love everything that is good, but it seems even rarer to encounter someone who is able to find good in everything and love it. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that there is a higher chance of encountering such people among those who suffered in their life, as one of my favorite Hasidic songs says: מפני מה ירדה הנשמה / מאיגרא רמא לבירא עתיקתא / הירידה צורך עלייה היא ('Why did the soul tumble / From a high roof to a deep pit / The descent is a necessity for ascension').
The person who had the best sense of humor among all the people I have become acquainted with was a Holocaust survivor, who passed away quite unexpectedly last year. In spite of all the hardships he must have undergone, about which I heard for the first time only one year before his death in a talk he gave in the synagogue in Kobe, he always radiated joy of life and love of human beings, and was loved by everyone who met him. He must have developed his extraordinary sense of humor through his struggles for survivial during and after the worst crime the mankind has ever committed.
It was only in her last years and after her death that I first heard all the hardships my beloved grandmother experienced in her life, but I remember her only as the most optimistic person I have ever met. She could not even finish her elementary education because of the poverty of her family, so she remained illiterate (though she was very eloquent); she lost her husband in her thirties; she lost two of her daughters when they were still young (my mother is her third daughter). In her last years in life she was bed-ridden and was taken care of by her daughter (i.e., my mother). About two months before she passed away, my sister and her husband visited her and videotaped their interview with her. I still remember and am still touched every time I recall this: when my sister asked her when was the happiest moment in her life, she answered "now" in spite of the fact that she was bed-ridden and could barely speak.
When I meet people who can see only bad in everything or even in something that is basically good, I often tell them about my friend and my grandmother. May their memory be blessed and protect me from pessimists and their possible harm.