6 July 2007 (20 Tamuz 5767)
It is almost seven years since I started this online journal as a weekly kheshbon nefesh ('soul-searching'). In spite of (or thanks to?) my offensive remarks and innuendos and in spite of the fact that it is necessary to email me privately, I have been fortunate enough to receive comments from strangers who stumbled upon this journal and/or are patient enough to read it regularly. I receive a few comments on average every month from these people in addition to several more from those who know me personally.
This political incorrect journal seems to be read weekly by about 100 people. The majority of them seem to reside in one of the three countries: United States (ca. 40%), Israel (20%) and Japan (10%). The majority of strangers who take the trouble to send me comments live in the United States and Israel as well as several countries in Europe, but I have never ever received any single comment from any stranger living in Japan.
You may say that this is because I write in (broken) English, but I do receive comments from non-native speakers of English in Israel either in English or in Hebrew. So this total lack of feedback must be sought elsewhere; it must be something cultural rather than linguistic.
I have noticed that in Japan more people seem to keep their blogs and online journals anonymously instead of revealing their own names. In principle, I do not trust the content of what these people write because it seems to me that writing anonymously is almost equal to saying that you are not responsible for what you write; you write things you really want to say under the cover of some camouflaged identity. No less amount of responsibility must be required to respond to a stranger unanonymously, especially if the comment you send personally is critical.
Unfortunately, I have to say that such culture of healthy confrontation does not exist in Japan online, and even less offline. Even when comments are made online anonymously, they often become attacks ad hominem. I am not surprised that "persona non grata" like me who does not hesitate to criticize someone else face-to-face did not find a full-time position in a Japanese university. I wish I were wrong. Any comment in whatever language I can read, including Japanese, from anyone in Japan who disagrees with me is more than welcome.
13 July 2007 (27 Tamuz 5767)
I often suffer no less from silence of fellow human beings in society than noise, both man-made and natural. It is the kind of silence that I encounter in those social contexts where I would expect speech. Although there seem to be contexts where silence is the accepted norm in all the cultures, different societies dictate their respective members differently when to keep silent.
I was not so happy about those social rules about silence that were accepted in Japan. The context of silence by which I as a person who spent a lot of time teaching was bothered (and sometimes even tortured) me was lack of verbal (and often even nonverbal) reaction from students in class. Average classrooms in Japanese universities are more silent than graveyards in Israel. I am really happy that I do not have to suffer from this kind of silence here anymore. I am grateful to my students for enabling me to experience and enjoy lively verbal interaction in class.
Generally speaking, people in Israel are more extroverted, sociable, frank and talkative than people in Japan. But especially recently, I have come to notice a few social contexts where many Israelis keep silent (and many Japanese do not). One of them, which is totally enigmatic to me, is that when a bus delays for whatever reason, the driver never apologizes, and passengers, many of whom must blow the horn in an irritated way if someone else before them does not move off immediately after the traffic lights turns green, do not complain about the delay to the driver, even when he is to blame, and remain patient.
This leads to another, very bothering, context for Israeli silence. It is lack of apology in many occasions. Many people go to great lengths and waste their words just in order not to say, "I am sorry." Some of them even seem as though they would feel the sting of conscience if they apologized. They instinctively justify themselves and sometimes even blame others when they themselves are to blame.
Another situation, which is no less annoying, is that some people decide to ignore questions and requests by email to which they have to say no. I am not sure yet whether this is because they have to say they are sorry when they say no, or they are simply embarrased to say no. I am sure that in such a context many people in Japan would apologize at length for being unable to say yes. In Israel I often find myself waiting for an answer to my question or request, only to realize after a few days that the person whom I asked preferred to remain silent.
I think I probably know the single rule that controls speech and silence in Japan, but I have not found yet one single principle that can explain what seem to me contradictory choices of some kinds of speech and silence in Israel.
20 July 2007 (5 Av 5767)
Our eating habits and taste are formed largely in our childhood, so parents have the chief responsibility for teaching their children how to eat regularly and healthily. In this respect I have to thank my parents and late grandmother for having allowed me to eat nothing between the meals, given me no junk food and taught me how to appreciate raw materials as naturally as possible without too much "makeup". I am not sure whether my parents were exceptional in Japan, but I am quite sure that they must be in Israel.
In the synagogue where I daven every Sabbath I always encounter a very annoying view: almost all parents who bring their small children there give them junk foods full of salt, sugar and/or oil in order to soothe them during the services, especially in the morning. Even if you yourself as a parent do not give your children anything to eat between the meals, they are not free from this "poison", as they get it anyway from their peers.
I really want to ask these parents whether they are aware that this way they are actually "poisoning" their own children. Since a receptive age these poor children learn to resort to junk foods as a means of pacifying themselves. Bad eating habits and unhealthy taste, once established, are very difficult to eradicate later in your life. Worse still, these people make new victims, who are mostly their own children.
The result of this vicious circle is the abundance of people in Israel whose bodies have been violated physically by themselves through all those years of "poisoning" together with lack of physical exercises. It really hurts and frustrates me to see so many prospective disfigured people still in their infancy before my eyes without my being able to do anything.
27 July 2007 (12 Av 5767)
One of my favorite Jewish jokes goes as follows:
Bush was very curious about how the Jewish people knew everything before he did. So he called the FBI and asked them to figure it out.
One week later they came back and said, "Mr. President, the Jews have something called Sabbath. They meet each other at the synagogue and use a code. They sit, they pray, and there is a word that is the key to this secret. This word is 'Nu?'. When one says to another, 'Nu?', the other tells him everything, every bit of news."
Bush wanted to see this for himself. So the FBI dressed him like a Hasid and taught him to read from the right to the left of the siddur. Bush arrived at a synagogue on Sabbath and sat beside someone. He waited for a moment, and said, "Nu?"
He answered, "Sh, don't talk now, Bush is coming."
Jokes are funny because there is some truth in them. The above one is no exception in this respect. I consider synagogues as one of the ingenious Jewish inventions, though they may seem enigmatic to outsiders like Bush in the above joke. You see more or less the same people at least once a week or often every day, depending on the frequency of you davening there. In Japan you can spend years with the same people you see regularly at the same place without speaking to them or being spoken to by them, but fortunately, this is not the case here in Israel.
In the synagogue I visit twice a week in Jerusalem I shmooze with some of the regular congregants before and/or after davening, though rather briefly, and when I am invited to their places for Sabbath meals, I aurally shmooze with them quite at length. Generally speaking, they are the kind of people I would have no chance to get acquainted with if we did not daven in the same synagogue.
This talk may sometimes be gossip about other members of the community, but they can sometimes be informative and even inspiring about known or unknown matters. I have been claiming that the seemingly most boring people are often far more interesting that the best writers whose voices I can hear only in their books. I have experienced very few exceptions to this, at least in Israel, as long as they speak from their own experiences of life.