7 March 2008 (30 Adar I 5768)
One of the tenets of Judaism I like is נעשה ונשמע, which literally means 'Let's do and hear', i.e., first you practice something, then you receive a rational explanation about it. Our intellectual and spiritual life is full of those things that can never be fully understood without prior first-hand experience; only afterward you can also understand an explanation about it. This is not the same as blind faith. You trust the knowledge of someone has proved himself as knowledgeable and credible in a given area. Rejecting something immediately after trying it only for a second or even without trying it at all seems to me lack of intellectual modesty. I would give a chance to something that is praised by many mavens. Actually I have come to certain things I appreciate and cannot live without in this way.
There is one skill I have had to share with a group of people for the past four years. I have never met anyone who was familiar with it or even has heard of it before. When the audience has absolutely no clue about what I am talking, it becomes a Herculean task to convince them to try it. I have no choice but to give them a rational explanation about its amazing utility, but naturally, most or all of them fail to understand it, which is alright with me, as the very skill I would like to share with them has a very steep learning curve and requires us to fiddle with it for a substantial amount of time to start really appreciating it.
However, it does annoy me that some of them have the chutzpah to blame me by totally ignoring their intellectual arrogance. I find it hard to understand someone who does not understand a certain thing and knows nothing about it can have an opinion about it and is not ashamed of doing so publicly. I am sorry that I do not seem to be a good "preacher" or may not seem credible enough in their eyes to convince them to continue to try the skill which I consider essential for everyone who writes or has to manipulate text with a computer. I am even more sorry that they remain in what I consider dark ages. It is as if they were used to swimming with a suit and a tie and were not ready to my advice that it would be far more efficient to swim without a suit and a tie.
14 March 2008 (7 Adar II 5768)
I am still quite bothered by lack of intellectual modesty among quite a few people I encounter in Israel. I am afraid that it is a very rampant manifestation of the mentality of those who were born here, whether they are secular or religious, if not haredi. I have no idea how this annoying mentality came about in a culture created almost ex nihilo; at any rate the fact remains that I seldom encounter it among those who were born outside Israel and immigrated here, so it must be specific to this society.
As I wrote last week [this is the first time that I refer to my past writing!], one generally needs a certain amount of experience with something to start to understand and appreciate it. But the above mentioned people lose no time in starting to complain about something after five minutes of failed trial with it. There is a very fundamental logical contradiction here. How can a person who "boasts" of failing to understand something can judge it and decide that it is useless?! It is like going to a yeshiva and after trying to read a page of the Talmud with no success, you blame your teacher that he is forcing you to learn something totally useless.
I have to admit that I have chutzpah in certain areas, but when it comes to intellectual challenges I have always tried to be modest and listen to what those more experienced than I have to say about things I am trying to learn. This way I have learned many things whose existence I had never been aware of, and I am really grateful to them for this. In absolute terms I am not knowledgeable enough in many areas of intellectual expertise, but in relative terms I seem to have far more experience in certain areas than some people I have to get along with. I have been asking myself what I can do to convince them to trust me and my experience in these areas.
21 March 2008 (14 Adar II 5768)
I realize anew how deeply our relationship with others is affected by whether they can eat and drink the same things together. In many cultures world over doing so is interpreted as a sign of accepting and respecting those who invite us to dine. Reasons for not eating or drinking certain things can be religious, medical, or simply matters of personal taste, but whatever the reason is, and whether they mean it or not, those who do not or cannot do so with us send us a covert message that they refuse to socialize with us or even refuse us ourselves.
Jewish dietary law is first and foremost a religious one and is meant for spiritual health, but it also has a social function as is well known. It prevents observant Jews from socializing with non-Jews, hence helps prevent intermarriage. The very fact of eating and drinking the same things together is often enough to bring those who are involved closer even without the effect of alcohol.
For these reasons I have always found it extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, to socialize with those who do not or cannot drink wine (or other alcoholic beverages). I would even say that it is almost a torture for me to dine with someone like this, especially if there are no other diners. It seems to me that he or she throws a wet blanket over the pleasant atmosphere, if not on purpose. This takes away most of the pleasure of dining with someone else. I also seem to have a problem with those who maintain a special diet which has nothing to with their religious beliefs, such as vegetarianism or macrobiotics.
The bottom line is that it is true that sharing the same "taste" in the figurative sense of the word is very important in living with someone in symbiosis, but sharing the same taste in the literal sense of the word seems no less important.
28 March 2008 (21 Adar II 5768)
I never imagined that such a day would come. I have just purchased a mobile phone for three compelling reasons, though I have been opposing using it as I may have explained on this journal. I even use a line telephone, which I do have, very rarely. I reserve non-face-to-face synchronous communication to a very small number of people who are really close to me or to urgent cases. Otherwise, that is, with less close people and for work, I prefer asynchronous communication by email, as I do not have to be interrupted and can answer whenever it is convenient for me.
However, two new situations have arisen in addition to one existing one. It relates to the main means of public transportation between cities, i.e., buses. As the traffic condition is not always predictable, buses often are late, especially during rush hours. It also happened to me several times that the buses I took to commute to my work place stalled on the way for lack of maintenance, and we passengers were forced to wait patiently on the road for another bus to come. Of course, none of the drivers of these buses apologied to us, though this may not have been their personal fault. So I sometimes find myself in need of calling the secretaries of our department to tell them that I may be late for class. I have to admit that in such cases mobile phones come in handy. But since I can always ask someone to let me use his or her mobile phone, this was not enough for me to purchase a mobile phone. Without the following new situations I would not have done so.
The first is that I am making a three-week trip in Japan from next Tuesday. In my previous visits there I managed to do without a mobile phone. Besides I could find enough public phones everywhere. But they are becoming rarer and rarer, even (or mainly?) in big cities. Since I will not have a constant access to a line phone or to the Internet and may not be able to find a public phone so easily, and I must contact more people and more places this time and keep in touch with them there, the only choice I have is to use a mobile phone (an Israeli one with a SIM card to be purchased in Japan). The second and probably more compelling reason is that I want to always keep open the possibility of contacting and being contacted by some important person, even when I am on the move in Israel.
I have not failed so far to surprise my friends and students here with the news that I have come out of a "cave". It took this "caveman" a little while to learn all the functions packed in my new electronic pacifizer, but I am already more or less familiar with them.