3 April 2009 (9 Nisan 5769)

[no update due to a trip]

10 April 2009 (16 Nisan 5769)

[no update due to a trip]

17 April 2009 (23 Nisan 5769)

I returned from Japan to Israel early this morning as was planned. Like every trip to Japan I had made before, this one could not leave me unaffected, either. It has given me material for thought about life in general and differences between Jewish and Japanese mentalities. I still continue to ponder upon what I felt and thought there.

It does not surprise me any more to find differences between Jewish and Japanese mentalities, but this time I have experienced and realized some fundamental difference between the two. The official reason for this trip was to give a talk at a departmental colloquium of one of the places where I studied in Japan. What struck me so deeply there was the fact that the majority of the people who attended the meeting had such gloomy and tense faces; I could even discern fear in the faces of some students. This was nothing new to me, and one can encounter such faces everywhere in Japan, but I have never thought about it. If I am to choose one word to express the atmosphere forged by people with such faces is sadness. I felt as if my positive energy were sucked up.

If it were not for the Orthodox synagogue in Kobe, I might have been unable to survive this trip and have dried up. Coming there and shmoozing with people, including the Chabad rabbi there, I felt as if I were docked with a spiritual recharger. I cannot find any better word than joy to characterize the atmosphere there, in sharp contrast to the surrounding society. Actually, this unique synagogue was the only place where I could feel truly comfortable during this visit.

While traveling in Japan, I read and thought about the so-called "Law of Attraction". While shmoozing with the Chabad rabbi in Kobe, he quoted the following sentence of the Lubavitcher rebbe: "Thing good and it will be good." Actually, this captures the very essence of the Law of Attraction. I have decided to try to get rid of any negative thinking from inside me, though it may not be so easy. The experiences I had in the synagogue in Kobe have also strengthened my bond with Yiddishkeit. S'iz azoy gut tsu zayn a yid!

24 April 2009 (30 Nisan 5769)

The shortest romantic relationship I had used to be the one I had about a year ago. It lasted only two months. Today I am breaking this personal record of mine. A still fresh relationship came to an end only after five weeks. I cannot help wondering something must be fundamentally wrong with me, as these two failures had more or less the same development and ending.

Before these relationships I was not interested in marriage. So every time a relationship reached the point where the other side hinted at marriage, I left her. I am still sorry for the pain I must have caused those ex-girlfriends I left this way. I feel as if I were paying for this. Now I am the one who suffers from this pain of being discarded all of a sudden, finding myself turning from a happy man to a devastated and wretched one.

In the last two relationships that ended last year and today respectively I had almost everything I wanted to see in a future spouse, but one thing was missing on both sides or on the other side - sufficiently strong love. In both cases the other side decided to put an end to the relationship for lack of such love. Compatibility seemed and does seem far more important for me than love. Besides, I believe that true love must be based on mutual understanding and appreciation, which definitely require more than one or two months. This is only my opinion, and women, or at least these two ex-girlfriends of mine, seem to need a strong emotional attachment in the very beginning as a precondition for the continuation of a romantic relationship. But I still find it extremely difficult to understand how they can make such a decision to finish the relationship after a month or two.

Naturally, I do not blame them for making this decision. The pain of finding myself alone and lonely again reminds me not only of the same pain I had last year but also of the same question to which I have not found an answer - what makes me unlovable. I am more and more confused about what love is at all. I cannot help asking myself a hypothetical question, either - in these two relationships I had to visit Japan for half a month in a fairly early stage of the relationship, which forced the other side to ponder upon its continuation, so the question is what if I had not visited Japan. I ask myself this question because after the period of my absence I could not fail noticing a change in the way the other side related to me - they became colder. Anyway the fact remains that for this and/or other reasons I noticed that the initial enthusiasm of the other side disappeared little by little, while mine increased, until we reached a point where there was an unbridgeable gap in the way we felt about each other.

I am also confused about and bothered with the fact that at least these two ex-girlfriends changed so much in such a short period of time in the way they related to me verbally and non-verbally. I wish I were wrong, but I am more and more inclined to think that this is not specific to them but part of women's nature. This reminds me of La donna è mobile in Verdi's Rigoletto, which expresses so eloquently what I feel now:

The pain is still so fresh that I do not know what lesson I can learn from this failure. But one thing I would like to do is not to linger upon it too long so that I may open myself again to new, and hopefully better, opportunities. The present is too precious to be wasted by my thinking only about the past and worrying too much about the future. In spite of everything I try to be optimistic, as I consider life as a test.