1 January 2010 (15 Tevet 5770)
[no update due to a busy schedule]
8 January 2010 (22 Tevet 5770)
I am supposed to make a two-week visit to Japan in about a month. The official reason for this visit is to give a talk on Jewish names and teach an introductory workshop on traditional Ashkenazic folk dance. I know it is quite a chutzpah to organize such a workshop, as I myself have started to learn it only some 20 months ago here in Jerusalem. But I am rather excited that I will be able to share this joy of mine with lovers of Jewish culture in Kobe.
Every time I ended my annual visit there, I said to myself, "Next time ...", but unfortunately, this does not seem to happen this time, either. Instead, I am going to experience something I have not experienced before. Having lost my Japanese citizenship not only officially but also practically, I have to enter the country of my birth with my Israeli passport.
Until several months ago I used to visit the websites of some thirty major publishers in Japan every month to check their new books, but after I lost my Japanese citizenship, I stopped this. Somehow I have lost interest in Japanese society since then, though I do continue to check Japanese newspapers online. What is happening there is getting to seem less and less relevant to me.
In addition to meeting my parents, sister and her husband, and some Japanese and Jewish friends there, what am I looking forward to in this forthcoming visit? To visit bookstores, but not necessarily in Japanese, but mainly in English. Among all the cities I have visited so far in the world, Tokyo boasts the best academic bookstores in English, at least in linguistics. Every time I visit Tokyo, where my sister lives and works, I make a "pilgrimage" to these bookstores. This is a refreshing annual catalysis for the frustration I feel all year long in Israel, which has no serious academic bookstore in any language, at least according to my Japanese standard. On the other hand, it is rather sad to realize that nothing else interests me anymore in Japan.
15 January 2010 (29 Tevet 5770)
This week I attended the first meeting of what I consider a very important and blessed initiative - a forum of young faculty members at Bar-Ilan University. By "young faculty members" I mean those faculty members, mostly in their thirties or forties, who are at the start of their academic career in the university. Bar-Ilan University is said to have more than 1,300 faculty members; I have no idea how many of them are tenure-track lecturers, like myself, who are working hard to acquire tenure, but there was a turnout of about 50 colleagues at the first meeting of this forum this week. It consisted of two main parts: 1) a talk by the rector about promotion and tenure, 2) talks by about ten of these colleagues from various disciplines.
Since quite a few of those who teach at Bar-Ilan seem to live in Jerusalem, I became acquainted with some of them on the same bus on my way to or from the university, but I had always missed the formal opportunity to meet my colleagues, especially those in the same academic rank as I have, in other departments and faculties. I strongly believe that exposure to new ideas from new disciplines and personal acquaintance with people working in these disciplines can enormously stimulate us and our academic output.
In my own department there is only another tenure-track lecturer without tenure yet, so it gave me a sense of unity to see so many other lecturers who are in the same situation. Unfortunately, I could not attend the second part of the forum and hear the talks by my colleagues. I also hope that I will be able to give a talk in one of the next meetings of this forum.
Various rumors are circulating about the issues of promotion and tenure, and I could not decide for myself which is the exact one. In this respect it was very informative to hear the rector himself explain officially the (complicated) procedures related to promotion and tenure. A number of practical tips he gave for our success in promotion and receiving tenure has also given me a fresh academic impetus.
Knowing the dominant culture of this country, I do not think this will happen, but personally I wish we could meet at least once a year at a less formal setting over a glass of wine in the evening and not only at a formal academic setting during the day.
22 January 2010 (7 Shvat 5770)
When I immigrated to Israel in the summer of 2004 to assume a position of full-time tenure-track lecturer at Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, Bar-Ilan University, I imposed upon myself four goals. At that time all of them seemed so daunting that I wondered if I would ever attain any of them.
Fortunately, I attained the first goal in the summer of 2006 after working on it for more than ten years. The second was far easier to reach than I had feared; I achieved it surprisingly easily with almost no effort on my side in the spring of 2007. I started working on the third goal right after I immigrated here in the summer of 2004, but it was not until I had attained the first two goals that I started working on it really hard.
This week I finally reached this goal, too. When I reached the first two self-imposed goals, I jumped and cried out of joy, but strangely, I felt more relieved than joyous this time. I have to confess now that there was no single day when the thought of this goal and uncertainty about attaining it left me. It will take me some more time until this relief will be converted to joy.
The fact that I have attained this third goal does not mean that from now on I will be free from any pressure. On the contrary, I will be under more pressure in a sense. This goal is only a turning point, but not a finish line. I still have a long way to go to reach this line, if at all.
Now I feel ready to allow myself to invest the largest part of my energy in an attempt to reach the next, fourth goal. There was a period in the relatively recent past when I felt (erroneously) that I was ready for it, but in retrospect, I seem to have bee too preoccupied with the third goad to open myself enough to the fourth. This goal is probably the most difficult of the four, but having worked hard and attained the first three goals, I have not given up working on the fourth, either.
29 January 2010 (14 Shvat 5770)
I am already convinced that many of those who were born and brought up in Israeli society prefer oral communication, be it face-to-face or by telephone, to written communication, typically by email in our days, for those contexts in which the latter can fulfill the task far more efficiently. I reserve the use of telephone for personal conversations with my closest friends. I find other uses of telephone extremely intrusive. I even find telephone calls from people I know on business matters even more annoying than unsolicited calls from total strangers.
My past experience has shown that more than 99% of business matters can be better handled by email and the use of telephone as an intrusive tool of communication is hardly justified in these cases. So I have been wondering why so many people in Israel seem to prefer telephone and sometimes insist on its use, often causing others to waste their time.
One of the main possible reasons is that traditional Jewish culture, unlike, e.g., traditional Japanese culture, has put more emphasis on oral communication than on written communication. This is also backed by my empirical observation that as a rule my Israeli friends and acquaintances write far less both in quantity and in frequency than their counterparts from Japanese or Russian culture, where writing letters, and long ones at that, as a means of communication has been a well established custom.
Another possible reason is that due to technical difficulties speakers of Hebrew were exposed to the use of email in their mother tongue much later than speakers of other languages. So email has not become an indispensable part of their communication and still remains a kind of substitute for telephone when it is unavailable. And almost none of those who email me in Hebrew seems to know time-honored netiquette of email use.