Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Great Minds, Great Mistakes

Great Minds, Great Mistakes

It's a story of a professor and his student, of a Nazi and a persecuted Jew, of forgiveness that shouldn't have been offered - or perhaps, it's merely about hormones. Even if it was the hormones of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Richard Cohen has some interesting thoughts:

Taken together, this is a thoroughly frightening couple -- two of the 20th century's great philosophers, their genius contradicted by their inexplicably appalling lives: One embraced Nazism, the other excused him for doing so. In one critical area, they were no different than a goon and his gal. By way of caution, there ought to be statues of them in every city square, and billboards of them looking down on the naive who think, as Alan Greenspan once romantically did of financial markets, that man is rational.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Great Minds, Great Mistakes

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Rescuing Lust from Extinction

Rescuing Lust from Extinction

The following story appears at least twice in the Talmud, the more detailed version (if memory serves) near the end of the Yoma tracate. However, having recently passed it in Sanhedrin, I'm posting from there.

The context is a discussion of the laws of idolatry. As is standard practice in the Talmud, there's lots of extremely detailed discussion of hypothetical matters that don't happen in the real lives of the scholars doing the discussing. Sometimes (tho often not) these discussions eventually mention the fact that they're religious and intellectual exercises, not practical discourses. So in this case. Having spent days on the minutiae of idolatry, the Gemara wonders how it came to be that the Jews lost their interest in the practice. After all, it was clearly a major issue in the early biblical times, yet the scholars of the Talmudic era apparently had never heard of Jews engaging in it for many centuries.

If you're into modern historical analysis of documents as a primary way to decipher the events of the past, the Gemara's answer won't satisfy you, because it's a fable (or myth, or metaphor, or allegory, or something. The literary folks will better know which term it is). According to this fable, the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem once managed to capture the flaming lion cub of idolatry which had emerged from the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Its roars were terrible to hear, but the prophet Zachariya told them to force it into a cage and pore molten lead over it; lead apparently having special sealing properties, as any reader of Superman comics will confirm.

(If you're less than 40-some years of age and don't know what I'm talking about with the Superman allusion, forget it. Not important).

Since they were having such a good day (Et ratzon) the Sanhedrin decided also to do away with lust. They prayed that the beast of lust be handed over, and when it was they caged it for three days, waiting to see the implications. (They realized the danger of their actions, and were being careful). As they had feared, the absence of lust in the world wreaked havoc; as the Gemara describes it, during those three days even the hens stopped laying eggs. Wondering if they might request that Lust be so limited than men would have it only for their rightful wife, the Sanhedrin recognized that this would not be granted. So they blinded the Beast of Lust but then let it free; as a result, men no longer lust after their immediate female relatives, and incest became rare.

Sanhedrin 64a

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Rescuing Lust from Extinction

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Banality of Banality of Evil

Banality of Banality of Evil

Norm Geras has a thoughtful post on the ease with which too many folks assume we're all potential genocidaires, and wonders why we're not also commonly assumed to be potential rapists, say.

Norm is a nicer and more moderate chap than I, and much better at English understatement. Me, I'm of the opinion that much of the banality-is-evil chatter is bunk. This opinion of mine is based on years of close investigation of the worst genocidaires of all: the men of Adolf Eichmann's office in the SS. Yes, the very group about whom Hannah Arendt postulated the banality concept while willfully not listening to the proceedings at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. I don't much deal with the matter anymore, but once wrote a book about it which you can read in a variety of languages (see the link somewhere over to the left).

The closest one can reasonably come to a blanket condemnation of man's potential for evil is that it's not easy to know in advance who is capable of it, and who isn't, not ever. That's a far cry from the silliness traded in so mindlessly by the "Anyone might do it" brigades. And also - here I'll unmask how unpolitically correct I really am - cultural conditioning is part of the story. Some cultures more easily allow people to engage in mass murder than others.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Banality of Banality of Evil

More on Elias Khoury

More on Elias Khoury

Last week I wrote about the translation to Arabic of Amos Oz' book A Tale of Love and Darkness. The translation, remember, was commissioned by Elias Khoury, an Israeli Palestinian lawyer, after his son was murdered by Palestinians who thought he was Jewish. Now we read that Khoury's father was likewise murdered, not many years after he managed to climb out from under years of Shin Bet persecution. After all that, he can still say

“This book tells the history of the rebirth of the Jewish people,” he said as he sat in his law office. “We can learn from it how a people like the Jewish people emerged from the tragedy of the Holocaust and were able to reorganize themselves and build their country and become an independent people. If we can’t learn from that, we will not be able to do anything for our independence.”

Awe inspiring. If there were more such people around, on all sides, the world would be a better place.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: A Tale in Arabic

A Tale in Arabic

If you've not yet read Amos Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness, do so. Stop reading this blog if you don't have time for both. It's the best book published in Israel last decade, period.

If you can't read the Hebrew original, you can now read an Arabic translation, published in Beirut.

The translation, by Israeli Arab Jamal Gnaim, was funded by the Khoury family of East Jerusalem in memory of their son George Khoury. Khoury was a promising Hebrew University law student when he was killed in a 2004 shooting attack while jogging on the university's Mt. Scopus campus.

(His killers thought he was a Jew).

Oz himself, musing on the success of the book, makes a profound point:

"Apparently the more a book is provincial, the more it is universal. When I wrote the book, I thought it would be read only by Jerusalemites from my neighborhood - I was sure that they wouldn't understand it in Tel Aviv," Oz said. "Now they're reading it in Beirut, Albania, Bulgaria and Korea. In China, for example, it was chosen as one of the best books of 2007."

Universal values are all well and fine, but they must start with real people, who live in real places, with real contexts. The power of universally significant stories or ideas is that people worldwide recognize our common humanity in diversity.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: A Tale in Arabic

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Temples Before Cities?

Temples Before Cities?

Via one of Andrew Sullivan's assistants, here's an article about an archeological finding poised to change the story of the rise of Man. It about the dig at Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, where an extravagant complex of temples was constructed 11,500 years ago, centuries before the earliest know city, and with no city anywhere in sight. Klaus Schmidt, the chief archeologist, claims the need to have a temple ignited civilization rather than vice versa, the rise of civilization called forth religion.

Schmidt (55) has been digging there for 15 years, and expects to stay the rest of his life, yet he understood the full significance of the site in the first 60 seconds of his first visit.

The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.

The human mind is even more complex than its past.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Temples Before Cities?

Can ALS be Stopped?

Can ALS be Stopped?

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a horrible way to die, as Tony Judt has been describing with harrowing detail in the New York Review of Books. Were someone to find a way to stop it, or possibly even to cure it, the world would be a better place.

Some Israeli scientists, entrepreneurs and doctors are trying. Here's hoping.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Rumination on Higher Education

Rumination on Higher Education

A truism of modern contemporary politics is that some strands of the polity think there's a connection between their comparatively elevated degree of education and the inherent correctness of their political positions. (The NIF dust-up we're having these days reeks of this). The corollary, mildly distasteful as it is, is that folks who have spent fewer years accumulating academic qualifications may be less likely to understand what's right, or good, or correct.

I'm all for education. Some of my best friends are university professors. I even spent some years of my life in university environments, and put significant efforts into acquiring various degrees. Yet sad to tell, the case for the intellectual superiority of the academically-trained has never seemed compelling to me. I know too may people without the training who are highly intelligent, and too many folks with fancy degrees whose ability to understand the world is, how to put it, unconvincing.

Recently I've been engaged in an unusual exercise: I'm reading lots of doctoral theses. There are business reasons for this: in a nutshell, I'd like to offer the academic world a tool that will make life a wee bit more efficient; for this purpose, however, I've got to understand what different types of academic research looks like. What do doctoral students do when they get up in the morning?

Unfortunately, the more I read, the more I'm wondering if perhaps the acquisition of an advanced degree in today's academic world might not actively hamper one's ability to relate to humans. I'm not seeing that it strengthens one's ability to express coherent thoughts, for one; nor that there' an overriding curiosity about people. Paradigms, yes. Constructs, certainly. Models, there are those. People, and how they relate to their lives: less.

Maybe I'm simply finding the wrong doctoral theses.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Miep Gies, RIP

Miep Gies, RIP

The Economist has a moving obituary for the woman who tired to save the family of Anne Frank.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Death and Transactions

Death and Transactions

Tomorrow the Daf Yomi brigade will finish Bava Batra (I'm ahead right now, and finished already). At 176 double pages Bava Batra is the longest of all tractates; actually, it's the third segment of a mega-tractate called Nezikim, which contains 414 double pages. So even at the breakneck speed of a double page a day, we've been in Nezikim for well over a year. Coming up is Sanhedrin, which deals with courts (and lots of other things, this being the Talmud).

By way of farewell from Nezikim, here's a story we passed a few weeks ago. The Gemara has spent many pages on the laws of shchiv merah - a person who is approaching death. There are various ways in which a shchiv merah differs from a healthy person when it comes to transfer of property. First, since they may have but little time left, the procedures of transferring property are mostly waived. There's no need for a contract, for example. Second, unlike a healthy person who gives someone property but then can't take it back since ownership has passed to the recipient - if a shchiv merah heals, he or she can claim the property back, since the presenting of it was predicated on approaching death which fortunately didn't happen. The way to gauge if a shchiv merah intended to give a present (irrevocable) or hand out property soon not to be needed anymore (revocable) is to see how much property was handed out. If the shchiv merah handed out all his or her property, clearly it was in the expectation of death and thus revocable.

There, I summarized the whole thing in one paragraph. Cool.

So here's the story, which I'll try to tell in a mildly accurate rendition of the original, minimal wording and all:
The sister of Rav Dimi ben Yosef owned a small orchard. Each time she was weak she'd give it too him, and take it back when she felt better. One time she was weak and sent for him:
- come, take.
- I don't want.
- come and craft it however you wish.
He came and wrote a contract which left her with part of it.
When she got up, she wanted it back.
[Rav Dimi apparently refused]
She went to Rav Nachman [perhaps the greatest judge of the period]. Rav Nachman sent to Rav Dimi: Come.
- No. What for. I left her part of it, and she signed a contract. [My case is waterproof].
- If you don't come I'll beat you with a whip that draws no blood [I'll excommunicate you].
[Rav Dimi apparently came]
[Rav Nachman to the witnesses]: What did she do?
- She cried vey I'm dying and I won't see my brother! [who was refusing to be bothered]
- In that case, she really felt she was dying, and giving presents right before death can be revoked [if death doesn't happen].

Bava Batra 151 a-b.

As I've often said, this thread starts and is explained here.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Ups and Downs: They're Life. Both.

Ups and Downs: They're Life. Both.

Michael has responded to this morning's blogging with a story he heard from his father, who survived Buchenwald:

Otto had been a chess champion (won the Belgian title in 1936), and his chess hero had always been a Russian named Alekhine. One day in Buchenwald, in the latrine, Otto came upon what he thought was a miracle of sorts: there on the ground was a page from a recent German chess magazine, undoubtedly discarded by an SS guard, with an article by, of all people, Alekhine. So Otto's heart skipped and his mood soared. Until he began reading. Then he discovered, for the first time, that Alekhine had become a rabid antisemite sympathizer with the Nazi cause, and the article was all about the evils of "Jewish chess..." And Otto then sank into an especially low depression. But then there was another uplift, because it occurred to him that if he was still capable of experiencing both joy and depression it must mean that his humanity had not been destroyed, even by the Nazis. And this awareness, that he was still human, gave him hope and the will to continue.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

The Great War: History

The Great War: History

I've been busy in the real world today, so blogging has been light. Here's a third article on today's theme of memory and how it passes.

The Economist recently offered a respectful and touching description of the war memories of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham, the last two British veterans of WWI who died, implausibly old, in 2009. They began telling their tales only once they had reached extreme old age; the memories were literally snatched from the jaws of oblivion at the very last moment.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Contracts, the Iternationale, and Massachussets

Contracts, the Iternationale, and Massachussets

We're nearing the end of Bava Batra, the longest of all tractates. The final chapter, from page 150, deals with the technicalities of contracts: who writes them, what's their correct form, and so on. On page 157a there are a number of sayings and stories from Abayeh, one of the major scholars of the 4th generation of Babylonian Amoraim, so early 4th century. Thus, if someone asks for an example of your signature, always write it at the top of the page, otherwise they may write obligations above it and you'll have to meet them. The Gemarah then tells of a Jewish tax collector who came before Abayeh: "If your honor would give me a sample of his signature, in the future I"ll be able to reduce the tax on scholars recommended in writing by your honor". As Abayeh was about to sign at the top of the page, the tax collector tried to pull it up so as to leave space above the signature. Abayeh told him the rabbis had already warned us of scoundrels such as him.

We learned this page last week. Also last week, the New York Times had an article about internet passwords and how many of us make it easy for hackers to break through them. Apparently the single most common password is "123456", and many millions of users use one of 20 popular passwords.

The differences between the world of 310 and 2010 are too numerous to count. The issues, whoever, are exactly precisely the same. Abayeh, were he alive today teaching Bava batra, would easily recognize our modern day scoundrels, and would remind us that "the rabbis already warned us about them".

In 1871, in the excitement of the Paris Commune, a fellow named Eugene Pottier wrote a poem called the Internationale. Within a few decades it was the socialists' anthem world wide, and after 1918 it became the anthem of the Soviet Union. It never really caught on in the United States, but in many parts of the world it was the rousing anthem. Israeli socialists were still singing it into the 1980s (though I expect they're mostly glad we've forgotten this). The song had many versions in dozens of languages, but all included the theme

This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Enslaved masses, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation

or, in a more rousing rendition:

For justice thunders condemnation:
A better world's in birth!
No more tradition's chains shall bind us,
Arise you slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations:
We have been nought, we shall be all!

(Wikipedia, predictably, offers many versions. The Hebrew is a pithy "Olam yashan nachriva").

The idea of destroying the old world so as to build a better one has rather fallen out of fashion recently, to the extent that most people today don't believe how real the intention was. Yet not long ago this impulse was the motivating idea behind humanity's worst political movements, Nazism and Communism both (but probably not fascism, which is ironic as today that term is the one used for "whatever nasties we don't like"). In their different ways, Communists from Petersburg to Phnom Penn really did intend to build a new world with new people, and the Nazis agreed fully.

Yet the impulse is still there. Not, admittedly, through violence. No, today's inheritors of the idea hope to re-wire humanity and start history anew by smothering us all in kindness, I can't say it any other way:

Our point was simple and direct: "Your success depends on helping people believe that they can count on each other, that they are not alone in a ruthless world in which people are out for themselves, and there is a possibility of building a society based on kindness, generosity, and caring for each other. Unless your programs actually allow people to feel in their own lives that they are part of build a new society based on love and generosity of spirit, they will soon fall back into the older paranoid view-that we are all competing with each other and have to look our first for number one. And that will likely them right back into the hands of the most conservative forces in this society. It's that simple, President Obama: if your policies do not give people a personal experience of caring and generosity, people will quickly succumb to the fearmongers who compete in the media over who can make people most afraid, most cynical, and most angry."

Written and e-mailed last week By Rabbi Michael Lerner, of Tikkun Magazine, cited by Jeffrey Golderg, who seems to be on the mailing list. Goldberg pokes fun at Lerner, and right he is in doing so, but I'm more interested in the underlying theme. All that happened was that a Republican won a by-election in Massachusetts, after all. For Lerner, this is the demise of the chance Obama never properly grasped to change human nature.

Lerner is a side show, yes, but he's not Richard Silverstein or even Mondoweiss. He's been in the public eye since the Civil Rights Movement reached Berkley, Bill Clinton reputedly read his Tikkun Magazine even while at the White House, and perhaps his wife does still, who knows. He thinks it's possible, indeed, the only admirable option, to reform humanity into something it isn't, never has been, and - if Bava batra is any indicator - unlikely to be anytime soon.

(As an aside, sometimes I wonder what kind of rabbi Lerner is? He must have learned Bava Batra, no? How does he fit it into his understanding of the world? And also, since he's a strident critic of much Israel has done these past few decades, what does that say about Israel?)

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Field Hospital in Haiti

Field Hospital in Haiti

Jeffrey Goldberg is kvelling about Israel's field hospital in Haiti, here and here. (He also has a fine expose of the under-reporting of Egypt's brutal siege of Gaza, here, but that's not my present topic). Indeed, if you believe CNN or CBS, it's an impressive story.

I once asked Richard Silverstein why he only ever had bad things to say about Israel, and what that told us about him, but he rejected my insinuation: there's precious little about Israel that's positive, but in the rare cases there is, he's glad to report it. OK, fair enough (just barely). A team of Israelis saving lives at the other end of the world: moderately positive, don't you think? Not if you're Richard Silverstein. He has found a grumpy Israeli who has nasty things to say, and he gleefully amplifies his kvetches. The bottom line: Israelis saving lives in Haiti is a Bad Thing. (His blog, you'll recollect, is called Tikkun Olam).

Mondoweiss would prefer not to talk about the topic, but does mention it: why are Jews so great for everyone but the Palestinians? (Why, indeed. Let's see if we can think of any reasons).

As of yesterday, a week after the catastrophe, there were two field hospitals in Haiti. One was Israeli (the better equipped one, apparently). I looked for this fact on the Guardian's website, but was unable to find it. If any of you do manage to find it, feel free to correct me. Sometimes a lack of reporting can be as damning as a false report.

The interesting question, to my mind, is how come. OK, so Israelis are cynical and will bend over backwards to garner a positive mention on CNN, even if they have to cross the world and save lives to do so. This doesn't explain how they manage to do so, ahead of everyone else (or anyway, ahead of those who try at all). The answer to that, it seems to me, is that they think about such matters, and constantly try to improve. A fundamental aspect of the IDF (and of some other sections of Israeli society) is the commitment to learn as you go. Every event is analyzed. Participants, from the junior grunts up, are encouraged to think, and then to tell what they see and what their opinion about it is and how things could be done better. There are frameworks for learning from experience and not repeating the same mistakes (hafakat lekachim) - though there will always be new mistakes to be made, life being what it is.

Israelis go through more life threatening events than most people; they've got a culture that accepts and tolerates first-time mistakes, while encouraging everyone to think about how to avoid them the second time; and given their neighborhood, the potentials for future scenarios is great so at least some of them are thought about in advance. All this makes for abilities to respond which are greater than those of some other places. Yesterday, for example, they held a big exercise enacting a mass bio-terrorism attack on Tel Aviv by terrorists from Europe. Experts from 30 other countries decided not to boycott Israel but rather to come to Tel Aviv and observe the exercise.

Don't get me wrong: there is as much stupidity in Israel as anywhere else, and it hurts just as much. But not all the time, everywhere, and sometimes, mostly where it's most important, the stupidity gets sidelined. This can be a matter of life or death for Haitians.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Freedom of Inquiry at Universities

Freedom of Inquiry at Universities

The Economist has a review of Jonathan R. Cole's The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. It looks like an interesting book. Since I haven't read it, I can only argue with its contents as seen through the Economist. According to the review:

The author describes how these institutions built upon Germany’s model of the 19th century, with its combination of research and teaching; how they benefited from America’s early enthusiasm for mass education as a route to social mobility; and how they hit the jackpot in the 1930s, when many brilliant academics in Germany and Austria fled to American universities (some of which had recently been purging Jews from their own academic bodies).

So the American universities learned from the Germans, then benefited when the Germans chased out their Jews. Later in the review, however, this thought leads to another:

Certain areas of study, such as climate change, stem-cell research and work on the Middle East, are particularly vulnerable to political pressure. Professor Cole tells how two respected scholars, Joseph Massad at Columbia and Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College, were harassed by the Jewish lobby—and asks what would have happened had American universities given in to rampant institutional anti-Semitism and “resisted hiring the Jewish scientists and scholars from Nazi Germany”?

Well, no, not necessarily. The reviewer, and probably the author, assume full freedom of inquiry is always good, and any questioning of it is bad. This overlooks the well documented fact that the free German universities hosted dangerous and increasingly crackpot ideas from the late 19th century, and by the interwar period - in spite of still including many fine teachers including Jews - they were churning out large numbers of the most destructive men history has known. As historians such as Goetz Aly, Sussane Heim, Ulrich Herbert and others have shown, it was the university-trained generation of the late 1920s and early 1930s who gave Nazi Germany its most potent cadres; moreover, it was the universities which were their main spawning ground.

The telephone is morally neutral, as is the Internet. They can be used or misused by people. Strange as it may sound, freedom of inquiry can also be used or misused by people. A careful amount of surveillance of all three is not a bad idea.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Disaster in Haiti

Disaster in Haiti

Given the magnitude of the destruction and suffering in Haiti, we should pause a moment from our daily matters and hope the aid workers can still save as many lives as possible.

Coincidentally, this week the daf yomi project is passing a number of mishnas which deal with earthquakes, and how inheritances are divided when buildings fall on families and it's not possible to know which family member died first, thus notionally bequeathing their property to other family members who also died. The legal issue could have been demonstrated with other scenarios, of course (what happens when families die in a war and we don't know details, for example). Yet earthquakes have always been with us and always will, so they're an easily recognizable tag for the more abstract "What happens when simultaneous sudden death strikes?"

Bava Batra 157-158

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Freedom of Speech, Within Limits

Freedom of Speech, Within Limits

The Guardian has an interesting item about free speech and the right to be boorish. No, they're not defending the crude norm of their discussions of Israel. This time the shoe is on the other foot. A British Islamist with an impeccable accent by the name of Anjem Choudry has cooked up the idea of protesting the UK's participation in the war in Afghanistan and particularly the high number of civilian casualties there by having a procession with mock coffins in Wootton Basset, the town through which the biers of many fallen soldiers are marched. So the demonstration is sort of like pissing on their funerals.

Predictably, everyone is furious, from the prime minister through the Home Secretary Alan Johnson who apparently has the legal tools to block the demonstration, through 120,000 Facebookers who have banded to express their anger, all the way to the more mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, many of whose members probably agree with Choudry's politics but whose officials fear the tactic is all wrong.

You really ought to watch the short interview with Choudry. He's clearly a charismatic chap.

I've been saying for months that the societies whose soldiers are fighting the just war against the Islamists need to be taking a closer look at how they're waging it and how many civilians they're killing. So I'm warily on Choudry's side that someone's got to raise the issue. (I doubt there's much else we can agree on).

Banning freedom of speech is necessary sometimes. There's the principle of shouting Fire in a crowded theater, of course, but there are also operational matters at time of war which clearly don't need to be public - and even at time of non-active war, come to think of it. There's direct incitement to violence: there have to be limits on that, though they need to be monitored carefully.

Is being rude justification for being silenced? I think not. Even when it's extreme rudeness, beyond any plausible lines of discussion. It looks like the British consensus sees it differently than I. In the UK, being rude can get you silenced, if your rudeness is directed at the right (wrong) target. You can't offend Muslims too much, and you can't offend fallen soldiers. Israelis, Americans, Russians, MPs, fox hunters and zoo visitors, however, are all free season. It's a democracy, after all.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Songs of Prayer

Songs of Prayer

Someone recently brought to my attention a beautiful new record of Israeli songs. It's called The Sound of the Soul
קול הנשמה, שירי תקווה וגעגוע
The producer is the son of Moshe Hovav (1930-1987). Hovav was the younger brother of Reuma Eldar, one of the most famous radio announcers in Israel's history, whose articulation of Hebrew (with a recognizable Mideastern accent) was widely regarded as near perfect. Moshe's was even better. Until the 1980s there was only one radio news channel, and since Israelis listened to the news hourly and obsessively, Reuma Eldar and Moshe Hovav were recognized by literally everyone. Moshe announced many historic events, the single most important being the liberation of the Kotel (Western Wall) in June 1967. You can still hear him every morning at 6am, more than 20 years after his death: a recording of him reading the Shema Yisrael prayer opens the daily program.

His son has now collected 35 songs in his honor. They are all songs of prayer, from varying sources. Some are straight from the Bible, others are traditional prayers written over the centuries, yet others are contemporary and don't belong to the liturgy at all. They are in many musical styles: traditional east and west, hassidic, almost-rock, and others. There's a prayer from the culmination of Ne'ila, at the end of Yom Kippur, which must surely be familiar to anyone who ever participated in that service, but in a version which sounds like pure Arabic music (and exceedingly moving). There's a chant by a young man hoping to be granted to do the utmost with his time in this world - this may be a traditional text but I don't recollect having come across it, and may well be his own heartfelt prayer. It's a gripping record.

It's also a snapshot into a part of Israeli society many foreign observers will never see: the conflation of popular music and prayer, preformed by a broad gamut of musicians. Predictably there are recordings by religious men whose entire career is made of singing religious songs - many of which however are consumed (also) by people who don't share any religious life-style with them. There are popular singers who have become religious and their music has evolved accordingly, while their popularity has never flagged. Yet there are also deeply moving prayers by singers, especially women, who cannot be identified as religious in any standard meaning of the term, by any measure: Ilanit, say, or Achinoam Nini (better known in Europe as Noa).

My favorite is the second track on the second disk. It's sung by Rivka Zohar. Back in the 1970s, when I spent lots of time following such matters, Zohar easily had the best voice on offer, like a crystal-clear bell. Then her life spun out of control, and she spent years roaming drug-scenes in many countries; most of us forgot her, though someone once told me he'd heard her in some club in Amsterdam, if that's where it was, and her ruined shell was pitiful to observe. Then she came back, pulled herself together, and lives on a hilltop in the Galilee. Only rarely will she record a single song - there have been but a handful since she came back. Her voice now contains all that she's gone through, and it's the most powerful voice you can imagine. The track is a simple expression of thanks to her creator.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

War as Tool or Goal

War as Tool or Goal

Yitshak (Ike) Aharonovitch, captain of the Exodus, has died. He was 86. Yossi Harel, Haganah commander of the operation and Aharonovitch's superior, died last year. He was also in his 80s (89, I think). May they rest in peace; we owe them both.

Apparently the two never ceased arguing about the outcome of their glorious moment, not when they were in their 20s, and not when they were in their 80s. Harel was willing to kill or be killed for the national goal, but in a pragmatic sort of way. Aharonovitch wanted to die with glory and justice, and was peeved for the next 60-some years that he was destined to die in bed. Yoram Kaniuk, another old-timer writes about their arguments that ended only in death (the translation is awful, you've got to pretend you're reading it in Hebrew).

All of Zionism is the story of the struggle between Yossi and Ike. Ike wanted Yossi to continue the war to show that we were heroes and in order to beat the British and Yossi said he didn't bring the ship so that 4,500 Holocaust survivors would be killed, and if Ike's Palmach wanted war he should bring the young people from the kibbutzim. Ike didn't forgive him. No logic would get through to him. He accepted the battle that was almost Masada in the sea. Yossi wanted life. Ike wanted struggle and victory.

Historians can't know "what if" - so how can we know Harel was right, and Aharonovitch was wrong? Unfortunately, because while in the Zionist camp the Harel's mostly win, with the Palestinians the Aharonovitchs always win.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

The Real Rain Man, RIP

The Real Rain Man, RIP

Kim Peek, the real-life inspiration for the Rain Man film, has died, age 58.

He apparently made more of his life than could reasonably have been expected, and helped may others through his example. The even greater hero of the story, however, seems to have been his father, Fran Peek. Fran will be missing him sorely now.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations