Horns

Sometimes I think that amateurs acquire equipment in inverse proportion to their skill. A mediocre amateur photographer might have a dozen cameras. An unskilled aspirant to gourmet cookery might clutter his kitchen with expensive pots, pans, knives, and other paraphernalia.
So it is that I own four saxophones and two clarinets, as well as an electronic wind instrument, plus a bunch of ethnic instruments, drums, and recorders. If I were really good, I would own, let's say, one saxophone and a back up horn, or a B flat and an A clarinet, and that would be enough.
There are of course experts who also collect the tools of their trade. I remember reading that Eric Clapton has a massive number of guitars, and I have heard that the virtuoso, versatile reed player James Carter owns an impressive array of instruments. So owning too many instruments isn't necessarily an indication that one isn't a skilled player.
My main instrument is now the baritone saxophone, a huge, heavy, clumsy instrument, which is such a pain in the ass to bring to places where I am expected to play, that I wonder how I ever got involved with it.
Gerry Mulligan was the first musician I ever heard of who played the baritone sax, but I wasn't a fan of his when I was first getting enthusiastic about jazz, back in the late fifties when most of the gods of jazz were still alive. Sonny Rollins and his tenor were what swept me off my feet.
Many years later, in Israel, a few years after I took up music again, and I had acquired a brand new Yanagisawa tenor, a friend of mine invited me to play a couple of times with a saxophone quartet that needed to include a second tenor on a couple of pieces, and I met up with a real live bari player. I was distinctly uninterested in the instrument and wondered why anyone would choose to play one.
However, in the late 1980s I was playing tenor saxophone in a short-lived amateur bigband, and there was no baritone player, and at the same time I heard of a musician who had decided to sell his baritone, so I decided to buy it. I overpaid for his mediocre quality Italian horn (a Grassi), but I got to like playing the instrument, and a few years later I decided to treat myself to a really excellent baritone (a Selmer Super-Action 80, for those who are involved in that sort of thing). My father had died, and I was sad. I needed something new in my life to perk me up, and he left me some money, so I could afford the instrument (good baritone saxophones are not cheap). And, it turns out, not-s0-good baritone saxophones are hard to sell. I was stuck with that Grasssi for quite a while.
As I mentioned, I own a bunch of other instruments, including a decent alto saxophone (Selmer Mark VII) and a classic vintage Conn tenor (my wonderfully generous cousins Lewis and Ellen gave it to me when Ellen's father grew too demented to play anymore), as well as a decent clarinet (my second clarinet is a Turkish metal G clarinet that is more of a novelty than an instrument that I can play), and I feel that I owe it to the instruments to play them now and then. What's a sadder object than a musical instrument that no one plays?
Individual musicians have their own personalities, which are expressed in their playing, and every instrument has its own personality. Not only does every type of instrument have a personality (trombones versus violas, let's say), but each individual acoustic instrument has a special character. So what comes out is always a blend: the musician's personality expressed through the instrument's personality. For example, Eric Dolphy, who played alto sax, flute, and bass clarinet, was always Eric Dolphy, but each instrument enabled him to express a different aspect of his protean musicality.
To step down from the Elysian Fields, where Eric Dolphy is still playing, I hope, recently I have been playing clarinet a little more frequently than in the past, and it's taking me a while to feel comfortable on the instrument, and I don't yet have a clarinet me. The lowest note on the B flat clarinet is a concert D below middle C, and the lowest note on the baritone sax is almost an octave below that. The clarinet is an agile instrument, the baritone sax is kind of elephantine. Their expressive potential is different.
The problem is that it's so much easier for me to play sax than clarinet, that I tend to avoid the challenge and settle back into the place where I feel comfortable. My music guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, used to say that you shouldn't keep doing what you're already good at, if you want to progress. That's something to keep in mind.

Pottery Fantsy - Pottery Reality

I have installed a well-equipped pottery studio in the back room of our house, which we call the "blue room." I have a wheel, a kiln (outside in a shelter), work tables, shelves, tools for working and decorating clay, engobes, glazes - the works. I have essentially quit working as a translator and editor and given up writing projects and ambitions. My main activity in life is now producing attractive, mainly useful forms. Every day I get up and work in the studio, on a variety of projects, both throwing on the wheel and hand-building. I sell the work that I make at moderate prices, and I am not aiming at producing perfect pieces - just pleasing ones.
I travel to ceramic supply shops, to the studios of other potters, to exhibitions.
I read about making pottery and experiment with techniques - gradually.
I take on projects - in order to learn - sets of things - exploring forms.

Suppose I had gotten bitten by the pottery bug back when I was in high school. Would I have been happy as a potter? That's a stupid question, of course. Stupid because I can't go back in time, and stupid because, had I been the kind of kid who was swept up into a craft like pottery, I would have been a totally different person, because I wasn't that kind of kid. So then I'm asking, would that other person have been a happy man? Or, perhaps, I'm asking: would I rather have been that kind of person?

Running (?) Again - at my age?

I swore to myself that I would keep jogging until I turned sixty, even though I was suffering from chronic tendinitis , but after I took that "last" run, I stopped. That was four years ago. I'm coming up on my sixty-fifth birthday, and every time I see somebody jogging, I feel envious. So the other day, I decided I would start jogging again, very gradually and very slowly.

Having a vigorous young dog to walk is clearly another incentive. I used to jog with our two dogs in the Peace Forest, not far from our house. I'd let them off the leash, and we'd have a good time. But one of the two dogs is dead, and the other old one is so lame she can barely walk around the block. But our new, young dog needs a lot of exercise, and so does this aging human. After only 5 jogs, I can already feel the positive effect.

The first 3 times I only jogged for 6 minutes, but yesterday I got it up to 15 minutes, and today to 20 minutes. My muscles seem to remember what it was like to run, though they are still weak. But today, when I started my slow jog, I could feel my body asking for it, telling me, where have you been? I'm trying very hard to avoid injuring myself, to avoid overdoing it. When I jogged regularly, I never tried for speed. I took the advice of that great book, Running and Being, and tried for LSD: Long Slow Distances. The only one I'm competing with is me. If I manage to keep jogging for twenty minutes three or four times a week, that will be fine.

As for the dog, he sticks close to me but takes ten steps for every one of mine, zigzagging around, smelling things, dropping back, racing to catch up, running to the side, observing.

Fasting and Belief

Last night, after the Yom Kippur fast, we ate dinner with some friends, one of whom, a man in of seventy, has recently converted to Judaism. He admits that it was an odd thing to do. He married an orthodox Jewish woman, who was there with him. They both said that people ask them, at your age, why did you bother to marry? After all, you're not going to have children. Bill, the convert, usually responds, "Really?" After all, they're both very young looking.

Bill noted that it was the first time in his life that he had fasted, gone without food or water for 25 hours. I was a bit surprised, because I can't count the number of times I've fasted. It's almost normal for me.

The purpose of the fast is to keep the message of Yom Kippur in mind: God judges us between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when we have ten days to repent and change our ways, and He delivers our sentence on Yom Kippur, when our fate is decided (actually, there's supposed to be a grace period until the end of Sukkot). If we repent for our sins now, we won't die this year. Otherwise, our fate is sealed.

Did any of the six of us around the table last night, all of whom had attended the long Yom Kippur services and fasted, take that message literally? I doubt it. I know that my wife and I don't believe it, because we discussed it.

So why do we bother?

Solidarity, for one. Jews have been fasting on Yom Kippur for a couple of thousand years, and for many otherwise completely unaffiliated Jews, fasting on Yom Kippur is still a sign on their part that they feel an allegiance to the Jewish people. The Marranos in Spain used to fast on Yom Kippur for the same reason. It's the kind of religious observance you can practice without people noticing it.

Okay, but why sit through and participate in the long and repetitive liturgy? Why pound your chest endlessly, confessing to an alphabetical list of sins? Why get to your knees at certain points in the service? Why not just stay home, fast, and listen to music or read a book?

The best answer, for me, is one that a learned friend of mine proposed: "Spiritual Theater." I know that, like an actor, I am speaking with a kind of sincerity when I recite the prayers. But what am I acting out?

First, I'm responding to the terrible uncertainty of life. I looked around the packed synagogue while we were reciting one of the central prayers, "Unetane Tokef" (Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness), and I realized that, without doubt, some of the people present in the room will not be alive next year at this time. Perhaps I myself won't be. Maybe I don't believe specifically that by observing the Sabbath more meticulously, I will avoid that fate. In fact, I don't think that anything I might do will be helpful, except exerting caution, watching my health, and so on. But I know that, as carefully as I drive, a car could veer into my lane and cause my death, just to name one of the many reasons why I might not make it through the year.

Second, I'm responding to the need to repent - maybe not in the orthodox Jewish sense of trying to observe more of the commandments more scrupulously - but certainly in the sense of trying to be a better person. It's easy to avoid examining one's life. The High Holidays push you in that direction.

Third, let's not forget solidarity. After all, publicly observing Yom Kippur as part of a community is much more powerful than privately observing it. Part of my identity is that I am the kind of Jew who attends religious services quite frequently, setting aside the issue of belief.

Fourth, the High Holiday liturgy is very beautiful. Even though it is too long and repetitive, there are some aesthetic high points, some great poetry, some dramatic moments in the service, some beautiful music in the hymns we sing. It has a lot of emotional depth and power. Not only is it "Spiritual Theater," it's good theater, and theater of a unique sort, in which the spectators are also actors.

Last, it's therapeutic. Yom Kippur brought up many deep and disturbing memories in me, memories of people I had disappointed, relationships I hadn't done justice to, personal failures of various kinds. I barely slept at all on the night of Yom Kippur. I felt that my life was shattering. But over the day the pieces fell together again - I hope not in the same way. Because self-improvement is a process of dismantling, sometimes painful and frightening, and reconstruction, often challenging and uncertain, with some of the bad pieces left out and the whole structure different from what it was.

Read Out Loud in British English

A while back I had a little story accepted by a creative British organization called The Liars' League. Every month they hold an evening at which actors read short stories that have won their contest, and they also post the stories and the MP3s on their web site. I've attached the MP3 to a video and I'm uploading it here.

The pictures aren't really connected to the words. I found out that the only way to upload an audio file is to use Windows Move Maker to make the audio file into a sound track, and then you can stick whatever picture you like on it.

It was very amusing to me to hear my work enunciated very carefully in British English. It was also amusing to me to hear the audience's reaction: it took them a while to figure out that it was supposed to be funny. Probably because of the deadpan delivery. I wish I could have been there in person. Next trip to London!

Being Away and Coming Back - Awareness of Change

I just spent a bit more than three weeks in the United States, in the suburbs of the capital, and once again I had to deal with the intense and contradictory feelings of familiarity and strangeness. It's the country where I grew up, where I speak the native language like a native, but so much has changed in the 36 years that I've lived away from North America. Frequent visits and keeping up with the media - seeing American films and TV shows, reading American books and magazines - all that is not the same as living there.
On my last day in Washington, DC, I went into a Borders book store for the first time (!) and bought a couple of books, including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, who may be a bit too glib for some people's taste, but he's definitely very smart and insightful. I read the book within a couple of days, on the plane home and in bed when jet lag gave me insomnia.
I was especially taken by the chapter on context: if you change the context in which people act, you can change their behavior. I began to wonder (and I am far from coming up with any answer) how it would be possible to change the context here in the conflicted Middle East so that the epidemic of violence would tip and an epidemic of non-violence might begin.
Long ago I was involved in Tai Chi, where, as in many Asian martial arts, the theory is that you can defeat your opponent not by overpowering him but by using his strength against him. The sub-title of Gladwell's book is something like: how a small change can make a big difference. The peace movement doesn't have the power to make big changes, but if it makes the right small changes in people's attitudes, in the context of behavior, they could lead to a big change. Up to now, the Israeli peace movement has been largely ineffective in changing attitudes. Obviously it's been doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing be?
So what's the connection between my opening paragraph about the strangeness of being in America for me and the rest of it, about the Tipping Point and changing the context of behavior? For me, the strangest (and most wonderful) thing about America was the visible change in racial relations. Over and over again I saw mixed groups of black, white, and Hispanic people walking in the street, sitting at tables in restaurants, passing each other on the street, in the most natural way.
When I was growing up, even in multi-racial New York City, it would have been very rare to see people of different races mingling. Something has tipped in America with respect to race, and the election of a man with an African father as President is a symptom of the change, not a cause of it.
I'm not so naive as to think that discrimination is gone, or that people of darker color aren't disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and badly educated compared to people of lighter color, but the open, unselfconscious mingling shows that some of the fear and hostility that had marked race relations in the America I grew up in has abated. Black people are no longer invisible in the United States.
So couldn't the same thing happen between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine?

A Challenge

My cousin N. H. an accomplished, professional printmaker with an international reputation, a woman who has devoted her life to art, as an artist and as a teacher of art, challenged me in a phone call, in response to the blog entry about the Jerusalem Craft Fair. What exactly did I mean when I put down the man who was trying to make a living as a potter? (I didn't mean to put him down. I have a lot of respect for his skill. I know how hard it is to do the kind of work that he does. It's just that if I did have his high level of skill, I don't think I would use it to make 100 mugs all the same, etc.).

I respect N.'s responses enormously, because she's thought about these things, taught about them, and also lived them. She's a fine artist, not a craftswoman. But printmaking has a lot of craft to it, a lot of technique, a lot of process. As she pointed out to me in the phone call, my profession - I am a translator - is also a kind of craft, and I have spent years and years trying to get better at it - even when the task at hand is a routine, even boring, I try to do the best job I can, to use all my skills. So how is that different from the potter who applies all his skill and experience to producing a series of mugs, jugs, bowls, and so on?

I guess it has to do with the level of creativity involved in the task. If I'm translating a carefully written work of literature, a work that embodies creativity, then I need creativity, too. The same goes for making pots.

There were 3 other ceramicists showing their wares at the fair, whose work I respected more than that of the man I mentioned. All three were prolific - they had a lot of ware for sale - but they were also more creative, more experimental, and they made fewer examples of each type of their work. It's very challenging not only to start off every day, making things, but also to make new things and new types of things every day, to master new processes. I'm still at the beginning stage in pottery, where the basic techniques are challenging: centering a pot, building it up, getting it thin and light, controlling the shape. But I can already see that meeting the early challenges only brings you face to face with new ones.

This planter is pretty big. I made it last summer, so when I say that I like it, I'm not being blinded by partiality. If I still like it after a year, then maybe I'm right.
I like the size of it. When my skills enable me, I intend to do a lot of big pieces. I like the presence of a large piece. With handbuilding, I can actually make things quite large, but on the wheel, I can't control the clay yet.
I like the surface. I purposely left the coils visible. I could have rubbed the surface with a damp sponge until it was completely smooth - I've done that - but I wanted it to have a crude, organic feeling, as if it had grown, not been made. I never intended to glaze or decorate the surface.
I also like the usefulness of the vessel. Strictly speaking, it's not useful. It's decorative. But when you make a planter, you're making something in the service of the plant.
I'm not ready emotionally to produce something that I would point at and say: this is a Sculpture. Just as it's hard for me to put some lines of my writing in front of someone and proclaim that they're a Poem. Perhaps if I didn't use capital letters, I'd be more comfortable with the idea. But I believe that Art deserves capital letters.
When you make things like flowerpots or bowls, even vases intended for flowers, you're making something that should be decorative, pretty, but not something that makes a statement, like a self-proclaimed work of art. Though of course it does make a statement - under its breath.
Notoriously, the question, "What is art?" has been answered in many ways during the history of Western culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, the existence of the category, "Art," is far from a cultural universal, and the notion that a painting, a poem, a sonata, and a play are all works of art, and, in that sense, have something in common, is rather odd, when you think of the extreme differences among the things that we regard as art.
So if I sat down in front of a lump of clay and said to myself, "I intend to create a Work of Art out of this lump of clay," I would probably inhibit myself so severely, that I would never touch the clay. But I do intend to produce works that partake of art.

One of a Kind (two of them)

Yesterday evening my wife and I went to the annual summer craft fair in Jerusalem. It is held in the Sultan's Pool, an ancient reservoir in the valley beneath the Turkish walls of the Old City, a setting of the kind not too many cities can offer. I'm very familiar with the place. When I had two active dogs, I used to bring them down there frequently, because they could run about freely without being hit by cars. Now I have only one, elderly dog, who's too arthritic for long walks, so I don't walk about the Sultan's Pool anymore.
As familiar with the place as I am, I found it hard to orient myself, because it was dark, and because of the booths that had been put up all over the place, and because it was packed with people.
The fair always attracts thousands of visitors, because in addition to booths selling crafts from all over the world (Korea, Uzbekistan, Morocco, India - you name it), the work of Israeli craftspeople, and a nice selection of fast foods, there are performances every night by major local pop stars.
After sharing some food - a spicy chorizo wrapped in dough, and a container of Chinese style chicken and mushrooms on white rice - we looked for the Israeli crafts booths. We went the wrong way first and walked past all the international displays, which were generally attractive, but there was nothing new for us there. Three Andean musicians (I don't know whether they were from Peru or Ecuador) were performing on a stage as roamed about - the full tones of pan pipes. The Israeli crafts turned out to be on the far side of the food court, so we had to shove our way through the gathering crowd. First there were some displays by store owners from the Old City, Palestinian merchants selling the kind of thing you can buy there: Hebron glass, embroidery and jewelry, brass trays. Then we finally got to the booths displaying things that the people selling them had actually made by themslves. Most of it had no appeal at all for us, but there were four or five ceramicists whose work was on a high level. If our house weren't entirely flooded with my own work, we would have been tempted to buy.
I was interested in comparing my workmanship to that of professionals (I have a long way to go), in getting ideas, and also in imagining what it would be like to be a professional potter. If you can afford it, it's probably better to be an amateur (the same goes for music, photography, and writing). One tall, slightly aloof man had a large stock of well-made, useful objects, ranging in size from small custard dishes to imposing bowls and tall pitchers and vases. But how interesting could it be for him to make a hundred mugs, all more or less the same? To make a living at pottery, even if you're bohemian and settle for a low income, you need to take in a couple of thousand dollars a month. That's a lot of mugs!
I can see trying that, for the discipline, to demonstrate and develop control - but I'd much rather produce unique things, like the two clumsy animal forms I've posted here. They're meant to look as if they'd been dug up from some chalcolithic site, Canaanite pagan cult objects. I've made three more of them, but I haven't fired them yet. I don't have to sell them or to try to make the kind of things people will buy. I'm free to have fun with forms that appeal to me.
Yes, I aspire to acquire more skill and improve my work (in pottery as in music), and I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't think I was improving, but I have to careful to trim my aspirations so that my creative work will serve me, and not the opposite.
I don't mean to sound egotistical here. There's a difference between serving oneself by buying expensive things for oneself or indulging oneself in other ways, and serving oneself by meditating, hiking, playing music with friends, or engaging in a craft or art.

Two Planters

I made the foot on the right last summer. An elderly ceramacist who wasn't using her studio during the summer graciously allowed me to work there. For a month or so I used her wheel, practicing. But I made an error that prevented me from firing and glazing all the pots that I made: I mixed together different kinds of clay, so that it wasn't possible to know what temperature the pieces should be fired at when it came time to glaze them.
To glaze pots, you have to fire them twice. The first firing is at a relatively low temperature, but the second one is generally at a higher one, and clay that is meant to be fired at a low temperature will melt if it's fired at too high a temperature, and that will ruin the kiln it's fired in. So I had a few dozen bowls and cups that I couldn't fire and glaze.
I recycled all of the clay, smashing the pots, throwing the shards into a bucket of water, and dissolving the clay. There was something spiritually useful in that act, a reminder not to be too fond of what I'd made.
So I had a lot of clay that couldn't be glazed. I decided to use it to make things that don't have to be glazed: planters. I made three of them in the form of feet, and that was fun.
I made the flower pot on the right more recently. I bought a book about alternative firing methods - I'm not ready to invest in a sophisticated, electric kiln - and had an iron worker make me a barrel-kiln (which is generally not used for first firings, but rather for second firings, to give pieces special surfaces and colors).
I cleared a space for myself in a spare room of our house and started hand-building. A lot of the pots that I made and fired in the barrel-kiln collapsed and exploded during the firing, and some of them were extremely fragile - they hadn't been at a high enough heat long enough. But some of them came out interesting, and I planted a succulent in one of them.

An Earlier Effort

This bowl is one of the first I took home.
The excitement of taking work home from my pottery class brought me back to elementary school days.
Technically, this bowl is a mess. It's lopsided and extremely heavy.
But everybody loves it.
There's something happy and playful about it.
Ruth, our artist friend, said that you could see how involved I was in the joy of making something, and she was right about that joy.
Handling the wet clay, manipulating it on the wheel so that suddenly and miraculously a vessel emerges from a lump - if you haven't experienced it, you're missing something.
By now I've progressed, technically. The bowls that I make are generally lighter and thinner, more symmetrical. I have more control over what I'm doing. This bowl was more or less what happened to emerge from efforts to keep the clay centered and pull it up. Today I'm still somewhat of a victim of chance, or, rather, of my own lack of skill, and I can't consistently produce the shape that I want to produce. The clay often rebels and refuses to go where I want it to. But I'm a lot closer to controlling the process. And that means that I'll probably never produce a jolly, clumsy piece like this again.
As I gain in skill, I'll have to find a way to retain the spontaneity and joy that I found in my first months of struggling with the wheel.
The form of bowls fascinates me - perhaps because I am a male working on such a female form. I like to make things that are useful, and you can't have too many bowls in your china cabinet. But I also like the pure shape of bowls, their sculptural quality.

Making Forms

It's not quite round, and it's a bit heavier than it ought to be, but it's a nice size - a small cup with no handle - and the color came out well (I use the glazes supplied by my teacher in her studio; I haven't begun getting involved in the art and science of glazing).
During the first year, after I started to get the hang of centering lumps of clay on the wheel, I tried to make large pots, and they came out heavy and clumsy - but expressive. My teacher didn't discourage me. She let me make my own mistakes.
After a while I told her how frustrated I was feeling, and she advised me to keep working on smaller pieces of clay until I was centering them easily and building them up without making them lurch out of shape in the process.
I decided to take her advice, and since then I've been working on relatively modest projects: cups and small bowls. I've been trying to make them thinner and lighter, more symmetrical. I want to master this craft, and I realize that, doing it only once a week for a couple of hours, it'll take me much longer to do it than I initially expected.
Still, I'm not aiming for technical perfection. That aim would just frustrate me and take the fun out of pottery. Factories turn out thousands and thousands of perfect pieces of pottery. I don't want what I do to look as if it was produced by a factory. Handmade things should look and feel handmade - skillful, but not perfect. I want to produce mainly things that are more than decorative - pieces that people can eat and drink out of - but I do want what I do to be expressive.
It would be easy to regret that I can so late to pottery, since I enjoy it so much. If only I'd begun at the age of 23 instead of the age of 63, I would be a master now (possibly - or I would have burned out and gone on to something else). But I hope that the maturity I've gained doing a lot of other things over the years, and my general aesthetic background, can give a depth to my work. Because I do take it seriously. There's no point doing something that you don't take seriously.

Follow Up - A Strange Princeton Reunion

Recently I met my Haredi fellow alumnus of Princeton in a modest coffee shop on the fringes of the Haredi neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and we had a lively conversation for an hour or so. He is clearly a highly intelligent man, well educated in secular studies and fully a master of rabbinical literature. He is also very open about himself and has not shut himself off from the world beyond his own extremely religious community. I enjoyed meeting him and talking with him, and I felt that despite the huge gap between our world views, we could be friends.
I doubt that anyone who had known either of us while we were students at Princeton (he graduated high school the year that I graduated college, so we were never there at the same time) could have predicted that either of us we would end up living in Israel and getting seriously involved in Judaism. People's paths in life are unpredictable, which gives us a feeling that what happens to us is not inevitable, but I find myself more and more believing in fate: that which happens in the world had to happen.
You can find out more about the man by reading his blog.
My wife and I, although we took up a fairly orthodox life style after we moved Israel, were never tempted to go the Haredi route, even though she is related to a huge clan of Hasidic Jews. Why would one be drawn in that direction?

• Belief: God chose the Jews and told them how to behave, and the Haredim have it right.
• Conviction that Haredi Judaism is the only authentic Judaism.
  
• Admiration for Haredi teachers and leaders: the desire to emulate them.
• The desire to live a sanctified life.
  
• Alienation from earlier life interests.
  
• Intellectual interest: the Talmud is fascinating, and if you're a studious person, it's easy to become immersed in Talmud study, especially because it's sanctioned by your community.

But we were always put off by the restrictions that Haredim take upon themselves, by loyalty to values that conflict with Haredi values.

Dialogue of the Deaf

A Web-Based Dialogue
One of the Internet social networks got me connected with a fellow alumnus of Princeton who has become an ultra-orthodox rabbi. Here's part of our dialogue:

I mentioned to him:
I got "religious" for a while too (I'm not sure why you put it in quotes) - but I'm getting more and more turned off by orthodox Judaism - though we still attend shabbat services and keep kosher and stuff -

He responded:
Well, I know why I put religious in quotation marks. It's because I really hadn't become all that religious at the time. Since then, I've gone the whole way, meaning that I am a twice ordained ultra-orthodox rabbi. Probably, if you have any issues with orthodox Judaism, it's because of the orthodox Jews. Religious life is dreadfully politicized in this country.

I answered:
I respect your decision to go all the way with Judaism, but I couldn't do it. I tried. I lived in a very orthoprax way for a long time, but in the end, it isn't because of orthodox Jews that I'm turning away from orthodoxy (though I have to admit that they are a strong factor in my emotional attitudes toward orthodoxy) but because I have never subscribed to the theological beliefs that underlie halakhah.

He replied:
I am, of course, curious as to what you meant by "because I have never subscribed to the theological beliefs that underlie halakhah." What are they?

My answer to him was:

I think you're pretending to naive. Wouldn't you say that unless one subscribes to a list of beliefs something like the following, there is no good reason - beyond individual existential choice, a kind of absurd assertion - to observe the Halakhah?

1- there is a God
2 - that God chose Abraham and his progeny
3- that God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, revealed Himself on Mount Sinai, and entered into a covenant with them, demanding that they keep a set of laws, which He dictated.
4- there is an unbroken chain of tradition from Mount Sinai to the present, by virtue of which rabbis interpret the Halakhah authoritatively.
Aren't there also a lot of other beliefs about the connection between reward and punishment in the world to come and observance of the commandments in this world?

His reply, which, I think, has put an end to the conversation was:
Of course, but I never imagined that you had an issue with that part.

The moral:
I can imagine (sort of) what it would be to subscribe to the beliefs I outlined, but he can't (or perhaps can no longer) imagine what it would be like not to subscribe to those beliefs. Religion may not close the mind, but sometimes it fills it up so completely that there's no room there for anything else.

My Daughter's Graduation Ceremony

The Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University, Professor Boaz Shamir, spoke about what he had learned as a student, and about what he hoped the graduating students had learned. He mentioned five things: learning to think, learning to learn, learning about a field, developing (or beginning to develop) a world view, and knowing oneself better.
Since our daughter was living with us for two of the three years of her studies, we could see that on every front, she was achieving those five things, and it was a privilege and pleasure for us as parents to see her develop.
The Dean's words prompted me to look back at what I took away from my own undergraduate education. It seems to me that on the first four of the five counts, I did well at Princeton. But I don't think I knew myself much better at the end. I asked Judith whether she would say that her four years at Wellesley gave her self-knowledge, and she laughed.
We were both twenty-one when we graduated, and Hannah, our daughter, is twenty-five, because, like most Israelis, she served in the army for two years and also did a lot of travelling before beginning her studies. It isn't possible for twenty-one year olds to know themselves as well as twenty-five year olds, and it probably isn't possible for universities to attempt intentionally to provide students with self-knowledge. But it would probably be a good idea if beginning students were told that one of their major tasks in the coming years would be to increase their self-knowledge -- whether they're studying physics or finance.

The Case of Joshua Redman

I don't really mean to use such a gifted person as a "case."
He had a choice: to pursue a career in law or to give himself a chance to become a great musician.
Another African-American, in an earlier time, Paul Robeson, faced the same choice and, in fact, attended Columbia Law School. Then, confronted by blatant racism in the law office where he was working, he developed exploited his talent as a singer and actor.
But Joshua Redman reached maturity in a new era, with a lot less racism, and, with his intellectual gifts, he could well have been in line to be the second African-American president, after Barack Obama. It must have been a very difficult choice for Redman: Yale Law School and the road to political and economic power and a solid social position or the tenor saxophone and the risks of a career in music. I honor his courage for taking the risky path, and, having heard him play recently, I am grateful to him for making that choice.
I have read about other very talented young people who chose the piano over medical school or a career in mathematics over a career as a violinist. I also read about a man who was a successful ballet dancer until he reached his forties and then started college as a freshman. Of course a dancer, like an athlete, knows that his career will end with his youth, and, if he is prudent, he will plan for the future. But usually the options we are offered are mutually exclusive, which makes the choice among them agonizing. How can a person of twenty-two begin to imagine what his or her life will be like in another couple of decades?
At my age, my options are more restricted than they ever were, from one point of view. After all, how much can I do even if I am granted another twenty years of decent health? But they are also less restricted than before: I've esssentially done what was expected of a man from my background; there's no point in regretting what I might have achieved and failed to attain; what's done is done. There's less risk now in deciding to put all my chips on a number and letting the ball stop where it will.

Potting Progress

More than a year has gone by since I first sat at a potter's wheel with a lump of clay in front of me and tried to center it. By now I can center smallish balls of clay pretty consistently. At first, if I managed to create a vessel of any shape, I was pleased with it. In the past few months I've begun to make stricter demands of myself. I want the vessels to remain centered from start to finish. I want them to have thin walls, so they won't be too heavy. And of course I want them to look graceful.

I've also become more concerned with decoration and finish, less willing to accept whatever happens. Perhaps I've become less playful and spontaneous, and pottery isn't quite as much fun. But I still love the feel of the clay in my hands, the challenge of getting it centered and making it take the shape I want to give it, and it's still fun to get to the class and find a couple of newly fired pieces that I can take home.

Do I have a long term goal?
I'm not sure.
Is making a lot of bowls, cups, plates, and pitchers a long term goal?
For the moment I'm deeply involved in the process, not concerned with the outcome. And I have to remember that I'm doing it for fun!

As with music, the farther I progress, the more possibilities for progress become visible. It's like climbing a mountain: when you get to the top of a foothill, you see the peak that was hidden behind it.

Sometimes I let myself fantasize: I'm going to quit my paying work and devote myself to pottery. I'll open a studio with a store in the front and sell my own work and the work of other (better) ceramicists on commission. More realistically, I imagine buying a good electric kiln and a wheel of my own. But in fact, meanwhile, the two and a half hours a week I spend at pottery lessons is about all the time I can spare for that right now. I have set aside a space in a spare room where I can do some hand building, but in the past few weeks, I haven't even had time for that. I wouldn't take the step of equipping a studio unless I were sure I'd be using it almost every day. Maybe it wouldn't be fun anymore.

A Writer's Statement

This is the statement that I prepared for a reading sponsored by IAWE, the Israeli Association of Writers in English, which was held in Tel Aviv in February.

Why We Must Keep Writing

Despite the Inadequacy of Language and Our Skill in Using It

During the past few years, I’ve been increasingly aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience.

Let me illustrate by evoking two scenes from my recent life.

On a Friday night a few weeks ago, a friend of mine from college, an extremely austere and quiet professor of Chinese who has been dividing his time between Princeton and the Hebrew University for the past fifteen years or more, brought another classmate of ours, as effusive and ebullient as the professor is withdrawn, to our home. Though we had been friends in college, I hadn’t seen this other man since we graduated in 1966. I knew that he was born in 1943 on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where his mother was hiding, and that he and his parents survived and got to New York in the early 1950s. I also recalled that they had scratched out a living selling brassieres on the Lower East Side. That much I remembered about my friend – but I knew next to nothing about what had happened to him since then.

For about an hour and a half, with frenetic energy, which came in part from the excitement of seeing an old friend after so many years, he spoke to us about his life. It was like a private stand-up performance – and I realize that I don’t possess the literary skills to convey the scene, which was hilarious, with deep tragic dimensions, and heightened by the coincidence that at that Sabbath meal we happened to have volunteered to host two Christian visitors from Michigan, kind, intelligent people – but absolutely bland compared to the brilliant, entertaining, energetic man who had dropped in on us! If they were hoping for exposure to authentic Jewish people, they sure got some.

Then last Shabbat, my wife and I participated in the Bat-Mitzvah celebration of my second cousin’s husband’s grand-daughter – the kind of tenuous family connection that somehow can matter here in Israel. During a small luncheon for family and close friends, I noted the huge variety of people assembled there: from a demented retired Conservative rabbi to a Korean convert to Judaism, and I realized how much literary skill it would take just to convey everyone’s background – forget about a plot!

My third lesson in the inadequacy of language is painful. Quite a few of you know me personally, so you know that I suffered a tragic loss last year, when my twenty-eight year old son Asher fell to his death while hiking in the Colca Canyon in Peru. During the past year, almost all of the personal writing that I’ve done has been connected with this loss. I kept a blog about it to share my feelings and experiences with our friends. But of course the words came nowhere close to expressing what I was feeling – and still feel.

I had number of reasons for writing about our loss in the public form of a blog. It was a way to make my writing available to family and friends without imposing on them by sending them individual emails, for example, which they may have felt required to read. With the blog, if they didn’t want to read, they didn’t have to. And if a stranger somehow stumbled on the blog and benefited by sharing my feelings, that would please me, though I have no idea how many strangers actually logged onto it and read it. I wasn’t even tempted to put a guest counting widget on the blog, because I didn’t want to get caught up in wondering whether or not I had an audience, or in feeling disappointed if I wasn’t reaching more than a handful of readers. If my wife and children read it, and some other people close to me, that was enough. Nevertheless, it was important for me to make it at least semi-public, and that’s a point I’ll return to.

I managed to attain a degree of self-revelation in the blog, and it has had some unexpected and heartwarming personal consequences. For example, a few weeks ago a Hebrew author whom I admire and once interviewed for the Jerusalem Post found me on the Internet and got in touch with me by email. She was looking for a translator and wanted to know if I was still in that business. She’s been abroad for the past ten years, so we’ve been out of contact.

I decided to tell her about what had happened in our family by referring her to my blog. (I don’t do that with everybody I am in contact with: it depends on how personal I feel about them.) This writer is a clinical psychologist, and, as she told me in an intense correspondence, she also lost a child – her first one, a son who died of an illness when he was six. She encouraged me to write – not the blog, but fiction. Writing should be my way of coping with grief. With the blog, that has been the case – but as to writing fiction ... I don’t know. I’m not ready yet.

I began by saying that life has made be acutely aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience – but I should add that life has made me equally aware of the marvelous ability of language to stimulate the imagination and thus enlarge our experience. And that is why we should keep on writing, even if we’re not as successful at it as we could wish.

I engage in two main expressive activities aside from writing: music and ceramics. I have been an active amateur musician for many years, and I’ve kept up with that almost obsessively during this year of bereavement. By contrast, pottery is new for me. Last spring, spontaneously, without brooding about it or planning it, I looked for ceramics classes on the Web, found one within walking distance of my house, enrolled, and have been happily messing about with clay ever since. For my psychological health, I knew it would be useful to do something new, something not laden with memories of my son (although he was a very talented artist), and something non-verbal – as music is non-verbal. And I was right.

If I’m suspicious of language and glad to spend time in non-verbal activities, that’s because I’ve always been excessively verbal. Silence troubles me. My working hours consist mainly in translating Hebrew to English and occasionally editing English, so words are always reverberating in my head, and I’m constantly involved in the technicalities of writing. It’s also a craft I’ve come to know a good deal about, so I’d like to move toward a conclusion by being bluntly honest with this group about our writing.

I think it’s safe to say that no one in this room, no contributor to ARC, is ever going to be recognized as a major writer, and I hope I haven’t offended anyone by saying that. It’s even safer to say that none of us is going to get rich and/or famous by writing. If we go on writing, it’s because the activity of writing is important to us, not because what we write is important to a large outside audience, waiting breathlessly for our next magnum opus.

However, though we don’t have a large outside audience, we do have a small inside community, and our writing lives and matters in that community – essentially the people in this room and the people outside it whose lives we touch.

There are many bad reasons for writing, mainly connected with excessive egotism. But there are also a lot of good reasons for it, even if one can’t approach the level of the writers one admires (here I speak for myself). After all, I’m not terribly surprised or upset that I can’t play tenor saxophone as well as a professional who started off with more talent than I have and has devoted his or her whole life to music. I don’t expect ever to be more than a decent amateur player, but I do appreciate great musicians because I know how hard it is to play at their level. As for my pottery, I’m not aiming to exhibit in the next biennale or to sell my work in the lovely shops in Nahalat Shiv’a. But my friends seem to be pleased when I bring a misshapen little bowl as a house present when I come for dinner. So, I also don’t kick myself for not being as successful (both in terms of gaining recognition and in terms of mastery of the art) a writer as Bellow, Updike, Nabokov, or Borges – or some of the people I have translated, like Appelfeld and Agnon. Trying makes me appreciate their greatness and their devotion to the art.

Aware that I am not a great or important literary artist, I still want to share my words, to get them out into the world, because publishing gives our work reality, just as playing music for an audience makes it count in a way that it doesn’t have when you’re only playing by yourself in your room. The imaginative depth I spoke of before can exist in isolation, but it’s stronger when it’s shared. Our task as Israeli writers in English is to create a public space for our writing, a public space tolerant of our shortcomings, patient with our limitations, and appreciative of what we do achieve. We should all be grateful to one another for providing enough of a public to make our writing live.