Interesting, Important, and Authentic (1)

Nothing is absolutely interesting. A lot of what I care about, for example, is of little or no interest to most people, and a lot of what many people in the world care about (at least insofar as the media pays attention to it) is of little or no interest to me - like who wins a golf or tennis tournament, or whether a certain movie star is having an affair with another movie star.
Since I am a translator and editor, I am very interested in correct and effective word choice, issues of fidelity to the author's intention, sentence structure, and a great many other technical matters that I wouldn't necessarily care very much about if it weren't my job to care about them. I certainly don't expect anyone in a casual conversation to respond to these topics without a yawn.
Similarly, as an amateur musician interested in improving my improvisational skills, I am concerned with harmony, rhythm, phrasing, originality, coherence, and so on, with specific application to playing a melody over a series of chords. There is no reason why anyone who isn't trying to improvise in music to have the slightest interest in these things. You can enjoy listening to jazz without knowing how Sonny Rollins handled a half-diminished chord.
Yet good writers and movie-makers do manage to make technical details interesting even to people who ordinarily don't care about them. How?

**

Long ago, when I was a student of literature, I never considered the issue of why some writing is boring and other writing is fascinating. All the works we were reading in the courses that I took were more or less universally acknowledged to be important, hence interesting. And the better teachers managed to bring us into the works and make them interesting for most of us, because they themselves were interested in them. That, perhaps, is they key to arousing interest in an audience of readers, listeners, or viewers. One manages to make oneself interesting, and, consequently, what interests one will also interest others. Though, obviously, some of the students in general literature courses in college were only taking them because they were required to, and the only interest they developed in the books they read was related to passing the course. The charisma of the professors, if there was such, was lost on them.
I majored in French literature because I thought it was important, not just because I was good in French and enjoyed reading. I was interested in literature because I was convinced that it was important.
But what did I mean by important? In what way is literature important? How could I convince an economics or engineering major, for example, that he or she ought to care about Shakespeare? For that matter, how could they convince me that it was more important to master economics or electrical engineering than to understand King Lear?
Is "importance" just as relative as "interest"?

Klezmer and the Unity of the Jewish People (?)

We enjoyed the Klezmer festival in Safed because the music was, in general, great, the crowds were relaxed and friendly, and almost every variety of Jewish Israeli was represented. Because admission to the concerts was free, lots of people who couldn't ordinarily afford to go to concerts came to Safed to hear the music. The streets were lined with booths selling fast food, jewelry, clothes, and assorted stuff (I bought a digital wristwatch for only twenty sheqels!).

Between pieces, many of the Israeli musicians offered religious inspiration. After all, Safed was the home of Kabbalah five hundred years ago, and a lot of the townspeople are following personal, mystical agendas, floating through the streets of the old city a few centimeters off the ground.
Speaking for myself, I could have done without earnest sermons about the potency of the month of Elul for penitence, the coming of the messiah, and miracles that came through prayer. Music itself is enough of a miracle.
One of the sermonizers, the guitarist in the middle of the top picture, gave a heartfelt plea for Jewish unity. If only we were all unified, respecting differences but still together, we could surmount all obstacles.
His talk made me realize how much anxiety people like him feel because of the deep and significant conflicts among segments of the Israeli Jewish population (forget about the gaps between the Jewish Israelis and the Muslim, Christian, and Druze Arabs, as well as the black African asylum seekers, and the non-Jewish immigrants from the former USSR).
What kind of unity was he talking about?
I deeply disapprove of the behavior and opinions of quite a few of my fellow Jewish citizens of Israel, and I know they disapprove of me. For example, I regard the Jewish settlers in Hebron as criminals. Expressing that opinion publicly, on Facebook, for example, is an invitation to vicious attacks, even death threats (since almost no one reads this blog, I don't think I have anything to fear on that account). How can there be unity between people who disapprove so categorically of one another?
Anyway, Jewish unity is a myth. There never was Jewish unity, and there never will be. We have a culture of controversy and confrontation, both within the tradition and between traditionalists and modernists. Perhaps because we were always differentiated from the gentiles around us, we are very sensitive to differences within our community: differences in ethnicity, in levels of Jewish observance, in social class, in political orientation, and in level of education.

Shlomo Bar, an extremely Moroccan musician, appeared with Tsemed Re'im, an extremely Ashkenazic pair of singers who have been performing together for more than forty years. They sang beautifully and made a lot of stupid jokes about Moroccans and Ashkenazim, but they also showed great respect for each other's music and made a show of the traditional Jewishness they all drew upon. They, too, preached Jewish unity, as if admiration for both Andalusian and Moldovan Jewish music would solve all of Israel's problems. Their message was a feel good message, not overtly religious or political: we can all get along, and our culture is big enough for both Oriental and Klezmer music.
But anxiety about lack of unity has a strong political dimension. That anxiety is a characteristic of right wing politics, certainly in Israel, and probably elsewhere as well, and comfort with diversity and difference of opinion is characteristic of the left. The left challenges the status quo, the right maintains it.
One reason why the left can't get its message across to the very people who are suffering most because of right wing policies is the failure to address this anxiety. The left is seen as negative, controversial, divisive. Zahava Galon (the head of the leftwing Zionist party, Meretz) doesn't make anyone feel good.

Klezmer Plus

From the end of July to the beginning of August, every day for a week, I was playing music at the international Klezmer Seminar here in Jerusalem - paradise!

About forty musicians attended, mainly clarinetists, but also flautists, violinists, and saxophonists (including two other baritone sax players). Many of the participants were young music students, but there were three or four professional musicians, and a lot of good amateurs. People came from Germany, France, Switzerland, and even Brazil, as well as from here in Israel.
It was all acoustic, nothing electronic, nothing synthesized.
In addition to workshops and master classes from nine to four, every evening we gave a concert somewhere else in Jerusalem. The concerts were more than well attended, some by more than a thousand people.

Actually, I'm not a big fan of klezmer, and I wouldn't have signed up for the program if they hadn't offered a tango workshop and Balkan music as well. But now that I've played some klezmer stuff, I'm more disposed to like it.

The teachers were extraordinary. Every morning I attended a tango workshop taught by Raul Jaurena, a bandoneon player, composer, and arranger originally from Uruguay. He is the kind of musician that can never be trained in a conservatory, someone who grew up playing his music as part of a living tradition.
We worked very diligently to get his arrangements of tangos just right - and we didn't actually manage to learn them well enough to perform, because they were a bit too tough for the three clarinetists in the group. But the experience of rehearsing with a master like him was more important than the final result.

Equally inspiring was the German klezmer clarinetist, Helmut Eisel.
The entire group of forty musicians was led in performance by a brilliant quartet, Les Gitanes Blondes, a klezmer group based in Munich.

The communication among musicians playing together is uplifting. Being with other people who were willing to take a week out of their lives and incur the expense of participating was a fine thing.

Under the Knife

I am used to being pretty healthy. I had a minor operation on my big toe yesterday - sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? - and I realized that it was the first time I was in a hospital for any kind of treatment since I was ten, the end of the summer of 1954, when I broke my leg very seriously.
The operation was to remove a lumpy thing from my toe, not a tumor, because it had begun to be painful, and the bureaucracy was more formidable than the operation itself. First I had to get an appointment with an orthopedist who specializes in the foot, and his first available appointment, when I called in early May, was in late June. To get my health fund to pay for the visit, I had to obtain a large number of documents, and when the time finally came for my appointment, I ended up being seen at twelve-thirty or so, although I'd been called for two hours earlier.
The consultation was at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, a huge, labyrinthine factory of a hospital, which has been on the verge of bankruptcy for several years. As I wandered through the halls, looking for the orthopedic outpatient clinic, I could only think of all the parts of one's body that can stop working. Not only was I made aware of how many of one's bodily organs can break down, but I saw hundreds of worried people in the corridors. Almost all my recent visits to Hadassah were for the births of my grandchildren, and everyone in the Mother and Child building looked pretty happy.
Once I saw the doctor, and he agreed that I needed an operation, I had to run another bureaucratic gauntlet. Even though the operation was minor, on an outpatient basis, I had to have a complicated blood test, an ECG, an ultra-sound on my foot, and a chest x-ray.
So my wife drove me to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus yesterday morning at 7:30, and of course I was fasting. I also hadn't slept well the night before, though I wasn't aware of being nervous about the operation.
Dozens of people gathered in the surgical outpatient department, including quite a few parents with young children, mainly Palestinians. We also bumped into some people we knew. Again there was bureaucracy and a lot of waiting around. My turn in the operating room didn't come until around 11:30. I was pretty hungry and thirsty by then.
What's astonishing about the hospital is the way Jews and Arabs mix without visible tension.. Doctors, nurses, patients, and workers can be all native speakers of Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, or what have you. The anesthesiologist who numbed me was Palestinian, one of the nurses was Russian, one of the physicians was also Russian, and one of them was, I think, English.
Today the nurse at the health fund who changed the bandage on my toe was a young Armenian woman from the Old City. If only we could live together outside of the hospital the way we do inside it, life in this country would be closer to tolerable.
I imagine I'll be seeing a lot more of hospitals as I speed along from being old to being very old (or dead), and I'm not looking forward to it.