Duty Calls - Do I Have to Listen?

Two things fall together: my reading of Shakespeare and the High Holidays.
Honor is one of the main themes in Shakespeare's plays, especially as the duty a person has to self-image. A noble person is expected, and expects himself, to behave nobly. Honor is worth more than life itself - or at least that is how the ideal is presented in the plays. Betrayal is both of the trust placed in one by others and of the standards to which one holds oneself.
Honor is not a particularly Jewish value, at least as it plays out among the European aristocracy. If you insult a rabbi, he's not going to challenge you to a duel.
But the theme of the High Holidays is not unrelated to the idea of honor: we are deeply aware that we have sinned, we promise to better ourselves, and we ask God for forgiveness. A Jew who takes her identity seriously sets high standards of behavior for herself. Failure to live up to those standards is almost inevitable, but one has the duty of trying.
The sense of duty applies in almost every area of life. One has duties toward one's family, one's friends, one's community, one 's employer, and oneself. The sense of duty is both contractual and emotional, to the letter of the law and to its spirit.
In my work as a translator, I often have no personal connection with my clients. I have never laid eyes on some of them. My obligation to them is strictly professional. Yet I feel a personal obligation to them - to do the best work I can, on time, even to do things that aren't expected of me like checking the spelling of authors' names. I try to live up to what I see as professional standards, and it's always a pleasure to encounter someone else who has that attitude.

* * *

Here's a great example of high professional standards:
Recently Dror Ben-Gur, a musician and saxophone repairman, told me about the Japanese repairman who instructed him in New York. Dror once arrived a few minutes early for a session and found a flute lying on the repairman's table, completely in pieces.
"How are you going to finish putting that together in time?" Dror asked.
"Watch this," said the repairman, and in five minutes he had assembled the flute down to the last screw and spring.
"How did you do that?" asked Dror.
"In Japan," the man replied, "we learn to work in the dark!"

* * *

Some people appear to have no sense of duty, while others suffer because their sense of duty is exaggerated. On Yom Kippur you're really not supposed to say to God, "I did the best I could," but for the sake of sanity, while it's a good idea to aspire to improve, one must be aware of one's limitations and accept them.

Electronic Shakespeare

When you read on a tablet, you don't feel the heft of the physical book, the feeling that the end is in sight as the stack of unread pages on your right (with an English book) gets smaller, and the bulk of read pages on your left gets bigger. I knew that when I got to The Tempest, I was close to the end, and I was surprised to find out that Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida still awaited me. Unless another play is hiding behind Troilus and Cressida, I'll have read through the complete works in a little while.

Timon of Athens, which I'd never read, turned out to be something like a hybrid of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" and the Book of Job, and Titus Andronicus (I can't imagine anyone else reading that play unless it was assigned in a course) is as violent and gruesome as some of the movies and TV series I've been avoiding.
Clearly some of Shakespeare's works are of literary interest today only because they were written by the genius who wrote Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream. But even in the sub-standard plays there are passages of breathtaking beauty, of course.
Of course?
You try writing a passage of breathtaking beauty like John of Gaunt's praise of England from Richard II, not one of Shakespeare's greatest plays:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry, Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm: England, bound in with the triumphant sea Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds: That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

The project of reading all of Shakespeare offered me a fine demonstration of my ignorance (about British history, for example, and of Elizabethan English) and has left me with a lot of questions, whose answers I might pursue, if I'm not too lazy.
One of these questions involves the connection between dramatic convention and real life. One of the main drivers of plot in Shakespeare's plays is the conceit of love at first sight.
The moment Romeo lays eyes on Juliet, he forgets all other women. The moment Ferdinand spies Miranda (in The Tempest), he knows she's the woman for him. In Midsummer Night's Dream the lovers keep falling in and out of love with each other, on the spot, thanks to magic - perhaps a humorous comment about the dramatic convention.
I don't know the history of this convention. It certainly goes back as far as Jacob and Rachel in the Bible and remains powerful in contemporary fiction, drama, and film. So maybe there's something to it, and it's not just a literary convention.
In general, there is something to almost everything in these plays, meaning that, even though some of their concerns are local and time-bound, Shakespeare manages to present them in a way that enables us to identify with them, five hundred years after he wrote them. 
Perhaps I should be distinguishing between conventions like love at first sight, which he uses to push the action forward - insults to honor, intrigue and manipulation, deceit - and universal human concerns. 
Take Cymbeline, which involves a bet on a woman's chastity, rather offensive to twenty-first century readers. Still, if the spam messages I keep getting, advertisements for services to find out whether my spouse is cheating on me are indicative of anything, the issue of trust in relationships is perennial. 
Needless to say, the themes of ambition, revenge, honor, trust are not peculiar to English society at the end of the sixteenth century. Conventions change, but people have always been people, so I assume (and hope) we'll keep reading and staging Shakespeare.

A Hospital Lobby, Flute Practice, Turning my Back on Someone in Need

A week or so ago I found myself sitting in the lobby of a hospital with nothing much to do, waiting for my wife to emerge from a medical examination, so I started scribbling in my diary, something I do only occasionally. 

I used to write lengthy entries in diaries, and I kept them for years, but when our son Asher died, I threw away all my old diaries. I knew I would never reread them, and I didn't want to leave cartons full of banalities for posterity. His death made me feel very unimportant.

The paper in the diary I'm writing in now is hand-made and thick. I bought it in Mumbai. I write with a fountain pen, and it's fun to see the way the ink is absorbed in the paper. I write by hand because I enjoy the act of forming the letters. I get no physical pleasure from typing and seeing the letters pop up on my computer screen.

Since Asher died, I find myself prone to worry about illness and accidents – not to myself so much as to the people I love. But I wasn't worried about the results of my wife's examination. We were focused on the unpleasant preparations and never thought about the possibility that it might reveal some horrible disease (fortunately it didn't).

Recently two vital people we knew, both younger than we are, died of cancer. Our age cohort is thinning out. 

Once I was an optimist.

* * *

In my diary I started writing about the flute I bought at an exorbitant price, an unjustifiable extravagance, perhaps, but I'll try to justify it nonetheless.

How much longer do I have to play flute until I die? Not that many years. I'm sure I'll never be as good a player as I'd like to be, but why not give myself the pleasure of playing on a good instrument while I can still play? Besides, I'm a fairly rich man, though I find it hard to write those words (my mother always thought of us as “middle class”). I could afford to buy a professional-level instrument without affecting our standard of living at all – so I did it. Anyway, the flute will always be of value, and my heirs can sell it.

I wasn't really sure when I went to the music store in Tel Aviv that I would upgrade my flute, but the moment I played two or three notes on the instruments the salesman showed me, I could feel the difference between my decent instrument and the excellent ones I was trying out.

I know the flute is not going to sit in a corner untouched. I've become obsessive about practicing. Every day I go through a methodical routine to improve my tone and articulation, and this slow and careful work has carried over to my saxophone playing. I hear more.

* * *

I have been exposed to two different approaches to practice. My flute teacher, Raanan Eylon, is a stickler for detail and aims at control of the instrument. He has decades of experience and a coherent method for attaining that control. A couple of years ago I heard a fantastic young guitarist say, “practice the same thing every day” – a corroboration of Raanan's approach. If you practice the same thing every day, you can monitor your progress.

However, the late Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, if I ever had one, said, “Don't practice! Play!” The approach of Raul Jaurenga, a brilliant tango musician to whom I was exposed this summer, is similar to Arnie's. He said you should start out by falling in love with your instrument, spending time every day just exploring the sounds you can make.

The point is to combine the two approaches. Arnie was a master of his instrument, and Raul plays the bandoneon with incredible skill. Raanan, with all his emphasis on sound production, aims at enabling his students to play a melody communicatively. When I play something badly he says: “I don't understand.” Technique and feeling must go hand in hand. Feeling must provide the drive for acquiring technique, and the acquisition of technique enables the expression of feeling.

* * *

As I was writing this I got a phone call that makes all this thinking about music feel terrifically self-indulgent (as if reading about the refugee crisis in Europe or the asylum seekers here in Israel weren't enough to make flute practice a bit like feeding brioche to the poor). Two distant relatives of mine have gotten themselves in a bind, and I've become involved in their problem even though, objectively (if there is such a thing), they are not my responsibility.

I am not prepared to do what a more charitable person would do, which is to take them into my home, lend them money, and care for them until they can get onto their feet. I would admire someone who did that, but I have to admit to myself that I'm not the kind of person I would admire.

I feel guilty and angry at the people who put me in a situation where I feel guilty.