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.