A bit silly

What is striking in many forms of anti-Semitism today is that it is inspired by abuses in Israel. But in many cases the wording is such that the bias against Jews in general splashes off. If you say that certain situations in Israel show well that “they” are good for nothing, then it is clear that your departure point is that “they” are no good and that Israel supplies just the next piece of evidence for that.

I think such blatant bias in that direction is a bit silly. Just as stupid indeed as that other bias: “Gosh, I didn’t expect this from Jews because they themselves have been through so much”. Against all these biases, I would say: call things by their name. It’s just wrong to destroy olive groves, to build illegal settlements and to humiliate others. And that’s the way also many Israelis think about it.

In the list stupidities I found another such statement. This time from the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai commenting on the Dutch intention to provide products from the occupied territories with a separate label instead of the label Made in Israel. “It is strange that the Netherlands does not take steps to fully compensate Jews who during the Second World War have lost everything, but finds it necessary to mark Jewish products”.

What does he drag in by the head and shoulders, his statement goes in all directions. Again I would say, stick to the subject matter. But then maybe Yishai would have little to say, because the occupied territories according to international law simply don’t belong to Israel.

A bit stupid, that continued unjustified expansion of associations and prejudices, they frustrate any meaningful exchange of arguments. I’m a bit allergic to it.

Also see The Green Line and the Red Line

Begging for Feed-back

I recently read that in the short term we in the West must not expect revolutionary new technological inventions. Technological innovation will mainly need to build on existing technology and therefore productivity increase on this basis will be modest in size.

If that’s the case indeed, more profits and faster productivity growth are to be expected of social innovation. By which I mean the fixing of the energy leak which in many organizations exists because people do not or too little cooperate. And also I mean the stopping of the waste of money, time and talent which results from dysfunctional beliefs about management.

That energy leak and waste are usually not caused because employees or managers have bad intentions, but because the organization through budgets and powers is sometimes arranged in such way as to set people against each other instead of bringing them together. And that in its turn is caused because we are saddled with obsolete, dysfunctional beliefs about management and organization. These limit, consciously or unconsciously, our space for movement and improvement.

Take the views on management and leadership. In most organizations it are still mainly forms of hierarchical thinking and command structures that determine which concepts are associated with management. These include concepts such as power, competency, the ability to override others. And far fewer – apart from exceptions – a serving and facilitating attitude.

Then this is what you get: managers who get a kick out of their decision-making-power and who in intimate moments don’t keep secret that they are in that position because they cannot stand that others tell them what to do. But who at the same time do not but expect that others are able to do precisely that.

And you get relatively many frightened employees, who have effectively been silenced.

That pinches of course, and those managers may as well feel the pinching. They largely, despite their formal power, fail to achieve what they aim at. And they feel that more is needed, and – above all – something else: they should engage in genuine consultation with “their” people. But at this point also impotence enters the story: they have to listen but because of the way they have organized things and because of their character structure that does not work properly. They beg for feedback, but what follows is a deathly silence. Touching, almost.

This is not managable any longer by hurling in a top-down way some more behavioral science and communication tricks into the organization. Here another way of social interaction is required. Which justifiably may be called: social innovation.

Also see Trust

Committed Gossip

Lashon hara, or speaking evil, is expressly prohibited in the Jewish tradition.

But that does not hold for gossip, because if that were the case large parts of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud suddenly would become incomprehensible. Actually, on many places in the text nothing else is done but that. In my idea gossip is even a core element of Jewish learning.

But then the meaning of ‘gossip’ must be properly understood. I understand by it: to become  agitated about the behavior of somebody else, to say that something is not done, to be indignant, to find something unfair – or the opposite –,  and that in a passionate way. And aloud.

I think many Jewish texts and commentaries are born from that kind of feelings generated by the behavior of patriarchs or other fellow compatriots. There is plenty of time taken to comment on that behavior and those deeds, approvingly or disapprovingly. I call it gossip, but without any negative connotation. On the contrary, a community worthy of the name can not do without. In good family relationships or social clubs, the conduct of its members múst be subject to debate. Because how else do you get to know what you believe in or not? How else do you achieve moral clarity? Where else do you get your prophets from?

There is a lot of judgement going on in Tanach, with respect to several Biblical figures. Jacob for example praises some of his children. He calls Joseph a fruitful vine, Jisachar is a strong ass, and Naphtali a hind in freedom. But he speaks less flattering about a number of other sons. Dan asserts the law, but he is like a viper on the path. Benjamin is called a ravening wolf and about Simon and Levi: they contrive nothing but violence.

The latter statement consequently triggers one after the other commentator. They never seem to stop talking about how this should be understood. For example, Nechama Leibowitz in her commentary on Genesis: “Jacob took a very grave view of his sons’ conduct. Many decades after the massacre of Shechem, the Patriarch, on his deathbed, severely reprimanded Simeon and Levi for their dread deed, though all were now safely and comfortably settled in Egypt. His indignation at the crime does not seem to have diminished, with the passing of time. On the contrary, it seems Jacob’s first reaction is eminently practical. They had placed the whole family in danger, a minority surrounded by hostile tribes, far outnumbering them. But on his death bed, no such consideration could exist. The House of Israel was secure, enjoying the protection of the Egyptian viceroy. His anger is now directed at the cruelty and injustice of their deed”.

Another fragment which is much commented on concerns an imputation in Exodus to the address of the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt: “Thus they stripped the Egyptians”.  That's quite a statement, commentators cannot easily ignore it. So there is much written and said about it. And fortunately, the text offers various clues to a relativization of the theft, though I sometimes prefer the unsalted imputation to implausible excuses from later generations.

But it may be clear that in many of the discussions this question is at stake: did it go decently or not? If gossip is conceived this way, then it is allowed. I call it committed gossip.

Also see Squabbling

(Un)purity

Vaguely I was aware of it, but I never realized it as precisely as described by Stuart Isacoff in The Octave. That the establishment of our tonal system – in which we modulate through all keys back and forward and in doing so produce the most beautiful musical constructions – is the result of a major battle, and that this battle proceeded along theological and philosophical lines. The story of that struggle can be read as a sound built version of a larger story. If you want: a liberation story that has interfaces with the emancipation of Western man from the tutelage of the Greek classics and the Christian church.

The story begins with ideas and with a problem. The ideas include the view – based on Pythagoras and Plato – that music is the reflection of a universe which is organized according to harmonious mathematical relationships. Music therefore must be composed of pure intervals such as the perfect fifth (3:2) and the perfect fourth (4:3).

The problem with this was that Pythagoras’s formulas left no space for some very popular harmonies: the major thirds, the minor thirds and their counterparts, the sixths. These intervals were so popular because they made music more intimate, more sensual and more expressive. But their use generated a lot of discussion, because according to opponents these intervals did not fit into the the world order as proclaimed by Pythagoras and the Church.

There were quite some solutions for this problem. They were found in the musical practice and consisted in more or less cheating as to the purity of the intervals. With stringed instruments this could be done because the musician has to pitch the tone himself and always can intonate slightly higher or lower. Singers could do so the same by constantly adapting their pitch to make the different intervals sound together as harmoniously as possible.

These were pragmatic solutions in which the problem was not calked and which did not challenge the guardians of the strict mathematical order. But these solutions were half-baked, because singers were accompanied by organs and there was music written for strings with harpsichord accompaniment. And with keyboard instruments such as organ and harpsichord one can not intonate while playing as it can be done with a voice or a string. Instruments must be tuned properly in advance, and when you want to play thirds on them then you have to consciously tune them differently than when only fifths and quarters are to be heard.

This technical feature left less room for pragmatism, the question of tuning had quite some theoretical aspects. That’s why it soon attracted the attention and the interference of more or less self-appointed guardians of the divinely established order. And these had fundamental objections against any infringement of the pure mathematical relationships.

Meanwhile blood was thicker than water and musicians tried all kinds of tunings on their  keyboards. Concessions were made as to the purity of the intervals for the sake of the possibility to unlimitedly interconnect a variety of fifths, fourths, thirds and octaves without the music getting terribly false.

The opponents were not amused. The 16th century music theorist Zarlino Gioseffo believed, like many others, that singers naturally sing pure intervals and that the new tunings threatened the world’s unity. He was offended when Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei) found that singers in practice go in one piece through different tunings because they are constantly looking for a beautiful harmony. Galilei reproached Zarlino that he fought for an illusion and that the music had to be completely freed from the tyranny of the inviolable numbers.

Rousseau also took position in the debate and he chose for his own variant of the cosmic order. Therein music figured as a primeval force that definitely had to be defended against the refined and therefore decadent experimental tunings. Even Newton, who in his physical work was brave enough to describe the world as it is rather than as it should be according to tradition, showed conservative here: “It is unworthy of philosophers to interfere with the pure proportions” he thought.

In particular, in the appeal which is made here to the sanctity of a divine natural order – against the praxis actually experienced or sought by people – a parallel can be drawn between what happened in the musical area and what in other areas is still happening. I am thinking of some representatives of the established order that label gay sexuality as unnatural and therefore as undesirable. Or of managers who barely pay attention to the actual undercurrents in their organization because their self-invented order leaves no room for them.

From this perspective one could call the musical struggle against the illusion of purity and pro  the multiplicity of lived practice an exemplary European project. And fortunately that struggle  ended well. In the late 17th  century the physicist Daniel Bernoulli was able to show that each tone produces overtones and that the series of overtones ‘above’ the basic tone of a string is much larger than originally thought. Isacoff: “These additional sounds are an endless expansion of the range with tones that are generally not harmonious. So all vibrating bodies float in a sea of dissonants. The idea that nature has a preference for pure harmonies was, it appeared, permanently expelled from the scene.”

Also see Order

Collectivity and Individual

The relationship between collectivity and individual can be complicated. In the film Life of Brian the crowd shouts out oudly “We are all individuals” and so precisely confirms its herd character.

With (other) Jews it may be the other way round. They belong together in a shul or in Israel and pretend to be linked to each other by a shared tradition but then don’t miss an opportunity to emphasize their own individual positions.

It is interesting to observe the relation of the individual versus the collective through history for both the Jewish and the Christian tradition. Then it appears that the two traditions on this theme often are out of phase with each other, but at other times nicely match.

For the period - some two thousand years ago - in which the equation can be made for the first time, I would say that they are out of phase with each other. In the Jewish tradition learning is strongly emphasized, as a duty incumbent upon each individual. In the Christian tradition collective confession of the new faith is promoted under the leadership of clerics who tell the people what that faith must entail.

From the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance Judaism and Christianity in these matters moved towards each other. In the West humanism came to blossom, with great attention to the development and independence of the individual. This trend was only strengthened by the Enlightenment in the 18th and Romanticism in the 19th century.

Many Jews felt attracted by this development and joined with enthusiasm in the pursuit of greater individual freedom and fuller citizenship of the surrounding culture. The struggle for emancipation of the Jews was matched by that of other groups in society and the bourgeoisie as a whole.

In our own time, the developments seem to be somewhat out of phase again. Christians complain that the collective story is lost, that society consists only of loose individuals. What exactly connects these individual citizens to each other, according to the philosopher Marcel Gauchet, and how they relate to the state has become subordinate to the defense of their individual freedom. Which is not to be limited in any way.

Conversely, in the twentieth century Jews rediscovered, already before the Holocaust, their collectivity. This resulted in the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel. It may be true in general that, still, Jews don’t easily allow others to tell them what to do, not even their fellow Jews. But meanwhile, the Jewish tradition is alive and Israel, with all its shortcomings, is a thriving country. Paradoxically a certain connectedness stands out there.

Maybe it’s the connectedness of everyone who does not let himself be silenced: that creates a bond. But if that’s the case, then the Christian and the Jewish world at one point will be back in line with each other. Because, to wish that your voice is heard, isn’t that a universal human desire? Or as I heard say David Grossman recently: the least which must be awarded to each human being is the opportunity to speak in his own words about his own things.

Also see Parrhesia

Winter and Wilderness

According to many authors the desert plays a central role in the creation of  Jewish monotheism and thus of the Jewish identity.

One can think of Moses, who gets his first message from the Eternal when in the wilderness He  speaks to him from a burning bramble bush. Consequently  Moses leads the 40-year  groupidentity-forming process of the journey through the desert, and there on Mount Sinai receives the Ten Commandments.

Later in the Bible, after a 40-day trek through the desert without food or water the prophet Elijah eventually reaches  Mount Sinai where he is gifted with an appearance of God. He  shows Himself in an  abstract desert-like  manner not in storm or earthquake or fire, but in a gentle breeze. His successor Elisha also passes a while in the desert.

For North-West Europe a completely different identity shaper can be indicated: winter. At least, that’s what Adam Gopnik says in his book Winter. Five windows on the season. According to Gopnik winter played an essential role in the development of the self-consciousness of young European nations. Especially romantics in northern countries such as England, Germany and Russia experienced deep awe for mysterious virginal white plains and let themselves be inspired by fairy tales and heroic sagas which play there.

Gopnik’s attention to the European winters appeals to me, but not because of their romantic nature. I am struck rather by a kinship that the winter has with the desert, which kinship I find in the wintry stillness, in the halt of time when the water freezes and all life is covered with white. That to me is the European equivalent of subtropical deserts. In either situation stillness, if not hardship, occurs by which man can  be brought in a mood of repentance.  Not without reason white is the color of Yom Kippur.

Those  situations have another feature in common, namely that you can long to them: to the severity of dry heat or biting cold, probably because of an intensified internal consciousness that may be caused by them. That desire comes up, at least with me, whenever we live through the type of half-hearted ailing winter we had up to now this year.  Then you may be  looking for hard ice.

But Western culture is sufficiently steeped in the Bible so as to make the desert, besides the winter, figure as a spontaneous metaphor for inner edge. This is evident when a Dutch author gives his impression of an everyday car-ride from Amsterdam to The Hague:  rippling, messy and crowded. “I passed  the junction, then Wallmart, Primark. I stood behind a huge truck in a short traffic jam. At the truck’s back I read  that I could call if I was not satisfied with the driver. But the man did nothing wrong, though he stood still. A forklift, loaded with pallets, drove on the sidewalk. A cyclist, now faster than the cars,  passed  us. He had a parcel under his elastic straps, but what was in it? Everyone was busy with something, on their way somewhere. Everywhere houses, offices, megastores, people working behind windows. You know what it is, the poet Mustafa Stitou recently said to me: Holland has no desert.”

Also see Scapegoat

Church and State

It is, apart from the hostilities that there may be between Muslims and Jews, remarkable how much these two cultural-religious groups have in common. This can appear when it comes to parallel rituals and customs such as circumcision and dietary laws. It also appears to apply to a completely different field, that of the constitutional question of the extent to which it is desirable to separate religion and state. Anyway, neither Islamic States nor Israel just let themselves be squeezed into the straitjacket of an absolute separation of church and state.

I arrive at this parallel after hearing a lecture by Joseph Weiler, an expert on constitutions of countries around the world. His lecture starts from the question whether, if Israel wants emphatically to be a Jewish state, the separation of church and state would be jeopardized. And if so, whether that would be bad.

It actually looks like being bad. Because at first sight, says Weiler, there seems to exist but one proper view on the relationship between church and state. Namely, the one according to the French and American constitutions. In them religion and state are considered to be fully detached from each other, so to be things which can very well be absolutely separated and should be so. France and America don’t want to be nation states, but rather states of their citizens regardless of their faith or group identity.

That paradigma served as an example and has become normative for much thinking about the separation between church and state. And that's weird, Weiler thinks, because except for France and the U.S., there are in fact no other countries in the world with such absolute separation. For most of the cultures, there are not only the state on the one side, and the individual on the other side. If that’s the case, religion and group identity could indeed very well disappear behind the frontdoor and the state would be absolutely religionfree.

But for most countries, there is also such a thing as a national sentiment, a collective identity. Coupled with the belief that this identity should take shape in the establishment of a collective fundamental right. This is for example what the Egyptians want at this time, by adopting a constitution with references to Sharia. This is what Italy wants when it comes to crucifixes on the walls in classrooms. And it is what the Israeli people want by emphatically stating that Israel should not only democratic but also Jewish in character.

Besides these empirical observations Weiler suggests that a neutral position in these matters is, even from a theoretical point of view, an impossibility: those who want neutrality, form an ideological group alongside other ideologies or religions. So opting for neutrality is not neutral, but is favoring that particular group. In a society where the main dividing line is not between religious groups such as Christians, Jews or Muslims, “but between religious people and irreligious people, there is no luxury of neutrality. Laïcité is not a neutral position”.

It should be taken for granted, he adds, that there must be religious freedom, “freedom of religion and freedom from religion”. But actually, a country with a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy and respect for personal freedom may very well have a religious identity. For that reason Weiler fought before the European Court of Human Rights for Italy's right to hang crucifixes in the classrooms.

By the way, in this identity struggle Israel does not only resemble Egypt and some other Islamic countries. It runs, except with Italy, also in line with most other European countries, says Weiler. Look at England, where the Queen is head of the church, or to Greece where a government is ordained by the Orthodox Church.

And conversely: France, although striving to strict neutrality, is not always successful in curbing French chauvinism. As Geert van Istendael wrote: the gift of Fraternite was only granted to those who spoke French.

Also see Progress after all