Memorial Day - Just Another Monday Off?

It's kind of strange to experience Memorial Day here in the USA after living in Israel for many years.

Memorial Day in Israel is serious stuff. Places of entertainment are closed. Torches are lit by relatives of the fallen. At 11 a.m. a siren sounds. All traffic halts. Drivers get out of their cars in the middle of the highway and stand silent for 2 full minutes. If you're in a meeting, the same instantaneous suspension of activity, the same silent homage to the fallen. At sundown of that day, Independence Day begins. Fireworks, barbequeues (mangal ), performances. But the organic connection is made manifest - between the precious gift of independence and the price paid by tens of thousands to achieve and maintain that gift.

Here in the USA, by contrast, there is an emotional remove -- for all but the families and friends of the recently fallen. The average American goes to the beach or to a picnic or backyard barbequeue. Maybe they attend a parade of aging veterans. But there is no national involvement, no sense of the greater collective. To take Memorial Day seriously in the USA, you have to be military family or rabid right-winger.

I see this partly as a result of our basic sense of security - something Israel still yearns to achieve - and partly as the unfortunate consequence of the wars we have fought in our lifetime, wars which lacked a national consensus. That absence of consensus has shorn military service of much of its sacred character. It is not the soldiers' fault - they cling to the sacred task of defending their nation. It is the fault of our elected leaders who are entirely too ready to send other people's children into harm's way, while their own sons and daughters would never dream of signing up to serve.

Really interesting book

Defining the World, by Henry Hitchings. The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.

I've always had only vague notions of this person and his work. A really enjoyable and enlightening read, about the very first effort to systematize and codify the English language.

I notice that Dr. Johnson was a late arrival - his father was past 50 and his mother past 40 when he, their firstborn, came into the world. And this was no modern birth in a hospital: it was 1709. The year the pianoforte was invented.

I've also been reading about that. Apparently the real attraction of the pianoforte was that it put a period forever to the perennial complaint concerning the harpsichord, virginal, and all other keyboard instruments of that era -- namely, their aural monotony, caused by those instruments' inability to produce variations in volume and tone. Since the pianoforte employed, for the first time, hammers to strike the strings (rather than pluck them), those hammers could strike in accord with the precise degree of force the player applied to the keyboard that controlled the hammer action.

We took the wonderchild to see Over the Hedge at the local multiplex today. It was better than I'd expected, though entirely predictable in most part. But it introduces to impressionable young minds the radical notion that we humans aren't the only ones with a right to inhabit this planet. It also poked fun at overweight Americans, junk food, suburban landscapes, SUVs, exterminators, and neighborhood organizer types. Methinks the screenwriter might be a (gasp!) liberal!?!?

Death, Resurrection, and Gardening

Poet Stanley Kunitz died two weeks ago at the great age of 100. A long and happy life, despite his father's suicide shortly before Stanley was born.

Here's a memorable quote from "The Wild Braid:"

"Death and life (are) inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil."

Yay, someone else noticed...

Whispers in the Loggia: St Paul Meets St Jaroslav

Misplaced Schadenfreude

The secret illiberal in me, the one that occasionally sucks on a juicy morsel of schadenfreude like a delicious sweet, has looked on with a certain grim satisfaction as, in recent weeks, Hamas and Fatah trained their gunsights, not on Israeli schoolchildren and ordinary felafel eaters, but on one another.

Hah, let them decimate each other's ranks - then maybe at last the way might be cleared for rational Palestinian leadership. Maybe if the cowboys all kill each other, then reasonable people such as Sari Nusseibeh will be able to step forward and make a genuine peace deal with Israel and start focusing on nation-building alongside and in concert with Israel, which has, whether you like it or no, clearly demonstrated its own abilities in the nation-building sphere.

But that, of course, presumes that the Palestinian people would follow a Sari Nusseibeh. And the fact is, when given the choice, and understanding all the ramifications of that choice, they elected - Hamas.

I saw the movie Gandhi again the other night on HBO, and recalled my thoughts upon seeing it the first time, back in the 1980s, at a cinema in Jerusalem. I thought then, as an Israeli citizen, that it was a dangerous film, that the Palestinians would go see it and realize how they could win. Organize a mass peaceful march on the Knesset. Lie down in the streets of Jerusalem. No guns, no rock throwing. Men, women and children. They'd have their state so fast it would make your head spin.

That was 20 or more years ago, and not a heck of a lot has improved since then. Whatever you think of Israel and its actions (and I'm not defending much of what has been done), you still must grapple with the basic fact that Israel hasn't had lots of good choices here, that the Palestinians have never once demonstrated any real willingness to coexist or abandon violence.

And don't tell me their violent campaign against Israel started as a reaction to the Israeli occupation, because a cursory glance at history pre-1967 will expose that as utter nonsense.

But, anent my schadenfreude, here's Danny Rubinstein of Haaretz:

"The situation in which Israel is not obliged to take responsibility, and the assumption that anarchy in Gaza creates a convenient political reality for Israel, are in fact short-term illusions. Nothing good for us can come out of what is now happening in the Gaza Strip, and it could easily spill over into the West Bank. Anarchy among our neighbors, turmoil in the security situation, economic crisis, fear of civil war and perhaps famine, anger and bitterness - all of these will eventually affect not only the Palestinians but us also, directly or in a roundabout way. No walls or separation fences will stop missiles and attacks that will cause us security and economic damage. The truth, therefore, remains as always: what is good for, and needed by, Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from all points of view are quiet and stability, a flourishing economy and a regime with which we can reach an agreement - and not the opposite of these."

From his mouth to the Palestinians' ears. Or God's. For clearly the Palestinians seem incapable of making this leap unaided.

Death of My Teacher, Jaroslav Pelikan

My mentor and teacher from my undergrad days, Jaroslav Pelikan, died of lung cancer over the weekend. Obituaries will be legion, if a tad slow in coming. Here's one appreciation: http://www.svots.edu/Events/Summer-Institute/
2003/readings/Pelikan-Legend.html

In more than 30 years, I never forgot the experience of studying with him. The single most extraordinary teacher I ever knew.

If you're not a fan of church history, never mind; he'll make you one. I had intended to be a Russian Studies major but he 'converted' me to medieval intellectual history. I dropped Gogol and Tolstoy to grapple (in Latin) with the likes of Aquinas and Anselm, But somehow, Mr. Pelikan made this an intellectual adventure whose attraction lay in its very otherness, its distance from modern thought.

If you don't feel like reading his books (there are at least 40 of them), Google him and with a bit of patience you can find some recorded lectures and interviews. Here's a link to a few quick hors d'oeuvres:
http://www.counterbalance.net/transcript/jp-frame.html

Or, if creeds are your interest:
http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/speakingoffaith/20060518_pelikan.mp3

Listen and watch. The unfeigned joy, the humor that bubbles through his awe-inspiring erudition, are what set him apart from so many deeply learned scholars. His pleasure in sharing his knowledge was infectious.

I still love the quote from Augustine that he always used to cite, in a somewhat vain stab at humility: "What we have written we have written not in order to say something, but in order not to remain altogether silent."

Even though he was a name dropper who loved to brag about his accomplishments and tell anecdotes about how he learned to type before he was 3, and spoke 5 languages before he was 10, these foibles merely served to render him human where he might otherwise have appeared too godlike.

Despite his scholarly prominence, he was incredibly kind to me and to other students and took his time with us -- although if you wrote a paper for his class, you'd probably get a "Very good. B-". Here's what one of his colleagues had to say about his relationship with his disciples:

YDS Home>News for the YDS Community>Pelikan

James Dittes, the Roger J. Squire Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology, said, “Jary Pelikan liked to say that the best graduate education occurs when the student can look over the shoulder of the professor at work. But I am not entirely sure he followed that maxim in practice.

“Too often it seemed to me that the education was going on because he was looking carefully over the shoulder of the student. As mentor and as advocate he exercised a profound and vigorous respect for the accomplishment and talent of others, especially perhaps of those regarded conventionally as ‘junior' scholars, even the maverick.”

****************************************************************************
He did, for a time, seriously entertain thoughts of becoming a concert pianist. I see both vocations - music and scholarship - as his way of spreading the knowledge and joy of our Creator, by whatever name we choose to call Him/Her.

Indeed, his respect for other faiths was genuine and heartfelt without in any way interfering with his own firm membership in the Christian faith. The fact of his progression from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy in no way lessens that firmness - he saw all denominations of the church as branches of a single tree.

I will miss knowing he is here on earth with us but feel sure he has gone to his rest having lived a full and fulfilling life. I hope he didn't suffer too much at the end. Ave atque vale.