23 November 2009

Letter from Lhasa, number 159. (Ochs 2007): Inventing Jewish Ritual

Letter from Lhasa, number 159. (Ochs 2007): Inventing Jewish Ritual

by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Ochs, V. L., Inventing Jewish Ritual, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A., 2007.

(Ochs 2007).

Vanessa L. Ochs

(Ochs 2007) is about Jewish rituals. All rituals are invented. Basically, rituals need to reassure and to satisfy people. New rituals generally seem invented while old ones appear as natural, as always existed, only because people are accustomed to them. In Judaism, there are more than one thousand practices or customs.

In creating new rituals, what is essential is their justification and self-justification. In a culture founded on tradition, as Judaism is, essential is to found new rituals on some orthodoxy.

(Ochs 2007) deals with all these aspects and it includes also some useful study cases.

Ochs, V. L., Inventing Jewish Ritual, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A., 2007.

Letter from Lhasa, number 158. (Gratzon 2003): The Lazy Way to Success

Letter from Lhasa, number 158. (Gratzon 2003): The Lazy Way to Success

by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Gratzon, F., The Lazy Way to Success. How to do Nothing and Accomplish Everything, Soma Press, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, 2003.

(Gratzon 2003).

Fred Gratzon

According to this book, there is no connection between hard work and success. On the contrary, hard work and success are negatively correlated. “The fastest way to success is the laziest.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 13)

Use the brain for doing the job avoiding work. “The basis of success is not hard work. The basis of success is doing less.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 42). “The Creative Person Is a Lazy Person” (Gratzon 2003, p. 43). “Your work (I hate to even say that unpleasant word) should be fun. Pure, unadulterated FUN. Your work (oh, God, I did it again) should produce happiness.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 54)

Having been intimately involved in the life cycles of my own businesses, I have seen what fuels growth and what causes rot. Fun fuels growth. Disapproval causes cancer. Having fun is the fastest way to the goal because fun is the goal (or at least one of them). So, HAVE FUN! Play with everything. Play with things, play with ideas, play with machines, play with co-workers, play with customers, play with words, play with food, play with fabric, play with paint, play with academics, play with money, play with music, play with science, play with technology, play with computers, play with kids, play with friends, play with grandma, etc., etc., etc. Above all, play with what you are doing right now.

“I believe that if it isn’t fun, you are wasting your chances for success.

(Gratzon 2003, p. 54)

Do not focus on money. Focus on passion.

It’s simply in the cards. God, quite obviously, wants each of us to be a rip-roaring success — wealthy, healthy, happy, filled with love, and of maximum usefulness to His creation. And it’s equally obvious that He designed each of us, not to mention the whole Enchilada, accordingly. In this light, let us consider the concept of calling.

“By calling I don’t mean a job or a profession, which simply describes one’s activity. That definition is superficial. My meaning is an individual’s highest purpose. In ancient India this was called a person’s dharma.

“Everyone has this kind of purpose or calling in life. And everyone has also been generously endowed with the talent necessary to fulfill it.

“The value of a calling is on two levels. First, it is the means to an individual’s greatest possible growth, success, and happiness. And second, it is the avenue through which one makes the greatest contribution to the world.

“But there is one characteristic of a calling that is particularly cherished by those of the Lazy Persuasion. A calling is, by marvelous happenstance, the easiest, most irresistible path to follow, the easiest path that produces the most results — what could be more perfect?”

(Gratzon 2003, p. 72)

The secret of solving problems is functioning on a more subtle level, which will always result in working less and accomplishing more. And to take this one delicious step further, the subtler the level of the solution, the more far-reaching the influence will be.

Good leaders don’t work. They don’t exercise terrifying authority. Good leaders create an inspired vision and sell it with a spirit that makes Big Ten cheerleaders seem like geriatric cases.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 129)

One of the “secrets” is commitment, ...COMMITMENT!

One thing is sure — commitment brings good luck. But if per chance your luck seems thin, that support of Nature is not abundantly there like it should be, take that as a sign from Nature to correct your course. Your objective may be faulty or you may even be heading in the wrong direction. Your lack of luck will let you know that you need to correct your strategy.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 141)

The secret of success is in cultivating good luck. The secret to good luck is making commitments. The secret to making commitments is in adoring what you are doing.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 147)

What about the myth of success and the terror of failure?

Failure is not bad. Quite the contrary, it is good. Failure is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Failure can be an enormous asset for many reasons. However, I want to sing the praises of failure from the angle of the lazy school of thought. From this perspective, I like failure because it’s often easier to find success in failure than to do the chore again in hopes that you find success the next time. That’s right — find success in failure. Why not? It saves time, effort, energy, wear and tear. And if you know where and how to look, one good failure can be worth a million previously strived-for successes.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 162)

The usual story of Abraham Lincoln, the author reports, is just a stupid common sense, because his “success” after a lot of failure was, finally, the success of being assassinated, perhaps in the contexts of one of the usual U.S. coups d’état.

The starting point is a realistic self-consciousness.

Obviously your own self is the basis for every one of your experiences. If you do not completely know who you are, if you are ignorant of your own self, then any other knowledge you gain is built on that weak foundation of ignorance. Knowledge based on ignorance cannot be profound or powerful. Knowledge of your own self —knowledge of the full unbounded totality of your own self — is fundamental to any other knowledge. Unfortunately, every school overlooks this vital knowledge.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 185)

“Various cultural traditions have recognized the illuminating value of the experience of pure consciousness and have devised techniques that aim to deliver it. (...)

“I, however, am very fond of easy. The easier the better. (...)

“The Transcendental Meditation technique is both easy and effortless. (...)

(Gratzon 2003, p. 187)

“Experiencing consciousness, in its pure state, is the ultimate experience of doing nothing. All kinds of doing — including thinking — cease. You are left awake in your own essential nature. Just consciousness wide awake to itself. Just quiet and ease. Just being. Just bliss. This experience of pure consciousness, of doing nothing, is the basis of accomplishing everything.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 188)

The story of the lazy way to success is a story of continual refinement, of transcending the surface to experience the subtle. Toiling on the surface requires energy, strain, and work. Tapping into the subtle produces powerful solutions.” (Gratzon 2003, p. 191)

Is that the solution for the “universe” “problems”?

Today our world is overwhelmed with innumerable problems — war, disease, crime, pollution, violence, hate, hunger, ignorance, greed, corruption, substance abuse, etc., etc., etc. There are so many problems that no one knows which one to tackle first because each one seems insolvable. Complicating matters is each problem is inextricably tangled up with all the others.

“The Lazy Way to the rescue again. The Lazy Way gently points out that we need to solve only one problem and all the others will magically disappear. That’s because all problems have their roots in one problem. If we fix this one problem, all the other problems vanish immediately. This one problem is that each individual is functioning with a limited use of his or her brain. A more fertile breeding ground for problems than this doesn’t exist.

“Fixing this problem is simple. We’ve learned that “doing nothing” activates the unused reserves of an individual’s brain but it is a big world with billions of brains. Where do we start?

“We start with ourselves. There is nothing more important that we can do for ourselves and our world than to strengthen our own consciousness (by regularly being still and doing nothing, of course). Even though a light bulb takes up very little space in relation to a large room, when it is lit, it eliminates the darkness. As we grow in consciousness, others will naturally be inspired to follow suit. The more people strengthening their brains and growing in consciousness, the faster societal problems born of limited individuals disappear.

“Systematically strengthening the consciousness of the individual will solve the world’s problems. In fact, there is no other way.”

(Gratzon 2003, p. 192)

...Don’t be too sure of anything...

However, less but better, alias using the brain and applying it to problem solving, may be a key or the key or one of the keys for achievements and success.

Gratzon, F., The Lazy Way to Success. How to do Nothing and Accomplish Everything, Soma Press, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, 2003.

17 November 2009

Letter from Lhasa, number 157. (Segal 2006): In Those Days At This Time

Letter from Lhasa, number 157. (Segal 2006): In Those Days At This Time

by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Stahl, E., In Those Days At This Time. Holiness and History in the Jewish Calendar, University of Calgary Press, Calgary, AB, Canada, 2006.

(Segal 2006).

Eliezer Segal

This book is a journey through the Jewish calendar with historical and cultural comments.

“Only in recent years have the Jewish communities of the United States and Canada become aware how our governments, while maintaining public postures of liberality and benevolence, were in fact hard at work suppressing all reports of Nazi genocide, and ensuring that no Jewish refugee would find refuge on our hospitable shores. At the same time, Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom was making additional efforts to keep Jews out of Palestine, for fear of alienating their Middle-Eastern allies.” (Segal 2006, p. 137)

There are, naturally, more interesting and meaningful considerations than the historical-political one just reported.

Stahl, E., In Those Days At This Time. Holiness and History in the Jewish Calendar, University of Calgary Press, Calgary, AB, Canada, 2006.

Letter from Lhasa, number 156. (Stahl 1998): A Gentle Introduction to Game Theory

Letter from Lhasa, number 156. (Stahl 1998): A Gentle Introduction to Game Theory

by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Stahl, S., A Gentle Introduction to Game Theory, American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, USA, 1998.

(Stahl 1998).

Saul Stahl

Despite, the “gentle” title, the book is a rigorous and complete introduction to game theory at academic level.

Stahl, S., A Gentle Introduction to Game Theory, American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, USA, 1998.

08 November 2009

Letter from Lhasa, number 155. (Shandler 2006): Adventures in Yiddishland

Letter from Lhasa, number 155. (Shandler 2006): Adventures in Yiddishland

by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Shandler, J., Adventures in Yiddishland. Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, 2006&2008.

(Shandler 2006).

Jeffrey Shandler

States are, basically, criminal and insane entities frequently built from criminals and insane people. I have not yet fully understood whether the insistence to call the Germanic massacre of Jews “holocaust” means that it was the holocaust for the creation of Israel. It was possible to create Israel also without the massacre of East European Jewry. However... There will be, one day, historical research focused on that, on that “mystery”. Did somebody, inside Jewry, promote the WWII so-called holocaust?

Anyway, the book is not about that. It is about Yiddish, the Germanic language which was the most commonly spoken language within Jewry. (Shandler 2006) tells us that, perhaps not casually, it was not very popular in the militant phase of the creation of Israel. Popular and spoken from common people, it was not promoted, it was on the contrary opposed, from the early Israeli State. During WWII, in concentration and extermination camps, Jews not speaking Yiddish were not really considered Jews from other Jews. For instance, Primo Levi wrote something about that.

“Official policy in Israel has consistently denied the value of Yiddish as a Jewish vernacular within its borders (although Ashkenazim have spoken Yiddish in the region for centuries).” (Shandler 2006, p. 10)

“The great majority of Jews murdered during World War II spoke Yiddish; within less than a decade the number of Yiddish speakers in the world had been cut in half. Along with the extensive loss of life came the widespread destruction of Jewish communal infrastructure in Eastern Europe, compounded by its regulation or liquidation at the hands of various postwar communist-bloc governments. Yiddish proved to be newly problematic for East European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.” (Shandler 2006, p. 14-15)

Obviously, there are, in this book, different considerations about this word, postvernacular and its association with Yiddish. “Postvernacular engagements with language inevitably engender different kinds of cultural practices from those of the native speaker or even the schooled vernacular speaker. In this regard, postvernacularity can be a liberating concept, prompting possibilities of language use other than the vernacular model of fully fluency in an indigenous mother tongue. Thus, postvernacularity has important implications for the interrelation of language, culture, and identity – indeed, for the notion of what might constitute a “speech community” – especially for a language such as Yiddish, which has been so extensively and exclusively associated with Ashkenazic folkhood.”

“To understand postvernacularity it is therefore essential not to regard it as any less valid than vernacular engagement with language. In particular, postvernacular Yiddish is distinguished from its vernacular use, as well as from the use of other languages of daily life employed by Jews today, by virtue of its being motivated so prominently by desire.”

(Shandler 2006, p. 23-24)

Yiddish and Hebrew are two different worlds: “The notion of Yiddish and Hebrew having, in effect, traded places within the constellation of modern Jewish multilingualism, at least within the State of Israel, has particularly important implications for conceptualizing Yiddishland in the postwar era. At the beginning of the twentieth century Yiddish was rooted in an actual place – Eastern Europe, home to million of Jews, the great majority of whom spoke and declared Yiddish as their mother tongue – while Hebrew belonged to the realms of Jewish imagination – both the Jewish state of the future promoted by political Zionists and the virtual realm of cultural Zionism. At the end of the century Hebrew had become the official language of an actual place – the State of Israel – while Yiddish had become the language of several imaginary worlds: the imagined milieu of East Europe Jewry before World War II (which is not entirely coterminous with the actual Eastern Europe, past or present); the diaspora of hasidim and other Ashkenazic khareydim; and secular Yiddishland, both transcontinental and localized.” (Shandler 2006, p. 49)

Yiddish was a natural and spontaneous expressive and communication code: “Its primary association with orality notwithstanding, Jews have been reading and writing Yiddish for centuries. A popular Yiddish readership developed following the advent of the printed Yiddish book in the sixteenth century, which engendered a sizeable vernacular literature with its own genres, audiences, and notions of literacy. However, there was no institutionalized instruction of reading Yiddish in traditional Ashkenaz. This was simply a by-product of Hebrew literacy, given the cultural imperative of learning Hebrew as an instrument of divine service and the fact that the two languages use the same alphabet (though employing letters in different ways).” (Shandler 2006, p. 62-63)

At the same time, for a multiplicity of reasons, central- and east-European Yiddish escaped to whatever formalization and institutionalisation.

“A major factor contributing to the destabilization of East European Jewry at the turn of the twentieth century was the departure of about one-third of its population – some two million men, women, and children – from the early 1880s until the start of World War I, most of them bound for the United States. Immigration was an ongoing option for Yiddish speakers over the span of a generation. Whether or not they chose to leave their homes, all members of this community were affected by the knowledge that it was possible, and there were few East European Jews without a close relative or acquaintance who had decided to immigrate.

[...]

“Upon their arrival in the United States, Yiddish speakers swiftly created a distinctive immigrant culture. Thanks to new political and economic circumstances, American Yiddish culture often flourished in ways that were not feasible in Eastern Europe.”

(Shandler 2006, p. 73)

“While Jewish self-consciousness regarding Yiddish speech dates back to the Haskalah, its significance today is shaped most powerfully by the Holocaust. The implications of this catastrophe for Yiddish are but a part of the Holocaust’s manifold repercussions in Jewish life during the past six decades. Besides posing compelling theological, political, and aesthetic challenges, the Holocaust has disturbed widely held assumptions about how to enact Jewishness.” (Shandler 2006, p. 127)

“Given the primacy of orality in the meta-meaning of Yiddish, the postwar attrition of Yiddish vernacularity is manifest most acutely in speech. What has been in decline is not merely the number of speakers or the extent of Yiddish discourse, but the unselfconscious, seemingly inevitable use of Yiddish as a full language (as opposed to isolated Yiddishisms embedded in another language) for routine conversation among Jews. (...) The decline in the routine use of Yiddish and of other diasporic Jewish languages, especially in spoken form, are both consequences and symbols of other losses: ruptures in intergenerational continuity and the erosion of Jewish sociocultural distinctiveness.” (Shandler 2006, p. 128-129)

In the conclusions, (Shandler 2006) seems to present Yiddish as a language of desire and will. Anyway, this book is an interesting journey, whatever its conclusions or absence of decisive conclusions.

Shandler, J., Adventures in Yiddishland. Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, 2006&2008.

Letter from Lhasa, number 154. (Sacks 2000): A Letter in the Scroll

Letter from Lhasa, number 154. (Sacks 2000): A Letter in the Scroll

by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Rabbi Sacks, J., A Letter in the Scroll. Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion, The Free Press, 2000.

(Sacks 2000).

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

This book is a philosophical reflection about the meaning of existence and about the meaning of being Jews.

“Judaism is a uniquely restless faith. Jews are always traveling, dissatisfied with the status quo and never quite merging with new environment. The midrash suggests where and how these traits began. For Judaism, faith is cognitive dissonance, the discord between the world that is and the world as it ought to be. That tension has been the energizing mainspring of Jewish life from the time of Abraham to today.” (Sacks 2000, p. 58)

“To be sure, Judaism is a religion of law and justice between human beings, because only where there is law can there be a just society, and Judaism is nothing if not a religion of society. But between God and man there is a bond of love.” (Sacks 2000, p. 86)

“Judaism has not one political theory but two. Not only does it have its own theory of the state, possibly the earliest of its kind, but it also has a political theory of society, something quite rare in the history of thought, and to this day a vision unsurpassed in its simplicity and humanity.” (Sacks 2000, p. 122)

“So biblical Judaism has a carefully elaborated theory of the state. Oddly enough, though, this is only its secondary concern. Far more fundamental is its theory of society and its insistence that the state exists to serve society and not vice versa. The state came into existence with the appointment of a king. Israelite society came into being centuries earlier at Mount Sinai. The difference between them is that the state is created by a social contract, but society is created by a social covenant.” (Sacks 2000, p. 125)

The last chapter “Why I Am a Jew” is perhaps rhetorical, as when one need to find some “justification”. Perhaps people are what they are or, paraphrasing the Torah, they are that they are.

Rabbi Sacks, J., A Letter in the Scroll. Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion, The Free Press, 2000.