Thinking about the unthinkable

A lamentation for the State of Israel

There was a powerful, thought provoking article in Tablet Magazine¹, about the threats, possible fatal threats, to Israel. However much we consider these threats unthinkable, they do deserve consideration. Hiding our heads in the sand is not sound strategy. These threats include someone lobbing a nuclear device from a fishing boat off the coast of Haifa at the mainland, attacks from ISIS and other terrorist organizations from places surrounding Israel, or simple low-tech knife attacks on the streets of Jerusalem. Israelis might get sick of living with daily danger from the Arab kids next door with a knife and might decide to move in droves to a safer place. Israelis might decide that they have had enough; the Zionist dream is no longer worth fighting for. The BDS movement, the blatant blindness of Western intellectuals, academics, people who should be the smartest, yet are so easily deluded, present perhaps an even greater danger, because tall walls, anti-missile rockets, or secret agents provide no defence against this. So how can we have faith in the long term survival of Israel. There is no easy answer to this question, certainly no fashionable answer. Can one point to a religious answer, God's special relationship with the Jewish people? You don't have to be religious to see the miraculous nature of a Jewish state coming into existence in the aftermath of the greatest slaughter of the Jewish people and the large scale destruction of the Jewish world. You don't have to see the Divine hand at work in Israel's survival, and indeed its flourishing. There are rational explanations for all these, but the reality is that Israel exists and survives against all odds. And we have to believe that it will continue survive; that the world will recognize, as much of Europe is already recognizing, Israel's special role as the only democratic, sophisticated, progressive society, a bastion of European culture, in a volatile region. It is conceivable that in a generation, perhaps sooner, Israel's neighbours will want what Israel has, a comfortable standard of living, a chance to bring up their children in peace, provide them with education and hope for a better future. They would want, what Israel has, a stable (if divided and argumentative) democratic government, an educated people, and the prospect of a good life. A region at peace, like the formerly war-torn Europe, is not beyond imagination. We can only think the unthinkable and have faith in the future.

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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/195438/lamentation-for-israel?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=97a19c9025-Sunday_December_20_201512_18_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-97a19c9025-207191705

Pity the bank!

My bank, Westpac NZ made a mere $441 million profit in the last six month. This is up by only nine million over the same period last year. The unfortunate bank had to find some way of making more money. They used to have a nice, smiling young woman who greeted you when you entered the bank, help to direct you to someone who could solve your problems, and sometimes she solved problems herself. She made appointments for you. You, the customer, felt good about being welcomed. As a cost cutting measure this person was replaced by a mannequin, unsmiling, unhelpful, somewhat ridiculous, standing in front of a computer that seems to serve no useful purpose, but then it probably doesn't cost much, there are many discarded computers lying around. I needed to discuss a matter with someone who had the authority to help me, but there was no one, apart from the unsmiling mannequin to talk to. The few staff who were around made a great effort to ignore me. Never mind, I thought, these days you communicate by phone and email. I can't phone my branch of the bank directly, I had to call a call centre. They didn't answer. Talking to customers didn't seem to rank high priority. OK, I thought, I send them an email and ask them to ring me when they could spare the few minutes from their precious time. No one rang back, but two days later I received an email that did not solve my issue. Back went my email, and four days later, I did get a call from an accounts manager, my problem was solved, but not to my satisfaction, but with the additional cost of $400. By then I did manage to get an appointment with a real human being, a helpful young woman in my branch of the bank, and she solved my issue and a number of other issues I didn't know I had, in a few minutes. She explained that though they are busier than ever, the bank cut staff by a significant number, so they are all too busy to attend to customers. Within living memory there was such a thing as a bank manger, who made a point of personally knowing his customers. Such bank managers are things of the past. We used to have accounts mangers, whose job was to look after your accounts should they need some looking after. These days staff don't stay long enough in a job to get to know their clients. Hang customer service, customers are numbers, suckers who contribute to the corporate profit of the institution. This is the face of corporate capitalism. I know that I can't complain, that compared with the New Zealand banking system, those in other parts of the world are worse, but it used to be better, and only the drive to increase the dividends to shareholders accounts for this decline. Perhaps one of there days public companies will compete to satisfy the needs of their customers, and not only to fleece them for increased profits.  

About friendship

It was Malvin Brandler's Yahr-Zeit, the anniversary of her death, last week. Malvin had no family, no relatives left anywhere in the world, so I said Kaddish for her. She was my mother's best friend. In the last years of their lives they rang each other every day to make sure that each of them was still alive. They discussed everything, television programmes, my mother's children, grandchildren, mutual friends. They could be forthright, to the point of rudeness with each other, but this was part of their plain, unvarnished friendship. They didn't mince words, they spoke bluntly. They got to know each other in October 1944, when all Jewish women under 40 had to report to the brickworks in Budapest for slave labour. The Brandlers lived in the same building as us, designated for Jews only, in Bezeredi Street. From the brickworks they were marched off towards the Hungarian-Austrian border to dig ditches to stop the advancing Russian tanks. As ditch diggers these little, unfit Jewish women were not very efficient, but to embitter the lives of Jews this measure served its purpose. Malvin and my mother looked out for each other, shared a blanket, helped each other to survive. They slept together in a pigsty in Kophaza, They survived the the Lichtenwort concentration slave labour camp together. They walked back to Budapest together after the camp was liberated. It was an acquaintance of Malvin whom they met on the way, who told my mother that we, my brother, I, my grandparents and aunt had survived, were still alive, back from the ghetto, living again in Bezeredi Street. Malvin's husband, Miklos, was a prisoner of war in Russia, lucky, because he was spared the fate of being in a Nazi concentration camp. Malvin and Miklos and my parents kept in touch, but they were not close friends. They hadn't had a lot in common. Compared with my parents, who both matriculated form a gimnazium, an academic high school, Malvin and Miklos had little education. You would not meet them at a concert or in the opera. The latest works of great literature that had just appeared in Hungarian translation would not have featured prominently in their lives. They were simple folk, Miklos a skilled tradesman, a hat maker. What they enjoyed was getting on their motorbike, Miklos riding, Malvin in the side-car, and whizzing around the countryside. After some miscarriages, their son, Robert was born, a cherished son, an heir, a future. Adventurous people that they were, they escaped from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. They remembered their friends, my parents, in New Zealand, and they came here. They worked long hours, lived frugally, at first in an almost dilapidated corrugated iron cottage at the foot of Central Park, then once they scraped together enough money for a deposit, in a tidy comfortable house in Karori. Tragically, Robert was killed in a car accident. Miklos couldn't cope with the sorrow. After Robert's death he refused to utter Robert's name. This made the grieving process especially difficult for Malvin. She could not talk about the thing that was most precious in her life. Miklos died three years after Robert was killed. Malvin survived him by nineteen years, alone, with not one relative, anywhere in the world. Yet though alone, she was surrounded by friends. She worked on making and keeping friends. She joined every Jewish women's organization, WIZO WJS, she was active in B'Nai Brith. She was hospitable, invited friends for lavish afternoon teas. Our children were her grandchildren. She was a hard working, down to earth woman full of common sense. She had a hard life, but a good death. She fell asleep with her supper in front of her, watching Gone With The Wind, and never woke up. My mother died two months later.

Hanukkah and Christmas

Take time out during this festive season to think about what is being celebrated. Hanukkah commemorates the revolt of a band of bigots against a formerly tolerant, but increasingly intolerant empire. Christmas celebrates the triumph of superstition, fear of death and afterlife, guilt and sense of sin, over a rational classical philosophical world view. The Persian Empire, and the Alexandrian Greek Empire tolerated the different practices of their various constituent people. This tolerance, however, degenerated over generations into intolerance. The Seleucid successors of Alexander imposed Greek values on people under their rule, including the Jews. The Greek world view might have appealed to an assimilated ruling class, but alienated the simple peasants, the people of the land. They had no appreciation of the rich Greek culture. They wanted simple answers to life's problems, as people did in more recent times, under Nazi rule, under the rule of the Ayatollahs in Iran, as benighted followers of ISIS do now. Similarly, adherents of Christianity wanted answers simpler than the closely argued complex answers of Judaism. This is what you do, this is what you believe in, because the priest says so, the Church says so, the Pope says so. This search for simple answers lead to the destruction of classical civilization. I have just finished reading Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, [Norton, 2011], an amazingly readable, vivid account of how Poggio Braciolini, a papal secretary, temporarily unemployed, went in search of ancient manuscripts and came across, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, in 1417, a long epic poem celebrating Epicurean philosophy. For a thousand years this work was lost, known only from extracts and references to it by other writers. The rediscovery of this ancient work had an great influence of the intellectual history of the world. It taught that the world was made up of atoms, that the Gods care not one bit about the lives of humans, that there is no afterlife, no soul, the body just disintegrates into its constituent atoms. The purpose of life is its enjoyment, pleasure. Epicurean philosophy, transmitted through the poem of Lucretius undermined and ultimately destroyed the medieval cultural landscape. The Maccabean revolt also had a huge impact on Jewish culture. Not only were traditional practices and rituals restored, it gave strength to a popular Pharisaic and democratic approach to questions about how to live; Pharisaic as distinct from Sadducean, which was sacerdotal ritualistic. And although the revolt was against Greek domination, the Greek influence was absorbed by the Pharisaic tradition. You arrive at answers about how to live, as Greek philosophers did,  though discussion, in which no opinion is ruled out, every opinion is given weight. Chaim Raphael describes in his introduction to the Passover Haggadah, The Feast of History, Seder as an epicurean discussion with people reclining and exploring the variety of issues raised, and, of course, eating a lavish feast. The impact of Epicurean philosophy and Greek philosophy on Jewish religion is vastly greater than narrow-minded religious bigots would acknowledge. And what started as a peasant revolt, a revolt against the priestly elite, turned into a reappraisal of Jewish religious beliefs.

Otello at the Met

For a mere $25 I attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, or rather a screening of the Metropolitan production of Verdi's Otello at the Lighthouse Cinema in Petone. I had a good cry. If you don't cry listening to the Willow song and Ave Maria in the last act you have no feel for music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMDa0Ua_KrI The production had its faults. The chorus, like a large phalanx, faced the audience and shouted at it, of the principal singers only Iago, Zeljko Lucic, the Serbian baritone was totally convincing. Latvian Alexandr Antonenko, as Otello, sang loud, in your face, but without subtlety and with little acting skill. Bulgarian Sonya Yoncheva sang with real feeling and wonderful clarity, but perhaps didn't manage to capture the young Desdemona, desperately in love with the arrogant war her, Otello. Huge glass partitions moved randomly around the stage trying to set the scene. But all this didn't matter. It was the music that mattered. After completing his most ambitious opera, Aida in 1871 and his Requiem in 1874, Verdi thought that he had retired. And then, at the age of 73, he was tempted by the text of Boito's, his librettist’s rendering of Shakespeare's Othello to write yet another opera. Boito reduced Shakespeare’s text to a quarter of its length. This focused the the story on its essentials and let the music expand and touch on emotions that words could not do justice to. Wagner has changed the way opera was perceived, operas with beautiful tunes and coloratura singing were considered old fashioned. Wagner's last opera, Parsifal had just been premièred a few years before. After that an old composer, writing a great opera in the Italian style was a major statement in support of the Italian operatic tradition. The novelty of the Metropolitan production was that Otello was not painted black. This added rather than detracted from the production. The important thing about Otello was not that he was black, Elizabethans were largely colour blind; it was only later, once slavery became big business and large number of Africans were shipped to America, that racial prejudice became a real issue, with its implication for money making. The play, but certainly the opera is about the insecurity of the outsider, Otello, a successful warrior, but not part of the establishment, not a member of the Venetian aristocracy. How could he be sure that he was not just exploited and made fun of by those born to privilege. Iago, the Machiavellian villain, with his own ambitions and jealousies works on Otello's sense of insecurity. Cassio well-born, privileged, with high office due to him as of right, was a more suitable lover of the aristocratic Desdemona. Iago could sense that the future belonged to the politician, versed in intrigue and cunning. He was ready to demolish not only the triumphant commander of the army, but also the ruling aristocratic order. The innocent victim of his scheming was the proud simple young woman, Desdemona, in love with the unsuitable outsider, Othelo. You can read a lot into this story, which has universal and timeless relevance. Verdi, in his old age, captured this in the most exquisite music of his entire life.