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From 'Smut' by Alan Bennett:
"If you are getting married in a church ... the vicar likes you to pretend you believe in God. Everyone knows this is a formality. It's like the air hostess going through the safety drill. God's in His heaven and your life jacket is under the seat."
LOL
From 'Smut' by Alan Bennett:
"It's ... interesting ... that though a daughter can say 'I have to do everything for her' about her aged mother, at the other end of life a mother would never say of her infant child 'I have to do everything for her'. Why do we take the helpless condition of infancy without complaint but not that of senility?"
I began writing this post about deadlines and the hypothesis that, for work or important goals and tasks in our lives to be completed, deadlines are vital. After all, it seems nothing important ever quite gets done without a looming line in the sand. This is certainly true about work. There's no juicier kiss of death from a client than one who tells me "no rush, finish it whenever you can." That's a recipe for a project sinking to the bottom of my to-do pile.
But the more I thought about them, I quickly realized it's not deadlines that motivate, or the lack of them that keeps us from achieving goals.
Deadlines are simply the outward manifestation of something far more sinister. Fear.
It's fear of letting down a client, embarrassing myself or ruining my reputation that motivates me to finish work on time. Just as it was fear of letting down my teacher or getting an F that motivated me to hand in my project in school.
This realization also sheds some light on why I've had such a hard time getting my book finished. True, on the surface, I've had no deadlines to motivate me and I've always blamed that fact. But deeper down, there's no fear about not completing the work. In fact, I bet fear is motivating me in the opposite direction -- if I don't finish the book, no one can ever criticize it for sucking.
Two tactics however will hopefully compel me to complete my oeuvre. First, I've signed up for writing courses that require me to submit chapters on a regular basis. (I.e., deadlines --> fear.) And second, sooner or later, I suspect I'll reach a tipping point where the fear of being judged for a bad book will be overcome by the fear of dying without finishing it.
Back in the 1990s, when email and the internet were exploding, lots of companies with mostly nothing to do with e-commerce tried to get into the game by marketing themselves in the lamest of ways. One of my favorites was a prominent department store that added "@ Home" to its logo as a tagline -- to suggest apparently that it was cool and hip and with it. In fact the @ popped everywhere it didn't need to be.
Another example of this attempt at jumping on the coolness bandwagon, of giving the storefront a fresh coat of paint when the merchandise and service still suck, is companies that add a lot of white and Helvetica to their websites or marketing material so as to appear more like Apple.
It may work for some but it's essentially dishonest and catches up with companies when customers discover those companies didn't really clean up their act -- they just swept all their junk under the living room sofa.
Take this DM piece I got in the mail this week from BMO Bank of Montreal.
I've already been using several apps on my iPhone -- like CardStar and Cineplex -- that allow me to ditch my loyalty cards and simply scan my iPhone. Starbucks' app is pretty cool too -- I can load up my Starbucks debit card and pay instantly with the app. The next logical step of course seemed to be credit card apps and I've been excitedly waiting for the banks to introduce them.
At first I was really excited when I got the mailer since at first glance it looked like BMO was unveiling just that -- a credit card app. "Call, Text, Surf, Tweet and now you can use it to... Pay" promises the headline. Errrrr. It turns out the iPhone shown doesn't have an credit card app on it, it has a Tap & Go PayPass sticker stuck on it.
A sticker. I'm supposed to stick a lame-ass sticker on my phone. My phone. My iPhone. My iPhone?
#Fail. I'm sorry BMO but this doesn't cut it. I'm sure all the banks are working feverishly on secure credit card app technology but I wish they had poured the money they invested on their lame-brain sticker and marketing campaign into getting the credit card app out to consumers faster.
An @ symbol never made any company cool. And no smartphone user is ever going to be fooled into thinking a sticker (a sticker?!) is just like an iPhone app. It ain't.
In a recent op-ed about Passover, Jewish-American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer shares an anecdote about him and his son:
A few nights ago, after hearing about the death of Moses for the umpteenth time – how he took his last breaths overlooking a promised land that we would never enter – my son leaned his still wet head against my shoulder.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, closing the book.
He shook his head.
“Are you sure?”
Without looking up, he asked if Moses was a real person.
“I don’t know,” I told him, “but we’re related to him.”
Foer’s honest and humorous response encapsulated something that’s been floating around my head a lot lately.
Imagine the same scene but rather than the father and son being Jewish, they’re Christian or Muslim. And imagine the Christian father responding to a question about Jesus being a real person the way Foer did, or a Muslim father answering a similar inquiry about Mohammed. I don’t know about you, and I may be wrong, but I can’t.
True there’s a wide range of belief among believers in any religion. And there are certainly Orthodox or Ultra Orthodox Jews who might have been offended by their child’s impertinent question. But I think it would be pretty rare.
I’ve noticed that’s not as true for a lot of Christians and Muslims – even the pretty secular ones I’ve chatted with. You can’t for instance question Jesus’ or Mohammed’s existence without getting a dirty look. I’ve, for example, joked that Moses was probably smoking some really good “bush” up on Mount Sinai when God “spoke to him.” But try telling your Muslim friends that Mohammed was inhaling some wicked hashish in his hookah when Allah appeared in his cave and they will likely not be amused. Some things, apparently, are just too sacred -- ask those Dutch cartoonists.
Jews, on the other hand, seem more used to asking questions and poking fun, even if it's at the expense of the purportedly sacred. After all, when you’re taught for three thousand years that you’re God’s chosen people while being exiled from your country, and suffering through pogroms, inquisitions, blood libels and holocausts, if you didn’t laugh about it and ask why once in a while, you’d probably go a little crazy, no?
But I think there’s something deeper at play here and it all comes back to Passover. Most non-Jews know eating matzoh, or unleavened bread, is a central tradition of the Jews’ festival of freedom from slavery. But another tradition, just as central, is Mah Nishtanah, the asking of the four questions. Every Passover for 2,000 years kids have been invited and encouraged to ask a series of questions centered around “why is this night different from all other nights?” Although the questions are simple, it seems to me it’s the act of asking them that has become so rooted in Jewish tradition. Jews learn early on that they are never required to take anything at face value. Instead, they’re encouraged to read, to uncover, to discover, to ask why.
This tradition of inquiry is, I think, also wrapped up in another unique quality about Jewishness. Imagine Islam without Mohammed or, even more difficult, Christianity without Jesus. It’s pretty damned hard. But even if Abraham never existed, or Jacob, or Joseph, or Moses, or David – and there’s a strong likelihood none of them ever did – the Jewish belief system isn’t really affected because it transcends any person or, dare I say it, even God. It's the lessons that matter, not the players.
It’s why when Jewish sage Hillel, when asked if he could teach a gentile the whole Torah in the time that he could stand on one foot, simply answered: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”
For all humanity, there is no tradition, no religious or political figurehead, no deity more important than that one core value.
"What's your background?"
"I'm Jewish."
"But I didn't ask you your religion."
"Jewish is my ethnicity and (nominally) my religion."
"But Jewish is not an ethnicity. Where is your family from?"
"My mom is from Egypt. Her family is from Egypt and Syria. My dad's family is from Ukraine and Romania."
"Oh cool, so you're part Egyptian and Ukrainian."
"No. My mom was born in Egypt but she's not Egyptian. She's Jewish."
"I don't get it. Her nationality is Egyptian. Her religion is Jewish."
"No, her nationality is Canadian. And her ethnicity and religion are Jewish. The Egyptian government didn't consider her Egyptian when they threw out her family for being Jewish in 1956. So she's not Egyptian -- although she's born there."
"I'm confused."
"Sigh."
I’ve had a conversation like this too many time to mention. It seems people can reconcile that light is both a wave and a particle but they can’t deal with Jewishness being both an ethnicity and a religion.
The trouble, I think, in western cultural tradition at least, stems from the fact that we’re now mostly used to and familiar with pan-national religions. You can be Muslim whether you’re ethnically Persian or Palestinian or Moroccan. You can be Christian whether you’re ethnic French, Greek or Russian. But Jews are mostly an exception to the rule. This wasn’t always the case. Four thousand years ago, if someone asked an Egyptian his ethnicity or religion, he could have answered Egyptian to both. Greeks and Babylonians had their own national religions. Jews too. Today, perhaps the only other existing major religion that’s also closely associated with a ethnic-national group is Hinduism. True not all Indians are Hindu but the vast majority of Hindus are from the Indian subcontinent. But while the words Indian and Hindu are related, they’re sufficiently different enough to not confuse people who can’t seem to handle a word like Jewish meaning two different things.
It’s important to remember that the Jewish religion wasn’t what originally defined Jews. Crack open your Bible and you’ll note that the story of the Jews begins way before the word ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ does. Moses didn’t lead Jews out of Egypt. He led the Hebrews, who were recognized as a Semitic nation from southwestern Asia. The Jewish religion as we know it today didn’t yet exist. And when the Hebrews founded their first national homeland, it was called Israel and its people Israelites. It’s only when ancient Israel split in two – into the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah – that Jews (i.e., the people of Judah) appeared as a description for those who had previously been called Hebrews or Israelites.
So why isn’t my mother Egyptian? After all, she was born in Egypt, her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother too. I don’t know. You’d have to ask Gamal Abdel Nasser. He didn’t throw out my mom’s family because they weren’t Muslim. He exiled them because they were not Egyptian, they were foreigners. Similarly Hitler didn’t murder six million Jews because they weren’t Christian but because they were not German. In other words Jews were viewed as a nation or ethnic group apart.
In fact, Jews have always been viewed as a separate nation, no matter where they lived. Just like many other nations without an independent homeland – Armenians (until recently), Kurds, even Palestinians. Ask a person whose ancestors were born in Bethlehem 75 years ago but who himself was born in Kuwait or Lebanon or Jordan. They don’t consider themselves Kuwaiti or Lebanese or Jordanians.
If you don’t believe this whole Jews are an ethnicity/nation thing, ask the geneticists. Studies over the last few decades confirm what Jews have known about themselves for 2,000 years, whether they’re from Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Poland, Russia, France. We are all more closely related to each other genetically than to any of the ethnic groups with whom we lived. In fact, to come full circle, the only other group Jews in all these countries are closely related to other than each other are Palestinian Arabs. Surprise! Palestinians, in other words, are likely simply the Jews that stayed in Israel/Palestine and converted to Christianity and Islam while their brothers wandered around the world for the last two thousand years. Which of course makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that much more ironic and tragic.
And which gets me back, in the end, to what Jews ought to be calling themselves. Clearly a lot of people have trouble with the whole Jews are an ethnicity/people/nation concept. And frankly, as a secular atheist Jew, I sometimes feel strange using the term Jewish to describe my ethnicity, even if it beats out Egyptian or Ukrainian by a mile.
But there are a couple of terms ethnic Jews could use instead. Jews do after all have a traditional language – Hebrew – so why not refer to ourselves as Hebrews? We did once.
Or we could just use a variation of the term we once called ourselves -- Israelites. After all there’s a Jewish homeland called Israel where I could move tomorrow and be granted citizenship. True I wasn’t born there and I don’t speak Hebrew. But that doesn’t stop my friends who weren’t born in Italy or speak Italian from calling themselves Italian?
So if Jewish is just too confusing a term for you or others to handle, I say we learn to market ourselves a little better and just call ourselves Israeli. Todah rabah.
Films from really good books tend to suck. Think Children of Men. Think Memoirs of a Geisha. There are few books like The Godfather that are actually better on the big screen. The movie version of The Hunger Games isn't The Godfather (what is?) but it turns out it's not Memoirs either. And that was a relief and pleasant surprise.
I worried going in that The Hunger Games would be too light, too Disney. But Katniss was acceptably brooding, Peeta was more than believably goodhearted, Stanley Tucci was fantastic as always as Caesar Flickerman and Donald Sutherland was positively creepy as President Snow.
Best of all, what the movie managed to pull off better than the book was the spectacle of it all. This is a story after all of reality TV gone mad (well, more mad) and watching it in a theater rather than reading it on the page made me uneasily feel more like a resident of the Capitol participating in the Games' sadistic spectacle.
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