A Course in Complexity and Bridge-Building

study offering

While en route, Martha and I got into one of our conversations about how to cope with discord and division that antizionism and support for Israel provoke. We were flying to Boston, where she’ll complete her aliyah process, at the end of which - about a month from now - we’ll return to our home in Zikhron Yaakov.

Both of us will then be dual Israeli-U.S. citizens living in Israel and staying connected with family and friends here in the United States. Affection we feel for those loved ones in our native land is in this fraught era caught up in worries about their and America’s safety and well-being.

Jewish Americans find themselves through no desire of their own at the epicenter of a political earthquake. The shakeup of priorities centers to a great extent on reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel and is contributing to an increasingly fractious, unstable cultural dynamic.

We were lamenting how many Americans - including “well-educated” ones, Jews among them! - have a simplistic understanding of Jewish history, politics and social life in general: a tendency to reduce complex issues to two-dimensional sound bytes and to hide behind ideological orthodoxies based on erroneous premises compound of ignorance and prejudice.

She suggested that a way to reduce tension and lower barriers to communication might be to step outside the arena of partisan conflict and resort to a time-tested Jewish remedy.

Recognition that disagreement has positive value has always been a core premise of - a requirement for - communication in Jewish life. This is not the same as “agreeing to disagree,” a shallow, platitudinous, morally complacent attitude I hold in contempt and have no use for! That’s merely a dodge to shirk constructive - although often painful - debate necessary for overcoming division.

As Judaism’s Talmudic tradition teaches, we thrive when we let disparate understandings coexist interactively; doing so helps course correct where our analytical focus has veered off center.

This assumes that no one person holds a monopoly on the truth and that truth-seeking is not an exercise in oneupmanship among competing opinions but a collaborative exercise: it demands, on all sides, factual accountability and logical integrity. Through our willingness to acknowledge and wrestle with complexity, debate holds disparate perspectives in constructive tension and straddles the gulf between them: bridge-building.

I am inviting you to join with me in a minicourse. Its focus is not explicitly political, yet I want its lessons to improve our ability to communicate across political divides, including those relating to attitudes about Israel. Platforms for such dialogue are urgently needed.

I’ve organized informal learning sessions sequentially in correspondence with Kabbalists’ four-world concept; as follows:

Unit 1 / Assiyah/Doing focuses on Real and Unreal and asks: How, in collecting, sifting through, examining and assessing empirical data and news reports, to determine if a consequent truth claim is valid? Participants will discuss, as tools for this purpose, the roles of sensory impressions and fact-gathering, deductive and inductive logical strategy. Examples for discussion: a stoner’s belief that you can dissolve clouds with your mind (this, from my personal anecdotal files); object constancy in human development, or “how many fingers am I holding up behind my back?”; “All Is Vanity” (see: https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/all-is-vanity).

Unit 2 / Yetzirah/Forming focuses on Me and You and asks: How, in expressing what one feels and perceives, to avoid superstition, confirmation bias and psychological projection by subordinating subjective considerations to the greater good; but at the same time guard against actual threats to one’s legitimate personal needs? Examples for discussion: “I feel threatened by you; therefore, you’re a threat to me”; wanting to believe the serial abuser whom you love who “made a mistake” and repeatedly promises to change; “there’s a monster under my bed.”

Unit 3 / Beri’ah/Thinking-Moralizing focuses on Good and Evil and asks: How, in evaluating motives and consequences of people’s behavior, to sort out good from evil and rationally distinguish right from wrong in ethically conflictive zones where people’s motives and behavior appear self-contradictory and problematic? Examples for discussion: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach; great artists who hate Jews; Akedat Yitzchak / The Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22).

Unit 4: / Atzilut/Radiating-Holiness focuses on God and Satan and asks: How to know - in our search for authentic soul healing, spiritual guidance and sacred community - what’s wholehearted, transformative and transcendent and what’s underhanded exploitation or gaslighting masking itself in “religious” garb? Examples for discussion: “no pain, no gain” or redemptive masochism/sadism? (with reference to the mystique of saint posing as sinner); holy men in BMWs (“spiritual materialism”); Michael Pollan’s idea of “how to change your mind” with psychedelics.

Four units in all, one session per unit (if we discover we need more time, we’ll expand the number of sessions), one hour per session.

Eligibility requirements: an open mind and curiosity.

We’ll meet on Zoom.

Please let me know - via email at olamhaba18@gmail.com - if you want to participate. Indicate days/times when you’re available to meet. (Not too late in the day, please; Israel time is 7 hours ahead of U.S. east coast time.)

The course can begin in late August, after Martha and I have returned to Israel.

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I wish those of you who are observing the fast of Tisha be’Av / Ninth of Av (this year from sunset on Wednesday, July 22 through nightfall on Thursday, July 23) a day of meaningful reflection on our people’s encounter with exile and despair.