Self-Knowledge

Knowledge in general and self-knowledge in particular are gained not only from discovering logical answers but also from formulating logical, even though unanswerable, questions. – Rabbi Soloveitchik “The Lonely Man of Faith,” p.8

also check out this video on Aliya(growing)

A winters morning

Winter, I’ve truly become enraptured by the winter. The deep freeze seems to bring out the realness of life in all its glory. I can feel it all around me, when I wake up in the morning warm and comfortable in my bed, I roll over and put my hand against the wall and feel it seeping in just a tiny bit. I can feel the cold hardness of it. The colors all around me are light pastels. A cold winter’s morning brings with it a pale blue sky, with just the faintest wisps’ of white cloud. The trees have let go of their leaves, their brown branches rub softly against one another as the wind which can be heard audibly blows against them steady and true. I enjoy the winter because there is no pretense about it, nothing underneath it. It feels true and real. It’s not trying to fool anybody or anything. The birds outside my window are struggling to stay warm, moving as little as possible, chirping and flirting about, looking for a warm spot and meager rations to keep them going. And I sit warm and content to look out upon the wintery scene. A part of it yet apart from it, it’s a long dark winter, yet life continues, it struggles yet does not stop. It continues to move ceaselessly around me as I sit, waiting, watching, in awe of the beauty around me.

A People's History

"I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president - which means, in our time, a dangerous president - unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction." - Howard Zinn

The result of having our history dominated by presidents and generals and other “important” people is to create a passive citizenry, not knowing its own powers, always waiting for some savior on high – God or the next president – to bring peace and justice. – Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States"

The idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations is false people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women – once they organize and protest and create movements - have a voice no government can suppress. – Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States"

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of

Funny how life has a way of getting ahead of me, I feel like it was only days or weeks ago that I began life as a graduate student and now I sit here almost a month into my second semester of studies. As I had hoped for at the beginning of this chapter it has been a most illuminating experience. It has also forced me to settle down more than I had in the last four years.

This is a startling revelation for me, to wake up and realize how many things I now have keeping me rooted in my current location. I don’t know if everyone properly understand my wanderlust. How much I yearn for the open road, for new experiences and people, for unfamiliar setting and places. To be honest it wasn’t until I began to acquire so many things (car, apartment, etc) that I properly understood the weighty effect they would have on not just my physical body but also my soul. There are times I long to break free and just set off for a new location with nothing more than a vague plan.

Yet there is something very nice about stability, about knowing with more certainty what tomorrow will bring. It’s nice to have a stable group of friends around me, to have a community where I’m not some transient wanderer but an integral part of the rhythms and cycles of life. Where I’m expected to be week in a week out, I do enjoy the feeling of acceptance and (albeit perceived) permanence of my current life.

I learned a long time ago that a man’s life is one of duality, it ebbs and flows with pulls and pushes of forces far greater than its individual parts. Philosophers call these forces those of light and dark, Jewish mystics call them the yetzer hara and yetzer tov, and Hunter S. Thompson called it a relentless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other. I have tried as I’ve grown older to reconcile these competing interests and I know that I will always have to be examining and reexamining myself to see where I stand. My desire to roam and be free is offset by my desire for stability; my desire for chaos is offset by my desire for order. All any of us can hope to do is understand our impulses to become intimately attuned to them and make sense of them as much as making sense of anything is possible. May we all merit the strength to do just that.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Shalom Aleichem.

New Problems

Every solution to a problem tends to create new problems. This is not unique to science but is true of human action generally. - Statistical Conclusion Validity and Internal Validity; Standish, Cook, Campbell

Welcome back to Boston!

After an eventful break, I’m back in school and just generally back in action. Having surgery threw me off for the last month. I’ve had a bad shoulder for the last five years. I even dislocated it near the Dead Sea in March of last year, so this had been planned. But there really is no good time to do something like this. For the entire first week post op I could barely move my upper body at all. My shoulder was bound up, my arm in a sling, sleeping all day; this was likely the combination of a much needed break and the effects of the anesthesia still circulating through my system, I was a mess. After week of recovery I started to feel human again, slowly - not every movement caused a jolt of pain to run through my right shoulder, I was getting better at doing everything with my left hand and left arm - I’m left handed but I had never realized the extent to which I use my right. By the end of the third week everything had gotten back to normal, well as normal as possible as I still have a very limited motion and two or three months of rehab ahead.

Still I marvel and thank god for living in a time and place where I can just correct the structural damage to my right shoulder and essentially be fine in ninety days.

And with that its back to school, this semester I’m diving head first into my program, taking classes on: city planning, strategizing public policy and design and research methods. It’s intense but also interesting (most of the time) and I’m enjoying the challenge.

The opening quote is from a book I’m reading for my research methods class. It’s a good summation of most if not all social theory and important to keep in mind when studying human behavior and attempting to draw conclusions. So hello from the great white north(east).

Shalom.

The rock

The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty and love and friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands, - their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them.

“Death Comes For the Archbishop”, Willa Cather