
If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed that I haven't posted in almost three weeks. I could give the excuse that I've been busy with a mix of long-form projects, which is true: an article in the December Harper's on the Palestinian right of return (subscribe!), a book review on American healthcare forthcoming in the Nation, the galleys of my Portnoy book--all projects dear to my rather promiscuous heart. But the truth is a little less grand.
More and more, I've been finding that the thing on my chest has been got off before, here and elsewhere--in some cases many times before--and that knowing the intelligence of the blog's readers gives pause in a vaguely familiar way. When I was around nine or ten, a pupil in an orthodox Hebrew day school (Talmud Torah in Montreal), I came to the precocious understanding that the daily Jewish liturgy, whatever its aesthetic virtues or failings, was excruciatingly repetitive; that most of us came to regard "davening" as a kind of smug sacrifice. You were seriously bored (try even listening to Pavarotti sing "Nessun Dorma!" three times a day), but in suppressing revulsion for your boredom, and whispering, say, the "Amida" yet again, you were proving yourself worthy, ethically disciplined somehow, in touch just a smidgen with the suppressed revulsion Isaac must have felt when Abraham bound him, and thus sharing a smidgen in his moral prestige. I thought: was the All-Knowing dumb enough to fall for this kind of thing?
Anyway, I sat down recently to write yet another post about the folly of entertaining an attack on Iran and felt that I was just davening. Ditto, the many laws pending before the Knesset that expose how vulnerable Israeli democracy is, and has been almost from its inception. I called a friend and went out for coffee, instead. I've done that a few times since returning to Jerusalem.
Needless to say, I don't want this blog to become some kind of mandatory ritual, and certainly not just a way of punching an ostensible moral coupon. So I ask your help in refreshing it. I have opened a new email account, bavishai.blog@gmail.com, and invite you to let me know what's on your mind--not "comments" in the ordinary sense, but ideas, reactions, hopes, confusions. I'll post notes I think especially provocative or original. Meanwhile, I'll pick up the pace, but probably with shorter and more off-beat posts.