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AUTOBIOSOPHY AUTOBIOSOPHY Copyright © Nahum Mandel 2001 All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by photocopying or bay any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieved systems, without permission in writing from the copyright owner of this book. Email: [email protected] ISBN 0-75411-393-0 First Edition: 2001 by MINERVA PRESS, London, England ttp://www.gaash.co.il/!nahummandel/autobiosophy.htm l Other book by Nahum Mandel: MISCHAK IELADIM? (Children’s Game?) 2003, in Hebrew, by Yad Yaari, Guivat Haviva, Israel Virtual Version Edition Dedication I dedicate this book to you, Shoshanah – my spouse, life comrade, guide, and supervisor, you who did not believe that I was able to write it. I would never have had a better reason to complete my task than the ambition to prove you wrong. I love you, Shoshanna. Acknowledgements My thanks go to my cousin Arnaldo Mandel, Professor of Mathematics of USP (University of São Paulo, Brazil), who scrutinized the manuscript for scientific discrepancies ...and found plenty of them; to Motty Perel, my cousin in Toronto, Canada, who analyzed with care and observed with good will; to Tally, his daughter, an English teacher, who improved the synthesis and to my friend Zwi Shua, a scholar in Judaism, who helped me to find the precise Biblical and Talmudic quotations. To Leony Goldenberg, a painter in Gaash, for the caricature on the front cover, inspired by Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, ‘The Thinker’. To my good friends, Naomi Cohen, a young and talented editor, and Joseph Galpaz, a critic without tricks, who did much good work. To my exacting editor at Minerva-Press, whose watchfulness saved me from unforgivable lapses. Their help was very meaningfully: since they corrected my manuscript and translated my English into English English, I have begun to understand what I meant to say. Contents INTRODUCTION I The Book's conception. Why a dog chases its tail. Reflections on Kibbutz. Bibliography. The writer. 1. EDEN WITHOUT ANGELS OF MONEYLESS MILLIONAIRES 19 What is a Kibbutz? A brief dissertation about its development. The Kibbutz’s sine qua non factor. 2. TRIBAL ROOTS ARE DEEP 31 A brief ethno-anthropologic adventure. trivial information – without sensational revelations – about what a Tribe is. The Past – a key to understand the Present and guess the Future. 3. ORGANIZATION SCHEME OF THE KIBBUTZ 71 Dichotomic Kibbutz apparatus. How does the Kibbutz function? A discussion upon individual's involvement with the whole community, and the eternal conflict hierarchy vs. democracy. 4. KIBBUTZ – DEMOCRACY SOCIETY LTD. 97 Eight random criteria for Democracy applied to the Kibbutz. 5. WHY DO WE DO WHAT WE DO? 109 Saladlogy (a fine mixture of bits of sociology, anthropology, psychology, etymology, etc.) to confront the work problem. Why work? 6. MEN & ANIMALS, TABOO & MORALITY 123 A pseudo-anthropological discussion on social organization of men and animals. Entrance into a jungle, which exit is not yet known. 7. PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE 147 Education – an attempt of the past to tame the present. Is a person really able to become himself? 8. TO BE OR NO TO BE A JEW? 155 Jew – a privilege, a curse, or a problem? 9. WHAT IS NATURAL IN NATURE 191 Rights and duties. Laws, rules and Regulations. Why human is not natural, and natural not human? Nature – a perfectly organized anarchy. Humanity, a confused disorganized humanarchy. 10. GOD AND MY GRANDMA’S WHEELS 229 Is the future rememberable? 11. DETERMINISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 249 Who is guilty? If my mother could program a cake, why can’t we program the world peace? Can we remember the future? To whom does destiny belong? 12. TRAGEDY AND DEATH AS EDUCATIONAL SOURCES 271 Death factor in life. Veneration of the past. 13. ZIONISISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION 305 A preliminary discussion for preparing the field. Conquests and reconquests – in the past, in present, and in the future Zionism – a racist movement? Why only Judaism has a Zionism? Zionism and its Siamese brother, the Messianism. 14. SOCIALISM VS CAPITALISM = NONSENSE 345 Is banana the contrary of guitar? Why democracy married capitalism, and not socialism? Communism – the highest, or the lowest stage of humanity? 15. TELL ME WHERE YOU RESIDE – I WILL TELL YOU WHO ARE YOU 367 My house - my Fortress, or my Prison? 16. WOMEN VS. MEN, OR WOMEN & MEN 377 Sex, a conflict or a bridge? Homus feminis lupus. Which sex is strongest? Has the difference a solution? 17. SHARING A CAVE WITH A TIGER 397 Why cheese does not love me. Who are my friends. Loneliness in multitude. Fellowship, Friendship, and Community. 18. MY SYMPHONY 415 What can I say that I did not say until now? INTRODUCTION: The thought of an Agnostic Jew AUTOBIOSOPHY The thought of an Agnostic Jew INTRODUCTION The book's conception. Why a dog chases its tail. Reflections on Kibbutz. Bibliography. The writer. The Book's Conception I am a Jew. Personally, this statement has no greater importance to me than the assertion that I have blue eyes. Ultimately, it would not have affected my life had it not been for an incident that I experienced on my first day at primary school. I was only seven years old. Some children waited for me on the corner and accused me of killing Jesus. I swore that I did not know what they were talking about and that I never killed anyone – all in vain... They beat me up and tore my new white shirt. I wonder how it was that children, whom had never met me before, knew things about me, since I did not even know myself that I was a Jew! I was certainly the first Jew they had ever seen, since my family was the only Jewish one in town. When my parents emigrated from Poland in 1929 with my sister and me, they settled in a place far away in the hinterland of São Paulo, a state in Brazil. At home, we spoke Yiddish and every Friday evening my mother covered her head with a kerchief and blessed candles while murmuring strange words. I thought then that at home all children spoke Yiddish with their parents and that on Friday evenings all mothers cover their heads with a kerchief to bless candles, murmuring strange words. (Later I learned that she was reciting by heart prayers in Hebrew.) The traumatic experience that revealed me my Jewish identity marks the exact moment when I began to ‘write’ this book: I asked then my first philosophic why. Even if my great- great-great-great-(and so on)-grandfather killed Jesus, why was I to blame? The persistent search for an answer to this question, - VII - INTRODUCTION: The thought of an Agnostic Jew and others that arose in the meantime brought me to Israel and to the kibbutz. Even here, I met with human behavior that I tried to analyze and understand, but could not accept. This book sums up my confrontations with such conflicts, defines my attitudes, and attempts conclusions based on deep reflection or intuitive inspiration. The book I allude to is really two books. Some time ago I completed the first one, Children’s Game?, which tells the events that led me to my Jewishness, to my Zionism, to Israel and to the kibbutz. It relates historical events I participated in, or witnessed, until 1951. Being an autobiographical narration and testimony, it is of course personal, subjective. This present book, its natural continuation and completion1, is an approach to social problems and conflicts in my territory (my kibbutz, my country, and the world in which I live). However, this time I write as an extra actor, an observer. For this reason, in this book I attempted to be objective, ‘scientific’, and more impersonal. Force of the Written Word In 1977, I sent an article to Ha'shavua, the internal bulletin of our Kibbutz Federation. I complained in it that twenty years after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1956), where Khruschev had denounced Stalin’s crimes, the leaders of Mapam, our party in Israel, had not yet expressed a single sentence of protest against the annihilation of Jewish culture in the USSR. The discussion whether or not to publish my article (one of these leaders vetoed it!) caused the collective resignation of the editorial board. An ad hoc committee appointed to deal with this crisis suggested the abolition of censorship in our press. The principle was officially adopted and the bulletin reappeared after a one- month strike. The article that provoked this affair, the most effective thing I have ever written, was never published. Later in the same year (1971), the same bulletin published another letter of mine protesting that some people occupied indeterminable jobs transforming them into little dictators in self-made kingdoms. I proposed rotation; a limitation on the 1 This book, a logical continuation of my previous book (Child’s Play?) is also an autobiography, but of my thought instead of my life. Therefore I have called it Autobiosophy, a word compounded of autos (Greek ‘self’) and bios (Greek ‘life’) and sophos (Greek, ‘skilled; wise, learned’) that is intended to mean ‘autobiography of thought’. All footnotes in this book are the author’s observations. - VIII - INTRODUCTION: The thought of an Agnostic Jew terms that anyone could serve in any influential position. The word ‘rotation’ entered the daily lexicon in our Federation, and a general conference resolved to define the maximum period of terms a person might serve in a leadership capacity. Though immediately applied to all low and intermediate levels, the use of this principle at high levels has been much slower.
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