Curricular Diversity I

Last Monday evening, I found myself discussing The Return of Martin Guerre, the history of a trial which took place in rural 16^th-century France, to a friend of mine. As I began to explain the book’s premise, and why I was writing a paper about it, my friend, who happens to be in the College of Engineering, asked me with complete and utter candor whether a justice system already existed in Europe in the 1560s. Without showing my surprise, I responded that there was, adding that it took many of its precedents from Roman Law.[*] My friend is intelligent, hard-working, and bilingual, and the fact that he was not even aware that Renaissance France had a system of courts, judges, and parlements is merely the most recent example I have encountered of the low standards of historical education in our society. History is the most-disliked subject among High School students, and is particularly unpopular among racial minorities, and I do not know whether our culture dislikes history because of the way it is taught, or whether it is taught inadequately because we consider it not worth teaching well.

Although as a history major and potential historian or history teacher, I take historical ignorance somewhat more seriously than the rest of you might, historical ignorance among the well-educated is, I think, one particular manifestation of a more general problem in our education system. I am referring to ignorance of fields outside of our own specialty, whatever it may be. Education is meant to broaden one’s minds and one’s horizons, and make one aware of the larger world: education ought not to sharpen the mind by narrowing it.

Before I continue, I would first like to combat three antithetical myths. The first is that of a division between the natural sciences and the humanities. Most of us have heard this before, and most of you probably disagree with it at some level: according to this theory, one’s mind is either suited to math-and-sciences, or to the humanities. One will receive a 760 on the Math section of the SAT, and a 590 on the Critical Reading section because one is, in a sense, fated to do so. This theory is even supported by the quasi-scientific explanation of the division of the left and right sides of the brain (by which people really mean the telencephalon), one associated with quantitative reasoning, and the other with creative tasks. Somehow, the existence of these two halves means that one must be superior to the other, and that therefore, one side, and therefore one talent, predominates. Although I do not wish to dispute laterization of brain functions,[†] this fact should no more lead to the supposition that one is only capable of using one or the other side, any more than the fact that one of one’s shoes fits better than the other should lead one to conclude that one should wear only one shoe at a time. We all have special talents (or maybe not), this should not preclude our seeking to learn a relatively more difficult subject.

The second myth, again brought up by a friend of mine the other day, who was praising 19^th-century (and earlier) methods of Jewish education, in which the same teachers taught all subjects to a group of students, from physics to Tanakh, and from astronomy to Talmud. He seemed to think that the existence of specialty teachers is due to the lack of recognition that all laws, whether Halachic or physical, derive from the same source. Disregarding the theological origin of this statement, what he didn’t seem to realize was that until the early years of the 20^th century,[‡] a single learned person could reasonably hold most scientific knowledge in his head. This is even more so before works of such physicists as Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Before this, those with sufficient intelligence and leisure time could fit all scientific knowledge inside of their heads, with room to spare: living in the 12^th century, the Rambam learned his physics by reading Aristotle and the classical commentators. He found that Yechezkel’s divine vision squared remarkably well with the world of Aristotle. This myth is even more spurious than the first: in order to fully understand a field of science, one must work in a well-equipped laboratory: in order to fully understand a field of history, one must read all relevant secondary-source literature, and spend extensive time in archives. It is difficult to even be a specialist in history-in-general, specifically, because one cannot remain on top of the vast amount of research in every field, and follow the shifting historiographic river of claim, counter-claim, and compromise.

Because all fields, from astrophysics to the classics, are all changing so much so quickly all the time, we can no longer understand just what it is that Stephen Hawking studies, or just what makes M theory so trippy. This can sometimes lead to a feeling of intellectual helplessness, which brings me to the third myth: that nobody can ever really understand anything, and therefore shouldn’t try. In Travels with Charlie, a Yankee farmer complains to John Steinbeck that “My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty’s beard. I don’t even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that made a rock or a table. I don’t even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We’ve got nothing to go on — got no way to think about things.” In other words, because most of us can’t tell a charmed blue quark from a Higgs boson, or wrap our heads around the Mandelbrot set, or explain oxidative phosphorylation to a small child, we should never open up a book on science. This is patently false and quietist approach: as the logic goes, because we cannot know everything, we cannot know anything.

This is not a purely academic discussion. Ignorance of the basic facts of life has real-world consequences. Sallie Tisdale, describing her work as nurse in an abortion clinic, recounts a dialogue with a patient, which is simply one example of the damage caused by the ignorance of one’s own body:

“When’s the baby going to go up into my stomach?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when women get so big, isn’t the baby in your stomach? Doesn’t it hatch out of an egg there?”

This is an egregious example of misinformation, but regardless of your position in the abortion debate, I think that you can probably agree that this patient would not have found herself in such a quandary (medical or ethical, take your pick), had she known more about human reproduction.

Leaving you on that note, this blog post is turning out to be longer than I had expected. When I get to part II, I will go on to flesh out my argument, explaining why even academics should learn subject matter from other fields, and how, within the Cornell community, we can make it easier for them.

~JD

“Overnight, foreign lenders’ confidence collapsed and economic policy floundered in internal bickering. The International Monetary Fund imposed draconian conditions in return for new loans, while overseas creditors demanded that the regime guarantee the entire private foreign debt of the companies that had been taken over — about $7.7 billion — or risk jeopardizing their agreements for new loans. The desperate officials had no choice but to sign, thus fully protecting foreign banks while passing the burden on to domestic taxpayers. During the boom, Chile’s economic gains had been privatized; now, in the crunch, the country’s losses were socialized” (Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet, 197).

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[*] In fact, many Americans might be surprised to know that the justice system in most of the American states more closely resembles the legal code of the French Ancien Regime, which shares common roots with the English Common Law introduced in the thirteen original American colonies, than it does contemporary French Law, based upon the Napoleonic Code formulated in the early 19^th century. Not to say there are not major differences, such as the existence in modern American trials of a jury of peers, and the ban on torture. If you’re interested on experiencing firsthand the differences between the Common Law and the Napoleonic Code, commit a crime first in New York, and when you’re finished doing time, drive to Louisiana and commit the same crime there.

[†] The two hemispheres are, in fact, quite good at compensating the one for the other, provided that damage occurs earlier in one’s life rather than later. A 19^th-century autopsy once revealed that a normal, functioning human being had apparently lived his whole life with only one hemisphere.

[‡] The real turning point occurred in the years 1923-1924, when physicists finally ditched the old Newtonian model of the universe, having realized that the fact that energy came in tiny packets known as “quanta” threw much of what they thought they knew about the universe to the winds.

Questions I Tire of Answering I

There is a series of half a dozen questions which almost all acquaintances have asked me by the time they have become my friends. These questions even tend to be asked in the same order. As the youngest member of my family, I am by now accustomed to asking a series of the same four questions in the same order twice annually, but unlike at the Seder, the answers to my personal questions are more complex, and not already known by the questioner. Although I understand that nobody who innocently poses these questions has any idea that I have already replied to exactly the same question within the past 48 hours, I am nonetheless becoming tired of answering them. Therefore, I have decided to post them permanently on my blog, if only so that somebody, somebody, among you who hasn’t already asked me these questions will settle with reading the answers online, and not need to hassle me. There are too many questions to list all in one blog post, so I have decided space out the answers over time, ordering the responses categorically. I will begin with by far the most frequent pair of questions.

Q: How long have you been a vegetarian?

JD: Approximately seven years.

Q: Why did you decide to become a vegetarian?
JD: There are many reasons. I will try to list them in approximate order of importance.

First of all, there is the element of animal rights. I believe that animals have certain rights, which are not identical to human rights. Although there is not enough room (or concurrence) for a complete listing of human rights, suffice to say that these rights involve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My pursuit of happiness may look very different from yours, but we are equally entitled to our respective pursuits, insofar as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. The basis for a being to have rights is not intelligence; nobody would argue that Stephen Hawking has more rights than Joe Schmoe because Stephen is more intelligent than Joe. Their rights are equal, regardless of their respective IQs.

What, then, is the basis for human rights? Why is it that depriving my fellow human being of his life for my own enjoyment is morally wrong, whereas depriving a carrot of its life for my own enjoyment is morally neutral? Carrots and human beings are equally alive. We can thus establish that it is not the very fact of being alive that entitles one to rights. Following philosopher Peter Singer, I believe that it is one’s ability to feel pain that establishes one’s rights. The reason that the carrot has no rights is because it cannot feel pain; the same is true for the rest of the plant kingdom, as well as all inanimate objects.

There are two possible objections to this statement. First, you could argue that, by this logic, I am depriving brain-damaged people who have lost the ability to feel pain (they exist) to their rights. This is a fallacy. When I speak of pain, I am describing not only the physiological phenomenon associated with stimulated c-fibers, but also emotional anguish, etc. Suppose I were to cripple an aforesaid brain-damaged human for my own sadistic pleasure: my act would be morally unjust because I would be violating my victim’s right to liberty: a cripple is less mobile and capable than a human being with a whole body, and by depriving my victim of the advantages of a whole body, I would be committing a morally unjust action. The second objection (really just a vamped-up version of the first) is that this logic condemns to euthanasia brain-dead orphans with no ties to friends or family. This, anyway, is Peter Singer’s conclusion. Although this conclusion is rational, I object to it on the basis of human uncertainty: even medical experts may condemn a case as hopeless when it is not so. For instance, Japanese novelist and Nobel laureate in literature Kenzaburō Ōe’s eldest son Hikari was diagnosed as a human vegetable, and doctors suggested that he be allowed to die. Kenzaburō and his wife remained hopeful concerning in their severely handicapped son; despite his mental and physical limitations, he has gone on to become a successful composer.

Back to vegetarianism: I maintain that the ability to feel pain entitles one to rights. The animals that we raise for food are, biologically, as capable of feeling pain as are human beings (the relevant part of the brain is identical in mammals and birds). The factory farm conditions prevalent in United States agro-business are cruelly restrictive in ways that I believe cause animals physical and mental anguish. Hens are enclosed in individual cages too small for movement, steers are stuffed full of hormones and confined to live in pools of their own shit, and the living conditions of veal calves are too infamous for me to repeat them here. By choosing not to eat meat, I am refusing to finance such a system of animal abuse: I am eating my vote, and my form of protest is withholding my dollars from abusive enterprises.

My second reason is environmental. As food writer Michael Pollan has well expressed in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the American beef industry floats upon a sea of fossil fuels. A plate of meat costs twenty times as much energy to produce as a plate of vegetables; the world is facing an energy crisis, and even if you reject the anthropogenic nature of climate change, there are many reasons to avoid wasting the fossil fuels that remain, in part because many of the countries which benefit most from their sale are repressive and hostile towards democratic government. There is no good reason to encourage wastefulness and overconsumption: although our consumer economy is full of the pitfalls of planned obsolescence and waste, these business strategies, however profitable they may be for the corporations which employ them, result in the increase of pollution and the swelling of landfills. By choosing not to eat meat, and trying to eat locally, I have tried to reduce my own environmental footprint, in order that my lifestyle might be sustainable. Although there is not enough room to describe it now, my environmentalism is neither environmentalism-for-environmentalism’s sake nor environmentalism-for-natural-beauty’s sake: I hold my environmentalist beliefs because I wish for future generations to be able to enjoy the same style of life on the same planet as I do. I am an environmentalist for the same reason that I have placed my savings in a mutual fund: I do not want my children to ever know want, or hunger, or thirst, or sickness.

My third reason is religious. As an observant Jew who tries to obey the rules of Kashrut, it is far simpler to exclude meat from my diet. I never need worry about the amount of time that has elapsed since I last ate meat, I do not need to worry about the relative unavailability of kosher meat, and, when I become older, I will not need to have a kitchen with four sets of dishes.

These are the main three reasons why I choose not to eat meat. As you might have noticed, my argument is incomplete: I glossed over climate change, and have not discussed sustainable fishing. There is one point, however, that I must make before I sign off. This essay is not meant to convert any of you to my cause: it is merely my own justification for my behavior. I was never particularly attached to meat, anyway, and do not suffer from the cravings which I know some would if they were constrained to avoid meat. Eschewing meat is easier for me than others, cognizant of this, I realize that my academic treatment of the subject seems far to abstract to seem convincing. I wish only to avoid the kind of harassment I have experienced from acquaintances who treat my dietary choices with disdain and contempt.

~JD

“The Vatican ordered bishops to take an oath of loyalty to the state and agreed to the dismantling of the church’s temporal organizations… The Nazis had gained another important prop for their regimes. Almost immediately, the Nazis began to go back on the agreement, principally by harassing priests who were seen as hostile” (Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History, 152).

JDMeme

This is what we call "setting the record straight."

~JD

In Touch With the Past

Some of you may know that I’m currently taking a course on history methodology, in preparation for writing my senior thesis next year. If you do know, however, you probably didn’t remember until I mentioned it just now: it’s a somewhat boring class, which could and should last one hour every other week, rather than two hours every week. The students and professor alike do their best to keep the conversation dynamic, but if, at the end of each class, you asked me what I’d learned, I’m not certain what I’d answer. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled with good seminar; after all, discussing historical methodology at a party won’t get you a date, in the way discussing the Enlightenment or European Fascism will. Although I’m looking forward to finally reading Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, and Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, there is one topic definitely missing on my syllabus, covered only vaguely in the first week’s reading, and tangentially in one article in the fifth week.

That topic is what I call concreteness in history. It has to do with a very delicate balance in historical writing. When historians seek to describe the events of the past, they information they present falls somewhere on a scale of specificity, ranging from the anecdote on the one side to the generalization on the other. Although I emphasize that this is a scale, and that there is a well-sized grey area, most event can be classified without much difficulty as one or the other. Whereas an anecdote (from Greek, “unedited”) is a specific event involving or in the presence of a certain individual or group at a particular time and place, a generalization (from Latin generalis, in contrast to specialis) sweeps anecdotes into a blender, sets it to “purée” for ten minutes, and tells you how the smoothie tastes, thus “editing” the unedited. If a generalization is quantitative, we call it a statistic. When selecting, interpreting, and presenting the primary sources that reveal the events of the past, historians must write in both anecdotes and generalizations. This is a fine balance to strike: how often to generalize, and how often to recount anecdotes.

Too many anecdotes, and too few generalities, leaves the reader uncertain just to what he should importance, and how much. Herodotus is a classic example of this (Ibn Daud is too, but less well-known, and a certain neighbor of mine might not appreciate criticism of Sefer HaQabalah). The man just loved anecdotes. For instance, he tells us, the names of the bravest soldiers in every battle, and of individual acts of heroism. For instance, at the battle of Plataea, the Athenian Sophanes “wore an iron anchor, fastened to the belt which secured his breastplate by a brazen chain; and this, when he came near the enemy, he threw out; to the intent that, when they made their charge, it might be impossible for him to be driven from his post: as soon, however, as the enemy fled, his wont was to take up his anchor and join the pursuit” (Histories 9.74, where there follows a second, contradictory story about Sophanes). Even Herodotus’s generalities are more curiosities to be admired than meaningful topical summations. For instance, he describes non-Greeks to his all-Greek audience in part by their foreign eating-habits: Assyrians lived exclusively on fishcakes; Massagetaeans were cannibals, milk-drinkers, and lacked agriculture; and Persians were unmatched in the decadence of their cuisine (Histories 1.200, 1.216, and 9.82, if you don’t believe me). Although the citations reveal that I’m pulling these from different books, my point is that these may be generalizations, but by the time you pull up Facebook again, you’ll have forgotten these passages. This is the problem of Herodotus: though his descriptions of battles are riveting, and his anthropological observations are fascinating, one week from now, you won’t remember who Sophanes is, nor will you know anything about Assyrian eating habits.

The opposite problem is much more common among contemporary historians, particularly (in my own experience), those who study East and Southeast Asia. For instance, all I remember about the Tang Dynasty (618-907) from a semester-long class on premodern China and Japan is that some people played polo in the North. So that I won’t be comparing apples and oranges, I’ll choose a written source, instead. Seymour Drescher wrote the most boring assigned course reading I have ever read, the introduction to a book-long debate over the precise connection between capitalism and the abolition movement (the same people involved, the best example being the Quakers). Throughout the entire Introduction, only the name of a single historical actor (a wealthy British merchant) is ever mentioned, and the non-scholarly reader is left clueless as to just what the natures of the abolitionists and capitalists were like. All I can remember is the premise of the article: I derived no benefit, because there were only generalizations, no anecdotes.

John Lewis Gaddis, in his Landscape of History (don’t bother reading it), writes that historical writings are to the events of the past as maps are to a landscape. Historical writing cannot describe all aspects of the past without becoming as vast, clumsy, and “unedited” as the past itself (or, rather, the vestiges it leaves behind, which Gaddis calls “relics of the past,” which, upon historical scrutiny, become primary sources). To borrow a statisticians’ adage about models, all historical writings are false, but some are very useful. Anecdotes must be selected, and generalizations must be made; major questions remain which ones, how many, and in what proportion to each other (bearing in mind, of course that no single historian, no matter how dedicated, can ever exhaust all primary sources on a subject). Many students of the past have successfully struck this balance over the years. To name just a few, Edward H. Schafer (The Vermillion Bird), Thomas Cahill (How the Irish Saved Civilization), Arturo Valenzuela (The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile), Benedict Anderson (“Census, Map, Museum” in Imagined Communities), Mark Kurlansky (Cod), Philip Deloria (Indians in Unexpected Places), Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers), Belinda Davis (Home Fires Burning), Ada Ferrer (Insurgent Cuba), John Ellis (Eye-Deep in Hell), David Fromkin (A Peace to End All Peace), and every contributor to The Cultures of the Jews have all produced excellent, informative, well-written, and well-balanced works.

My favorite example, however, of balanced historical writing, is Thucyidies.. In Book I of his sadly-unfinished History of the Peloponnesian War, the old Greek general establishes the great conflict, that all Greece ought to have seen coming. Athens and Sparta had been on a collision course since the Persian Wars more than a half-century before: the Delian League had become the Athenian Empire, and every year, more poleis were joining, ever increasing the Athens’s resources of ships, warriors, and treasure; before long, Sparta, long the most fearsome Greek polis, would be in an obvious position of inferiority: Athenian power posed a direct threat to Spartan hegemony, and Athenian coercion of traditional Spartan allies, most importantly Corinth, and most cruelly, Megaros. But though Thucydides’s political acumen was great enough to write such cogent generalizations of international relations in Classical Greece, he was also capable of including the anecdotes necessary to make the generalities stick. One of Thucydides’s famous contrasts between Sparta and Athens, for instance, is that the former’s power is land-based, and the latter, naval. This is best illustrated in his numerous descriptions of battles. For instance, early in the war, an Athenian fleet fights a group of enemy ships, who are so frightened by the Athenians’ navy, famed as the mightiest across the Hellenic world, that they form an outward-facing circle, and back water to maintain a safe distance. The Athenians threateningly close in circularly, and, eventually, their enemies bump into each others, their sterns and riggings tangle, and they surrender to the Athenians. The ease with which I just wrote this passage (notice the lack of citation) should convey Thucydides’s ability to make his ideas memorable. What he has done is make history concrete: the reader understands larger themes (generalizations), through specific incidents (anecdotes).

To return to Gaddis’s metaphor of historical-writing-as-map, if generalizations are the paper of the map, then anecdotes are the pushpins which “fix” it, and prevent it from curling up around the edges as the map ages. With no generalizations, pushpins in the wall are boring things; with no anecdotes, maps, no matter how valuable, will remain forever furled in the corner.

Concreteness is the effect of a proper balance between anecdote and generalization: it is not the balance itself. When the two are in proper proportion, one knows the physical, visibly human actions on a small scale, as well as the significance of these actions to a larger historical narrative. What many modern historians fail to do, in their generalization-based history, is remind the reader what his generalizations mean, and what they look like. When I was in France, studying at the Sorbonne, I vigorously studied the Finance Ministry of Louis XIV. I read and reported on the entire process of direct (and indirect) tax collection and assessment. The different courts and tribunals, the various officers and commissars, the lands of election and of estate, their calendars and timetables: all I tried to explain to my classmates, with my friend Pauline Renoir, in 20 very, very short minutes. Throughout the project, though, I was bothered by two closely-related questions as to the historical relevance and importance of the presentation I was crafting and the material I was sifting through. The first was: was any individual involved in this hierarchy of transfer actually aware of any of the other actors? My conclusion, at the end, was a tentative no: the higher-ups didn’t care how each receveur particulier (the crucial intermediary link in the chain) came up with the money he delivered to the receveur general, and the humble collecteur had no way of knowing what happened to the tax money he levied. My second question still remains unanswered: how did the average taxpayer physically pay his taxes? Would twelve soldiers, armed to the teeth, knock on his door demanding money, the way so many bad Robin Hood films have taught us to imagine tax collection? Or was he obliged to visit the collecteur and his staff with a purse of silver coins at some sort of regional office?

The negative answer and non-answer to my questions reveal that the books I was reading lacked concreteness: I could not ascertain the physical, visible aspects of the actions described therein. Concreteness is important for two reasons. First, it forces you to understand what you are saying when you are making historical claims. If, for instance, I made the sweeping claim that “in its early years, Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile was particularly brutal,” something I learned from my course on Latin America, and somebody pressed me for examples, I would know how to respond. I could say: “The day after Pinochets’s September 11^th 1973 coup, approximately seven thousand known supporters of the just-murdered democratically-elected president Allende, were rounded up, and detained in the stadium in the capital city of Santiago. Many of these people were beaten, tortured, and executed by machine gun fire.” Here, I not simply using a blanket statement, such as “coup,” “repression,” or “military crackdown.” If pressed for details, I could provide the example of Víctor Jara, the famous leftist folk singer, most of whose upper body was broken in the severe beating he received, who was taunted by his tormenters to try to play his guitar in such a state, and who began the composition of a poem (successfully smuggled out), unfinished because he was dragged away to be executed by machine gun.

Such an event is as vivid as it is shocking; and this brings me to my second point: concreteness is necessary in order to “fix” certain events and milieus in the mind of the reader. Just as medical students have their mnemonics (“On Old Olympus’s Topmost Top, A Fat-Eared German Viewed A Hawk” in order to memorize the names of cranial nerves), history students need their mental pictures, sound bytes, and video clips to prevent what they are learning from dribbling out of their ears. For instance, I still bear in my head the vivid picture of a housewife in wartime Berlin smacking an offending policeman with her milk pot. This instantly summons forth a host of other images and ideas: starvation and shortage, the colored rationing cards, steaks cut out of every horse which collapsed in the streets, the terrifying gun-toting and sword-wielding German police, the vast slaughter of one third of Germany’s pig population, the “turnip winter,” public kitchens, black market butter, k-bread and double-k bread: I suddenly recall the milieu of starvation in Berlin in World War I. Like turning over a seemingly ordinary stone, only to reveal a scuttling swarming universe beneath, each one of these scenes (and I have collected many, over the years), “reveals” a throng of interrelated images.

Many historians write concretely, consistently: others do not. Some professors at Cornell include concreteness in their lectures: many others do not. In less than one year, I will, for the first time ever, be in the position to write as a historian does: I only hope that my writing will be as concrete as it is insightful, and as original as it is interesting.

~JD

“A salient feature of the plantation period is the number of European accounts that actually credit slaves with the introduction of specific foods to the Americas, all previously grown in Africa” (Judith Carney, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s botanical legacy in the Atlantic World, 123).

Pox

Hello, everyone, I’ve decided to revive my blog, at least for the time being. Although I don’t expect the entries to be as long, I hope to keep the style enjoyable and entertaining.

As some of you may already know, Gannet Health Services diagnosed me with chickenpox, and have put me in quarantine in my room for a period of six days, until this coming Wednesday, February 22^nd. This has forced me to sit tight and read. I devoured books three, four, and five of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, and have also read about rice planting techniques in West Africa and South Carolina, Jewish discrimination in Paris under the Vichy Regime, Robert Boyle, the disintegration of democratic regimes in the 1960s and 70s in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s s foreign and domestic policies… I could go on, but to no purpose.

I’ve also been wasting a fair amount of time on the Internet. The final hours of the Order of the Stick Reprint Drive at Kickstarter have had me at the edge of my seat, trying to snag some signed books, I’ve read articles by my friends Judah Bellin (on Technion, in the Cornell Daily Sun) and Sam Moss (on nuclear Iran in the Cornell Progressive), listened to a lot of reggae on Pandora, found Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant” on YouTube, tried to catch up on some e-mail backlogging.

In some ways, I feel as I did back in France -- lonely, most of the time, and immensely happy whenever somebody has taken time out of his or her day to reach out and make human contact. I don’t feel sick, beyond the itchiness of the rash itself, and the worst part of this whole situation is the quarantine — apparently, you can catch chicken pox just by being in the same movie theater as someone else who has it, so that means no guests inside of my room, and I can’t go and sit in the living room downstairs, either.

This gets me to thinking of the story of another student, who lived more than eighteen centuries ago. I sadly don’t know his name, or any details about his life, except this one, which the Talmud relates: “It once happened that one of Rabbi Akiva’s students became sick, but none of the sages went to visit him. Rabbi Akiva, however, went to visit him. Because he swept and cleaned the floor for him, the student recovered. The student said to him ‘Rabbi, you have revived me!’ (Nedarim 40a).

On the surface, what Rabbi Akiva did for his student in visiting him was really quite modest: a bit of cleaning. (Though if his student were as messy as some Cornell Students, sweeping and cleaning might have been a strenuous task for the aging teacher.) Like Rabbi Akiva’s student, I have been helped by the kindness of a few people who have made the effort, going above and beyond, to make me feel better about my situation. Unlike him, I am not serious ill, but this does not exempt me from gratitude, and I’d like to thank everyone who has made a special effort of kindness over the past five days, in no particular order.

Dad, thank you so much for calling: it was the best part of my whole weekend. Josefin, thank you so much for buying me groceries: I would be out of food if it were not for you. Victor, thank you for delivering my Shabbat dinner. Mom, thank you for your unceasing support, and your concern. Peninah, thank you so much for stopping by my door, and engaging me in normal conversation, lending me just a bit of your unflagging optimism. Aaron and Nick, I really appreciate your offering to take notes for me, so that I don’t fall behind in my studies. Elliot, thank you for the favor that required you to know my Hebrew name. Sam, thank you for your article, and for speaking with me over the phone. Also, thanks to everyone who has wished me well by e-mail, or anyone whom I may have forgotten (you know who you are).

I’ve got to get back to work (or to sleep, rather, by now). Regardless, on Wednesday, I’m free. See you all soon, and love to you all.

~JD

“Whether at a crucial moment for Jacobin hegemony in the French Revolution, at the point of Stalin’s bid for controlling authority, the implementation of Nazi policy in Germany, or the triumph in Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeni, emergent ruler have justified dominion… as masculine, and made that code literal in laws that put women in their place” (Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, 1072).