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I’ve written a second post for New Voices.  This one is about the difficulties of providing for all students in a campus Hillel, and what I see as an important step in that direction.  Enjoy!

I had intended to write last night about the first day of Institute, but was too tired.  Thus, this post is going to try to cover yesterday and some of today.

I started off the day yesterday, after breakfast, with text study.  There were only three people there, including the teacher, who it turned out lives in Northampton as well.  We looked at a parable attributed to the Baal Shem Tov.  In the parable, there is a fiddler, who plays a certain tune that the king likes very much.  He commands the fiddler to play it for him many times a day.  In order to prevent the fiddler from growing tired of the tune and playing it with less inspiration, the king brings a man off the street into the court every time the tune is played, someone who has never heard it before, so that the fiddler is always playing to a new audience, and feels inspired every time.  Eventually, the king realizes that he can’t keep pulling dudes off the street, so he is advised to blind the fiddler, so he won’t know if there’s a new person or not.  Thus ends the parable – rather inconclusive, but with a lot of food for thought.

The classical interpretation is that the king is God, and we are the fiddler.  The particular song represents prayer or worship.  The parable tells us to find new ways of keeping our prayer meaningful and applicable.  Although I don’t pray regularly, this was the part I liked.  When we get to the blindness part, there’s an issue.  What this seems to be saying is that we are blind to God’s plans in the macro sense.  I don’t like that idea.  To me, it engenders willful ignorance; the idea that we should assume we can’t understand the universe, so we shouldn’t try.  It implies that we should become more insular, caring only about our supposed personal relationship with God, and not about trying to discover anything else new.

That being said, it was an intriguing story, and a good way to start the day, particularly because it remained applicable to a lot of the other stuff I did, surprisingly enough.  In my morning baking class, we talked about the spiritual and philosophical implications of preparing food, and looked at some historicaly Jewish rabbinical writings on this topic.  Some of them dealt with what you do to make eating unique or worshipful.  For instance, there was a rabbi who said that if you are eating while walking, you should stop walking to eat.  If you are eating while standing, you should sit.  If you are sitting, you should recline.  And if you are reclining, you should wrap yourself in a prayer shawl and then eat.  The idea is that you need to distinguish what you’re doing; you need to take a break and step back.  I like this idea very much, especially considering the economic and social context of food in our society today.

My afternoon class began with an introduction to the historical definitions and derivation of Shemitah, the Jewish sabbath for the land that occurs every seventh year (depending on where you are and how you define it).  This class as well is going to talk a lot about the politics and economics of food.  Yesterday (and today as well) we worked on understanding the various perspectives on the practice; we haven’t really gotten to the meat of discussing how this practice should be applied today.  However, it fit in nicely with the theme of yesterday’s text study; how do you keep a regular practice (agriculture) relevant?  The agricultural justification for this law is somewhat questionable; you can farm land pretty constantly without depleting it (enriching it, in fact), if you do it properly.  At the very least, a mandatory year-long break every seven yeasr doesn’t provide the flexibility I imagine a farmer would need to keep the land healthy if there was reason to cease farming entirely.  But it does raise questions about how we should think of that practice to avoid abusing the land or ourselves in its context.  More on this later, I imagine.

One of my friends accompanied me to this morning’s text study.  There is a different teacher each day.  Yesterday’s teacher wasn’t there as a participant, but the other participant from yesterday was, plus one more.  We looked at the origin of Tu B’Av, which is rather grisly.  In outline form, the story takes place during the period of Judges.  The tribe of Benjamin commits a heinous crime against a traveler and his concubine, and in return all of the other tribes except one swear to never let their daughters marry Benjaminites.  They also go to war and kill a lot of the Benjaminites.  A ways down the line, they all realize that they’re about to entirely exterminate an entire tribe of Israel (which they surprisingly didn’t have any qualms about before), and they change course, working out an elaborate solution that involves abducting women to be brides (from a different tribe, one that had taken the oath, but since the women are taken without their father’s consent, it’s a loophole), but not before also killing a bunch of the tribe that didn’t take the original oath.  I guess the whole being married without permission part is the origin of the festival’s tradition of women going out to get guys; I’m not really that familiar with the current-day practice (by which I mean that I didn’t know it existed until yesterday).

Obviously, this is a rather troubling story.  The women leading the study pointed out that this story contains the first steps of Teshuvah (repentance).  This is true, but  it’s difficult to really give the repenters credit, because they haven’t admitted that what they did was wrong.  A participant in the text study insightfully pointed out that what they were really donig is approaching a series of problems.  They had the problem of the possible eradication of the tribe, so they dealt with it in a way that would create as few other problems as possible.  But along the way, they killed a bunch more people, and abducted a bunch of women.  In short, I don’t know enough about the holiday to say anything about how this might affect my perception of it as a modern practice, but its origin is pretty screwed up.  This is true of a lot of parts of Judaism.

Today in the baking class we made seven-species bread, which has turned out fabulous (as did yesterday’s oatmeal-maple bread).  Our teacher told us about his personal history with baking, and how it has affected his life as a rabbi and a person.  I’m looking forward to discussing a lot of food issues in this class as well.

I seem to have unintentionally picked two classes that are both about the economic, social, political, and spiritual implications of food.  I’m glad it’s worked out this way (it didn’t occur to me until yesterday), because this is something I’ve been getting increasingly interested in recently.  Food is a big problem facing our society.  I’ve heard it claimed that we can’t fix the health care system without fixing the food system.  That’s true to a certain extent; we could save a lot of money if we were just healther in the first place, and many of our current health problems can be traced to poor dietary habits as a culture.  But I do think that food change is going to be more of a grassroots effort than a legislative one.  Ultimately, the system will correct itself as oil prices rise (with the passage of Waxman-Markey, I hope), and as we run out of the stuff.  Michael Pollan puts it best: the corn industry is floating on oil.  That can’t last by definition, if nothing else.  The question is how many people will starve and be harmed before we get there.  And that’s an issue the government can’t fix; as long as there’s cheap food available, people will buy it.  It’s up to us to recognize the hidden costs of food.  Food is not cheap.  It’s probably one of the most labor-intensive commodities on the market.  We need to make the choice to pocket the full costs of food by buying locally, organically, and sustainably.

Programs like this one give me hope that that kind of change can be effected.  A lot of people come here to get educated and to educate, and there’s a lot of really important learning going on.  That kind of education is self-replicating.  Ignorance can only hold sway as long as no one is smart.  The nation is getting smarter.  We’re getting closer to real change, change we can, finally, believe in.

I have four books that I need to read right now, five if I count one for Brown (summer work!).  One is not in the library yet – Seeds of Terror, which is about the connection between Al Qaeda and the Afghan opium poppy trade.  I saw the author being interviewed on The Daily Show, and she was one of the smartest people I had ever seen.  So I reserved the book right then, and am waiting to read it.  I have with me The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while and I think will start tonight, The Cluetrain Manifesto, which is about the way the Internet is changing business, and a book by the Motley Fool about direct investing.  I think I will write reviews of each after I finish.

We lost to Amherst JV A today on a universe point; it was 5-5, game to 6.  It was a pretty awesome game.

Tomorrow, I am biking to school (as I did yesterday) with a ton of other people.  It is Community Day, so we have no classes, and there are activities and free food (Chinese and Jamaican) all day.  A friend and I are performing a Talking Heads song at the open mic later.  Then the frisbee team leaves for the St. Johnsbury tournament after school.  That I am really looking forward to.  We’re in the B division, which means that some of our newer players should get to play a bunch more.  It also means that I am planning to win the division, which would be pretty awesome.  The tournament lasts through Sunday.  I will be bringing my megaphone.  Enough said.

Last night I finished the first draft of the one-act I’m writing.  It’s a collaboration between my Playwriting class and my school’s Holocaust Studies class, which I took last year, and will be used, once completed, in the Holocaust Rescue unit.  We read it in class today, and I got some very useful feedback on it.  I am very excited to see how it plays out when completed.  The Holocaust Studies class will do at least one reading of it, hopefully public.  This will be the first time I’ve ever had any of my work read outside of class.  WAHOO!

I have registered for the NHC Summer Institute!  I am taking Jonathan Rubenstein’s baking class and Ben Dreyfus’ shemitah class.  This is going to be a fabulous Institute.

Today was the Northampton Pride march and rally.  I took a longish lunch break to march with my school’s GSA, and then got some excellent food, including deep-fried cheesecake, which a friend and I sampled simply so we could say we had.  It was not very good.  The fried plantains and rice were, however.

And now, for the homework.

The HCCPS annual meeting was a great success.  I ended up going with some friends separately from my mom.  Afterwards, we went and got some ice cream (I had a root beer float) at Herrell’s.  It was great to see everyone again, and I really liked being at the meeting.  We talked a bit about ourselves, and our experiences at Hilltown, and then people asked us some questions.  Overall, a wonderful evening.

I have a bunch of homework to finish up, and then I am off to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

I didn’t get home until about three in the morning, so I took the day off from school today to sleep and catch up on work.

The concert was amazing.  The orchestra itself was really cool; a blend of people from all different countries.  The conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, was incredibly fun to watch.  He had more expression than almost anyone I’ve ever seen before.

Four ten-thousand-watt (I think) projectors covered the entire ceiling and back wall of the stage of Carnegie Hall.  Before each piece, they would show maps of where the composer lived, as well as periodically showing videos about select performers from the orchestra, compilations of audition videos during intermission, and some really cool multimedia stuff during a few pieces.  During John Cage’s Renga and Aria, for instance, they projected the shapes and syllables he used to notate the piece, which is pretty cool sounding.  Will and I got a look at the control room for all of the video, and it was intense.  There were racks and racks of complicated audio-video and computer equipment, and all sorts of things we didn’t understand at all.

The orchestra also played Ride of the Valkyries, which is pretty much the most epic piece of music ever.

For me, the two highlights of the performance were the Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica, composed and guest-conducted by Tan Dun in its world premier, and a piece they did with Mason Bates, a really awesome electronic DJ.  He played with the full orchestra.  Dun’s piece had a part for car rims which were played with ball-peen hammers.

The irony of wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt in a concert hall named after Andrew Carnegie did not escape me, and I think it was responsible for my being rejected by an interviewer from the BBC, who I guess was looking for people more well-dressed than us.  We were a rather odd-looking group.

We hung out in Times Square for a while beforehand, got some excellent food from a street vendor, bought some hip-hop (which we listened to on the way home), and almost purchased some Obama condoms (“Michelle approved, ladies and gentlemen”, and “Create your very own stimulus package”), but they were $5, which was not practical.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a historic event, but not for the reasons I had originally been thinking of.  In terms of the formation of musical groups, the real democratizer was the recording process.  In that respect, this is really no different.  But it does really represent the way that classical music, and, indeed, the idea of collaborative music in general, is changing in response to this type of technology.  It opens up new ground for the way music can be composed, put together, and performed.  I am excited to see where it goes from here, and I am proud to have witnessed this event.

Also, this post has more categories than any I have ever written before, I think.  It is just that awesome.

Egg salad (made with fresh eggs) and Tabasco on matza.

Apparently there is a scientific measurement of how spicy something is.  I wonder where my sandwich would rank on it.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about how society is going to change as the effects of global warming play out and we run out of fossil fuels.  We have a lot of thinking to do about how we want to restructure to avoid starving people.  It is going to get a lot harder to feed people.

I think the solution is to start centralizing the population around farming areas, with efficient public transportation to allow people and goods to be efficiently moved within relatively small areas.  Importing food from long distances is a luxury we cannot afford.  Areas of the world that cannot be used efficiently for farming should become centers for power generation (by nuclear fusion ideally), and research into such techniques.  That way, any safety concerns associated with running power plants will be removed from the population, and the land will be put to good use.

The current model of people living far-flung, away from distribution centers, and having to drive to get their food, is completely unsustainable.  We need to create small, localized, microeconomies that are self-sufficient in terms of food.  Electric power can be transported over long distances by the use of high-voltage lines, so it is no problem to create that thousands of miles away.  But goods such as food can no longer be shipped long distances, because that is the source of most of the energy expenditure associated with them.

We also need to scale back on our use of commodities; we need to consume less.  Some products require special facilities to be manufactured, and if we go through them too fast, we will waste energy getting them from place to place.

On the other hand, if we have enough clean energy, that won’t really be a problem.  Nuclear fusion has the potential to produce an immense amount of energy with almost no harmful byproducts.  If we harness more efficient electrical engines to power our machinery, we should be able to live comfortably without having a negative impact on the planet.  That balance is the key.

There is no intrinsic disadvantage to modernization.  The problem arises when we ignore the natural order of things, when we forget that as the dominant species, we are in a unique position to screw ourselves and everything else over with our tremendous influence on the planet.  That influence is both our greatest asset and our greatest liability, and we must tread carefully around it.