Nina
I love Robert Greene. The crux of this book is that you should not look at successful people and think, “well, some people are just innate geniuses.” Greene's writing is infused with this almost Jungian sense of pneuma.
Every single person who has found sustainable and long-term success has worked incredibly hard. There is not any short-cut around this. This piece of knowledge is emancipating.
I would have liked a bit more information as to how to actually work in practice and build habits. In that way, this book is most valuable in setting you on the right track and reiterating to you that you need to do long, sustained work, and there are not any shortcuts around this. It is a book that sublimates decades of knowledge in a concise way (I occasionally skipped over some of the anecdotes) and a book I intend to be returning to for years to come.
“In our culture we tend to denigrate practice. We want to imagine that great feats occur naturally—that they are a sign of someone's genius or superior talent. Getting to a high level of achievement through practice seems so banal, so uninspiring. Besides, we don't want to have to think of the 10,000 to 20,000 hours that go into such mastery. These values of ours are oddly counterproductive—they cloak from us the fact that almost anyone can reach such heights through tenacious effort, something that should encourage us all.”
So refreshing to read a neuroscientist who just gives you the concepts. I'm tired of books that explain things with convoluted metaphors, seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes and watered down concepts.
Recommended by Andrew Hubermann - in the context he raised it, he talks about how religions (I assume he's talking about Orthodox Jews and concept of Niddah) do not touch each other for 2 weeks - and how that behaviour, when based on a model of neuroscience, can be what leads to the most fulfilling and longlasting romantic relationships
Not really enjoying so far as much as some of Leader's other stuff. Only a little bit in so far, but mostly tends to be rather trite, true but ultimately bland stuff about capitalism. I also think the importance of sleep has been downplayed, mostly to play into this whole capitalist effective workers criticism thing...
Coming back to this book because it's annoying me. The whole Descartes error thing - yes, we know that tangible brain injuries can produced different mental states. But what is more interesting is the bidirectionality - how “subjective” emotions are actually measurable by bio markers. I'll come back to, I'm just aversive to anytning with too many anecdotes,
I'm a big fan of the Cambridge University Press Bookshop that is just off King's Parade, for the main reason in that I find books that I know I would otherwise never receive any recommendations for. I suppose it is because the books published here are by academics, who are usually notoriously dull.
The trouble I often find when I approach a subject I want to learn more about (particularly if its one that I have a foundational knowledge in) is that so many books are filled with meaningless “fluff”. This can be, for example, anecdotal embellishments that detract more than they add anything to the book. I know what the idea of such anecdotes is - it is is to liven up what can be otherwise seen as a dry subject matter. But that type of writing is just not for me. Alternatively, the writing is just too vague, too airy for it to really be enriching.
A good example of this (sorry, Baxter) is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. My dad is also a big fan of him. His writing is full of “feel good” platitudes - he takes concepts or biblical stories that are so overwhelming in their depth and extrapolates some sort of nugget of wisdom from them that can be used as a practical life lesson. The problem is, he does not go into his methodology as to how he even arrives to this process. It is all well and good talking about the “dignity of difference”, but where is the law, where is the animosity? There's almost something quite insulting about the sentimentality some of his books (which admittedly are not aimed at audiences who have an interest in Jewish law, so have to, by their nature, be sparse on particular details).
Anyway, where am I going with this? David Novak is a brilliant author who I discovered by pure coincidence thanks to the Cambridge Press Bookshop - and is a guy I would love to go for a pint with. He treats his audience as both intelligent and inquisitive - practically pre-empting some of the most difficult rebuttals to his points made, and conceding the more weaker points in his own arguments.
The book is a collection of essays, which cover subject matter which, quite frankly, several Jewish scholars have avoided due to sheer awkwardness such as “The Status of Jews in a Non-Jewish State”, and “Can Israel be Both Jewish and Democratic?”. There is also an interesting essay on Spinoza as the “first Zionist” which could probably have done with being separately published.
WHY SECULAR ZIONISM IS PURELY REACTIONARY, AND UNSUSTAINABLE
Novak's central conclusion is that the current state of Israel is an awkward and utterly deformed amalgamation of secularism and religious law. Questions of why Jews should recognise Israel's right to exist are too often left to rhetoric, rather than reason.
I can personally attest to this - my own father, the child of a German Jewish woman who barely escaped with her own life, loves lines like “the Holocaust would not have happened if it were not for Israel.”
Although this is (arguably) true, it fundamentally misses the point. Sorry to be blunt, Dad, but so what? Emotional intensity should accompany rational action, but it cannot itself justify it.
If Israel is to exist as a Jewish state with a cohesive raison detre for its existence - an ontological jutsification, rather than a purely sentimental or pragmatic one, Zionists have a big task ahead of them. They must prove (1) the state of Israel is rooted in Jewish tradition (2) Zionism furthers, rather than hinders the purpose for which Jews exist and (3) Zionism is integral to this practice of Judaism.
My repudiation of secular Zionism stems from my love of Judaism. Herzl's Zionism was itself a reaction to the alienation that Jews experienced in the 19th century. Ironically, through us being castigated as a perpetually alienated people, Herzl turns around and practically declares: “We will become an alien people. But we shall become this alien people on our own terms [in our own state] and not yours!”. But for him, the Torah/Judaism is nothing more than a cultural ornament - something that plays a ceremonial role in the life of a secular state.
This is almost identical to the advice given to the Maccabean king, Alexander Jannaeus (76 BCE). When asked “what will happen to the Torah?”, his advisors answered: “Let it be rolled into a corner; who ever wants to study it, let him study it.”
The Israeli Chief Rabbinate is, in essence, no different from this.
To go back to my Dad's comments - avoiding the Holocaust, and resistance to evil, should intend to some transcendent end that attracts it. Without this transcendent end point, the whole project in the end, is purely reactionary, just like Herzl's Zionism.
This is embedded within the landscape of the Israeli constitution. Take the “right of return” (the criteria by which one is eligible for Israeli citizenship). The criteria for this are truly staggering, when you think about it. The definition of a Jew is not one informed by Jewish law. Instead, a “Jew” (for the purposes of obtaining Israeli citizenship) are identical to that of the Nazi Nuremberg laws. That is, you can make Aliyah (move to Israel) if you have (1) just one Jewish grandparent/great-grandparent (2) you are not Jewish, but you are married to a Jew. Truly staggering.
TO BE CONT.....
Novak is a student of Abraham Heschel. It is really difficult to find books that are both (a) engaging and educational that also (b) presuppose an intermediate (but not extensive) knowledge in both Jewish contemporary events, religion and philosophy.
This book is catered for an admittedly narrow crowd (the author himself says that it is intended for Jewish readers) but if it is a crowd you find yourself in, this is a fantastic, thought-provoking book.
Ahhh, Gabor Mate. There's something so comforting about him, in a way that Jewish authors can only ever fulfil. I read this in Summer 2021, and it blew my mind. It helped me understand my own behaviour, but also that of my family.
Mum had read this book 20 years ago, and she remembered this line in the book about how a doctor, operating during WW2, said “all of my Jewish babies are crying right now.” This made me realise the impact of stress on babies - how they pick up, almost via this osmosis like process, or the stress of their parents. Mum said it made her think of the contrast of Babushka's sister (born pre WW2) and the anxiety that paralysed Babushka (born during 1941). It's weird that babushka, rather than her sister, came out more traumatised, as her elder sister surely would have been more cognitive and aware of the horrors surrounding her, right? But no, not at all. And with this knowledge in mind, it makes me think of my own mother, who was just 23, who barely spoke English, scared and traumatised in a new country... and so much more of my own childhood makes sense.
I'd recommend this book to any humanities undergrad purely to get a sense of what key phrases are eaten up- “secular nation's state configuration of power” “quasi-racial exclusion” “propagated discourse”. Not really my cup of tea
Extremely heavy philosophical heavy lifting - enjoying it, but I do not think I've got the level of literary and philosophical literacy to fully get out of it what I one day can. So many sentences that are laden with an excruciating level of precise detail, that capture such an essential point... could pour over it for hours
This is now the second time I have tried to read this book. I just am not at the level of philosophical and psychological literacy to currently really understand it, and I do not want to slog my way through it simply for the sake of adding it to a neat, compiled list of books I have read. A book to return to in a few years
There's something so oddly intimate, even intrusive, about reading anyone's diaries - but with Tolstoy, especially. I love Vol 2, because it is based on the last years of his life, and you can see the way his relationship with Sofia (Kitty) deteriorates. Some of the entries at the end give the same jumbled impact as the pages in Anna Karenina, when Anna was walking to the station to commit suicide - these schizophrenic switches between the mundane and the profound invoke this chaotic, anxiety inducing quality. And so, its quite ironic how “Anna Karenina”, although meant to be autobiographical in the sense that Tolstoy represents Levin, towards the end, remains an autobiography, but in the sense that Tolstoy resembles Anna! Which is quite interesting, because I always found Tolstoy's ability to write about women so incredibly personal.
What would be fascinating is to go back and read Tolstoy's “Youth” trilogy straight after reading this.
Having read some of Steinsaltz's other stuff, I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. Some of it resonated. Whilst I believe everything he wrote here is true, I think if this book was read by someone of a lower level of spiritual maturity (like myself, in all honesty), without a mentor, there is the potential for you to make some inferences about the world and about yourself that are not necessarily correct.
This bloody Russian fixation with the devil. Not sure what to make of it. It would be interesting to compare it to Gogol's Portrait. But what are any of them actually trying to say?
Nabokov has crowned him the best author to come out of Soviet Russia. Jewish, too! Murdered in the gulags
must read - clinical examples of Hobson. says in psychodynamic neurology about a treatment programme for childhood trauma
Reading this book is weird in ways that I cannot describe. It's very disorientating at times - to flip from the author's comments about the sexual attractiveness of a former patient to being told we are at the epoch of a renaissance of neurology... I can't help but feel these different things would be better off not juxtaposed in the same book...? Moreover, the author's frustration and attempts to repudiate their Freudian teachings sometimes go too far - the science is in your favour, so let it speak for itself.
The problem is Hobson cannot help himself when it comes to his loathing of Freud, and it leads him to arrive to frankly, incredulous conclusions. For example “(Freud's) own account of his academic frustration may have exaggerated the effects of anti-semitic prejudice.”
To say that Jews in Vienna during the period just before WW2 were not prejudiced in their careers is almost as mind boggling as Hobson's theory. Why could he have not focused more on the relationship between cholingeric and aminergic activities and dreaming? I'd recommend the Dream Drugstore to anybody instead, this book doesn't know what it is trying to do.
Must read. Slavophile author, obsessed with freedom, read his wiki page he's right up your street
Actually quite good, it tells you information rather than outdated “witty” anecdotes that nobody cares about
