Finding Rabbi Khalili

This summer, during my vacation to Spain, I discovered that the religious atmosphere is radically different from that of Long Island.  My brother, Dylan, had decided to have his bar mitzvah in Europe, rather than having a traditional reception at home.  The bar mitzvah vacation was originally supposed to have taken place in Israel, but these plans became impossible upon the eruption of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.  Truthfully, I have never been much of a believer in Judaism, and yet I was quite moved by the following event.

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On the evening that we were to meet with the Rabbi, we carefully explored the street that was specified in the address, but could not find the synagogue.  At long last, my father stumbled upon a man with a long black beard – an arguably “Jewish-looking” man, to our eyes – going into a smallish, whitewashed building.  My father politely, yet abruptly, stopped him.

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“Excuse me, Señor.  I’m looking for Rabbi Khalili.”“Rabbi Khalili?  I do not know this man,” he said in Spanish.“Is this building the synagogue?”The man paused, gave my father a sidelong glance, then replied in a hushed tone.  “Erm, yes.  It is.  What is it that you need here?” he said distrustfully.

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After this mysterious encounter, we entered the building to find that it was a beautiful, two-room synagogue, adorned with Hebrew and Spanish phrases, and with various bits of traditional Jewish decorum hanging on the walls.  A few men near the rear entrance were removing prayer shawls and yarmulkes from inconspicuous white shopping bags.  The windows were gleaming panes of stained glass.  We later discovered that these were “one-way” stained glass windows, which explained why we could not identify the synagogue from the outside.

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My family and I were awestricken.  How amazingly different this was than in New York!  This was not a huge, obvious synagogue like ours on Long Island; this was about the size of a small house.  It was almost like a shelter—a haven for the local Jewish community.  The congregants did not flaunt their culture; instead, they were inward and satisfied.  They were reserved, yet dignified and determined.

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Although I have never been an ardent Jew, I believe that I had a strong revival of spirit that day.  I realized that not everyone has the pleasure of practicing his religion freely, even though it seems routine in New York.  The suspicious and defensive tone of the congregant, the one-way stained glass windows, the fact that men had to hide their tallises¹ in shopping bags—all made me realize that the freedom to practice one’s religious beliefs is not a mundane gift.  It is an extraordinary privilege that I will always be thankful for.

 ¹ prayer-shawls

The Importance of Classical Music in my Life

Without a doubt, one of the most meaningful aspects of my life is music—specifically classical music.  I find that nothing has the ability to be more relaxing, more energizing, more saddening, more exciting, or more enchanting than a symphony orchestra on a Saturday evening.  There are three main reasons why I am so passionate about classical music:  First, I was exposed to it at an early age.  Second, I find that it has a mysterious quality that separates it from all other art forms.  Last, I enjoy classical music because a single piece can be heard repeatedly, without the listener tiring of its content.

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 I believe that more people would enjoy classical music if they were exposed to it at an early age, as I was.  After a certain period of time, it is natural for any person to become accustomed to popular music—the music that is played most often on the radio, and the music that is most listened to by his/her friends.  Thankfully, my parents have been playing me classical music ever since birth.  For my whole life, I have been drawn to its beauty and power.  After a childhood of listening to classical music, no vast amount of peer pressure could have drawn me away from it.  In fact, classical music has affected my whole perspective on popular music: the latter lacks almost all of the virtues of the former.  Popular music does not have nearly the emotional force that classical music does.  Technically, the intricacy of popular music is neither as high nor as sophisticated as classical music.  If only more people were exposed to it at an early age, they’d be able to appreciate it.

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There are but a few art-forms in this world that have the power to evoke such a wide range of emotions: among them are film, literature, and music.  But the thing that distinguishes music from the others is its mysterious “method of operation”; in other words, how does music work?  In literature and film, we are presented with a situation that we are able to associate with a particular emotion.  We have all experienced some form of physical pain at one point or another; therefore, when Voldemort tortures Harry Potter, we are able to associate an emotion with that event.  However, how is it possible to associate that same emotion with the brazen call of a trumpet or the passionate cry of a cello?  We are given no situation to identify with—so how can we get the same thrill from Rachmaninoff as we get from James Bond?  (At least I do.)  This perplexing quality of classical music captivates me.  Admittedly, popular songs do have words, suggesting some kind of situation or story.  But classical music is much more abstract, which makes it more intellectual than other forms of music.

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Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa de Requiem is approximately one hour and forty minutes long, yet I could listen to it over and over again, without ever becoming tired or bored.  This is yet another virtue of classical music, and another reason that classical music is important to me.  Because most classical music is so complex, one can hear the same piece repeatedly, and hear something different every time.

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These three reasons have caused classical music to become a large part of my life.  I only wish that more people could share this passion.

Tabula Rasa, or not Tabula Rasa, that is the question…

“It is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke more rancor than just about any issue in the world of ideas.”  In this quotation, Steven Pinker—author of four award-winning books on biological determinism—comments on an issue that has confounded people for centuries.  This, of course, is the argument of whether “nature” or “nurture” dictates our traits and behaviors.  In this instance, nurture connotes the environmental factors that influence one’s character.  Nature represents the idea that heredity is the principle determinant of human traits.  The phrase’s etymology is quite interesting; first coined by Francis Galton, it was probably taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.”  Many believe that at birth, the human mind is a tabula rasa—a “blank slate”—and that most traits are adopted during one’s life.  To the contrary, many others believe that a person’s traits and behavior are preordained by heredity.  In my honest opinion, such a categorically partisan decision cannot be logically made.  Several aspects of a person’s character have been scientifically proven to be caused by ancestry; conversely, some skills and mannerisms are quite clearly acquired during a person’s development.  Most common, however, are the traits that are governed by both genetics and environment.  In his essay entitled Why Nature & Nurture Won’t Go Away, Pinker cogently argues his position that nature is the primary influence on one’s characteristics.  In the essay, he also attempts to dislodge the “nurture” argument and the “mixture-of-both” argument.  Yet, I stand by that latter opinion.  No one could possibly be so bold as to refute either nature or nurture, not even Steven Pinker.  Clearly, genes and environmental signals equally contribute to behavior.

There are some traits that are purely hereditary.  However, most of these clear-cut traits are physiological, having to do with the body.  Examples of genetically controlled traits include vulnerability to diabetes, eye color, and ear lobe detachment—things that are usually static after birth (excepting plastic surgery of course).  Environment does not have any imminent effect on these hereditary traits.  Another relatively clear-cut trait is religion.  Statistically, most children adopt the religious ideals of their parents.  Even after the natural stage of doubt that comes with adolescence, most people will return to their parents’ religious preferences in adulthood.  This parent-child influence practically defines the “nurture” argument.  Parent-child religious trust is something that can only be established during development.  Even if a person decides to observe a different religion than that of his parents, the “nurture” argument is still being proven: it suggests a lack of trust and reinforcement, or a desire for independence.  In Pinker’s words, children do not wish “to surrender to their parents’ attempts to shape them.”  This struggle is engendered only after birth, not in the womb.  Pinker claims: “Virtually everyone concludes that the behavior of the parent causes the outcomes in the child.  The possibility that the correlations may arise from shared genes is usually not even mentioned, let alone tested.”  I have two responses to this statement: First, the parent’s behavior usually does cause the outcome of the child (unless they live apart from each other).  And second, parent-to-child gene transfer has been proven to affect their similarities, yet religious belief is different.  Religious agreement is not a behavioral “correlation,” it is a matter of ethics.

Most characteristics, however, are more complex, usually including genetic influence and environmental influence.  The simplest examples of this would be weight and skin color, which rely both on genes and on environment.  A more complex example would be language.  Pinker writes: “Children exposed to a given language acquire it equally quickly regardless of their racial ancestry.  Though people may be genetically predisposed to learn language, they are not genetically predisposed, even in part, to learn a particular language; the explanation for why people in different countries speak differently is 100 percent environmental.”  Again, Pinker puts all of his trust on one side of argument and not the other.  It is true, that people are not genetically predisposed to learn a particular language.  However, the main point is that people do have a predisposition to learn languages in general.  Pinker actually mentions this, and then dismisses it as unimportant!  This predisposition allows human beings to have great versatility in terms of learning languages—Why should the particular language matter at all?  Therefore, “100 percent environmental” is a false assumption; a child’s language education is partly influenced by heredity, and partly by environment.  (One must be wary when reading from Pinker.  He often attempts to dispel criticism by using phrases like “100 percent.”  Do not be fooled!)

Another interesting case of the nature vs. nurture debate would be free will.  Do people really control their own decisions?  Are a person’s choices genetically preordained, or are they shaped by his environment?  Can people really be blamed for how they act?  This argument cannot be backed by scientific data, but rather, must be discussed philosophically.  In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murdered a 14-year-old boy, and were caught red-handed.  Their lawyer, trying desperately to win the case, broached the topic of free will: “this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor… Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”  According to the lawyer, the boys’ decision to commit the crime was influenced by radical environmental forces.  An opposing argument would have been that Leopold and Loeb were born to be cruel and vicious, and that they therefore deserved to be locked away in prison.

While only a few traits apply to either nature or nurture, most belong to both at once.  The fact that environmental forces actually trigger genetically-based reactions reinforces this theory.  Heredity and developmental experience work in sync with each other; therefore, it is erroneous to say that dominance belongs to one or the other.  If the question of nature vs. nurture was asked of me, I would reply that the answer is “a fair mixture of both.” 

 ¹ Shakespeare, The Tempest. 

 Bibliography : 1)) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture    2)) Pinker, Why Nature & Nurture Won’t Go Away, 2004    3)) Gould, The Politics of Biological Determinism, 1999