We are so used to instant everything: instant food, instant news, that most of us do not know that it used to take anywhere from 12-24 months after an academic paper was accepted before it was actually published. It took a lot longer than that to research and write.
No, I am not a tree-hugger but yes, I still love the look, weight, heft, and smell of books: Old books, brand-new ones too. No, I don’t write long-hand anymore or on a typewriter, I do use a computer but yes, ’tis true, I do not own an ipod, blackberry, or kindle.
Therefore, on this very rainy day, I have been engaged in two very enjoyable projects.
I am doing the final revisions and additions for an academic paper that I’ve written about honor killings in the West which will be published at the end of February, about a year after I began the writing but about five years after I first began the research. And the thinking.
Today is just too good a day to spend on only one project. Thus, I am writing a Torah interpretation (a “dvar Torah”) that I will deliver this coming Sabbath. I love doing this. Time stands still–time flies.
Believe it or not, there is a thematic connection between my paper about honor killing and my Torah portion which is about the rape of Dina (and about much, much else).
I sacrificed several important events (an award to Rachel Ehrenfeld for her extraordinary work on behalf of freedom of speech in America, and a feminist literary reading by Alix Kates Shulman and Anne Roiphe at the National Arts Club) in order to do this work; these were events that I really wanted to attend.
No regrets…and yet, when the “instant” culture is able to clone human beings, I suppose I would not mind being able to be in several places at once.
Very sweet
When all is said and done what is really important is being one with oneself, connected and thus having access to the largest reserve of creativity that exists for any one of us.
This article reminds.
Thank you
Shechem humbled Dina. Does that mean rape? Maybe, but it may simply reflect a culture in which a single woman who is not a virgin has been humbled. Thomas Mann, in JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, portrays Simeon and Levi quite negatively. The story in Genesis makes it clear that they behaved badly. Nobody ever asks Dina what her opinions of getting married are. When Shechem fell in love with her, did she reciprocate?
In the Book of Samuel, Amnon humbles Tamar and then hates her, unlike Shechem, who loved Dina. My late friend Bernard Einbond, of blessed memory, wrote a poem about Amnon and Tamar:
He held he hand.
He heard her heart.
He humbled her.
He hated her.