Perceiving complexity (part 16)
Part of the series Perceiving complexity
⟵ Perceiving complexity (part 15)
By the end of the previous part, I mentioned how Que du bonheur of Riff Cohen and Rokedet of Ania Bukstein felt like a good musical outlet towards the Jewish mental fluidity for my parents’ problems I grew up with. But then I sense more clearly that there is still something to say, the Jewish situation in me has some nuances that now come better to light, they are something like in Hikiti Lo (translation) of Sarit Hadad. The same actor plays the roles of the abusive lover, the uncouth and selfish female acquaintance, the man inadvertently triggering her defensive reactions, the envious backing vocalist, the deus ex machina man fitting so well her expectations.
This is the kind of perception you have when you feel you are going through the same Jewish situations again and again, you feel like you can take a step back and just let them unfold in your mind, you are too tired to get so involved emotionally in them. You don’t feel it as a sacrilege, somehow the basics of the Jewish identity feel safe. The same actor playing all those roles is about the deep coherence you feel in all those typical unfoldments. It may not be a very active perception, you just live with it while you chase a Messianic plateau of good (like the lyrics of the song about a woman whose whole world is a man and she can’t really think of anything else for her life). In the first place, you would not know very well what to do with such perception, it is just that you are more aware about it.
The Jewish worldview appears to have typical feminine basics, which managed to come to the fore probably through the chain of events I described earlier: an arms race between genders to the point the women became very sophisticated in the use of the raw reality perspective, while the despotic men remained as inexperienced as ever about that perspective. This was turning them into airhead “masculine blondes”, the proto-Jewish men wanted to be more independent, only to find they need to face inside them this raw reality masculinity developed by the women with their increasing raw reality expertise. It is a tremendous masculinity, but it lacks mental tools for the men actually be able to work with it themselves and the Jewish men just find themselves living with it. It is something originally feminine, but then it slides into taking a life of its own among heterosexual men.
The entire structure around it is from a feminine perspective, which includes apprehensions about classical masculine mental plateaus of control of the situation. An opportunity for organization appeared when the situation was made too unbearable by the Egyptians and it never entered in a plateau further on. The Jews were unique in those times, they ended up with kings, but any ruler was constantly compared to a masculine ideal most of the times he was failing to fulfill (and they were duly chastised by the Jews with some cultural authority). This while the other populations around were orientating their minds around the psychological stability offered by their self-aggrandizing rulers without thinking anything beyond that.
When those kings were failing even to uphold the independence of the Jews, this was interpreted by the feminine structure of the Jewish mindset as a need for a man to save the situation, there must be such a man, he should appear. What else could have thought the women in such situations for countless generations before? This is all they had available in their classical feminine crisis management repertoire. This Jewish view of the masculinity that can save is so close to the heart, yet so idealistic and so lacking interest in practical masculine psychological mechanisms. This saving man is actually supposed as a static mental plateau in itself, but it is so disconnected from the mental plateaus the real men tend to create that it does not trigger the same rejection.
And this is not something created by the Jewish women in the background, most of these developments were originated by men themselves thinking with their minds immersed in the psychological structure of that tremendous masculinity of feminine origin. If you just go along with it, in difficult circumstances structurally you find yourself chasing a saving masculine figure without much thought about the practicalities around it, it is the job of that man to figure it out, it is a psychological area you are not stepping in.
This is different from the initial approach to change the inner paradigm of the man into that of a tremendous raw reality masculinity. From the feminine point of view that was about “life is so whatever, it does not correspond to the potential I feel with my feminine raw reality perspective”. The subsequent Messianic approach is about disastrous circumstances that kick in the only crisis management solution women had for hundreds of thousands of years, it must be a man there to save the situation.
There appeared men who did superhuman feats, the Superman side of the Jewish masculinity kicked in. They managed to free themselves from the Hellenistic powers, but it did not take long to face an even more formidable foe: a puny Jewish population in a puny piece of land confronting the huge Roman Empire and its overwhelming war machine. They did incredible feats, but it was too much. And the degeneration into a total war had disastrous consequences, most of the Jews massacred and the survivors displaced out of the country.
The subsequent consensus among the religious authorities was that this is not the way to act, we must wait for a Messiah who can really embody that tremendous masculinity, for a real Messiah nothing is out of reach. And so they lived for centuries. The propensity for angry prophets castigating the behavior of the people and of the rulers decreased a lot. That was about comparing the men’s real life behavior to that raw reality tremendous masculinity. This supposes the possibility of that masculinity to unfold. The status of powerless minorities scattered in the world at the mercy of the local rulers and local mobs made obvious that it was not an environment to imagine you can unfold such masculinity.
The imagery that comes to my mind as a personal distillation of this situation is the aforementioned Hikiti Lo of Sarit Hadad. A woman increasingly sensing in a daze how she is just chasing a masculine mental plateau as an organizational stability in her life, with a feeling that she went so many times through this situation, there is not much to add to it. She can’t help seeing the situation from a more detached perspective and the mind just notices how it has to face that plateau of ideal masculine stability in every practical situation in her life.
It feels like an increasingly coherent possibility to see the world from a complex perspective like in Habeit Ya Leil of the Lebanese singer Nawal El Zoghbi. Originally, this perspective was developed around the existing masculine organization, not really as a direct gaze into the unknown. In Habeit Ya Leil, the woman relies on the masculine organization. In the Jewish case, that possibility disappeared long time ago when they lost the land, lived in exile and the only hope was in the appearance of a man who can save the situation. There was no Jewish organization as an expression of personal power to dispose of your life as you see fit. Living like that century after century, if you start wondering what is going on with you and you take a step back to look at what is going on, you realize that you have an increasing familiarity with just living within that fluid thinking. You have direct practical experience in relating it to real life.
The same actor playing all those characters is like the simple static psychological plateau the woman is orienting her mind around for meaning in life. In classical human thinking, it is in the idea that the man provides simple static coherence, while the woman notices all kinds of fluid diachronic perceptions around it, like in Habeit Ya Leil. In the Jewish practical situation of exile, it was about orientating the mind around such a plateau as a hope for a delivering Messiah while facing real life without such a plateau.
In time, it feels like the diachronic fluid perceptions increasingly have a life of their own, they increasingly have substance, given how willy-nilly you had to face real life directly through them. The same actor playing all those characters feels like the increasing organization of the mind able to think with a plurality of thought threads in contact with real life, instead of the focus on the actor as just a static plateau of psychological stability. The simple plateau of “truth”, of “reality” that the mind is orientating around increasingly turns into a plurality of threads that feel so in touch with the depth of raw real life and such a source of authenticity. You practically can see a situation from a variety of perspectives and it feels normal and deeply natural, the same as that abyssal monotheistic deep authenticity in the initial feminine development of masculinity.
The initial point of that chain of Middle Eastern events (the specific Middle Eastern feminine technique of enframing the masculinity into an ideal position) was based on the assumption that the man has coherence, organization, he organizes things in a way a woman is clueless of and she is not even interested to know, she does not step into that psychological area. If you think you are so great, then I am going to think too that you are great, because I am confident that my version of your greatness has lots of value compared to what I see you do. This liberates in a sui generis manner the woman to think much more unhindered from the point of view of the raw reality perspective, which turns into increased expertise, while the masculinity put on a pedestal turns the man into a masculine blonde.
There are already lots of centuries of Jewish history of masculine mental blockage in using properly the classical mental tools after the disaster with a straightforward use of Superman masculinity in fighting the Romans. The overall feminine raw reality paradigm of masculinity has no real interest in how a masculine mind works if it is not about that tremendous raw reality version. In such situations of lack of further ideas, it is just focused on a masculinity that can save, the man knows what to do, he will appear. And so the centuries are passing by, the same situations keep repeating again and again in relations with the non-Jews who show their barbaric side when noticing the Jewish lack of psychological defensiveness.
And you can’t help noticing that you become increasingly experienced in the fluidity of life beyond that ideal masculine plateau and this experience becomes more relevant than that plateau. In terms of Sarit Hadad’s video, you have an organizational framework based on the ideal masculine plateau, but in practice it grew relevant an observational framework that developed in mind mind to make sense of the fluidity of life.
The vibe in the aforementioned HaYareach VeAni of the band Boom Pam is about the same thing, from a Jewish masculine perspective. It is about this sensation of emptiness of meaning in the official classical masculine perspective and increased stand-alone masculine coherent thinking with the diachronic fluidity. You are comfortable as a heterosexual man with it, you can work with it and the classical masculinity appears like those old men (with some understanding for their situation, like in the vibe of the video).
If you keep the official perspective, if you continue to see yourself as a classical man, then you are enframed in the classical feminine terms of that tremendous masculinity, of that idealized Messiah etc. If you acknowledge the stand-alone perceptions of the raw reality, then you can think by yourself as a man what to do with the situation, what reorganizations would be necessary etc. This choice is based on the fact that raw reality paradigm in itself is obviously valuable and you want to continue working with it.
This perspective is actually very present among the religious Jews, only that it is in the same psychological daze as in Sarit Hadad’s song. See this interpretation of A Sheinem Cholem (translations in the comments section) by an unnamed religious boy. A nice dream I see, the Third Temple built, the priests, Moses, Aharon all there, and further I see the shining face of Messiah. I know him already, he reveals the secrets of the Torah and from sleep I suddenly woke. Don’t worry, this will soon no longer be a dream, any minute from now we will receive Messiah.
This is about the immersion in the valuable raw reality perspective and the possibility to express the masculine organization slides into a raw reality feminine view about a man who knows how to do things. As a man, it is such an immediate perception of such a masculinity, it feels so real, so relevant, but with no connections whatsoever with the classical masculine organization. You just expect it to appear any time soon.
And the choice of this song is to make clear that my point of view is not some sort of rejection of this approach to life. In itself, it is natural to let your mind immerse in that raw reality fluidity and let unfold how things feel so immediate and palpable. The problem is when you look for ways to apply this in real life, when you try to fulfill this with classical masculine organization. This is where you may sense how much of that classical masculine organization does not make sense for this fluid psychological environment. And that in fact you have lots of experience accumulated in working with this psychological fluidity.
You may also be in a situation like that of Franz Kafka, sensing the value of the raw reality perspective, sensing how lots of things do not make sense from the point of view of the classical masculine thinking, but still orientating your mind around the “normality” of the classical kind of thinking. The mind is not stepping into the possibility of stand-alone perceptions of the raw reality.
The expressivity of the song about the dream of restoring the ideal mental plateau has some comfortability as a man with the abyssal fluidity of the raw reality perspective, which became increasingly relevant after the disaster in the conflict with the Romans. You can actually work with this perspective, you can think as a man from the point of view of its fluidity, you are not just rushing in to fulfill that plateau in real life. This is the approach from Talmud as a change in the angle to get involved in real life.
I find this show at a religious gathering as a good expression of what I see valuable in this approach. Those who perform it are known in the YouTube videos as “the twins from France”, I don’t know their names. With a broad and supportive music, the first part starts with them changing their body positions alternatively upside down to invite your mind taking in consideration the possibility to see things from unexpected angles. Then one of them juggles the balls, the other one tries to juggle too, but he is posing himself totally unprepared. The viewers contemplated first the skill and then the lack of preparation. If you want such skill, you need experience, mental preparation.
The showmanship of skill resumes, increasingly fascinating in what it can achieve. He can slow it down, he can turn it very speedy, in other words he is comfortable with what he is doing, his mind is not lost in it. The other guy tries too, again, totally inexperienced. This brings to the front stage of your mind that you have in yourself on the one hand such a skilled masculine approach to the raw reality, on the other hand such an inexperienced approach that is clueless how to conceptualize such skills in a fluid psychological environment.
The skilled one is developed along generations by facing real life situations. Whether you are a man or a woman, you have a deep fluid side of your mind as a depository of all that experience. As a man, you can have much more depth also as a result of the psychological bridges you and your male ancestors could make with women to understand how to work with the raw reality perspective. But again, as a man, even if you have such experience, there is a side of you that is very unprepared for this, it does not know how to make sense of this kind of thinking. This is the side of the masculinity with the central organizational role in your mind, it does not find ways to understand structurally such a way of thinking. All this unfoldment of the two guys makes you more aware of this.
Let’s collaborate then. A bit slow at the beginning, okay, now you get the hang of it. Then the novice tries to climb on the shoulders of the experienced one. He fails first time, but then he can do it. He is unstable for a while, but learns how to find his stability in such a fluid situation. Then they collaborate face to face on equal terms, then backside. They bring the unicycle on the scene, they give it unexpected uses, one of them cycles with it on the small scene, showing how can you stay in control of the situation in such an unstable environment while being able to do such fascinating moves.
Notice how uplifting is the music all this time, it is not circus music in the idea that you see something extraordinary beyond your usual life. It is in the idea to open your personality to this unexpected psychology. It is like the character Gilgamesh, after thousands of years of Jewish tribulations and with the practical real life experience accumulated, is able to sense the unexpected psychology of Enkidu.
In part two, they play with fire, it can be so rewarding seeing yourself handling such volatile situations, but be careful, you may catch fire yourself without realizing. And take in consideration that, if you start the fire, it may not be so easy to stop it, prepare yourself for this. And, if you use the unicycle, be careful to not hurt other people, it can have serious consequences. Then they put the bench in the middle, to put you in the mind of crossing into the other kind of thinking, one of them shows in slow motion how you can jump over. The music stops for the suspenseful moment, he gathers impetus, he runs to jump, he flusters. He tries again and he succeeds.
This is a good distillation of the direction of the Jewish ethos after the disaster with the Romans. The direction is not a conscious one in the manner I described it, the overall framework continues to be the mental plateau of masculinity initially imagined by the women and then taking a life of its own among the men, that one with tremendous masculinity, idealized Messiah etc. But in practice they notice how they can work directly as men with the fluidity of the raw reality perspective and they get professional about it. Only that they keep the feminine overall framework and they see the situation in a daze, like in Hikiti Lo of Sarit Hadad. They do not present it in the way I find its value here.
This entertainment show with an educational tinge is something marginal in the lives of these religious Jews. In terms of what it shows, it is just the tip of the iceberg. The part that is not seen is the tremendous mental abyss like in Hineni by Yossele Rosenblatt plus the terrible life experiences their ancestors went through and their own personal experience in living with anti-Semitism. Regarding the mental abyss, you should not take the psychological passage created by the twins as creating a new mental plateau of classical masculine control of the situation, this is not Christian “resurrection” of Jesus (you would only fool yourself in this manner, the Christianity is a lazy and coward way out of the conundrum with the Romans, it misses the subsequent Jewish developments).
You keep facing the abyss and the aspects you learn the hard way from the Jewish lack of psychological defenses in relations to other people. Willy-nilly, you discover new approaches to that Superman side of the Jewish masculinity. The option to assume you are a Superman and just plunge into whatever fight was doomed by the disaster with the Romans. You can’t do anything but endure the otherwise unimaginable mental pressure that keeps relentlessly for generations and you discover another take on the tremendous masculinity. The difficulties open your mind about the direct coherence of the raw reality perspective, as it was developed by women in powerless contexts, and you discover as a man that you can have the mental strength to work coherently in such a fluid environment.
