Monthly Archives: May 26, 2014

“When you walk through the city in the morning, what do you think about?”  Alessandro asked his father.

“Many things.”

“Do you think of the city itself?”

“No. I used to, but I’ve had a profession for a number of years, and it has mastered me.  A profession is like a great snake that wraps itself around you.  Once you are enwrapped, you are in a slow fight for the rest of your life, and the lightness of youth leaves you.  You don’t have time, for example, to think about the city even as you are walking through it.”  (Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War, 119)
Helprin’s lament is not only for the time – those countless hours of precious time! – that we invest in our careers.  He is concerned, also, about the way our professions, and the anxieties and stress that accompany them, come to dominate our thoughts.  For when our thoughts are preoccupied by to-do lists that are never completed, we no longer notice the sights and sounds that surround us.

Nachmanides writes that “a person exists where his thoughts are.” (Ramban, Iggeret HaKodesh, ch. 5).  This truism, though oft repeated, is far from obvious.  Suppose a person lives in London, but thinks about New York.  If you would interrupt his reverie about the city that never sleeps, and ask him – “where have you been for the last few minutes?” – he would tell you, almost certainly, that he has been in London, and was ‘only thinking’ of New York. His assumption is that, in reality, he is actuallyin London, and that his thoughts of New York were not as real.

But this attitude, according to Rabbi Itamar Schwartz, assigns too much importance to […]

Why did the Roman Empire fall?  Edward Gibbon, author of the classic 18th century Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, offers a fascinating theory. Although cultured Romans in the era of Hadrian and the Antonines greatly valued learning, literature and science, “this age of indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius… The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind…. This diminutive stature of mankind… was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed people by a race of pygmies; when the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed.” (Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter III)

According to Gibbon, Roman thinkers were unable to respond to the profound philosophical and theological crises of their times.  A new era brought with it new challenges; but the leadership and intelligentsia was not equal to the task.  They applied old answers to new questions, unable to break free from the shadow of the ancient Greek philosophers and to think critically for themselves.  Their intellectual smallness led to an internal crumbling of the Roman ideal, weakening the spirit of the people and making Rome an easy target for the barbarians to the north.

Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Piacetzner Rebbe, described public opinion and “settled truths” as a “torrent river surging forth, sweeping with it all that lies in its path, penetrating into deep recesses and washing away all buried things.”  Imperceptibly, common beliefs shape […]