The Price of a Passion for Life

I enjoy writing observations about the things in Israel that I find to be somewhat novel or unique – the type of endearing and ‘ethnic’ things that I think might interest those back in the Old Country. The relationship between Israeli culture and Jewish culture is often a blurry one, given that we do live in a Jewish state. Sometimes the problem is that these lovely cultural practices are a bit TOO familiar. In my opinion, many aspects of Israeli culture are just extreme manifestations of obnoxious, stereotypically Jewish behaviors.

For an example of what I am talking about: the Israeli workplace and the whole meeting phenomenon. Israelis LOVE their meetings in a way that borders on unhealthy fixation. In my opinion, this meeting fixation/fetish has a distinctly Jewish origin.

In college, I was very involved in Hillel. I enjoyed Hillel very much and we did a lot of really great things. However, the one thing I could just not stand were the endless meetings. There were always meetings because no one could ever keep quiet for longer than three seconds or agree on anything and thus nothing could ever be entirely resolved, therefore warranting another meeting.

A three item agenda could easily take over two hours as everyone weighed in at great length as to whether straws were really necessary for the bagel brunch on Sunday and if so, whether they should be bendy straws or whether straight straws would do the trick. You get the point.

No other meetings were as lengthy, ineffectual, frustrating, and inefficiently run as our special Jew meetings – whether it was Hillel student board, Hillel alum board, Hillel personnel committee, the Hillel director search committee, or even our short-lived Hillel book club – whether it was young Jews, medium-aged Jews, or senile Jews the overall governing theme was my insatiable desire for a fire alarm, real fire, or medical emergency. Anything to make the torture, I mean meeting end.

I realize all of this information might come as a shock to those who know me in real life as pretty good-natured, like the whole part about wishing personal harm upon myself or even possibly others in order to make a meeting end.

My favorite meetings in college involved organizations with high concentrations of non-Jews and science majors, two populations known for being people of considerably fewer words.

So, yes, getting back to Israel. I naively imagined that the end of my Wellesley College Hillel days would mark the end of the Jewish torture meeting phenomenon. This was before I settled into my first Israeli job. If it’s even possible, these lab meetings are worse than the Hillel meetings. For one thing, since the meetings are in Hebrew, I have totally exhausted one month’s worth of concentration in comprehending approximately four sentences. According to this calculation, it takes no longer than 2 minutes for my ADD drooling glazed eye vegetable coma to kick in.

In addition, here in Israel, the mastery of the “let’s sit in silence for 30 seconds and gather our final thoughts…oh wait someone has one last thing to add now let’s repeat this routine 395 more times” ritual is beyond proportions I ever thought possible. Inevitably during these meetings I am either shivering cold or melting and either my bladder is about to explode or I feel parched dry and in addition I have inevitably lost feeling in one or two or four of my extremities due to my sitting position. This element of physical torture serves to mirror the depth of my psychological torture.

The reason for the excessive length and inefficiency of these meetings is that we Jews love to talk. Everyone has a passionate opinion on everything and in addition, the conviction that his/her thoughts on every topic, no matter how mundane or ultimately inconsequential or how completely unrelated to one’s area of expertise are a)correct and b)deserve to be heard and c) absolutely need to be heard or his/her universe will cease to exist.

However, even though these meetings are often a form of extreme torture and even though everyone is really self righteous (in the most endearing way possible) in his/her unshakeable belief that his/her opinion on every conceivable issue is so important, isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful to be part of a culture that so values an individual’s opinion? Isn’t it wonderful to be raised in a culture that says to a kid that your opinion is important and deserves to be heard?

Well, we certainly aren’t an apathetic people, that’s for sure. If this is the price I have to pay for the free exchange of ideas, I’ll happily pay it because isn’t it wonderful to live in a place where there is such an abiding passion for life that everyone wants to squeeze life to its fullest and argue and discuss and overanalyze everything to death until there is truly nothing more to say? In the mean time, I should probably be working on how to fake a nosebleed without red marker.