1. Kitap Turnuvası - 2. Tur 1. Maç

Dünkü yazıda ilk turundan bahsettiğim kitap turnuvasının, bugün ikinci turuna başladım. Her maça ayrı bir yazı ayıracağım çünkü hepsini bir yazıya koyunca yazı bitecek diye uyku uyumuyorum. Ve 2. turun kitap okumaları 8-9 saat sürecek zaten.

Bu ilk maçta Grit ve The Invention of the land of Israel/İsrail Ülkesinin İcadı yarışıyor. İkisini de sevdim. İlki başarının temel faktörünün passion/tutku ve perseverance/sebat olduğunu, bu ikisinin toplamına da grit/sıkıca tutmak-dayanıklılık-metanet denebileceğini söylüyor. West Point'le ilgili bir örnekle başlıyor, diğer üniversitelerden devam ediyor ve insanların bir yerde kalıcı olup olmayacaklarını belirleyen en önemli faktörün bu olduğunu anlatıyor. İçinde ne kadar dayanıklısın? testi de vardı da, şöyle bir bakıp geçtim.

İkinci kitap 1967 savaşına katılmış bir İsraillinin gözünden Filistin'e inatla İsrail demeye ilişkin bir kitap. Internet üzerinde İsrail/Filistin kavgası yaparken lazım olabilecek örnek ve kaynaklar var. Kral Davud hanedanı için Kudüs'ün etrafına İsrail demek düşünülemezdi gibi şeyler söylüyor. Kitap güzel yazılmış, araştırılmış, Yahudi ulus kimliğinin oluşması konusunda hayli ayrıntılı bilgiler içeriyor.

Bir karar vermek gerekiyorsa, ilk kitabın daha uygun olduğunu görüyorum. İkinci kitabı da sakin sakin okuyup, birkaç gün sonra unutsam da zevkle İbrani tarihini öğrenmiş olmayı isterdim ama tercih yapmak gerekiyorsa ilki. İçinden bir iki hikaye öğrenirsem çocuklara anlatırım.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Students who graduated on schedule were grittier, and grit was a more powerful predictor of graduation than how much students cared about school, how conscientious they were about their studies, and even how safe they felt at school.

“No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become,” Nietzsche said. “That is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool.” In other words, we want to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity

The prolific writer and director Woody Allen, when asked about his advice for young artists, once said:

My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel he was well on his way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the play or book.

While taking the Grit Scale, you might have noticed that none of the passion questions asked how intensely you’re committed to your goals. This may seem odd, because the word passion is often used to describe intense emotions. For a lot of people, passion is synonymous with infatuation or obsession. But in interviews about what it takes to succeed, high achievers often talk about commitment of a different kind. Rather than intensity, what comes up again and again in their remarks is the idea of consistency over time.

The Invention of the Land of Israel - From Holy Land to Homeland

(1) I have never questioned, nor do I question today, the right of modern-day Judeo-Israelis to live in a democratic, open, and inclusive state of Israel that belongs to all its citizens; and (2) I have never denied, nor do I today deny, the existence of the strong, age-old religious ties between believers in the Jewish faith and Zion, its holy city. Nor are these two preliminary points of clarification causally or morally linked to each other in any binding manner.

Shelves in bookstores and university libraries in Israel hold countless volumes on subjects such as “the prehistoric Land of Israel,” “the Land of Israel under Crusader rule,” and “the Land of Israel under Arab occupation.” In the Hebrew-language edition of foreign books, the word “Palestine” is systematically replaced with the words Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Even when the writings of important Zionist figures such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ber Borochov, and many others—who, like most of their supporters, used the standard term “Palestine” (or Palestina, the Latin form used in many European languages at the time)—are translated into Hebrew, this appellation is always converted into the “Land of Israel.” Such politics of language sometimes results in amusing absurdities, as, for example, when naïve Hebrew readers do not understand why, during the early-twentieth-century debate within the Zionist movement over the establishment of a Jewish state in Uganda instead of Palestine, the opponents of the plan were referred to as “Palestinocentric.”

None of the authors of the books of the Bible would have ever dreamed of calling the territory around God’s city the “Land of Israel.” For this reason, 2 Chronicles recounts that “He broke down the altars and beat the Asherim and the images into powder and cut down all the incense altars throughout all the land of Israel. Then he returned to Jerusalem” (34:7). The land of Israel, known to have been home to many more sinners than was the land of Judea, appears in eleven additional verses, most with rather unflattering connotations.

We do not know why Halevi, who was known by his Arabic name Abu al-Hassan al-Lawi, chose an imaginary dialogue between a religious Jew and a Khazar king as the framework around which to structure his book. Reports of the existence of a kingdom near the Caspian Sea that adopted Judaism were widespread throughout the Jewish world, and even reached the Iberian Peninsula, where Halevi lived. All important Jewish scholars were familiar with the tenth-century CE correspondence between Hasdai ben Yitzhak ibn Shaprut, an influential Jewish dignitary from Córdoba in service of the Arab caliph, and the king of the Khazars. And, if we are to believe the testimony of the “Rabad” (Abraham ben David), Khazar students of the sages were also present in Toledo, Halevi’s hometown.60 However, we must also remember that Halevi wrote his text in the 1140s, after the Jewish kingdom in the East had already moved onto the sidelines of history.