I Wailed At The Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem

In about 1996 I went to Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

I queued for a ticket, and in front of me there was a young couple. Neither was Jewish but from the conversation I made out that the young woman’s father or maybe her grandfather was one of the righteous gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.

Apparently he was commemorated in the museum and the woman in the ticket booth explained to the young woman where she should go to find the records.

While I was waiting, I saw a postcard on a shelf in the booth. It was a photograph of an installation in the grounds of the museum. It was few railway boxcars on a piece of track built into a hillside and leading up into the sky.

When it was my turn to buy a ticket, I asked about the railway cars and the track.

The woman in the booth explained that the railway cars had been ‘rescued’ and brought to the museum and that yes, those very cars had been used to transport Jews to the death camps during the war.

I said that the image was terrible, and the woman said with a sympathetic tone said ‘Yes, this is Yad Vashem.’

I felt a wave of sympathy; it was so sad.

I walked on towards the buildings and started to walk along a path between rows of trees planted to commemorate the righteous gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.

I suddenly had an image in my mind of a thin woman with a headscarf standing near an old stove and holding a frying pan and I saw in my mind’s eye German soldiers marching with shiny helmets.

The woman wasn’t someone I recognised specifically, but how shall I say it – In principle, it could have been my great grandmother.

I don’t why that image came into my mind.

I had been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam years before and I had touched the frying pan on the stove in their hiding place – or perhaps it on the floor below.

I remember that I imagined that Anne had touched it, although perhaps it was just a frying pan brought in to put on the stove for visitors to the museum to see.

And on TV programmes like The World At War, I had seen German soldiers marching,

But the woman holding the frying pan that I saw in my mind’s eye as I stood in the sun at Yad Vashem – I didn’t know who she was – only that I was connected to her.

I mention about the Anne Frank House and the TV programmes I saw because my rational mind is trying to explain what happened.

What happened next was that I reeled and almost fell against a large rock in the garden and I wailed.

I felt my insides opening up and I wailed. I didn’t cry – I opened like a dam. I said, almost shouted, complained – into the air – ‘They killed them all: They murdered them all.’

Even as I was wailing, I thought it must be all too common for people to break down in Yad Vashem. I realised that I didn’t care whether I was making a scene, or causing some kind of embarrassment in pubic. I just didn’t care. I was not crying. There was nothing in me that was intentionally pushing or letting out the wailing – it just came out of me.

I was truly wailing.

It was a revelation to me. I felt that I didn’t know myself. Where had that wail come from?

It made no sense – I wasn’t even born then when it all happened.

Audiences, Culture, and Rubbish In Cinemas

Rubbish in cinemas bugs me. There, I said it.

So here’s what happened.

Tamara and I like to watch a film to the end of the credits, so we are often the last to leave.

Seeing the room after the film has ended is like seeing a room after the party has ended – rubbish (‘trash’ in American English) and detritus everywhere.

Call me a fuddy-duddy (actually don’t), but I can’t believe the mess that a gathering of human beings can leave after being in one place for two hours.

Popcorn, discarded cans, boxes, wrappers – the popcorn sometimes looks like someone decided they didn’t want popcorn after all, and scattered the contents of the box on the carpet.

One night we went to see Coco Before Chanel – a French film with subtitles, with Audrey Tautou in the lead role.

As we were leaving, I noticed that the floor was clean.

A cleaner came in with her black plastic bag to pick up the rubbish, and as we passed her I commented that the room was unusually clean.

Oh yes, she said this one and Screen 3, which was also showing a French film. I asked whether this was always so, and she said yes, audiences at foreign language films always left very little rubbish.

So now we know.

Recommendations And Looking For The Group

We all know that Netflix and Amazon use ratings to make recommendations.

Recommendations tap into the force that the public relations counsel Edward Bernays wrote about in the 1920s in his book Propaganda, through to what Chris Anderson wrote about in his 2006 book, The Long Tail.

That is, that we look to others whom we respect to guide us to what we want. Therefore what we want is often a product of the groups with which we want to identify.

Opinion leaders, peer recommendation, group identification, tribes, niche markets, the wisdom of crowds – recommendations and ratings are the life blood of all of them.

Google depends on it, Amazon thrives on it.

There is more going on than simple numbers when I read that 900 people on Amazon have all rated a particular camera highly.

I am swayed by the numbers because I attribute characteristics to a significant majority of those people.

I assume that a significant proportion are familiar with cameras and are level-headed and intelligent. In fact they may all be complete idiots who only take occasional happy-snaps.

I don’t read all 900 reviews, nor even a significant sample. Instead, I distill those reviewers into a mirror image of the reviewer I want to be convinced by.

Chris Anderson makes an interesting point in The Long Tail when he points out a problem that eBay has.

eBay wants to recommend products to us, but the users define their own products when they write their ads. So eBay simply does not know what it is selling. Therefore it cannot recommend the products for which it acts as middleman.

It’s a plausible explanation for why eBay has started to specify criteria and characteristics that sellers must use for certain branded products – such as cameras.

Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays set himself up as a propaganda consultant – or public relations counsel as he described himself in Propaganda, the book he wrote in 1928.

He was Freud’s nephew and because he was well connected he had access to the industrialists of the 1920s – with whom he found common ground.

Having seen the slaughter of the First World War he believed that the majority of human beings had to be controlled and that without something to divert them they would, if given any excuse, tear each other limb from limb.

He believed that men follow leaders and that their sense of identity and identification with the leaders and the groups was generally more important than the underlying truth or falsity of what they believed as individuals.

Sometimes, without the group mind the individual was lost.

Bernays believed that as a consequence, men would often rather sacrifice the truth than lose the fellowship of the group.

Therein lies the power of ratings and recommendations. The individual is not looking for the best book, film, or whatever. He or she is looking for the group.

Whoa! But not me. (say we all).

Being A Fool When Everyone Is Smart

I was thinking about the film A Serious Man, made by the Coen brothers. The film is unusual because it begins with a short film shot in sepia about a poor Jewish couple in nineteenth century Russia who are visited by a dybbuk (a malicious spirit) that has inhabited the body of a recently deceased rabbi.

The wife is fearful and practical. The husband is ambivalent and hesitant. There is not much to a story but the nub of the story is that the wife is certain that she and her husband will be visited by more bad luck.

Then we segue into the main film A Serious Man about a man who watches his life fall apart around him. Set in the present day, the main protagonist is a middle-aged man, a lecturer at a college somewhere on the East Coast of the U.S. – an intelligent man with a responsible job.

His wife is having an affair right under his nose. Now she tells him she is leaving with her lover.

His daughter ignores and derides him. His son, who is soon to be bar-mitzvah’d, seems to be in a world of his own. His boss at work is enigmatic and disconcerting. His wife’s new boyfriend patronises him.

In the middle of all of this one of his students tries to bribe him to change his grade on a paper. The hero refuses to take the bribe. The student threatens him. The hero talks to the father of the student and the father also threatens him.

Still our hero refuses. He will not take a bribe.

And then he looks around and everything seems to tell him that the smart money is on the people who have no conscience. They prosper.

The student comes to see him again. Sitting in his office, and after saying no, no, no, repeatedly, he gives in and says yes and takes the bribe.

He wants to be seen. He wants to be heard. Taking the bribe is payback time for the pain of being left behind and ignored.

Taking the bribe makes him feel like he joined the human race.

And immediately after the student departs, the phone rings and it is his doctor saying he should come in right away to discuss the results of his latest tests.

Right there he sees the punishment for his sin of accepting the bribe. His life has immediately changed for the worse and he will probably die.

When Bad Things Happen To Good People

He is basically a good man. He has a moral conscience. He tries to do right. He falters and does something he knows he should not.

And this is his reward! That he should be struck down with a serious illness and probably die!

How can this be fair when there are people who do much worse things and don’t suffer any consequences?

They even prosper!

What Is The Answer

Let me ask you something. When you read this sub-heading ‘What Is The Answer’, did you wonder what the answer was? I bet you did. I would. We are all going around in smaller or bigger circles. We think we have it sorted out. We know what is right and wrong, but still…

The protagonist in A Serious Man is Jewish and so are the film’s directors – so it seems fitting to examine the question from the point of view of the touchstone of their beliefs.

There is a thread in the Jewish tradition that teaches that the inclination to do evil is a strange beast. For a man who does what he wants without a thought as to whether it is right or wrong, the inclination to do evil has no work to do and so it becomes lazy, and weak.

But with a man who is striving to do good, the inclination to do evil is really stretched. It is in tip-top condition, so it waits for its moment, and then it slips in and does its work.

And the nearer that a man gets to being a good man, the finer the balance and the greater the consequences for doing a bad thing.

That same thing if done by a bad man will not bring about serious consequences or perhaps even any consequences at all.

Whether this is all true of course, is another question, but we can at least accept that there is logic in the system of thought that holds it together. It is not crazy and illogical, at least.

Of course, a person may accept all this and conclude he can be really bad. Then the chances are that he will get away with just about anything without serious consequences. At least he will do not worse than someone trying to do good.

Way to go!

And that is really the test, isn’t it? – whether one can be a fool when everyone around you is being smart.