Cows, Jews, and Tikkun Olam - Emma

Hey all.  I'm a bit nervous about posting this, and I apologize in advance for the superfluity of parenthetical statements. (tl;dr crowd: don't even bother.) 

I am Jewish.  This in and of itself isn’t particularly surprising.  A Jew in New York? Not such a novelty.   Judaism and I have undeniably had our issues.  We grapple several times a week, woman vs. religion,  (“Call me Yisrael*,” my epic would begin) and I have disavowed it more than once in a fit of general distaste.  However, never before have I felt so keenly connected to my own Jewishness than here, in Ahmedabad India, of all places.

*Yisrael, a Hebrew word meaning 'He who wrestles with god,' was the name given to Jacob, one of the fore-fathers of the Israelites/Jews, after he literally wrestled with God.

There are a few approachable reasons for this discrepancy, the least of which is the sudden deficit of an abundance of Jews in my immediate vicinity.

First: yesterday, ITSA went to a beautiful Swaminarayan Temple which, for those of you that don’t know, is a temple devoted to the celebration of Lord Swaminarayan, a religious figure from the 18th century who has been deified for his teachings in a sect of Hinduism.  In this massive and paradoxically opulent temple (I say paradoxical because Swaminarayan was an ascetic who allegedly both survived for eight years with only a gourd, a loincloth, a rosary, and a book of scripture and managed to climb a Himalayan mount without shoes) was a herculean idol, a huge and golden Swaminarayan.  

Well.

Perhaps it was my recent and prolonged proximity to holy cows (with whom Jews have had tense relations since that one incident at Sinai), or perhaps it was instinct, but my personal primordial Jew was awakened at this sight.  I suddenly felt an abrupt (if ultimately superficial) connection with Moses on the mount.  Where were my stone tablets of divine dictation?  Unlike Moses, the idol itself wasn't what pissed me off.  It was the deification of a man and the sight of people prostrating themselves before him. (But what of Buddhism? my inner judge cries.  To this I say the following; though Buddhism does venerate Gautama the Buddha, there is never any confusion as to his status as a mortal.) 

(Forgive me if I have offended you by commenting so harshly on Swaminarayan.  I don't know enough about it to cast judgement, truly.  What is written here is merely my reaction to the idol.)

Second: (there is a long preamble to this one) there are many monikers for the Jewish people, most of which are somewhat less than flattering. The one which I consider most pervasive is neither insulting nor complimentary: ‘the Chosen People.’  Though it smacks of a certain egotism, a certain quality of selective righteousness, I do not think it means ‘the people who have been chosen to go to heaven and live under God’s favor.’  Jews don’t have a heaven or a hell and they most certainly haven’t lived under the favor of a benevolent being.  

Personally, I think it is an epithet of burden and responsibility rather than of divine aristocracy.  

There is a Jewish concept, tikkun olam, which literally means “repairing the world.”  The idea is that the world is somehow broken or incomplete, but not irreparably so. An imperfect God (or an imperfect whatever divine absolute you choose to believe ) 'selected' the people who would become the Jews and gave them the responsibility of finding the remaining shards and placing them to right. It is a profoundly beautiful concept, one which simultaneously traps and frees. 

An aspect of tikkun olam is tzedakah, a word which means 'justice' and denotes a meting out of human justice, a concept similar to charity.  The idea is that one ragged shard that God callously left behind is poverty, and it is strongly suggested that we devote ten percent of our yearly income to tzedakah.  Essentially, if a person asks for money or help Jews are obligated not to turn away from them and to give whatever we can.  This has never been particularly important to me before, but confronted with the abject poverty and persistent begging common in India, I have found the fiat more and more pertinent and present in my mind.  I cannot guarantee that it will remain so back in the US, but it has been getting exceedingly difficult to turn beggar children away.

An old joke goes like this; one prostitute asked another if she could borrow the second's bed for the night.  When the second asked why, the first replied "I have a Jewish customer tonight.  Your bed is bigger than mine, and I need room for the Jew and for his guilt!"  Jokes aside, I am beginning I think to feel this guilt, this Jewish inclination towards tikkun olam and all its implications. Whether or not I want to be rid of it is something I have yet to decide, yet to fully comprehend. 

Eh. In the meantime, l'chaim! To life.

Who Should We Save?

Hey everyone (tl;dr people, go to the end).

    Three years ago or so, my group in sleep away camp had us all play a game.  It involved an impending and total nuclear holocaust and the ability to save only five people.  Each village member was gifted a single sentence descriptor of a person - mine was 'seventeen year old heroin addict' - and was told to choose which five (out of forty) were worth saving.

     A single description isn't a lot to go on, especially when you are acting as the arbiter of life and death.  There are things you must consider! For example; do you save the children, who might be dead weight, or the adult who, although useful, might not ensure the continuation of the human race and for that matter, is the perpetuation of the human race necessarily the ultimate goal at all?

     It is terrible and fascinating work to do, and in the previous workshop, we had the kids attempt to do the same.

Something funny was said

     Once they were divided into three groups, they were informed that the city was flooded, but there was a boat that could hold ten people, though fifteen were available to save: a smoker, a Muslim mother, a 150 Kg man, a rich bachelor, a beggar woman, a Sikh soldier, a female celebrity, a ten year old maid, an alcoholic, a Hindu man, a blind man, a man with AIDS, an engineer, an artist, and a mason.

     At first, the group I was in made snap judgements without a second thought. As an onlooker, I found it truly difficult not to react to some of their rationalizations with excessively acrobatic eyebrow gestures ("We shouldn't save the Hindu man!" they all agreed,  "he has nothing special to offer.")  When the decisions got too superficial for me to bear, I began asking questions.  Needless to say, my group got aggravated very quickly - first with me ("You're making things so confusing!"), then with each other ("You're only saving the Sikh soldier because your father is Sikh!"). 

    Then, they started to fight for the admission of certain individuals against others, giving critical reasons and backing them up.  It was sort of exhilarating, though when I laughed to myself the kids gave me looks of utmost incredulity.  Their views on certain people are unshakeable and solid, but as they fought I saw them pausing, sitting back, and blinking a bit at what they found themselves saying.

 Some of the kids explaining why their choices made it onto the boats (and lived)

    When it came to a group discussion though, the judgements came back a little and got more provocative.  Juliana, another intern, brought up the idea that instead of claiming that we are noble judges, suited ideally for choosing who might live and who might die, we ought to choose randomly.  No one person is ultimately more deserving of life than another. This went over their heads entirely.

     It is, of course, a long process.  You can't expect people who have been taught under an indoctrinatory education system their whole lives to rip free of inertia and bloom immediately into critical thinkers after only a few exercises.   Unrealistic, to be sure, but still, they are blooming at a remarkable speed. They have been so incredibly inhibited, mummified by the system, and it's such a pleasure to see them rip the system to shreds with a vicious pleasure in the workshops. I'm a bit giddy with excitement watching it happen, actually.

(tl;dr - we played a provocative game about choosing who gets to live in the workshop and the kids were judgmental but quickly more critical and then it was exciting)

~Emma, Intern 2011

Bard High School Early College

"We must keep the 150 kg, he is most certainly a wrestler!"

Hello bloggers!
        
So far, I have just posted blogs about the sightseeing that the ITSA interns have done in
Ahmedabad, but, as Emma already said, our reason for being here is not merely to explore the country, but to explore and gain a deeper understanding of the Indian education system. Before actually arriving here and participating in the workshops, Riana Shah & Jwalin Patel (the 19 year old co-founders and co-director of ITSA) had described the Indian educational system as extremely strict and rigid. The reason for this, she explained (I am going to give some brief history now, so stay with me), was that the Indian education system was set up under British Rule during the industrial revolution, and as a result was aimed at creating technicians, not independent thinkers. Consequently, the Indian education system involves a lot of rote memorization and teaching directly from textbooks, as opposed to discussion based, seminar style classes. However, not until I actually got a chance to participate in the workshops and talk with the students did this become evident. 

Above is Rajvi (right) and Paranshi (left), laughing while playing The Boat Game. They were, no doubt, laughing about the fact that another participant, Nishant, had just said, "we must keep the 150 kg man. He's most certainly a wrestler."

On the first day, every student was asked to describe themselves in one word (the workshop's theme was identity), and most of the kids described themselves as "obedient" or "tactful", or, most popularly, "disciplined", as opposed to what you might hear at Bard (to name a few: creative, independent, or a learner for the sake of learning). Afterwards, when we moved on to open-class discussion, most of the interns (myself included) felt that the students responded in a way that they thought we would approve of, instead of responding openly and self-critically. Riana & Jwalin explained this by saying that these kids had been hand-selected by their teachers to participate in the ITSA workshops, which means they already knew how to effectively promote themselves and give their teachers exactly what was expected of them. 


In yesterday's workshop, which was the fourth, we did a very provocative exercise called "The boat game." In the boat game, you have 15 people who are described in only a couple of words, like a sikh man in the army, a beggar woman, a muslim mother, a 10 year old maid, etc. The world is undergoing some sort of epidemic, like a flood, and only 10 out of the 15 can fit on the boat, based solely on their few word descriptions. What this exercise aimed at doing was to explicate the point that you cannot define, or stereotype, a person based on only thing. The man who was described as 150kg, might be a genius, for example, or the smoker--an engineer. However, interestingly we found that the students had many pre-concieved notions, no doubt propagated by their society, their parents, and their educational system. For example, all of the groups eliminated the beggar woman without much hesitation pretty early on, and seemed to have no concept that certain social structures might change once only 10 people were left on Earth. 


What this exercise, and the workshops as a whole, made clear to me is just how stifled these kids are when it comes to independent thought, and when it comes to doubting the structure of the world around them. In light of this, ITSA is like a breath of fresh air. In a set of interviews which we conducted yesterday (led by intern Mariah Widman), one of the participants, Paranshi, said, "every week I can't wait for Friday's and Sunday's to come, so I can go to the ITSA workshops! It's what I look forward to during the school week." And considering that sunday is the only day these kids have off, that's saying a lot.

~ Ana, Intern 2011

Bard High School Early College

Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms | Video on TED.com - Ana

Here is a great video relating to the type of educational system that India has. A bit long, but completely worth it! Enjoy.

Or here: Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms | Video on TED.com