Reflections While Blogging Above
High above whatever lies beneath the clouds below me, I’m on my way to the West Coast. Over the next two weeks I’ll attend a conference (Psychologists for Social Responsibility) and visit friends and relatives, first in Portland, Oregon, and then on Denman Island, off the coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. It’s good to be breaking routine. It’s especially good that there’s no one in the middle seat next to me, so I’m not completely hemmed in.
It’s almost nine months since I started this blog, primarily to keep track of what was then my planned winter visit to Israel and Palestine, in the context of my conflicted views about events in that part of the world. My regular website, which I still maintain, has more than a dozen columns and essays on Israel and Palestine, plus dozens of political and academic essays on other subjects more or less related to my interests in critical psychology, law and justice, and anarchist politics. In comparison to the the more structured website, I hoped the blog’s easier, more spontaneous approach would facilitate my ability to insert my own analyses and views into a broader public discussion, make contact with others whose interests overlap mine, and focus my attention on Israel and Palestine — the political issue that has come to dominate my attention over the past three years almost as much as it did when I became a Zionist in the 1960s — as well as on other issues that still interest me.
For the most part the blog accomplishes what I hoped it would. It’s a challenge at times to find the right balance between analysis and speculation, first reaction and considered conclusion. Sometimes important things happen that just don’t grab my attention. Frequently I avoid simply rehashing views I expressed elsewhere at greater length. But, all in all, I anticipate continuing this project.
One downside to all this blogging is that too often the process dilutes my enthusiasm for sitting and writing the longer, more structured pieces I used to do more frequently. The blog becomes one more way to stall, along with my local newspaper column, my photography hobby, my Arabic class, and even this flight westward.
I’ve been telling my family, my friends, and myself for a couple of years now that I’m about to start writing a book about my own Zionist history and my subsequent political confusion and reassessment. I would expand on many of the themes I touch on in this blog, assess my participation in Young Judaea and the group that started Kibbutz Ketura, reflect on what moved me in that direction and what moved me away and what moves me today. I think my struggle to work through ambivalence, to dissect the competing strands of tribal identity and universal values, is widely enough shared among many American Jews to make a book feasible. Having a publisher lined up would be more motivating, but in the meantime this blog helps me keep track of things to get to in more detail later. And it’s satisfying on its own. But at some point I should move from a rambling to-do list to something more substantial.
What motivates these thoughts, beyond the imposed luxury of the six-hour flight’s lack of Internet access, may be that last week marked my official end of employment as a university professor. After several years on disability leave, this week I’m officially retired from the University of Illinois at Springfield, with a pension and a certificate naming me emeritus associate professor of legal studies. Since I’ve been on leave anyway, the change in status has no substantive effect (well, the cut in pay is pretty substantive), but being labeled retired at age 56, an age at which my friends and colleagues have years of full-time work ahead of them, stimulates even more self-reflection than the disability label did. Perhaps that’s why a couple of weeks ago I finally gathered together papers I wrote decades ago as a young Zionist. Maybe wading through the morass will get me closer to that book.
