Author: Manny Kagan

Do You Believe In Miracles?

December 15^th, when you might be reading this story is the third day of the Jewish Holiday, Hanukkah. It is known as “The festival of lights”, and commemorates miraculous events that happened in the year 165 BCE.   One of the miracles happened when a small group of Jewish insurgents led by Judah Maccabee revolted against the Syrian occupation of the Holy Land, who turned to impose the forced Hellenization of the Jews. Miraculously, they were able to overcome several Syrian armies, to free Jerusalem and to found an independent Jewish State. They cleaned the Temple from idols that were being used for worship, and in the process of rededicating it; they rekindled the seven-branched menorah light. There was a problem though; in order to do that, there was a need to have pure oil, and only day’s worth of such oil was found. To everyone’s surprise, another miracle happened, and the oil lasted for eight days. The independence of the area lasted until 63 BCE, when it was conquered by Rome. The Romans continued to use the name Judea for their new province and they named the northern region Galilee. For the next two thousand years, the area would be occupied by many different people. During which time it would be commonly called “Palestine” (named after the Jewish enemies in the Torah) in both the English and Arabic languages. In the 20^th century, the name was used by the British to refer to Mandatory Palestine. In 1926, another miracle occurred, when the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration announcing, “His Majesty’s Government view will favour the establishment in Palestine of national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” On May 15, 1948 there was yet another miracle. The British mandate was terminated and the State of Israel was founded. Several hours later, Iraq and the neighboring Arab states, Egypt, Jordan (Transjordan) and Syria invaded the newborn state, and immediately attacked the Jewish settlements.

The young country of Israel, became home for many Jews who survived the Holocaust, was able to hold on. During the forthcoming years it was attacked again and again by much more powerful enemies. Then miracles continued when during the Six-Day War in June 1967 in six days Israel defeated armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria and finally liberated Jerusalem from Jordan.

The miracles did not stop. A small country with a total population of about 8.5 million, out of which the Jewish share is about 75%, became the world center for the technological developments. Former foes, Egypt and Jordan, established diplomatic relationships with Israel. Israel is still surrounded by enemies who seek its destruction. It will take another miracle to find a two-state solution with the Palestinians, who do not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

The Art of Seeing

One of our discoveries on our trip to Oslo, Norway was the Edvard Munch Museum, which I wrote about last week. Right by the entrance, there were three copies of Munch’s paintings (which looked very real to me) screwed into the wall. This by itself was very unusual, but then I read the description of what it was – “Touch the Art of Edvard Munch.” A new printing technology developed by Canon, along with the Munch Museum and the Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted made it possible for people to have a sensual experience of art. The images are printed in a way that it can be touched; allowing people to sense the image rather than seeing it with the eyes.

I do not know what it really means, but this reminds me a story of when a group of blind people were asked to describe an elephant by touching different parts of the animal’s body. To paraphrase the Russian adage, “The walker cannot comprehend the rider” – the seeing person cannot comprehend what the blind sense. Nevertheless, the new technological development breaks the boundaries of our perceptions and possibilities. Meanwhile, I personally had my own limitation. To paraphrase another saying, “A shoemaker without shoes”, for a short time I became a photographer without a camera. As I wrote a few weeks, my cellphone died, and then on the second day in Oslo after visiting the Munch Museum, so did both of my two photo cameras. For my cameras, one solution was to simply go back to the hotel and charge the batteries, and to have a spare battery with me. I realized however, what was left to use what many of us take for granted – my eyes. When I walk with a camera, my reaction is very fast, I notice something interesting and immediately click to take a photo. Now I had the time to see.

What It Takes
To Be A Great Artist

Shortly before leaving on our anniversary trip to Norway, we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to view the global debut of the “Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed” exhibition. I was not familiar with the works of the great Norwegian artist, except for his famous painting called Scream, an image that I find quite disturbing. At the exhibit, we saw about forty-five images on display, including many self-portraits that represented a dark period of his life and they did indeed look quite gloomy.

Since we were on the cusp of our trip to Norway, we were looking forward to seeing his work here. The final destination of our cruise through the Norwegian Fjords was to the second largest city in Norway – Bergen (I wrote about it a few weeks ago). There, we visited one of the art museums, and discovered a completely different Edvard Munch. Our new appreciation of this great artist’s work continued in Oslo, after visiting the museum dedicated to his work. He was born in 1863 and during the 81 years of his life, he created 1750 paintings, 18000 prints, 4500 watercolors, sculptures, graphic art, theater and film design. He himself equated his work with the greats like Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso. His art reflected his personal life experiences through love, death, sickness, psychological turmoil (he suffered from paranoia) and mortality. Though his career spanned 60 years, his best work was created after he was fifty years old. In the museum in Oslo, a large room contains many paintings that look like un-finished work. One of the commentators pointed out that it looks like Munch wanted the viewer to complete them in their own imagination.

Some Like It Cold

The name of my story is a play on the title of the 1959 movie “Some Like It Hot” with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (it was recently re-run on public television). You are probably reading this story on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and after consuming enormous amounts of turkey on the previous night. Some enjoy eating cold turkey leftovers the following day, which has led to a number of expressions. For instance, “cold turkey” means a sudden withdrawal from drugs such as alcohol and opioids. There is also Norman Lears 1971 film by the same title, “Cold Turkey” and John Lennon’s song, “Cold Turkey” (1969) about giving up heroin. But why do we quit cold turkey? Here is what I found in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Making cold leftover bits of bird into a meal requires very little preparation, which led to the introduction of the phrase “Talk Turkey”, which means to speak blankly with little preparation. There is also the question how the bird eaten on Thanksgiving got the same name as the country — Turkey? You can read online how this happened.

There are other confusing things connected with the Thanksgiving tradition of eating turkey. It became a federal holiday during the American Civil War, when in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our Beneficent Father who dwelth in the Heavens.” Actually, the first Thanksgiving Day was celebrated during the autumn of 1621 by the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who probably did not have turkey in their meal, since Pilgrims came from England and their recipes called for the “wild fowl”, which was more likely meat of ducks and geese. Meanwhile, the holiday is no longer religious, and there are so many things in our lives to express our gratitude As far as food is concerned, online I found many websites that offered vegan and vegetarian alternatives for this holiday. One of them is called “Tofurkey”.

I received this from a friend and I’d like to share it with you for your enjoyment.

November 18, 2018

To Our Clients, Colleagues, and Friends:

We do almost the same newsletter every Thanksgiving, and we’ve made only minor changes over the past 10-12 years. We call it Adam Smith and Karl Marx at Plymouth Colony.

When the pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock in 1620, they tried what they called “farming in common.”  They farmed the land together and shared the food equally.  This might sound good in theory, but it was a complete failure.  Those people who worked hard resented those who didn’t.  There was a lot of anger over this, and after three winters of under-production, more than half the original 101 pilgrims were dead, mostly from malnutrition.  After three years of near-starvation and the loss of half the colony, a new experiment was tried. 

The governor of the colony, William Bradford, had come to suspect that the problem was the absence of private property.  In his now-famous passage on property rights in Of Plymouth Plantation (see page 162), Bradford wrote of how he “… assigned to every family a parcel of land… only for (their) present use…. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, and much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means….” 

Bradford wrote that those who believed in communal property were deluding themselves into thinking they were “wiser than God.”  (Doesn’t that sound like Hayek’s concept of the “fatal conceit”?)  He drew up a map and gave each family a plot of land to call its own.  Production increased by a factor of five the first year. As Bradford wrote, “Each family, attempting to better its standing in the community, increased the hours worked on each plot.”

Isn’t it perfect that the very foundation of America was a free market economy? And this, amazingly, was 150 years before Adam Smith wrote in 1776 about how markets work.

We publish the following pretty much every year for Thanksgiving.  We got it from somewhere long forgotten, and over the years we’ve added bits and pieces:

How’s your health?  Not so good?  Give thanks you’ve lived this long.  Are you hurting?  Millions are hurting more.  Visit a veterans’ hospital or a hospital for children to appreciate what you have.

When you woke up this morning, were you able to hear the birds sing, use your voice, walk to the breakfast table, read the paper?  There are a lot of people today who are deaf, blind, paralyzed, or unable to speak. 

How’s your financial situation?  Not good?  Most people on this planet have no welfare.  No food stamps.  No pensions.  No health insurance or Social Security.  In fact, one third of the people in the world go to bed hungry every night.

Are you lonely?  The way to have a friend is to be a friend.  If nobody calls, call someone.  Get out and do something nice for someone.  Are you unhappy?  Go out of your way to smile at people you bump into during the day.

Be kind to everyone, for everyone you meet might be fighting a hard, lonely battle of some kind.

Are you unhappy with our government?  Don’t despair.  Our system has been saved over and over again by people who worried about our nation.  And worry not.  You can still worship at the place of your choice, cast a ballot in secret, and criticize your government.  Hundreds of millions of people live where this is not the case, where criticizing the government leads to a midnight knock on the door.

Are you worried about shrinking revenue and non-existent margins?  This is America where all things are possible.  Your hard work and persistence got you this far, and they’ll allow you to survive these hard times.

And let us also be thankful for our troublemakers and agitators, people like Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, Tom Paine, John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King.  Without them, we’d be a lesser country.

We should be thankful for the food before us and remember those who go without food.

We should be thankful for the friends we have and remember those who are friendless.

We should be thankful for our health and remember those with poor health.

We should be thankful for our families and remember those without families.

Let us be thankful for what we have, and not be unhappy with what we don’t have.

Where Do Norwegians Come From?

My trips to other countries are not only about visits to tourist attraction sites, but they are also about exploring the country and understanding its people and history. Visiting Oslo, the capital of Norway, was the last leg of our Scandinavian journey. The history of the city goes back to 1040. For almost one thousand years, Oslo was part of Denmark, and was called Christiania (or Kristiania). Then, it was a part of Sweden until 1905. Today, thanks partially to the oil riches, Oslo was ranked number one in quality of life among European large cities. It has a population of about 660,000 and according to some surveys; it is the second most expensive city in the world for living expenses after Tokyo. At the same time, in 2015 the EU report found that Oslo is a city that for many years has topped the heroin overdose ranking. Online I learned that statistically, Norway’s immigrant population makes up to 16.8% of the country’s total population and is growing faster than native Norwegians. The five largest immigrant groups in Norway are Polish, Lithuanian, Swedish, Somali and Pakistani. The rest are Iraqi, Sri Lankan, Moroccan and others. An American friend of mine who currently lives and works in Norway and whose skin is dark in color (his mother was from the Maasai tribe in Kenya), told me that Norwegians are polite but can be xenophobic. Having researched the origin of Norwegians, it turns out that like most of the Scandinavians, they are descendants of the Northern European people called Vikings, who were pirates. During the 8th and 11th centuries these Norse seafarers raided and traded from what is now Scandinavia, and established states and settlements in England, Scotland, Iceland, Wales, the Foral Islands, Finland, Iceland, Russia, Greenland, France, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Poland, Southern Italy and even Canada.

I suspect that a genetic test will show that we are all cousins and are somehow related to each other. We do not speak the Norse language, but today regardless of where we came from, many speak in English, which was a West German language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now a global lingua franca.