Bonjour, friends and family,

I write to you with more news from the cosmopolitan capital of France. In recent developments: the economic crisis and the pumping of European government money into the economy to stimulate trade, and the American election, which generates a fair amount of interest here. For the economy,
the same questions plague France, and everybody watches to see what Nicholas Sarkozy, president of France and temporary president of the European Union, will do next.

For me personally, I feel much more comfortable after this past month in Paris. I do in fact get into most of the museums in Paris for free, thanks to a pass provided by my program that indicates that I study in the European Union. I have had the time to develop personal habits and to get to know the city, the university system, and Parisian culture. I encounter more and more French, and American, students with whom I share common interests. Thanks to the help of a friend who lives in the same apartment building and is a web programmer, I built my own website, SiegelSounds.com, just for fun. Who knows, but it might be an interesting skill to develop in the workplace after college…

I went with several friends from my program on Sunday night to see “Edward Scissorhands,” as a ballet, at a theater near the Seine river. The dancing was incredible - imagine a professional cast of ballet dancers dressed up as shrubberies that Edward had styled, in complex coreography, while the main character performs turns and lifts without using his hands, which are hampered by the existence of giant scissors in each palm. Very impressive.

I love my music history class; it’s not part of the Paris University system, because the professor dislikes the way the system works, but at the Schola Cantorum, a small private school south of the Seine. We discuss everything from anthropology to philosophy, the way societies function, the relation of music to dance, the relation of music to mysticism and Number, and other fascinating ideas. My math classes, at the University of Paris, are going well. I feel lucky in that often in the University system, a student, especially a foreign student, can feel lost, whereas my math classes are specialized enough that I can contribute, and even be a familiar face to the professors.

The biggest news in my life is a trip I took last weekend, when several of my Friday classes were canceled. I decided three weeks ago that I wanted to, someday, visit the town where my great-great-grandparents were born, and see if any of the gravestones in any nearby cemeteries came from the “Siegel” family. Knowing that two of my classes were canceled, I bought a plane ticket to the Ukraine, and did some research on the Internet. According to my grandfather, his maternal grandparents had come from a town called Khotyn, in the region Bessarabia. My plane changed at Vilnius, in Lithuania, and landed in Kiev on Friday night. Then the adventure really started. That night, I had to find where to buy a bus ticket and where to catch the bus, without speaking a word of Ukrainian. The bus, it turns out, was 45 minutes late, which I guess only added to the excitement. I traveled 400 km overnight, arriving in the moderate-sized town of Chernivtsi on Saturday morning, and walked immediately from the bus station to the Chernivtsi synagogue, where I found a representation of the small Jewish population of Chernivtsi at Saturday morning prayers. With my terrible Hebrew, and what little English they could muster, we managed to communicate that I was looking for a Jewish cemetery in the nearby town of Khotyn. One of the men, named Baruch Fichman, took it upon himself to explain that I needed to catch a bus the next morning. In the meantime, he brought me to visit a man named Zislis, one of his close friends, a man who had been born in Khotyn and who had just had his 103rd birthday the day before I arrived. This incredible encounter was underscored by the fact that, given his age, Zislis could possibly have known my great-great-grandparents. However, he spoke Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian, and was a loud and excited man, and Baruch had much trouble translating anything he said into either Hebrew or English, the two languages I would understand.

That night, I stayed in a hotel, and the following morning caught a bus to Khotyn. Upon arriving at the Khotyn bus station, I realized I had no clue where to find the Jewish cemetery, aside from a suggestion from a US government document I had found on the internet that the cemetery was “to the north”. I asked at the first restaurant I found, and none of the employees understood word I said, even when I attempted to pronounce the phrases I found in my Ukrainian phrasebook. In the end, I showed them a phrase that Zislis’ wife had written on a slip of paper for me before I left their apartment, and that was apparently comprehensible, because one of the women working at the restaurant called a taxi for me. When the taxi arrived, she got in with me, and we drove to the house of one of her friends, one of the fewer than 10 Jews left in Khotyn, and who was, thanks to an incredible coincidence, professor of French at a nearby university. We were able to understand and communicate with each other, and in this way, the woman gave me a personal tour of the Jewish cemetery in Khotyn, where her parents were buried. This was incredibly moving. The cemetery, with more than 1000 graves, is overgrown with vegetation, and the tombstones have worn down, so unless I spent a month working every day to clear the cemetery, I would never be able to find a specific grave that may have belonged to members of my family. At this point, it seems that my genealogy becomes a communal history, following the Jews in Khotyn and Chernivtsi, who at one point were so numerous that Chernivtsi was more than half Jewish.

I also spent a day in Kiev, seeing Independence Square and other old buildings in this beautiful city. On the train to Kiev, completely by coincidence, I encountered another Russian Jew, a man who snacked on beer and dried fish, wore a cylindrical hat and had a long ponytail. I also stayed in a youth hostel that night, and made the acquaintance of a young Russian Internet marketer who enthusiastically explained his business idea of a new hostel website. All in all, the people I met on this voyage were perhaps even more interesting and unique than the country itself.I have put some of the photos from this trip on the Internet, on the website I created (www.siegelsounds.com). I’d love to hear what you think, through e-mail or other means. Also, if you find errors on the website, please tell me so I can fix them. Much appreciated.

I hope life is going well for all of you. I’ll send out another e-mail update in November.

A bientot, et à votre santé,

Jacob Siegel

This blog post responds to some ideas raised by New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks, in his article published on the 27th of October, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/opinion/28brooks.html). Brooks begins his article by outlining what cognitive scientists agree are four crucial steps to any decision-making process: first, perceive the situation. Then, think of all possible courses of action. Third, choose a course of action. Fourth, carry out the course of action. In Brooks’s opinion, humanity has shifted away from an emphasis on the third step, choice, and right now, the most important step in our decision-making processes is perception.
After having a hand injury for two years, I have recently turned to the Alexander technique to help explain the why I acquired this injury and what I could do to cure it. I’m an enthusiast of this technique, and also an aficionado of Alexander’s philosophy: I just finished reading “Use of the Self,” in French, one of Alexander’s four fundamental books. Here’s what he has to say about the issue: with the advancement of civilization, our habits have gone farther and farther away from what can be considered “natural” for the human being. For example, in the 1800s, to be bent over a spinning wheel for eight hours a day was not uncommon. This constant repetition of actions that we consider “normal,” but certainly aren’t “natural,” has a devastating effect on our habits. In our example, bending over a spinning wheel for eight hours a day strengthens our habit of doing so to the point that we stop choosing our actions, letting our habits guide us instead. Voila: we have already lost our emphasis on the crucial third step of Brooks’s process, the action of making decisions of what is rationally in our best interest.
At the same time, our perception shifts. Since we are bent over for eight hours a day, we start perceiving this as normal, and even when we walk away from the spinning when we may do so with a bent back. Moreover, suppose we realize that the spinning well has had some sort of devastating effect on how we use the parts of our body. How can we fix this? We would need to perceive these devastating effects, and then work to correct them, according to Brooks’s process. But here’s the rub: our perception has shifted. We no longer perceive standing up straight as normal, but bending over. Therefore, any attempt to return ourselves to a “normal” way of walking or sitting is inevitably influenced by our hours and hours of conditioning, and every attempt to sit up straight only digs us deeper into the hole. Imagine: in attempting to sit up straight, we are so used to putting the weight on the wrong part of our back muscles that we continue to do so, and so even though we are “sitting up straight,” we are using our back muscles poorly and find no way out of the cycle. We may be straight, but this certainly won’t relieve any pain we feel. In fact, the pain made it worse, now that we have unduly stressed other parts of the body in order to hold ourselves in a rigid position.
Alexander’s solution: what he calls inhibition. This is not the negative psychological phenomenon associated with Freud, but a positive, powerful concept used for creating any new habit. Which suggests is this: before taking an action, make it a habit to stop. Pause. In this way, we have an opportunity to actually consider what choice we want to make, bringing our focus back to the third step of Brooks’s process.
And above all, work to find ways to broaden our perception. Alexander used mirrors observing his body, and realized that what he sensed was different from what he saw. In the daily workforce, tools for broadening perception are all around us: other people, other spaces, visiting nature, traveling, and many other possibilities. In this way, we put the process back in its proper order for successful decision and a successful life.

I enter into the room. I drop my backpack on the floor, pull off my jacket, and hang it on a hook. I sit down in my chair. I pause. I take a moment - I decide how I want to act, what I want to accomplish in pulling out a textbook or powering up my computer, anything that happens on the desk in front of me.

in the matter what sphere of life, to respect the sanctity of the workspace. The word sanctity, in this context, is not necessarily religious: it speaks more about spirituality, and above all about intention. We each use our workspaces for hours every day, whether our desks with our computers, for adults in an office, or desk with a laptop and a textbook, for my fellow students. We may work outside, or we may work in a store with a cash register. In every case, we spend large amounts of time in nearly stationary positions and small areas. It becomes vital, in this case, to remain conscient of how we move, or don’t move, or stand, or sit, in our workspaces, or we risk injury, repetitive stress, and other physical malaise.

More than merely physical, our respect for our workspaces must be mental and spiritual as well. What could this mean? In other words, every time I sit down in front of my computer, before powering it up, or before touching a single key, I pause and ask myself, “What do I want to accomplish? And more importantly, how do I want to accomplish it?” In our stationary workspaces, we risk finding ourselves in stationary frames of mind, with boredom, depression, or frustration often resulting. Instead, the idea would be for us to retain our creativity, positive energy, and love for whatever it is we happen to be doing at a desk or in front of a register. The question is often not what we do, but how we do it. In other words, if I respect the sanctity of my workspace, and if I come in every day with the decision to make the day a positive impact on humanity, I could be doing the same work as somebody else and feel 10 times better about it.

This is not inborn. This is not genetic. This is not a vestige of childhood abuse. This is a choice. Each of us has the choice, every single day, to respect what we do and to respect ourselves in doing so. And even among individuals, this may vary; on some days I may forget, or be distracted by something important that happened in my life, or have a larger than normal problem to face during the workday. This doesn’t make the issue less of a choice.

Thank you for taking the time to read: I hope that in doing so, you have respected yourself, and thus improved the world.

Je comprends bien que cette phrase peut sembler provocatrice. Et donner de l’argent aux pauvres n’est pas parmi les problèmes souvent cités de notre société. Ou bien si?

Considérons le cas d’un malade. Il est au lit avec des jambes cassées. Il est bon et gentil de lui apporter de la nourriture pour qu’il puisse manger, et de lui donner tout ce dont il a besoin. Mais après que ses jambes commencent à guérir, il lui faut marcher un peu pour regagner la puissance dans les muscles. Et s’il ne sait pas cela, et si moi, le médecin, continue de lui apporter tout ce dont il a besoin, ses jambes deviendront inutiles et atrophies.

Je ne veux pas dire qu’on ne doit pas aider quelqu’un qui est malade. Évidemment, dans ce cas, c’est bien d’aider le pauvre malade. Mais la façon de l’aider est importante. On le guide vers le chemin d’amélioration de soi, lui-même.

Avec un chômeur qui demande de l’argent, qu’est-ce qu’on doit faire? Je donne trois points pour suggérer qu’on ne doit pas donner d’argent, nécessairement, mais qu’en revanche, il y a d’autres moyens d’aider. C’est à cause de la discussion plus haut, et aussi la Règle d’Or, et aussi des exemples dans la littérature des mœurs, qui nous suggèrent ça

Considérons le cas célèbre de Jean Valjean,des Misérables de Victor Hugo. Même quand Hugo décrit Valjean comme un homme qui sort de sa maison les poches remplies et rentre les poches vides, on voit que la chose, la charité, qui a vraiment aidé Valjean lui-même n’était pas l’argent, mais la nourriture et un lit. Avec son penchant pour le travail, et sa puissance, il a trouvé ses moyens lui-même sans l’aide des choses qu’il a volées au prêtre dans la première partie du livre.

Le regle d’Or: si j’étais pauvre, je voudrais qu’on me donne un emploi, pas de l’argent. C’est humiliant d’avoir besoin de demander de l’argent, et je voudrais sortir de ce cercle aussitôt que possible.

Enfin, cela dit qu’il est essentiel que nous aidions les pauvres dans le monde, mais qu’il est aussi essentiel que nous le fassions d’une manière considérée et prudente. C’est ce que je vous demande si jamais je me trouve sans domicile fixe.

Merci à Lubo d’avoir corrigé des erreurs d’orthographie dans ce texte.