Imagine the hustle and bustle of morning rush hour and the accompanying noise — like any other day — being suddenly interrupted by the wail of a siren. The overpowering sound of the siren then gives way to complete silence, as drivers get out of their cars, pedestrians stop in their tracks, and all that is heard is the wind as everyone stands stone still for two long minutes of silent remembrance.
That’s exactly what happened today as Israelis, joined by other Jews around the world, stopped to remember when the unthinkable happened. Thousands — Holocaust survivors, teenagers, Jews and a few Gentiles, joined in the March of the Living at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland, where 1.1 million people, 90% of whom were Jews, were exterminated by the Nazi regime.
Any Jewish parent wants his or her children to know about and remember the Holocaust.
How about you, my Gentile friend?
Archive for the ‘cultural understanding’ Category
A Memory to Stop Traffic
Bring on the Bocce!
Bonjour from Switzerland
Curiosity vs. Fundamentalism
Not only is Seth Godin a business and marketing genius, he also has an uncanny understanding of human nature. I could talk/type a long time about his latest book, Tribes (click on the title in my book section on the right to check it out) — and very well may write another post or two on my ruminations from the book — but here’s what is churning inside me right now. It can be summed up in this quote from Godin:
“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it; as opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not he wants to accept the ramifications.
“A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through it, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it.”
It’s impossible to read this book and not consider the question of what ‘tribe’ I belong to. Seth Godin has helped me articulate it. Yes, I’m of the tribe of faith, I’m of the tribe of art and creativity, I’m of the tribe of entrepreneurship — but I think the best term to succinctly describe the tribe of World to the Wise, it’s this:
I’m of the tribe of the culturally curious.
Godin describes curiosity as a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. Curiosity has to do with searching for your voice until you find it — very often against great odds. Many times the curious are punished — and, sadly enough, nowhere does that happen more often than in organized religion and education.
“What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook, regardless what your religion is.”
This blog — and everything that is to come out of World to the Wise — is for the culturally curious. The ones who look at the ‘whys’ as much as the ‘whats’. The ones whose only fear is losing their sense of fascination with this planet and the diversity of the peoples that have been placed on it. The ones who believe that this diveristy is not some great cosmic mistake, but on the contrary, that there is something of the Divine on the face and in the heart of every culture.
Stay tuned for the announcement of the inaugural World to the Wise Cultural Tour, followed by lots of other exciting developments. We’re just getting started.
Thanks for Thanksgiving
As an American, I’m not always particularly proud of our cultural exports. Halloween, for example, came into vogue in Europe while I was living there; and not all of Hollywood’s values make me want to stand up and say, “That’s us!”
Thanksgiving is different. And what is ironic is that I don’t know of other countries besides Canada that have instituted this tradition on a national level. (Prove me wrong by posting a comment!)
On this 4th Thursday of the month of November, we stop to remember how blessed we are. Not that celebrations of thanksgiving have never been held in other cultures; harvest festivals have been a tradition of cultures worldwide since recorded history began. But the feast that has become an annual holiday in the United States is generally attributed to an offering of thanks not for copious material blessings, but for mere survival. The Pilgrims who had come to the New World from England in search of the freedom to practice their religion in the way their convictions dictated were thankful just to have made it through their first winter. And this would not have been possible were it not for the providential help of a Patuxet Native American named Squanto. You should take a moment to read this remarkable story some time.
The first national declaration of Thanksgiving was made by the Continental Congress in 1777, but it was not declared an annual holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a civil war that was tearing his nation apart, made the following resolution:
“… to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union….”
How radical and completely counter-intuitive. In some of the darkest days of this young nation’s history, a leader urging his people to unite on two principles — gratitude and penitence.
The tough times we’re facing right now are a cake walk compared to many of the ordeals our ancestors went through. Is it possible that one of the divine laws of the universe might be that gratitude not only comes after deliverance, but also precedes it?
Here is one thankful heart that a day has been set aside for something that is actually intended to be a way of life for us.
May we all live lives of gratitude.
Bathroom Blues
Cowboys and Arabs
Our criteria for what makes a movie worth watching are as diverse as the cultures to whom this blog is intended. Some consider a film worthwhile only if it has a happy ending (a particularly American syndrome).
One of my criteria for a worthwhile film is whether it makes me think. My wife and I went to see “Body of Lies” the other night, and I came away thinking.
Without having read David Ignatius’ book, I can only take the film at face value. Was the Ed Hoffman character (played by Russell Crow) an intentional caricature of the stereotypical American cowboy with some very sophisticated toys he’s not afraid to use on people he’s never taken the time to understand? (It irks my Mississippi-born wife to no end that these characters always have southern accents.) Are we to extrapolate and believe that everyone in the U.S. intelligence community is cut from the same cloth? Whether or not that’s the case (and I still dare to hope it’s not), Hoffman’s line toward the end of the film (“After all, what is to like about this place?”) reflects an undeniable fact: many of us simply don’t see anything to like about, in this case, “these Arabs.” You could replace the word “Arabs” with countless other names, depending on what culture you live in and who your traditional enemies are.
I once had a voice student in Switzerland whose example left an indelible impression on me. She was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, a relatively small area and unfortunately susceptible to the traditional French prejudice toward Germans and German speakers. Aware of this prejudice in her own heart, this lady actually sought out a job in Zurich, the largest city in the larger German-speaking area of Switzerland –- simply to find something to like about those German speakers! Needless to say, she was not disappointed, and to this day has maintained several close friendships there.
Enough said. Or perhaps not.
Welcome to Water Cooler Wednesday.
Can you say ‘faux pas’?
Cultural Anecdotes, Part II
Thanks to those of you who responded with your own cultural faux pas stories. Unfortunately, they all came through Facebook and are therefore not posted on this site. That darn Facebook is just too convenient.
Here are a couple that have come through:
On the first day of classes, a university freshman in the States who has been raised in Europe and learned English only from her mother and foreign language classes, asks a classmate for a rubber. (Don’t get it? Ask someone.)
In one of my own French classes years ago, one of my students, who is a recording artist, was trying to tell me how her husband’s voice blends well with her own. She was making a gargantuan effort, truly; but instead of saying ‘He blends,’ she said ‘He changes my diaper.’
And finally, a dear friend who was living in Switzerland and learning French thought she knew a thing or two about predicting whether a pregant woman’s baby would be a boy or a girl, depending on how the woman was carrying the baby. In faltering French, but confident it was a boy, she proudly informed the dubious woman that it was going to be a fish.
Keep them coming! And post them here so non-Facebook members can appreciate them!
Under the Weather
Cultural Anecdotes, Part I
I lived for a number of years in Australia as a child. Even though my memories of that time are somewhat sketchy, I remember my parents recounting, through tears of laughter, the lessons they learned about the differences between Australian and American vocabulary. Some of these lessons they learned firsthand; others they learned through (or rather at the expense of) other visiting Americans.
For example, one American couple had been in Perth just a few days. The wife had come down with a bug of some sort and had stayed at the hotel. When asked where his wife was, the gentlemen forlornly replied that she was under the weather, so had to stay behind.
If you’re from a present or former British Commonwealth country, you already see the problem here. If you’re not, you’re probably not aware that in those countries, “under the weather” means very, very drunk.
The American gentleman was a pastor.
Stay tuned for more — and in the meantime, send me YOUR faux pas anecdotes!
Cultural Intelligence
