Internal Summary: What's Left of the Website?

Dear friends, I feel we can look back with satisfaction, understanding the limitations of the genre, the boundaries of ability, the constraints of the algorithm - and the limitations of the world. Our website stands as a monument to a world we erected in memory of the Netanya teacher - a place of pilgrimage where one can always encounter the birth of the Netanya school of thought

View from Mount Nebo  (Source)

For about a year now, following reports from users and brilliant narrow-mindedness, "The Degeneration of the Nation" website has been permanently blocked on Facebook. Thus, all hundreds and thousands of links to it disappeared at once, and it gradually sank in Google search result rankings as well. This is despite the search engine algorithm's claim to award points mainly for original content, and the site has about half a million words of exceptionally "original content," containing a complete ideological world that deals with almost every field of human thought and creation - a genuine enterprise. In fact, it now contains material for several books (among other things, it includes about fifteen books and booklets, mostly in PDF format). Did the site precede its time, or perhaps it's out of its time? Is the current external world right (after all, ignorance is the essence of the world), and will it never find interest in the world living within the site - ever? Only time will judge between the site and the world - and time has time (humans - not always).

The rest of the Netanya school members long ago stopped publishing on Facebook, and some were never there, but I'm more sociable (everything is relative) and gritted my teeth and continued to publish articles on the social network as a kind of conduit between the site and the world. Overall, the number of new publications by members on the site gradually declined (in my feeling: out of a sense of futility), which increasingly became an arena for internal dialogue - among us (and for such dialogue, we don't need a site, right?). As the level on the site rose, and it is now ten times higher than the initial competitor (whose name we shall not mention, of course...), we lost the reader. Does any of us regret this?

But I prefer to look at the glass half full: The site, as it is, and even if it remains as it is - is beautiful to the eyes and very, very good in my view, challenging and rewarding, stimulating and dreamy, rich and enriching. Everything, including the code, we wrote ourselves from scratch, at a cost of 0 NIS, even for the servers (not to mention the amazing design done by the beloved dog, and the free, beautiful, and apt images from all those paid image banks). Half a million words? That's like all of Plato's writings (!). More could have been added (and most is always lost in time), but it's enough - and it spreads a universe. An alternative to the degenerating land - spreading over it a diverse spiritual world of a complete school (but with a coherent internal logic, of a real school that develops gradually, not a Facebook cacophony trapped in an endless spin).

Above all, a unique alternative to the common discourse was formulated here, in my opinion, whose essence is not "discourse" (a repetitive and externalized matter), but documentation of an internal development system, namely: learning. The materials on the site - from philosophy to literature, from reviews to programs - document a group learning process that is all about aspiration for innovation and novelty, and loathing for clichés and templates - a kind of futuristic opposition to the current world. Even when I read an old current affairs article on the site, or an article that wasn't fully edited (the time pressure towards the end of the Netanya teacher's life led to very hasty publication of his notebooks, in "Philosophy of the Future"), I find great interest in it - which hasn't aged. In my eyes, with all the sadness in the matter, there is also joy in achievement: anyone who ever sits and reads the site will come out enriched as if from a new centrifuge.

Will this happen? Who knows. We all know there's no hope in writing in Hebrew, and maybe one day, if we're lucky, we'll translate the site into English (is there hope in writing in English? Well, we're no longer naive). There's always a horizon, even if it (by nature) is beyond the horizon, and it's hard to imagine it in the current state. The land continues to degenerate - and we have no Sisyphean tendencies to try to pull it up the slope again and again, although there's no doubt that we all invested enormous efforts, which end as always - in nothing. The site that grew distant from the land, and from earthliness, has no "this world," but will it have a "world to come"? Or is this indeed the final verdict: eternal oblivion, which is the paradise of non-updating sites?

I will continue to publish on Facebook from the existing materials and books, like the great book by Circle [Translator's note: likely a pseudonym] that we were privileged to host on our site, until I finally tire (if I don't tire - it will take years). And to the site members who are starting to study in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science (including those completing matriculation exams...) - we wish good luck. The Netanya teacher, who is not with us today, would surely be very angry and upset with us, as usual, and complaining and mourning the abandonment of the enterprise, which is also his abandonment (but, as usual, he would also be somewhat proud of us in his heart, I think - for the very enterprise that was completed). And since this site was born from the trauma of separation (and perhaps also the encounter?) with our teacher - I believe it is fitting that we dedicate the site to his memory, and to the future of his revolutionary "Philosophy of Learning" theory, which in its opposition to the "Philosophy of Language" was never written, but was sealed in learning notebooks and exercises and summaries (and tests!) and lessons and oral study, and now it is revealed on the internet - "before the eyes of all Israel."