The Degeneration of the Nation
Long and Irritable - External Summary: What Do You Want from Us?
The summary of all summaries, the response to all responses, and finally the answer to the most important question: Who wrote the website?
By: B.R.'s Note
An image of Bilhah, which has nothing to do with the real Bilhah, but you need it (source)
Well, what did you expect? And what did you think would happen, that could happen (alternatively: why are you so dramatic)? Are you also whining-disappointed-victimized (I thought you were against that)? Why should we respond to someone who doesn't respond to us/me? Why blame the whole world, look in the mirror, what do you see? Who are you, Bilhah? Who are you really, Bilhah? I know who you are, Bilhah! Who do you think you are, huh? I knew you were a man! (Two men outdid themselves by writing to me in masculine form). Do you really exist? Why should I be interested in someone who doesn't exist/talk to me/play with me/go out with me? Why should I bother to read, are you paying me for my time? (I don't have time, no one has time, time no longer exists). Why is everything so long and inconsiderate to the reader (me!), don't you understand that this hurts you? Why don't you shorten it? Are you willing to shorten it for me/chew it for me/love me/summarize it for me?

So here, I'm willing. I received a plethora of responses privately (and publicly) about the internal summary article, which was actually intended for within the group, simply because it seemed important to me to summarize the website in some article among ourselves, and not just abandon it, after the editor-in-chief, the Chief Rabbi, asked each of us to write something for the conclusion (Circle contributed a final avant-garde and exceptionally daring dream that simply cannot be uploaded to Facebook, the Bitch returned to a final scathing critique that devours not the reviewed but the reader, Balak son of Zippor chose a summary essay on deep trends in Hebrew prose and the development of its style, the Singing K.B.R. published a collection of poems and remnants, etc... and we even transcribed an old lecture by the Netanyahite, post-mortem). And now I will summarize for you all my responses to the responses, including the answer to the eternal question: What does Bilhah want. And this question, you'll be surprised, is related to the question: What does Bilhah do in the shower.

And not just in the shower. But also in the bathroom, in sports, in walks to the grocery store, in travels, or when I'm removing hair. I think it's already thousands upon thousands of hours, that is, on the order of magnitude of a degree or two, and it all started from some list by the Netanyahite that's circulating among us, which actually begins like this: "Kol Halashon: Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, Rabbi Shlomo Fisher, Why lectures - everything, Katzir lectures (everything) - science, the channel of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (except for 'Such is Life' interviews with emeritus professors and trash conferences), Ben-Ami Shillony - Japan, Yuri Pines - China, Ronnie Ellenblum - history, Avner Ben-Zaken - history of science, Prof. Michal Schwartz - immunology, Prof. Michal Biran - history, Assaf Inbari - literature, Ohad Naharin - dance, Dan Miron - literature, Menahem Blondheim - communication and American studies, Ariel Hirschfeld - literature, Leo Corry - history of mathematics, Yehuda Liebes - Kabbalah, Menachem Froman - thought, Daniel Kahneman - economics, Yossi Vardi - entrepreneurship, Zvi Lanir - aging and strategy, Gideon Ofrat - art, Yehuda Bauer - Holocaust, Israel Aumann - economics, Yuval Noah Harari - history (by the way, not anymore. Since he converted from Judaism to Buddhism, the hollow practice of meditation has made his mind completely hollow, and the brain damage is noticeable to the listener: he's no longer interesting and I've stopped following - B.R.), Dan Ariely - economics, Yoram Yovell - psychology, Yoav Rinon - literature, Amos Oz (repeats himself), A.B. Yehoshua, Haim Be'er - literature, Aaron Ciechanover - biology, Ruth Arnon - biology, Idan Segev - neuroscience, Inbal Goshen - neuroscience, Yair Zakovitch - Bible, Arik Glasner - literature, The Hebrews series (all archive segments) Yair Kedar - literature, Peretz Lavie - medicine, Ishay Rosen-Zvi - Talmud, Yehuda Vizan, Meir Wieseltier, Aharon Shabtai - literature, Haim Sider - biology, Yonatan Hirschfeld - painting, Isaac Ben-Israel - security, Dani Karavan - architecture, Shabtai Rappaport - Halacha, Shimon Gershon Rosenberg - thought, Yishai Mevorach - theology...". And it continues (but you'll say Bilhah is digging) - a list of people whose almost everything they say is interesting in some way (copy and save!).

From here comes the annual ritual, where I download all the new lectures, lessons, and talks of all the people on the list who haven't died from YouTube (searching by upload date) and other sites, and turn them into mp3 files using the free MediaHuman Youtube Downloader software, which then enter my Android, and from there to my brain. Do I appreciate, love, or even believe all these people? Not at all (some I hate!). But I listen to them. It's important for me to confront Harari, or Zipper, or Oz, or Meir Shalev, not because I'm their groupie, but because they are challenging phenomena, and the very confrontation with them builds me. And all these are just people I bothered to confront while I'm, say, on the toilet (if it's not Torah lessons), or doing Pilates. There's a list many times longer of people I've listened to for a few hours of theirs, and understood their point, or bothered to check them out and listen to them for an hour. And reading? Here they won't be counted due to their multitude. I've checked almost everyone and everything I've heard of or from them some interesting thing that innovated something for me. Sometimes it was a page. And sometimes it was reading everything the person wrote. And how did I decide? According to how much it challenges me and innovates for me, and constitutes innovation in general in relation to the system (culture, literature, science, Torah, philosophy, art, economics, technology, etc.). I'm not a groupie of anyone, but very interested in any substantial innovation, namely in possible futures of the system. If you will: a groupie of innovations (though not innovations for the sake of innovations, like for example in the hollow avant-garde in the "daring" art of our time and in playful linguistic innovation, but what the Netanyahite called deep innovation, which is innovation in the method of the system, namely: learning innovation. For example: precisely through its new continuation of its previous depth directions, by discovering its "deep method", in the Netanyahite's terminology, which it itself was not aware of).

What always surprises me - is that people are not like me. Innovation doesn't interest them, and not even the future of the field they're engaged in. Not really. And therefore all this doesn't occupy them. They don't constantly ask themselves: in what other new directions can literature develop, or how might science/Torah/society look like in a few more decades, what will be the next big turn in art history, or in philosophy and human thought, or what could be the next paradigm shift in culture. And that's how it looks - in their output, and in what they consider important and interesting, and in what they read or search for. Namely: in perception, in action and in judgment - innovation is not a central mental category for them. The horizon of the future does not define their consciousness, as it defines (probably necessarily) our consciousness, the students of the Netanyahite. That's why I'm so not nice, by Facebook standards (in reality I'm nicer than all of you!) - because people don't interest me. I'm not even interested instead (in what elitism) only in mere "content" - but in innovations. That's why so many are transparent to me. They don't really have anything to offer to the future. They don't present some other direction of development in a new way of the system, which is not an uninteresting variation, namely without a future. And no one in the future will be interested in them.

And I, what to do, come from the side of the future to the present world (hence the alienation and estrangement of present murmurs, for example Facebook). Every reading on the site, and every presence of the site on Facebook for example, is a collision and confrontation between someone whose world's premise is the future, and a platform and discourse whose eternal essence is the present. And all this not because I'm a prophet or futurist (I'm actually not), not because of the source of the message or even its content, but because of the direction of learning: its interest. I'm not interested in what they said today in the news, or wrote in Haaretz, or in the feed. Therefore they were marked as enemies, that is, as those who impose the present on human consciousness, contrary to thought and literature of the kind that seeks the next thing, and therefore they have a messianic horizon, which is a position of constant resistance to discourse - not in imposing another discourse (like discourse struggles in the present), but from the direction of its own future (if you will, it sees Judaism not as minority and as principled resistance in space, as it's customary to portray it "today", but as resistance that comes from the direction of time, and not only that of the past, as in the Haredi world, but also and mainly from the futuristic direction, hence the enormous power of the Jewish world precisely at the modern historical moment. We believe in the future, unlike for example the Enlightenment, which like science fiction, is the imposition of the present direction on the future through a simple stretching of the current vector, and therefore it is a belief in man, the ruler of the present, and not a belief in darkness - in the unknown that is the future. Messianism is adherence to the future as a signifier, as a learning interest - and not as a specific signified, that is, not in the future as a certain content revealed to us. I could continue but then they'll complain again about Bilhah's convolutedness, so come on, let's close parentheses).

You'll ask: if Bilhah doesn't live in the moment and in the present, because all her free time is full of words and speeches of others, and her consciousness is almost not free for wandering, then when does she think at all? Isn't this a dystopian existence? When does Bilhah stare? Well, I think while I write. Writing itself is the learning action, and everything else is just materials for it. I simply discovered that it's absolutely inefficient and doesn't work to think just like that, and my mind wanders to daily troubles, or worse to present nonsense (if you dedicate time to thinking about Bibi - something's wrong with your brain), and writing focuses me on what really interests me. That's why I chose to write the Alternative to Current Events column on the site, precisely out of a desire to confront from the direction of the future - against the present. That's why I, unlike the rest of the site members, was interested (and still am) in Facebook. This is the arena of confrontation, and sometimes collision (and therefore the blocking didn't surprise me at all, the present is unable to digest real originality, because it shows it the horizon outside it - and marks its limitation by its very existence. And it doesn't matter at all what the specific reason we were blocked for, which we'll never know, because Facebook only shows a generic message, according to which one of the more original sites that arose in Hebrew - is spam). That's why I'm also writing a response article - this is my confrontation. And here we're approaching the question of what the hell Bilhah wants from us. If you're not interested in discourse with us and don't participate in our discourse, then what the hell is our role in your show? To sit and applaud you? Don't you notice the internal contradiction in this position? What's the point of addressing the world, and what do you care at all about the site's position in the present? What do you want?

Well, deal with it. This is, in essence, the position I present on Facebook, when I publish materials as long as the exile - right in the middle of the destruction of attention, and in the heart of the enemy. And indeed, the rest of the site members are not really that interested in you, it's just me - who went out to confront in your field, and whose writing is within the arena. And true, I'm not interested in neither applause and responses, nor claims and arguments, but in the confrontation itself, each according to the root of their soul. And our culture has simply stopped confronting, and is no longer capable of confronting, anything that requires confrontation. Reading a long text? God forbid. An encounter with a literary perspective truly different from our own? Not in our school (not to mention our bird). An encounter with a different religious world? Interests grandma (with the sheitel). The Netanyahite philosopher formulates a paradigmatic change in philosophy? What? What does that even mean? After all, if it's interesting, it will come to me on its own, diluted and digested, maybe in twenty years, while I'm sitting and expanding my belly and opening my mouth wide wide, and the feed brings me all the world's dishes, and I don't even need to leave the house and my passive comfort zone. And if it has a mixed taste like vomit - well, that's the world. I knew there was no point in developing taste, and independently checking such a radical claim - that someone actually formulated an alternative to the linguistic philosophical paradigm, which is the great mother of all thought that has been thought in the last century. So is it any wonder that the texts I wrote (I, Billy), somewhat complex (and truly: not really), received the status of a bone in the throat? The demand here is actually quite simple: deal with it.

The site never sought readers, and never thought or aspired to become popular reading material. It sought contenders. And such were not found for it. And shame on us, even our cultural figures are unable to deal with any cultural proposal that deviates from the present of their repetitive and boring discourse. And believe me, as an expert on innovations, I know very well how to identify when it's a real innovation, which for example marks a new format (the Netanyahite would be more precise: a new method), and not a pretense of innovation, which is what characterizes the cultural field of our time, which is an infinite collection of slight variations that no one will ever remember (about me). The flooding present creates in them (and this is its method) a pressure, which does not allow any attention and listening to anything outside the system, including its own future possibilities, which are critical to its very vitality as a living system (and no, it's not the porcine acapitalism, which actually is interested in the future and therefore succeeds, but the porcine conformism, namely simply that good old and fattening and self-marinated stagnation from time immemorial, which frequently takes over cultures, not to say naturally, and snores with contempt towards any innovator. The aspiration for innovation is the exception, which characterizes exceptional states of the cultural system: golden ages). And indeed, we are not living in a golden age, and the disregard for innovation and the inability to deal with it leave the arena of confrontation outside the present - in the future.

There are those who are completely unable to identify innovation (and this ability not to see, when it comes to radical and significant innovation, is almost psychotic, and is explained only by the brain's ability to ignore everything that doesn't fit into its ready-made categories and conceptions as noise), and there are those who are able to identify (and these are the vast majority), and the innovation did reach them (for example on Facebook), but they never bothered to investigate it, to delve into it, to understand it and to be interested in it as an innovation, that is, to confront it (even if it is not to their liking, or against them, or in a completely different direction than they hoped, but exemption from confrontation - there is none). This does indeed require a bit of reading (but not in relation to any ordinary thick book), but this is not the real obstacle and barrier. For reading another book (and another book) that doesn't really innovate anything - many are easily capable of, and quite a few can read the entire site in a week or two, according to the reported rate of consumption. But what is required here is to leave the lazy zone of discourse, in which they dominate and are proficient, and to embark on a learning journey in a new spiritual territory - and this is much harder. Many of our cultural figures think and teach and write within the paradigm of the philosophy of language and one of its descendants or various formulations - and how difficult it is to exit your own paradigm! How difficult it is to internalize that the beloved and old and familiar format of the novel is not the great format of the future, but of the past, and that we are on the threshold of another format. And how difficult it is to read poetry that doesn't revolve around language, or around one of the spheres that descend from it, but around learning. Yes, there is someone who writes not inspired by the Zach-Alterman polemic (from either of its sides), which is of course linguistic in its essence, but following didactic learning formats (Lucretius for example), or open and contemporary - and new.

As someone with some minimal identification ability, I think I can easily and well mark the two great innovations that took place on the site, simply because it's very hard to miss them, and I can also mark the two great innovations that follow them, which are much less personally beloved to me (and therefore you've hardly heard about them from me), but I know very well how to identify their value as innovations, and of course I took the trouble to confront them: to read and digest, and finally even to oppose (yes, we too have disagreements. I like less the literary part edited by Balak son of Zippor, although in the culture section his editing is excellent in my opinion). And this is the opening quartet:


This is a summary of the site for those interested, and now I'll move on to summarizing my responses to the question that came up again and again to the point of exhaustion, which is the question of the authors' identity. And since I'm very tired of it, I'll simply quote 2-3 responses to commenters (some in private and some in public):


That's it. And since I don't have the energy for responses - I won't publish this article on Facebook.
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