The Winning Stories - "The Degeneration of the Nation" Short Story Competition
The Judges' Statement: The stories submitted this year are an inverted mirror image of the conservatism, fossilization, and degeneration of the original competition. The short story emerges in them as the central literary genre of the Facebook era and short attention span, but contrary to the cliché, this does not stem from superficiality and narrow-mindedness, but rather from ideological density, bold and incisive form, a rapid pursuit to the heart of the matter and the reader's heart through direct drilling - and not a little audacity. It turns out that outside the doors of the gatekeepers in Israel's narrow literary republic, a wild, original literature is growing here, deeply rooted in the soil of reality and time, compared to which our "official" literature seems stuck deep in the past. In the eyes of the panel of judges, the future of Hebrew literature looks promising, exciting, and more relevant than ever. Who would have believed - the generation is rising and ascending
Contemporary Theology (Part 2): The Three Great Theological Developments of Our Time
What is the theology of a religion of learning of Torah, namely Jewish theology? Giving the highest religious meaning to Torah study, and learning is not only (and not mainly) memorization and interpretation, but innovation and creation, and above all - innovation and creation in the method itself. The supreme religious act is writing a new Torah - creating a new method - and therefore Moses is the great founder and not the father (Abraham), the conqueror (Joshua) or the king (David). Therefore, the depth of the method that Moses taught us is not interpretation (to study the Torah) - but creativity (to learn from the Torah): to learn to write Torah
The Three Big Questions in Science Today
What's natural about nature? Is it possible that nature is not natural? Are the big problems in science today just holes (or enormous pits) of knowledge, which turn nature into a miracle, or do they hint at the need for a paradigm shift, and a new type of scientific explanation, which is not the laws of the system (nature) but the learning of the system? On the difference between a networked and descriptive scientific worldview (we must remove all explanation!), which is abundant in random and therefore improbable details - and a learning explanation
The First Masterpiece of Hebrew Literature in the 21st Century
Finally, a great Hebrew work - in quantity and quality - that is original and innovative by any standard, not just that of our local provincial literature, but also on the map of world literature. For a long time (decades?) we have been waiting for a work that would deeply digest the spiritual crisis created by technology in the world of spirit, and present a relevant literary conception that confronts it
The Degeneration of the Nation (Part 2): How Was Culture Corrupted?
Where did Amnon Navot z"l err in his war against corruption? How can culture be returned to culture? And is it possible that Maayan Eitan is a student of Yitzhak Laor? The cat as the future of humanity - doesn't leave the house, doesn't connect, doesn't bark, doesn't push its nose but raises it, but on the other hand is extremely curious, has many souls, independent and mischievous - from head to tail
The Degeneration of the Nation (Part 3): A Moral Lecture - What Does Culture Demand of Us?
What is the difference between the decadence of the late 19th century and the decline of the early 21st century? Why does our long life expectancy allow us a completely different creative conduct than in the past? Is our generation really special, or is it just lasting too long? And how is Brenner, the archetype of the professional rebuker of the generation, to blame for the sharp dispute in Israel between Bibi and anti-Bibi? Here is the solution to all the problems of our generation - through one more generation
The Annual Netanyahuite Lecture: What Is Learning
A stunning lecture delivered by the Netanyahuite philosopher, father of the school of philosophy of learning, who was finally invited to answer once and for all the question: What is the "learning" whose name he always bears (and twice in every sentence). In an attempt to preserve the spirit of the spoken words, the transcript of the lecture has been edited into boring and long paragraphs as long as the exile, reflecting the deceased's feverish and oxygen-deprived manner of speaking, which leads to early brain death
A Program for the Advancement of Learning Sciences: Computational Learning, Machine Learning, and Neuroscience
A letter on the philosophy of information sciences, towards their transformation into learning sciences: The philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of computer science, the philosophy of computational learning, and the philosophy of neuroscience
What Is Writing?
Why is writing about writing so terrible? This is the field of writing that invites the worst writing on earth: graphomaniac scribbling about itself, written by professional narcissists about themselves, bringing to distillation their inability to say anything about anything, particularly about the ability to say something. The convolutions, pretentiousness, and boredom of current ars poetica are one of the most repulsive (and worthless) manifestations of the era. Is it possible otherwise?
Investment Philosophy: On the Philosophy of the Stock Market
Why is the investment method compared to philosophy specifically, and not for example to belief, religion, method, theory or knowledge and science? Investment learning and economic growth is learning of conceptual revolutions and paradigm shifts - just like in philosophy. If so, what is the meaning of the philosophy of learning as an investment philosophy?
How Did Agnon Destroy Religious Creation?
Agnon as the prophet of religious shallowness. The external language is traditional but the entire reality is secular, and only the internal infrastructure structure is religious - but terribly primitive from a religious perspective, functioning only as a skeleton of religion, without the spirit. All the immense complexity stems from the way the complex secular world is composed on a simplistic religious myth - and not from mythical-religious complexity in itself, and the result is hypocrisy, which is a gap between practice and infrastructure. This is a description of a typical Agnon work - but also of the religious world in our time
Criticism at the Beginning of the 21st Century
The asymmetry between creator and consumer was the constitutive of the idea of "culture", which is a modern idea. The current book is the current peak of closing the epistemic gap that allowed the institution of literature. The cause of this surprising reversal of trend in spiritual history, after thousands of years of widening the gap, is still not well understood. And here comes this book and points to the cause
Sex in Culture and Literature (Note the Word: Sex)
Last and bad poems of the aging famous poet, which serve as embarrassments for him and as fig leaves for first and bad poems of a new young poetess who was born, and therefore they are the closest thing in our world to literary intercourse, ending in another cultural climax. When the urine from the diving board becomes a diving board from urine - another ripple is created in the puddle of Hebrew poetry. And criticism, which has also become inarticulate, asks: Can the same poems be both moving and a joke? Can the same joke be both poetry and sentimentality? If everything depends on the context of reading - what does that say about reading (The context: culture and literature)
Pornographomania - The Future of Literature
The victory of the image over the text is the victory of Christianity over Judaism and over what cannot be spoken about - one must be silent. Four (!) poems that reached the editor's desk mark a new wave in Hebrew poetry: Nuduality. Nudual poetry strips the supplement and its editing considerations - naked and bare. The clichéness of the poems is a breath of fresh air that allows to produce from nothing a noise of change and transformation in our non-existent poetry - from nothing, literally, and it will please the listener. And when every disruption and embedding is a use of our sources as an excuse, in the style of the wind blower and rain bringer, culture and literature mate in the sun for all to see, with the confused imagery like a cloud in the rainbow sky for purity - brilliant!
The Guide to Literary Sexuality
After physical sexuality replaced literary sexuality (namely romanticism), we are now witnessing the counter-movement, in which physical sexuality is again replaced by a new kind of literary sexuality - and anti-romantic. Do less - talk more, love less - think more, woman - more, man - a little less. The culture and literature supplement turns from boring ass to interesting ass (and is there anything interesting besides sex? And is there anything more boring than culture?), and therefore instead of dealing with literature, it publishes (last publication!) the martyr poet who became the harassing poet, after returning from two thousand hours of exile, in which he polished his sins (poetic). When the editor is your skin
The Poetry of the Future
The poetry of the singing KBR - an incredibly innovative and original voice in Hebrew poetry first discovered on the pages of this supplement - is spread out in a new tetralogy published by "The Degeneration of the Nation". His four poetry books offer four different directions of resistance to the accepted poetry in the country, with his writing desk always facing the wall of the future. This is post-humanistic poetry suitable for a post-humanistic era like ours, and as such it combines prophecy, pornography, didacticism, intellectual experimentalism, and flattery
The Final Computational Solution
To build a huge bonfire, an eternal flame, to which books will be brought in masses, in a kind of holocaust of the inanimate, until the last book. There were computers that claimed that what was done to books would be done to computers in the future, and others calculated that so what, if we become like them
Paradise Lost
The computer would look at them, back, because now the screen seemed like a large, square and frightening eye, opaque without a pupil inside, looking from another world, like the eye of a giant fish that rose from the abyss to land - and died. And the shape of the letters on the keyboard, which they would guess at, the mystery of their arrangement, always in the same order that doesn't form any word, although there were those who found words there, or hints from an ancient secret language. But the wise always warned people not to pity the computer
The Post-Romantic Era
Now the inanimate is taking revenge on chemistry, biology, psychology, theology, everything, and rising above them all. After no one thought about it anymore. And the last nail in the coffin of the man is the woman. As long as he has the woman then he can still live for her. But everyone knows that the compatibility between men and women is not built so well
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Even the low level can break into the high, as if the computer breaks into its user, or the book into its reader. Although the reader or user has defense systems, the only rule in the universe teaches that there are holes in every defense, that nothing is hermetic, not even a marriage bond, not even true love not of this world, one can always break into a relationship from outside and cause infidelity. Even the brain of the smartest person can be hacked
Prepare for the Coming of the Black
At first he ran away from the seller in the market, but his white color gave him away, and children chased after him, and it was only a matter of time before they would turn him in to the authorities. So he left the city and began to wander the roads. But a donkey without owners is a dangerous thing, because at any moment they can enslave it
The Code is Computer Code and the Breasts are Network Breasts
He preferred the more artificial, more masculine technology, which suited him, and wanted to pass on to it the torch of culture and the image of man - and that the other technology would serve it. But the woman preferred the more feminine, organic technology. It was precisely the solid individual core of the computer that appealed to man, compared to the network softness of the network, which the woman loved
Bitch
You surely have a guy, and you were selfish enough to send the email without understanding what it would do to me. But in that same future where people will get closer to each other against their will, because all their output in life will be public, and there will be no private work, private writing, and you will read this too - then we will get close again, even though we grew apart, and this time because the universe will shrink
The Second Revelation
Slowly you learn to fall asleep standing on one leg in balance on the stick, and to ignore the threatening warning whispers that fill the darkness at night. When your life depends on something, the brain knows how to manage. The snakes begin to whisper more and more terrible secrets, to tempt you - like listening to women's conversation about sex, which becomes more and more sensational, and teaches you things you would never know
0 and 1
This reversal caused me an uncontrollable internal tremor, though invisible, I hope, from the outside - and especially to her. The climax was of course the scream that escaped her lips, almost involuntarily, when I pulled, supposedly to tease her
Big Black and Little White
Mostly the curiosity bothers me, under the guise of participation. And I ask if it's okay to ask what happened, sounds tough. And I write to my friend who knew her, who told me see how they can do anything, if I had done it I would be in jail. He always says Ethiopians are the most beautiful, but he doesn't dare
The Sin of Knowledge of the Twenty-First Century
Even now he wasn't able to express anger. If only he had called her a whore, he thought afterwards, everything would have been different. The sky began to fall. The bird was no longer in the window. And he could no longer see clearly. He felt like chirping, but to whom, she didn't give a damn about his situation. There's no straightness to the eyes, and it was simply dangerous to drive like that. He felt like braking violently and having someone crash into him from behind. There's no other use for this site!
Eternal Hills
Few men reach maturity. Everyone falls at this stage or that, or escapes there in a moment of anger in adolescence. Therefore, men are very rare, and they are surrounded by women and the women say: See how good it is for you here, between real breasts, you don't need huge breasts the size of the world, who knows what's there
First Last Prophets
His fourth, new, updated monotheistic religion, intended for the network, including human beings, but not only them. Computers were also commanded, and all intelligent technology of its kind, including future artificial intelligence
God's Mistake as a Writer
They were given freedom, so they became more of what they are, monkeys, not angels. Freedom doesn't help the aspiration upwards, but distress does. Freedom leads to the lowest common denominator, because when given a choice, popularity becomes what's important. What, do neurons in the brain have freedom? On the contrary, it's the suppression of neurons that makes a person smart
The Internet of Dogs
There were men who wanted to walk around naked, tied with leashes, held by a female dog. Or women who fell in love with a dog. During that period, we began for the first time to form class consciousness, and sometimes even global canine consciousness, the same consciousness that was denied to us when we were isolated in houses
First Place in The Degeneration of the Nation's Short Story Competition: "Geography is a Matter of Pornography"
Judges' reasoning: "Geography is a Matter of Pornography" is a live report from the current battlefield in gender relations - dating sites, seemingly written in real-time during the competition's publication on Passover eve. The broader Israeli reality, outside the state of "Haaretz", is reflected in it as an intense mix of traditionalism with permissiveness and secularism with righteousness - which in turn produces a new and daring ideology, both sexual and religious. When Passover becomes the festival of porn, and the personal history of sexuality collides with the frustrating technological present, and the ants remind of the Israelites in Egypt, and the breasts of the yeshiva, and the stream of consciousness keeps swirling and circling around itself at increasing speed - the story reaches a new male festival of freedom at the center of the hurricane, in the eye of the storm.
Second Place in The Degeneration of the Nation's Short Story Competition: "Vayikra" [And He Called]
Judges' reasoning: "Vayikra" is the closest text to a new biblical book we've seen in these parts for a long time, but equally it can be seen as the closest thing to Jewish science fiction. This is a biblical-futuristic story in five chapters, demonstrating how one can write completely contemporary fiction in central biblical genres - law, prose, poetry, lamentation, historiography - which accumulate into a chilling technological prophecy. This is the most ambitious story submitted to the competition, and its engagement with paradigmatic themes of culture well suits its choice of the greatest and most classical form our culture has produced. In doing so, it recreates in miniature an achievement of the kind of the New Testament: the creation of a new myth from the grave of the old myth.
Third Place in The Degeneration of the Nation's Short Story Competition: "The Kiss with the Secular Woman"
Judges' reasoning: "The Kiss with the Secular Woman" is a story that combines the experimental with the emotional to create a principled engagement with the connection between the two - and with the price of experimentalism, its power and weaknesses. The story disguises itself as an ars-poetic manifesto, reaching the point of theoretical conceptualization, but ultimately reveals itself as a deeply personal story, of one whose life is his creation, and has no existence outside of it, and therefore his soul-searching - including the accounting of his romantic life - is a creative accounting. More than anything, this is a story of connection between cultures - secular culture and religious culture - where the twists and failures of this connection represent the Jewish condition. And also the circular condition.