4 Jan 2011

Why I Could Not be an Academic

It’s the first time that I am trying to write an academic essay in two years, and I realise why I am no good at it.  My housemate has asked me to write an article for Degel which is an academic journal published by the Alei Tzion community.  It is about Rav Soloveitchik’s approach to interfaith dialogue- a much misunderstood topic and one that I already know quite a lot about.  Moreover, I have read and re-read his works until they are coming out my nose. 

I should  be able to just sit down and write it!  Yet three things prevent me.  Firstly, no matter how clear, sublime and radical the thoughts are in my head, they never translate when I try and write them down where they appear dull and repetitive.  The sparkle and fizzle of my chaotic brain count for nothing so long as I can’t find the right structure to place them in or where the exact formulation remains on the tip of my tongue.  As R'. Soloveitchik himself says:

Feelings, emotions, thoughts and ideas become clear, and are grasped only after they are expressed in sentences bearing a logical and grammatical structure.  As long as one’s thoughts remain repressed, as long one has not bought them out into the open, no matter how sublime and exalted they may be, they are not truly yours; they are foreign and elusive.

Secondly, I end up deleting as many (if not more) words than I write.  At work, I write a lot of documents very quickly.  I act with complete professionalism and yet I care less about them.  As such, I can churn them out to a high quality as I know that my thoughts will be good enough even if the words don’t express what I want to say 100%Yet with a philosophy essay, I’m never quite happy with the formulation and see the objection to the statement even before I get the chance to write it.  This makes for a slow process!

Thirdly, and this isn’t necessarily a bad quality, I am never completely sure of my position.  So much has been written about Rav Soloveitchik, and so many conflicting opinions, that every time I read something new, I begin to unnecessarily doubt all that I thought.  It certainly doesn’t help that the Rav was not entirely consistent in his terminology, application of his opinions or typologies of Genesis!  Whilst the general trend is consistent, he certainly provides others with enough material to prove me wrong!

So there we have it.  Only time will tell if I manage to write this essay.