Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

The 13th Annual Jewish Film Festival, organized by the Jewish Community Center of Sonoma County, starts tomorrow with Knowledge is the Beginning. This is the film’s description provided by the JCC.

A chance encounter between renowned pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said led to Barenboim’s creation of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble of eighty young musicians from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia. Part concert film and part documentary, Knowledge is the Beginning chronicles the orchestra from its beginnings, including unforgettable scenes of students from such diverse backgrounds creating music together. 115 minutes, In English, German, Hebrew, & Arabic. English subtitles.

For more information about the movie check its website I admit I was having a hard time connecting this news with any of the books the library has, considering that we have no items from Mr. Barenboim or Mr. Said or about the Orchestra. Instead let me recommend a classic that the movie’s title reminded me of: Martin Buber’s The Knowledge of Man. It contains an introduction, a Buber’ dialogue with Carl R. Rogers and six essays. The volume was edited by Maurice Friedman. He wrote an essay in 1965 for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, where he described the selection as Buber’s final legacy. He descriptions after the chapter titles are form this essay

• Distance and relation - the direct fountainhead of all the essays that follow. The first of these two movements Buber calls “the primal setting at a distance,” the second “entering into relation.” The first movement is the presupposition for the second, for we can enter into relation only with being that has been set at a distance from us and thereby has become an independent opposite.

• Elements of the interhuman - distinguishes between the “interhuman”-that in human life which provides the basis for direct dialogical relations-and the sphere of the “social” in which many individual existences are bound into a group with common experiences and reactions, but without any personal relation necessarily existing between one person and another within the group.

• What is common to all - sets Heracleitus’ injunction, “One should follow the common,” in contrast to Taoist, Hindu, and modern mystical teachings, which he characterizes as a flight from “the arch reality out of which all community stems-human meeting.”

• The word that is spoken (no description)

• Guilt and guilt feelings - existential guilt transcends the realm of inner feelings and of the self’s relation to itself. But the order of the human world that one injures is not an objective absolute: it is the sphere of the interhuman itself. The order of existence that one injures

• Man and his image-work - shows how in art, as in knowledge, love, and faith-the other three potencies by which the human transcends the natural-, dissatisfaction with being limited to needs and longing for perfect relation raise man’s meeting with the world to a higher and fuller dimension.