An Ode to Dr. Zolondek= The Taboo of Influences

I am reading Martin Buber's biographic book about his letter writing, including his letters. The constant revolution that makes sense to he and his reader is the exchange in inter-humanity--a term he conjured, and is the case for deliberation on a kind of martyrdom for his students to seek by means of giving away the only thing we can solvently say gave us understanding in his or her (teacher/student) eyes: what they understand about the teacher, is the instructor's point of convergence of self-understanding, so identity is marytred, its trappings at least...and "given away." Pilpul is a Hebrew term that depicts the exchange two Torah students indulge upon in argumentation. Over biblical reality, of course. But, I can't deny the warm & fuzzy that ancient scribings are seen in a continuum of ideation while advancing, but also using this language that had been breathed and consigned to a time & place very much like we see today and has been for 100s of generations. **Upon my arrival at Ohr Somayach yeshivah in Jerusalem this healthy proximity to learning was something I wanted to witness. Actually, in the room where Torah and Talmudic learning commenced, I walked past trodding on cold open-to-the-outside foyer floors, looked into the shul where the arc dominates, but only saw individual students davening (=swaying in prayer). My mnemotechnical reckoning was brandished from the thoughts of the only (then) living Hasid I knew--yet wayward and thus more up my alley, who I could suppose digested these kinds of settings: my older brother's Arabic professor, and my Islamic Civilization professor--the same Dr Leon Zolondek at the Univ. of Ky. MEMORY was the internalizing of a procession of thought i.e. time & parallel to experience, living then in my mind--as to say then, which is a fallacy: you are either NOW or you are in conflict, there isn't any alternative to that. This particular trip to Israel wasn't for study however--rather I was going to meet up with my friend who in a few days would deplane at Ben Gurion airport. The Moshav, communal farm, was to be our longest stay in any one place while traveling for the 2-3 months in Israel and Egypt--and Zolondek was in the survey of my mind at a poignant moment. I was out on the perimeter of the banana fields--there on Moshav Fatsa'il, facing the noon day sun, thinking with impudence that Zolondek had socialist or Zionist values not alien to what I could absorb for myself there in Israel, a calling for all Jews I'm innocently but emphatically assuming. Zolondek, raised Chasidic turned his critical eye toward Islamic studies, so my yeahs could not be in fact my yeahs, hence the distraction and what came next, which I almost interpreted as my comeuppance, though the minefield around Zolondek's "person-ality" was only a phantom assumption on my part. I'm thinking out there in the hot sun, "Yeah, Zolondek would... " but I don't know what (over & over again in my mind) & then whack, I cut my thumb with my machete, but good--leaving me the rest of the day to do nothing, and imagining the damnable stereotyped sense of a finger pressuring the earth like to your side, as if I was G-d Damning something...something, but didn't know what, from the infiltration of agricultural implements and dirt from G-d's green into my permeable body.