The Jerusalem Circle – From One Perspective
Dr. Eli Pitcovski

We express ourselves with the aim of being understood. ““No one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood,” writes Nobel prize winner Peter Medawar. In this spirit, great ideas are shaped in accordance with universal standards—and if the goal is to make them, in principle, accessible to everyone, there is indeed an advantage in doing so. Yet there is a tension between the desire to be broadly understood and the aspiration to be deeply understood. Deep understanding requires a shared background, similar standards, and common challenges. In a friendly or home-like environment, one can express oneself more fully and hope for deeper understanding. To the extent that  depth, rather than mere breadth, of understanding is considered, it is especially important to have frameworks that allow our ideas to be illuminated through and through.

The choice to confine oneself only to thoughts that everyone can understand is oppressive in two senses. First, there is unique value in ideas that emerge from the foundations of our being—ideas that can only be understood in some restricted context (for instance, only among those who celebrate holidays as we do). Second, sometimes an idea is so original that the framework in which it can be fully understood has not yet come into being—indeed, it must itself be formed, perhaps in response to other, as yet unintelligible ideas. In this sense, Medawar’s quote can be turned on its head: one who never risks being misunderstood is unlikely ever to have anything truly original or important to say.

Too often, originality that lacks an established framework is nonetheless traced back to some cultural or traditional background. Too rarely is attention given to the inverse insight: everything we call ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ originated in ideas so original that a framework had to be created for them. Culture and tradition, then, are the quarries from which the raw materials are hewn for new frameworks that allow particularly original ideas to be understood.

The Jerusalem Circle is a new framework that has deliberately cast off the yoke of universal standards. Its members share a rich common background and a set of practical challenges (outlined in the group’s foundational statement). This shared background is, in a banal sense, the raw material for each participant’s ideas, but it is also the quarry for the building blocks of the framework within which the subtleties of these ideas can be truly understood. In this respect, the framework itself is dynamically in formation—emerging in response to original ideas on the one hand, and to the qualities of the shared background’s raw materials on the other. The aspiration is, first and foremost, to create by our own efforts the setting in which our ideas can radiate in their full meaning for those who share our background.

This is a demanding task; ideas formulated in universal terms are naturally more acceptable and influential. Moreover, since universal standards are not neutral, our own attitudes are likely to contrast with certain values that have already acquired the status of unexamined defaults. We may not be commonly understood—but such a possibility should not be ruled out in advance. Sometimes, a framework that has freed itself from prevailing standards proves so fertile that universal interpretive tools themselves undergo the transformation necessary to encompass it. When that happens, an artistic movement, a literary style, or a set of ideas once intended for the few may become the heritage of the many, reshaping the very standards by which understanding is measured.