The ironies abound here.
The Israel Prize? Never heard of it. But others have. And, for some of them, it is the center of the universe.
Here is what the film is about:
wiki
[b]Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba) is a philologist who researches the different versions and phrasings of the Jerusalem Talmud. He and his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) are both professors at the Talmudic Research department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Uriel, a young charismatic academic, is extremely popular with the department’s students and the general public, and is also recognized by the establishment when he is elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The father, on the other hand, is a stubborn old-school purist in his research methods. He is unpopular, unrecognized, and frustrated by his would-be lifetime research achievement having gone unfulfilled, as a rival scholar, Prof. Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), published similar results one month ahead of Eliezer. Eliezer is also highly critical of the new methods of research used by his son and other modern researchers, as he considers them superficial. His ambition is to be recognized by being awarded the Israel Prize, but he is disappointed every year when he does not win it. His nature and the lack of recognition have made him bitter, anti-social, and envious of his son’s popularity.[/b]
In other words, inhabitants in a world of words—intellectuals squabbling “academically” over how to understand that world going all the back to, well, as far as you can go.
I’m sure the same sort of stuff [nonsense?] happens in all the other university departments as well. Even the hard sciences: What really happens in a black hole? what is the exact nature of quantum mechanics?
People become fixated on one particular thing. And suddenly it becomes very, very important that how they understand it is the way everyone else had better understand it too. We see it here all the time as well. But there are many things that can be undertood in more than one way. Then what? Then this: Gentlmen [and it is almost entirely men] start your egos!
To wit:
Director Joseph Cedar on why he decided to make a film that focuses on the Hebrew University’s Talmud department:
It is the smallest department in the university, but it is famous worldwide for its uncompromising methods, and its unforgiving attitude toward the notion of ‘mistake’. Once I started hearing stories from within this department, about mythological rivalries between scholars, stubbornness on an epic scale, eccentric professors who live with an academic mission that is bigger than life itself, even if its topic is radically esoteric…
trailer:
youtu.be/3DjUwSr0VFo
FOOTNOTE [Hearat Shulayim] 2011
Written and directed by Joseph Cedar
[b]Uriel [at conference]: Today I know two things I didn’t know then. One, even a father being a senior Talmud lecturer at Hebrew University is not something kids brag about at school. Two, and seriously, this time. If one really has to define our profession, the nature of our craft, the essense of its totality…our aspirations, our social ties, our dreams…we are teachers. Those who impart knowledge to others. Who take from the former generation and pass on to the next. That is our role.
…
Narrator: Eliezer Shkolnik came up with a revolutionary argument. A version of the Jerusalem Talmud circulated in Europe in the Middle Ages, different from the version we have today. He proposed this after discovering small differences between the version we have and the text quoted by the Sages of the time. Understand, this means hundreds, thousands of books, each having several versions of manuscripts. Eliezer Shkolnik analyzed all of them, for almost 30 years. A huge undertaking! Then, a month before he was about to publish this monumental work, his life’s project, another scholar, Professor Yehuda Grossman, by chance, found inside the bindings of books at an Italian monastery, the manuscript of that version of the Jerusalem Talmud. The original that was used by the European Sages. And so made all of Shkolnik’s work unnecessary. It actually proved Shloknik’s thesis, but Grossman published it before him.[/b]
Again, all this for something only a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny tiny percent of the world even gives a damn about. And all regarding a God that almost certainly does not exist.
Yonah: Basically, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that, unfortunately, your father will not receive the Israel Prize this year.
Uriel: You should be talking to my father about this, not me.
Yonah: This brings us to the good news. You will be receiving the Israel Prize this year.
Uriel: Excuse me?
They called the wrong Professor Shkolnik.
[b]Uriel: The legal aspects here are all well and good but we’re talking about life and death. My father has been passed over for 20 years! Finally, when he thinks he is getting the prize, you can’t take it away from him. It’ll kill him. I’m not joking here. It’ll kill him.
…
Uriel: How is he inferior to Hecht, or Goldberg, or Sheperman? Notice I’m not mentioning anyone here.
Grossman: I’m willing to argue why others are worthy. But I refuse to list the shortcomings I find in your father’s research.
Uriel: Naturally! Because in the end, this enables you to hide the fact that the grudge you hold against him is personal, not professional.[/b]
But then it all gets personal.
I’m with Woody Allen here regarding awards such as this: it’s either politics or all hopelessly subjective.
[b]Grossman: Uriel, there is no greater betrayal of your father and his principles than what you are aking of me. In spite of my criticism of him your father never validated a mistake because it was convenient. You know that.
Uriel: Yes, but he won’t.
Grossman: We will.
Uriel: So what?
Grossman: So what? It turns the whole system into a circus.
Uriel: No! It means there are things more important than the truth.
…
Uriel: Enough with this truth! So much aggression and violence you hide under the word, “truth”. I don’t believe in this romanticism. You don’t seek truth. You seek honors, just like other mortals. Such a terrible thing you are doing in the name of truth. It’s just a prize. That’s all it is. It’s not a betrayal of anything.[/b]
Grossman finally agrees to go along. But only if Uriel 1] agrees to write the “judges considerations” and 2] is never again nominated for the prize himself.
Now is it “just a prize”?
[b]Eliezer [to interviewer]: I believe the Israel Pize has lost much of its prestiege in recent years. When things got mixed up and the prize in Jewish Sciences started going to people who deal with rabbinical literature, folklore. The recent recipients are not researchers in the scientific sense. Studies on rattle in the Talmudic era, or the musings about the marital life of one sage or another, or cookie recipes in the Babylonian Diaspora, do not offer a scientific contribution and do not honor the institution of the Israel Prize.
…
Interviewer: Your son wrote a book about marital relations during the Talmudic era.
Eliezer: Uriel wrote many books.
…
Interviewer: I got the impression you and your son represent opposite schools of research.
Eliezer: I’ll illustrate it for you. Say we both deal with potsherds. Yes, broken pottery. One of us examines these potsherds, cleans them meticulously, catalogs them, measures them scientifically and precisely, tries to decipher which period they’re from, and who made them. And if he succeeds, he has done his work properly, and it has scientific value for generations. The other looks at the potsherds for a few seconds, sees they’re more or less the same color, and immediately makes a pot out of them. The potsherds may be from different periods, they may not exactly match, the main thing is, he has a pot! The pot is very nice, very attractive, but it has nothing to do with the scientific truth. It is an empty vessel. An Illusion. A tower with no foundation.
Interviewer: Sounds like this pot really annoys you.
Eliezer: There is no pot! That’s the point! It’s fiction. You can’t be annoyed with something that doesn’t exist.
…
Eliezer: Uriel excels in what he does. But I wouldn’t call it Talmudic research.
…
Uriel [angry after reading his father’s remarks in the newspaper]: Measuring potsherds all your life, with nothing to show for it. That’s science? It’s masturbation![/b]