Martha Bayles: Hearts and Minds

Since Jeffrey Goldberg used it on his Atlantic blog and Michael Chabon picked it up in The New York Times, the word of the week is seichel, defined by Goldberg as connoting “wisdom, ... ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.” A person with seichel “looks for a clever way out of problems,” “understands that the most direct way —  blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, and (most important) can foresee consequences of his actions.”

Both Goldberg and Chabon regard last week’s attack on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara as totally lacking in seichel. 

Translated into ancient Greek, seichel would be sophrosune, a word connoting shrewdness, gutsiness, persistence, grace — and alertness. Above all, alertness: the capacity to pay attention, to read people’s motives, to grasp the moral imperative at work — and to act. The embodiment of sophronuse is Odysseus, Homer’s “great tactician,” but Odysseus makes one big mistake. Having escaped the clutches of the mighty Cyclops, he succumbs to hubris (the opposite of sophronuse) and taunts the one-eyed monster by telling him it was “Odysseus, raider of cities,” who blinded him. The Cyclops complains to Poseidon, god of the sea, who sends a violent storm to drown Odysseus’s crew and delay his homecoming by a decade.

Who is the Cyclops in the Mavi Marmara incident? Who else but the one-eyed monster of our time: the illuminated screen? On TV and the Internet, the battle of the citizen videos began immediately; the European, Turkish, and Arab media sputtered outrage; the dovish Israeli media agonized; and the hawkish Israeli comedy troupe Latma TV posted “We Con the World,” a parody of the 1985 aid-to-Africa song, “We Are the World.”

The latter attempt is about as witty as a Center for Security Policy–funded video can get. But it’s not going to outwit the monster. To avoid being shipwrecked by world opinion, Israel is going to need more a lot more seichel and a lot less ... How do you say hubris in Yiddish?