Victor Borge famously said that ‘the shortest distance between two people is a smile’. Tsujita Kyoji, or Kyoji sensei as he was commonly known at the East Asia department of the Hebrew University, taught me that a smile is also the shortest distance between two people who may not necessarily have linguistic symmetry.

Kyoji sensei was my Japanese teacher for four years, during which I, like the rest of his students, quickly grew to love and respect him. He was an incredibly kind individual and a generous and patient teacher. And he was a true mensch, with his gentle sense of humour, his wide smile and that twinkle in his eyes. As a linguist himself, I remember his great enthusiasm and support when he found out that I’m studying Japanese as part of a structural linguistics course. I remember his gentle encouragement to learn Turkish for comparative purposes, and my complete awe at his understanding of Hebrew which of course far surpassed mine.

Kyoji, together with his wife Mariko, who taught Japanese politics at the Hebrew University, opened their home and heart to us on many occasions. It seems to me incomprehensible that he is now gone forever. Whenever I think of or use what I sill remember of my Japanese, my thoughts often go back to him, and to the more profound and subtle lesson that he taught us; that is, that kindness and benevolence can transform even seemingly insurmountable tasks, including the learning of his seemingly impenetrably complex native language, into a gradually and safely realisable process. And that a smile is indeed the shortest distance between two people, in any language and outside it.

Kyoji sensei passed away early in the New Year. May he rest in peace.

I was born into a deeply musical family and, more broadly, a musical kibbutz community. Community sing-alongs, choirs and ensembles were a part of my childhood and adolescent environment that was as natural to me as breathing or walking. This meant that, from a relatively early age, I participated in various musical bodies, first as a choir singer and later as a (mostly) woodwind player.

Now, common music-making, and especially common singing, is a fascinating thing for someone who is interested, as I am, in the intersection of ethics and language. This is because music is, fundamentally, a non-linguistic system of human interrelationability. That is, a set of conventions and practices that enables individuals who may otherwise be complete strangers to one another, and without any kind of a common (natural) language, to share a sense of direction and purpose, and produce a sense of fellow-feeling among them. Not all music, of course, is instrumental, and textual settings can render particular pieces as highly captivating. But tonality seems to play at least as big a role, if not greater, in the production of this kind of momentum of human commonality, precisely because it appeals to our non- (or even pre-) linguistic nature.

There is nothing particularly new or novel about this observation, of course. Herder noted the immediate sense of sympathy associated with the very sound of a language, and Rousseau stressed the importance of music for communicating emotions as part of his idea of virtue as the ‘sublime science of simple souls. More recently, Leonard Bernstein has articulated this notion beautifully in The Infinite Variety of Music, with regard to the emergence - and decline - of atonal music: “[...] we are still earth creatures, still needful of human warmth and the need to communicate among ourselves. For which the Lord be praised. And as long as there is reaching out of one of us to another, there will be the healing comfort of tonal response.” (p. 13)

This unmediated fellow-feeling generated by joint music-making may, of course, be easily abused, precisely because of its intuitive nature. The tonality of military music, folksongs and national anthems are easily manipulatable in the service of adverse purposes. When misused, music can be an incredibly powerful force that transforms unmediated and often intuitive fellow-feeling into an instrument of group violence. But when used for good, the intuitive compassion generated by joint music-making can be a powerful tool for creating good will and a sense of commonality among otherwise estranged individuals. It may not in itself eliminate away social and political tensions; but it seems like a good way of creating the ‘circumstances of benevolence’ that just might.