Footnote (2011)

Shlomo Bar-Aba: Eliezer Shkolnik

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Quotes 

• Eliezer Shkolnik : That's a very nice idea, very nice... but wrong.

• Josh : We can learn from this that hospitality is more important than the Sabbath?

  Eliezer Shkolnik : This is a very nice idea. Very nice. But wrong.

  Josh : My father says that this is what Lévinas says.

  Eliezer Shkolnik : Yes. One cannot draw evidence from fools.

• Eliezer Shkolnik : To quote the Babylonian Talmud, "A man can be jealous of anyone except his son and pupil."

• Eliezer Shkolnik : 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, main thing is, he has a pot! The pot is very nice, very attractive, but it has nothing to do with scientific truth. It is an empty vessel. An illusion. A tower with no foundation. There is no pot! That's the point! It's fiction.

• Eliezer Shkolnik : A momentary lapse of concentration of the copyist, whose eye skips from one word to another, is called "homoeoteleuton."