Printed Books vs. Electronic Books

Since I was a child, I've been an early adopter of new technologies. The first of these "new" - now obsolete - technologies is a tape recorder. I still have one of the first recordings I made with my new tape recorder. And the still used technologies I adopted much earlier than my friends and acquaintances include email, personal websites, and blogging.

Every time I found a new technology I had adopted useful and worthy of wider recognition, I became its preacher. And every time I tried to preach it, I encountered people who refused to try it and decided stubbornly to stick to an old technology.

I already know that many cases of such stubbornness of these people stem from their sheer ignorance of new technologies as well as their tacis blind faith that they as users of time-honored technologies are superior to those who jump to emerging technologies.

In some cases I've also identified some kind of fetishism. One excellent example of this seeming fetishism is that of printed books vis-à-vis electronic books. I still continue to encounter otherwise learned people who refuse to try the latter. This is a pity as they don't know what they miss.

It's true that printed books have a few advantages electronic books don't have. One of them, at least for me, is that the former can affect my vibration with their very physical presence in my library. This is especially the case for me with Jewish books. I feel totally different now when I'm surrounded with Hasidic books from when I still kept academic books in the active part of my personal library in the living room. I also need certain Jewish books in a printed form for Sabbath observance.

Otherwise, I prefer electronic books for the ease of storage, portability and readability. I can only keep only up to about 1,200 printed books and I've already reached this maximum. Every time I buy a new printed book, I have to make a thorny decision of taking out one existing one for "adoption".

When it comes to electronic books, the storage space isn't a problem for all intents and purposes in our age. Recently the number of electronic books I have has reached 5,000, and this number is growing every week, if not every day.

The biggest advantage of electronic books for me is their readability, or to be more precise, their listenability. When a book I want to read is on some spiritual, that is, suprarational, topic rather than a rational, e.g., academic, topic, I can understand and absorb its content much better by listening to it than by reading it.

I've been using a free Windows program called Balabolka for converting electronic books in EPUB format to voice on the fly or to an external MP3 file so that I may listen to it with an external MP3 player while on the go. This way I've "read" literally hundreds of books in the past five years since I decided to leave academia. I don't think I could do this with printed books.

Why I've Stopped Using Facebook (Again) as a Means of Personal Communication

I started using Facebook as a means of personal communication for the first time in late August 2016, right after I got married (in the meanwhile I've got divorced). I originally intented to use it to share pictures of our honeymoon and new married life with my parents and sister as well as a small number of close friends.

It didn't take long to realize that I had become addicted to Facebook and this had started to harm our married life. So only after about six months I stopped using it.

In retrospect, I know clearly now that my addiction was to instant gratifications for "likes" I received for my posts there. I also know clearly now that the more sensational the posts are, the more "friends" they reach by design.

So when I had to start using Facebook again in July 2018 as a means of marketing my new private business of Jewish life coaching, I didn't intend to use Facebook for this purpose, but the moment I reopened my account, I was flooded with "friend" requests from people I also know offline. I accepted most of them, but I told myself to use it very carefully as a means of personal communication this time.

Again it didn't take me long to realize that Facebook has some fundamental flaws as a platform for meaningful personal communication. This time I shared all my personal posts in public on purpose in order to minimize the danger of writing them from my ego. I also tried my best to stay away from those who write negative and/or toxic posts.

On the one hand, I had a far less number of meaningful dialogs with those with whom I remained connected this time. On the other hand, even after I unfriended those with whom I had no interaction whatsoever, most posts by the rest of my "friends" didn't interest me very much as they seemed to have shared their posts with their respective "friends" for instant gratifications though this must have been unconscious.

To make a long story short, I stopped using Facebook as a means of personal communication about a year ago though I continue to use it for marketing my private business and follow the business pages of those individuals and organizations that inspire me and contribute to my spiritual growth.

Since then I've never missed this personal use of Facebook as I see now that it was one of the main sources of my daily stress. And since then I make a conscious effort to invest more time and energy in other means of personal communication, including face-to-face communication, telephone conversations, chats with instant messengers, and email correspondences. These days I'm reappreciating the power and importance of face-to-face communication, especially in terms of its spiritual vibration.

It's true that since I stopped used Facebook (again), I've lost in touch with certain people. But this seems to be a kind of connection I can do without. If I really care about someone, I contact him or her by other means of communication, if not every Monday and Thursday. Recently I've started doing so consciousnly.

The Most Scary People - Those Who Never Smile

I first took a serious interest in Hasidism not intellectually but as life wisdom when I started participating in Jewish life coaching, which I now practice as a coach, for a group of Jewish men in Jerusalem in December 2017. Though I had met enough Hasidim (followers of Hasidism) before, this was the first time to spend 50 hours with some Hasidim in a special setting where we were expected to disclose our innermost agonies.

Of about a dozen participants in these life-changing coaching sessions about one half were Hasidim and the other half were the so-called misnagdim, or the "opponents" of Hasidism. Until then I used to socialize with the latter.

It didn't take me a long time to notice a stark and startling contrast between these two groups of people though I know that not everyone in any social collective behaves stereotypically. The contrast between our Hasidic and non-Hasidic participants was between joy and depression. Naturally, I socialized mostly with these joyful and smiling Hasidim.

Then I started wondering what is in the teachings and practice of Hasidism, and eventually ended up studying Chabad Hasidism for three years since November 2018. Now I know that if you study Hasidism properly, this will inevitably bring you true joy in life.

That's why it was a great shock to me to find those who don't smile among people who daven regularly at one local Chabad house to which I switched last September after davening at a modern Orthodox shul for 16 years. These people who don't smile (nor greet back) may not have studied Hasidism or may not have internalized its teachings.

The most scary people for me are those who never smile. Unfortunately, I've seen that there are such people even among frum Jews in general and at a Chabad house in particular.

The most dominant emotion that is evoked inside me every time I see someone who doesn't smile is compassion as there were times when I myself didn't smile in my mid-twenties.

I believe that smile and lack thereof reflect how much our inner sun is covered by the clouds of our egoic thoughts. I also believe that smile can be infectious as King Solomon says, "Like water face to face, thus the heart of man to man" (Proverbs 27:19 - this English translation is by Robert Alter). If I smile to strangers, they generally smile back to me.

But unfortunately, there are a minority of people whose soul is covered so thickly with the clouds of their egoic thoughts that no smile of anyone else can dispel these clouds. All I can do with them is just to keep smiling to them if I have to see them regularly, hoping and praying that one day they will also start smiling.