The Second "Exile" and the Second Possible "Redemption"

From time to time I still find it difficult to digest the fact that I left Jerusalem at the end last September after living there for 19 consequtive years. This is my second "exile".

I left Jerusalem for the first time about 30 years before this in August 1993 after living there for five years as a PhD student at the Hebrew University. It took me about ten years to return there. In my first "exile" it was very difficult for me not only to digest this fact but also to live my daily life in another place. It took me two full years to start functioning more or less normally in the new society.

When I look back now at this first "exile", I wasn't living the present moment. Instead, I sacrificed it by waiting for a possible "redemption". It took me about 11 years to realize my dream of returning to Jerusalem in August 2004 to assume a position as a full-time lecturer in Hebrew linguistics at another Israeli university. I also acquired Israeli citizenship after a while.

The reason for the first and second "exiles" was more or less the same - money, or to be more precise, lack thereof. I had to leave Jerusalem both times in search of a new source of income elsewhere as I couldn't find any in Israel.

But the similarity ends here. I can relate to this second "exile" in a totally different state of consciousness, largely thanks to the fact that I studied Chassidus in Jerusalem. Its profound teachings give me not only a totally new perspective on life but also tools to cope with various life challenges.

Perhaps one of the most important diffences is that this time I can live the present moment without seeing it as a stepping stone for a possible "redempltion". So each moment can be a purpose in itself. This can fill my life in this new place with totally different, positive, energy unlike the first time.

Of course, I can't deny that I think of the second possible "redemption" from time to time, but most of the time I'm busy occupying myself with the fulfillment of two self-imposed missions - one private and the other public - which give me in turn both meaning and satisfaction though the daily challenges I face are not so easy.

Also concerning the possible "redemption" I expect, there is a fundamental difference. In my first "exile" I dreamed of returning to Jerusalem, but this time I'm thinking of a different city in a different country for financial and sociocultural reasons as well as for my spiritual growth, and this time I'm not sacrifising the present moment by dreaming too much and too often of this another beloved city of mine.

Discovering My Life Purpose

To be the best of my knowledge, and at least according to Chassidus, our life mission and life purpose are similar in that both of them are why we were born, and they are different in that the former is external, or a contribution we are supposed to make to the society and the world we live in, while the latter is internal, or a specific type of spiritual growth we are supposed to make.

I discovered my life mission at the age of 54 as a result of participating in group coaching based on Chassidus in Jerusalem from November 2017 until February 2018. This discovery was truly life-changing for me. It gave me a lot of material for contemplation, and eventually made me realize that academia wasn't even a means to fulfill my newly discovered life mission and decide to leave it on my own will for something that was in tune with this mission.

It was only two weeks ago during my weekly self-seclusion before the end of Sabbath. While walking and contemplating in nature in solitude, I suddently sensed two words intuitively - patience and compassion - and immediately realized that developing them is my life purpose in this reincarnation.

Since then I've been reviewing the major life events I've experienced and convinced that the more challenging they were, the more they contributed to the development of my patience and/or compassion.

When I discovered my life mission, all my life experiences started to make more sense. Now after discovering my life purpose, they make perfect sense. I also feel why I was guided to leave Israel after living there for 24 years and try a new life in a new location. I'm convinced that if I had remained in Israel, I couldn't have developed these spiritual virtues further significantly.

Enshittification

What a "juicy" word! ;-) I encountered it for the first time this week while looking for an ultimate solution to one worsening technical issue on Windows. I immediately understood its meaning and felt no other word could describe my growing frustration with Windows and its intrusive disservice more accurately.

Of all the online artiles I've found the one by Paul Thurrott, whom I remember as an amazing Windows maven, entitled Microsoft is Silently Reversing Some OneDrive Enshittification in Windows 11 eloquently described the same frustration I've been feeling. In this article he used the word nshittification.

I also found a Wikipedia entry called Enshittification, through which I also found two articles by the person who coined this juicy word - Social Quitting and My McLuhan Lecture on Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.

I've understood that there seem to be many other people who have been experiencing the same frustration with enshittification of not only Windows but also a growing number of software programs and online services, especially once they have become very popular.

I bought my first personal laptop computer in late 1994. The bundled OS back them was still Windows 3.1. I had - and still have - a rather unusual combination of multilingual requirements for my computing. It was with the long-awaited release of Windows 2000 that these requirements of mine were finally met fully. Ironically and unfortunately, Windows has become more and more intrusive and less and less flexible, forcing its users to use it in the way Microsoft deemed fit. I've experienced less and less freedom to customize it and more and more difficulties in doing so if at all.

My frustration with post-2000 Widows reached its all-time high when my two-year-old Asus laptop computer suddenly stopped working physically, and had to order a new one (but not by Asus!) and configure the preinstalled Windows 11, which showed visible signs of further enshittification.

This newly discovered word has helped me reevaluate the frustration I've been feeling with other software programs as well as some popular online services. I have no choice but to continue using Windows as I like macOS and Linux even less. But I have zero patience with any other Microsoft products, including Office, especially Word, whose users I admire in a sense for their patience. For the same reason I've stopped using any product by, for example, Adobe, Norton, McAfee, to mention just a few, because of their "ingenious" intrusiveness. They are good at making bloatware, which is fundamentaly opposed to my principle of minimalism.

PS: My favorite environment in multilingual computing

Self-Seclusion on Sabbaths

A few years ago when I still lived in Jerusalem I started a new custom of secluding myself in nature on the last hour of Sabbath, let's say, between April and September, when the day is still long. I was inspired directly by a small (but fascinating!) book entitled Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle and indirectly the the custom התבודדות of Breslov Chassidus.

All I do is to walk around and stay in nature, away from the incessant chatters of fellow humans, listen to its stillness, transform myself from a human doing to a human being, and feel the oneness of (or feel united with) the Universe. Once I'm transformed into a human being, I ideally stop talking to myself inside my egoic mind, so stop labeling anything around me. There simply exist no names, and nothing in the world is divided by linguistic labels.

This one hour is a culmination of the experience of Sabbath, or an "island in time", for me, and signals the return to the mundane state of a human doing. During this 25-hour period on this "island" I feel as if I were tapping into the wisdom of the Universe. I receive a flood of insights flowing into my mind without knowing why I know, and this flow suddenly stops once the Sabbath comes to an end.