A Year Since Leaving Jerusalem

Exactly a year ago I left Jerusalem for a few inevitable practical reasons after living there for 24 years in total. Hopefully I've learned and grown more from this experience in the past year than I had continued living there, not because I wanted to leave but because the new challenges I've been struggling with in this new place have forced me to get out of my comport zone.

After experiencing spiritual awakening, or liberation from the control of the ego, especially in thought, several years ago, I've been experiencing another kind of awakening, or liberation from the brainwashing by the collective ego in one important area. As I lost the common language with most of those I had known before my first awakening, I'm losing the common language with many of those I used to be in touch with before this second awakening.

This is also the second time that I left Jerusalem. When I left Jerusalem for the first time about 30 years ago, my new life in "exile" was very difficult. I spent the first two years doing nothing productive. But this time I'm not affected by this old new condition, mostly thanks to Chabad Chassidus, which I was lucky enough to have learned for three years back in Jerusalem prior to this "exile".

Though I live in social isolation with no regular physical contact with any Jewish community except once or twice a year when I visit a Chabad house in a distant city inside the same country, I've never felt lonely.

The fact that I've identified my life purpose in this past year helps me not only survive but also thrive in this new life as I can see clearly now that these new life challenges put me in an ideal condition for pursuing my life purpose.

This is also a very powerful experience for internalizing the Chassidic faith and confidence I learned in Jerusalem - the faith that everything is good, and the confidence that I'll be given the power to discover that everything is good.

Communication Skills

I started an online school to spread Jewish life wisdom anchored in Chabad Chassidus after leaving Israel at the end of last September and arriving at this new place soon aferwards. Recently I've decided to expand the existing menu of four courses and two types of life coaching by adding a third type of coaching - communication coaching.

While working with what few students and coaching clients I've had, I felt that some of them and potential clients like them have to improve their emotional intelligence first before improving their spiritual intelligence.

Before I starting this communication coaching, I thought erroneously that communication skills would be linguistic skills and some technical skills. What I've discovered can't be more distant from this. Linguistic skills constitute only a small part of communication skills. The latter are far broader and more complicated, which also makes them far more fascinating. Though excellent linguistic skills may be a minimal requirement for becoming an excellent communicator, they are far from being sufficient.

Now I'm convinced that everyone should acquire communication skills in parallel with the study of the first and foreign languages. In general, these skills are universal in that they can be applied to communication in any language though some sociocultural adjustments may have to be made to each language with its idiosyncratic sociocultural norms.

If I've succeeded in kindling your interest in the acquisition and/or improvement of communication skills, please allow me to recommend you the amazing book I use as the basis for my new communication coaching - Messages: The Communication Skills Book by Matthew McKay et al. This book has been translated into many other languages, including, for example, Russian - Как сказать: Главная книга по развитию коммуникативных навыков.

Almost Total Extinction of Meaningful Written Dialogs

When I first started using email in November 1994, almost nobody among my friends and acquaintances used it. Some of them even hadn't heard of it. But ironically, I remember having meaningful written dialogs with what few fellow early adopters of email.

In the meanwhile written communication has become identical to written digital communication though quite ridiculously, I'm finding myself forced to revert to snail mail in the year 2024 - three decades since I started using email - as the only way to contact one governmental authority in Israel, whose bureaucracy and system of digital communication are Kafkaesque.

These three decades have seen the rise and fall of email. Until around ten years ago email was still the most preferred means of digital communication. But since then more and more people, including myself, have switched to instant messengers for written digital communication. There are even enough people who have skipped email in their adoption of digital communication.

Theoretically, I know few people among my friends and acquaintances who have no means of digital communication. But again ironically, I have less and less meaningful written dialogs with them.

When I left Israel at the end of last September, I started to try to remain in touch with those with whom I had some kind of face-to-face communication in Jerusalem - about 50 in number - by sending them monthly updates of my personal mission in this new place. I stopped bothering about 20 of them, who never responded to me in the first six months or so. On the following months a few of them responded interchangeably, but this seldom lead to any meaningful dialog simply because they seldom or never answered my follow-up questions. I've decided to stop sending these public monthly updates as I've been feeling as if I were talking to the wall.

I wish I could say that my written digital communication in this new place is better. Unfortunately, the situation is more or less the same. I already have about 40 people living here, but I have meaningful written dialogs on a regular basis with only a few of them. They've told me that they have the same problem as I. I even have an impression that many people don't feel any need for any meaningful dialog, whether written or oral. I wish I were wrong. Some of them may even have a more serious problem of having lost the ability to express their (spontaneous) thoughts and feelings in writing.

I don't know how the situation is in other countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if I were told that it's more or less the same everywhere in the world. If so, meaningful written dialogs must be almost extinct. I'm still struggling as one of the remaining members of this "endangered species".