Author Christopher Miller writes 'The Small Scroll' to share the eternal truths of Christianity

VICTORIA, British Columbia, April 13, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ --In the Bible, the life of Jesus Christ is depicted through the eyes of various prophets. Author Christopher Miller wrote the reflective, jewel of a book, "The Small Scroll: The Enlightenment of Jesus," that follows the life of Jesus Christ from His perspective and unveils the simple, but eternal, truths of faith.

Written as a descriptive narrative, Miller weaves scripture and Jesus' stream of consciousness as he navigates the world as a human and fulfills his destiny. "The Small Scroll" portrays Jesus' human experience by demonstrating how He consistently faced hardship, and through meditation and internal knowledge that He was the Son of God, was able to rise above as the Savior.

"In a world that is riddled with disagreement, there are eternal truths presented in the Bible," Miller said. "With 'The Small Scroll,' I want to spread the word of these truths and allow readers to discover what a spiritual life is."

"The Small Scroll" features timeless lessons from Jesus that transcend past Biblical times and into modern day. Readers, who may be questioning their own destiny, will be able to relate to Jesus' journey of accepting that he is the Savior. Because this book illustrates the life of Jesus from a first-person perspective, readers can feel a one-on-one connection with this character and, in turn, with Jesus Christ.

"The Small Scroll" has received both the Editor's Choice and Rising Star awards from iUniverse. Also, it was recommended by US Review:

"The descriptions of the resurrection from the dead and ascending to heaven may provoke thoughts of what it might be like at one's own demise," said The US Review of Books. "Miller has produced a masterful tale as well as an argument for Christianity."

"The Small Scroll: The Enlightenment of Jesus" By Christopher Miller ISBN: 978-1-5320-6119-6 (softcover); 978-1-5320-9167-4 (hardcover); 978-1-5320-6120-2 (electronic) Available at the iUniverse Online Bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

About the author Christian author Christopher Miller found his faith with he was 35 years old. In the Christian faith, he found the logical, intellectually based religion he was looking for. He previously worked as a bank manager and operated a mortgage company before retiring in 1996. Currently, he resides in Victoria, British Columbia with his wife. To learn more about Miller and his book, please visit http://thesmallscroll.com/.

For Interview Requests & Review Copies, Please Contact: LAVIDGE Phoenix Krista Tillman 480-648-7560 ktillman@lavidge.com

###

SOURCE LAVIDGE

See original here:
New Book Shares the Life of Jesus Christ From a First-Person Perspective - Yahoo Finance

BEFORE THERE WAS a self, there was the tribe.

True, tribe is a troublesome word, bearing the weight of decades of anthropological study that privileged Western civilization over all other traditions. But let us rescue it here, pare it down to its simplest meaning, as a name for the first human communities that formed beyond the primal bonds of kinship the beginnings of the great experiment we call society, which taught us to be human.

Before there was a self, there was the tribe.

Our earliest ancestors did not stand alone; they banded together to survive. For vast stretches of history, our consciousness was shaped by our connections to the people in closest proximity to us. Identity was like a complicated address, at the intersection of birthplace and blood, the things we chose to worship and the ways we kept ourselves alive, in a finite landscape we knew as both home and world. We were defined not by our hidden interior life but by our outward gestures, the rituals and markings we shared, the tributes we paid to common ideals of goodness and beauty not by what made us different but by what made us the same.

Ernest C. Witherss I Am a Man, Sanitation Strike (1968). Dr. Ernest C. Withers Sr., courtesy of the Withers Family Trust

But how do we square this with the ethos of individualism that has dominated Western life for the past four centuries? The very idea of the individual (from the Latin for indivisible: that which cannot be separated from itself) is a late construct, specific to time and place. While some historians trace its origins as far back as 12th-century Europe, it was not fully embraced until the 17th century, at the start of the Age of Enlightenment, coinciding with the rise of the nation-state, which superseded and subsumed tribal allegiances into a single destiny. Becoming a citizen, part of an amorphous, disparate, geographically wide-ranging group many of whose members you would likely never meet was inextricably linked to becoming an individual, no longer beholden to the tribe that once claimed you, and free (at least theoretically) to decide for yourself who you are or want to be.

The primacy of the individual is still resisted by many cultures, particularly in much of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. For if you enshrine the self above all, theres the danger of dead-ending in solipsism, disavowing the responsibilities of public life in pursuit of a perfected solitude, as if being in the world and being true to oneself are at odds. The early 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought otherwise: that to be human is to be in the world. We come alive in the presence of others. The self is not a fixed goal but a flux, ever in progress, generated and modified by each encounter, in the space and sometimes the tension between what is expected of us by family, society, cosmology and what we might actually want. Even before we thought of ourselves as individuals, we had private desires, arising in response to the dictates of our context; as the American-Canadian historian Natalie Zemon Davis has written of the premodern era, being embedded in a circumscribed social sphere did not preclude self-discovery, but rather prompted it.

ITS WHEN THAT context grows too large, beyond the human capacity to grasp, that we may become unmoored: Our confidence in who we are starts to fray. In this age of globalization and corporate homogenization, when it appears that the generic is triumphing over the particular, there is a hunger to stand out, to resist the broader narrative. At the same time, the erosion of local institutions and neighborhood life has left a void: Some of us fear we no longer have a place to call home, in the deepest sense of the word, a place that is ours and can never be taken from us. In Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (1975), the American political scientist Harold R. Isaacs likened this alienation to the literal and spiritual displacement of immigrants transported across great physical and cultural distances; group identity is the ark they carry with them, the temple of whatever rules ones forebears lived by whatever form of creed or belief in a given set of answers to the unanswerables. To be part of a tribe is at once a refuge and a declaration of faith. It is to be anchored, to be certain that we have a role in the world.

Renee Coxs The Signing (2018). Pigment inkjet print

But is tribe the best way to describe the loose alliances of today, groups that transcend the old ties of kinship and language, united instead by ideology or aesthetic (itself often a manifestation of ideology)? The English language fails us. A clan is related by blood, a generation by age, a faction by politics, a sect by religion, a cabal by conspiracy. A clique doesnt scale beyond the intimacy of friends (and enemies), and a gang has come to be deployed almost exclusively in matters of youth and crime. To call a group a subculture presumptively shunts it to the margins. There is no English correlative to the Chinese suffix zu, which applies to both clan, zongzu, and ethnic group, minzu, and has been recently adapted as latter-day ethnographic slang, delineating the likes of yi zu, the ant tribe, college graduates from the provinces who move to the cities and wind up toiling at poverty level, and ken lao zu, the bite-the-old-folks cohort, young people who do no work and leech off their parents. Still, these are nicknames imposed by observers, not voluntarily chosen identities or loyalties.

Etymologically, tribe is fairly neutral, from the Latin tribus, an administrative category designating a voting unit: that is, a body of people endowed with a degree of political power. It does not presuppose an opposition, like the Japanese dichotomy of uchi-soto, which marks inside and outside, the familiar and the unknown, us and them each group explicitly defined by what it is not.

But after Europeans began to explore other regions in the 15th century, the word tribe took on the shadow of colonialism, as a label reserved for non-Western peoples who were seen to represent an earlier and implicitly inferior state of social evolution. The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has criticized the distinction long drawn between tribes and civilization as opposing cultures of war and peace, arguing that tribes are not innately fierce or predisposed to violence, and since the last half of the 20th century, the term has largely vanished from anthropological texts only to shift back into popular parlance. Today, American pundits speak in worried tones about the fragmentation of the country and an increase in tribalism, as if acknowledging a group identity were a retreat to a more savage time.

Dutch and Flemish authors photographed with personnel of the Dutch publishing house De Bezige Bij in the library of the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, on the publishers 25th anniversary, in 1969 (left); its 60th anniversary, in 2004 (center); and its 75th anniversary, in 2019 (right). 1969 Paul Huf/De Bezige Bij; 2004 Thom Hoffman/De Bezige Bij; 2019 Stephan Vanfleteren/De Bezige Bij

YET NO OTHER word in English carries the same promise of a family beyond family. Its a newly urgent notion in the West today, and to focus only on the clashes between partisans in the political sphere is to ignore both the multiplicity of tribes and how they bring vigor to public life. The strength of a culture lies not in its promotion of a single way of being but in its ability to sustain a diversity of viewpoints. How else are ideas generated but through exchange and debate, polyphony rather than a single voice? Among the groups celebrated in the pages that follow, borders are fluid; these are not hermetic bubbles but ever-expanding spheres. For some, membership is testament to a crucible of experience. The cooks who have passed through the kitchens of the seminal Mexican chef Enrique Olvera bear their scars and burns along with the banner of Mexican cuisine, staking its rightful place among the great culinary traditions of the world; the bond between the activists of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, founded in 1987 to denounce the fatal passivity of the medical-industrial complex in failing to confront the H.I.V. crisis, is sustained in part by the memory of their comrades who died too early. Others find their associates in the realms of art or fashion, like the black filmmakers championing the work of the formative American photographer and director Gordon Parks as they build legacies of their own, and the coterie of Guccis iconoclastic designer Alessandro Michele, including acolytes, muses and those who are both at once, in a give-and-take of inspiration. Sometimes connections are accidental rather than sought out, occurring by pull of gravity, as with the polymathic luminaries who over the past three decades have come to haunt humble Omen, a small country-style Japanese restaurant on a less-trafficked block of SoHo in Manhattan, whose indifference to chic paradoxically draws those most in thrall to it.

What these groups share is an experience of collective effervescence, in the phrase of the 19th-century French sociologist mile Durkheim. The catharsis and exaltation historically invoked in religious worship find a modern analogue in the electricity that snaps through a crowd gathered in common cause. There exists a source of religious life as old as humanity and which can never run dry: It is the one which results from the fusion of consciences, Durkheim declared in a 1914 speech. Transcendence can be achieved by the mere fact of coming together, thinking together, feeling together, acting together.

Tseng Kwong Chis Art After Midnight (1985). C Print Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.

The 20th-century Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan attributed the decay of tribal culture to the overriding of oral tradition by a codified, written language, a process accelerated by the 15th-century invention of the printing press. He saw this as a corruption of our original unmediated sensual relationship to the world of things and to each other. Once we no longer needed to communicate face-to-face, to connect the message to the messenger, we grew estranged. McLuhan also predicted in a 1969 interview, before the dawn of the internet that electronic media would revive tribalism by creating a simultaneity of experience, bringing back the prelapsarian immediacy of a long-lost village. In this ceaseless flow of data, theres a risk of a tribe becoming no more than a brand, its members identities reduced to the products they buy swirly-hued bath bombs, say, or catchphrases memorialized in neon scribble signs choices that can easily be monetized and exploited as part of a capitalist system. Marketers speak of consumer tribes and corporate leaders are exhorted to instill in their employees a tribal culture, leveraging loyalty and a sense of mission for greater production and profits.

But true tribes shuck off labels, resist easy slotting within an index. Theyre instinctual, constantly shape-shifting, drafters of their own fates. Whether rabble-rousers or quiet meditators, crusaders on a mission or proclaimers of unexpected beauty, they are family: individuals who choose to become one, and make of that communion the beginnings of a new world.

Ligaya Mishan is a writer at large for T Magazine.

Read this article:
What Is a Tribe? - The New York Times

Americas oracle of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, seeks to put the coronavirus pandemic in the context of his ongoing narrative of the changing world order.

In his two recent books, On China and World Order, Kissinger describes the geopolitical dynamics of the past half-century. He sees the changes as having laid the groundwork for a massive shift in world influence from the United States and the West to the Peoples Republic of China.

It is a revolutionary transition that he played a major, if not dominant, part in arranging as an adviser to eight U.S. presidents and, simultaneously, to five supreme leaders of Communist China.

Yet, in the 828 words of his Wall Street Journal article, The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order, Kissinger never mentions China. It is unclear whether he had it in mind when he predicted the pandemics aftermath: Many countries institutions will be perceived as having failed.

The direct cause of Chinas epidemic exploding into a global pandemic was the flagrant refusal of the communist authorities to control it immediately or to allow international experts in to investigate. But, for Kissingers purposes in this essay, that is not a matter worth considering. To argue now about the past only makes it harder to do what has to be done, he writes.

He is not reluctant, however, to identify U.S. shortcomings that span several administrations: insufficient medical supplies, overwhelmed intensive care units, inadequate testing resources, no cure, no vaccine. Still, he acknowledges, The U.S. administration has done a solid job in avoiding an immediate catastrophe.

But, depending on the pandemics outcome, Kissinger sees the consequences for the United States as almost existential. The Trump administrations ability to arrest and then reverse the spread of the virus will determine the prospects for public confidence in Americans ability to govern themselves. As for the Chinese peoples trust in the communist authorities ruling them, he is silent about the signs of further erosion. Nor does the regimes disinformation campaign to deflect blame to the United States merit his attention.

Instead, Kissinger instructs U.S. officials not to neglect the urgent task of launching a parallel enterprise for the transition to the post-coronavirus order. Based on his previous writings and his 50 years of activities since Richard Nixon enlisted him to help with the opening to China, it is likely that the new world order he envisions is some form of China-U.S. condominium, with China increasingly the dominant "partner."

But such a relationship, which essentially means carrying the recent engagement compulsion to its logical conclusion, inevitably would conflict with Kissingers subsidiary admonition to safeguard the principles of the liberal world order. The worlds democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. He lists justice along with the usual state responsibility to provide security and economic well-being, but is silent on whether human rights and the expansion of democracy should be pursued.

Kissinger avoids the issue by simply deferring it, saying, This millennial issue of legitimacy cannot be settled simultaneously with the effort to overcome the COVID-19 plague priorities must be established. The problem with this approach, as Kissinger has used it in the past, is that it always prioritizes order over legitimacy or justice. After the communist regimes massacre of peaceful sit-in student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Kissinger said Deng Xiaoping acted as any other leader would in a similar situation.

If, as Kissinger argues, political reform cannot be achieved and should not even be attempted during times of crisis, it might be expected that safeguarding the liberal world order and sustaining Enlightenment values should be the Wests priority project at all other times. But those are not the goals of Chinas ruling Communist Party, and Kissinger has spent an entire career prevailing upon Western leaders to accept this China for what it is and to make room for it in the ever-evolving world order.

That, however, was not what Nixon had in mind when he first educated the Soviet nuclear scholar and Harvard professor on the nature of the China challenge and the urgent need to change its system and world outlook. When he dispatched Kissinger to Beijing to prepare for Nixons upcoming visit, he cautioned him about the need to avoid making preemptive concessions to China.

But that advice was not followed, beginning with the abandonment of Taiwan. Decades later, and despite Taiwans full democratization, Kissinger still seeks the consummation of that betrayal, warning the Taiwanese government and people that Beijings patience is wearing thin. True to form, Xi Jinping has repeated Kissingers message and has escalated military preparations against Taiwan.

Just as an increasingly reckless and irresponsible China unleashed the coronavirus pandemic on the world, its actions may well cause war to break out across the Taiwan Strait. If so and like the pandemic, Tiananmen, Uighur concentration camps, live organ harvesting, persecution of dissidents and a range of other moral outrages, the institution of the Chinese Communist Party will be perceived as having failed. It will, at long last, be time for it to go. Priorities must be established.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.

Originally posted here:
Kissinger's post-pandemic world order and the demise of the Chinese Communist Party | TheHill - The Hill

Posted April 11, 2020 06:01:45

In 2011 the writer Shokoofeh Azar found herself in a strange country, with a strange dilemma.

As a journalist in Iran, words and language had been her weapon of choice a way to speak out about the injustices she saw around her. But suddenly she was a refugee in Australia, where she couldn't speak more than a few words of English.

"When I came to Australia I felt that I didn't have language and the journalism that I loved," Azar says.

"But then I said to myself, 'OK, you don't have language, but you have freedom of expression'. I had language in my country but I didn't have the freedom to write whatever I wanted, without being arrested because of my writing."

So, in her new home in Perth, Azar began writing a novel in her native Farsi language a novel highly critical of Iran's Islamic government.

That book, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, has now been shortlisted for the International Booker the top writing prize for a book translated into English.

She's the first-ever Iranian writer to make the list.

Shokoofeh Azar came to Australia by boat in 2011. She was seeking political asylum.

Back in Iran, she had been jailed multiple times for her journalism, which was critical of the theocratic Iranian Government, in power since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

After her most recent arrest, which included three months in isolation, Azar's family had advised her to flee.

"After I came out of the jail my mother and my older sisters said 'they will keep on arresting you, and next time it will be longer'," Azar recalls.

The journey to Australia was difficult. Azar spent five nights on the ocean, on a boat with no roof, and by the time she arrived at the Christmas Island detention centre, she was having trouble breathing. She was sent to the mainland for treatment for suspected tuberculosis, and after being given the all-clear, was settled in Perth.

Far from her family and unable to speak a word of English, Azar says she was depressed and angry. But she eventually realised that distance gave her scope to write critically of Iran without fearing prosecution.

In the foreword to her book, she pays tribute to her new home, and the freedom it gave her.

"I am profoundly grateful to the Australian people for accepting me into this safe and democratic country where I have the freedom to write this book, a liberty denied me in my homeland of Iran," she wrote.

The Enlightenment of The Greenage Tree follows one family as they are caught up in the violence and fear of the years after the Islamic Revolution.

The book opens in 1988, when the matriarch of the family achieves enlightenment at the top of a plum tree at the same moment that her only son is hanged without trial. It's a shocking revelation that sets the tone for the rest of the book, which expertly weaves classical Persian storytelling techniques with clear-eyed accounts of atrocity.

Jinns (genie-like spirits), demons, ghosts and mermaids sit side-by-side with dictators and torturers.

It is a precarious balancing act between light and shade that took Azar long nights of writing to perfect.

The book is narrated by the teenage Bahar, another character whose past combines violence and mythology. Azar, who was born just seven years before the Islamic Revolution, says Bahar is a version of her own teenage self.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is one of six novels in contention for this year's International Booker, an annual prize for a book translated into English, which is published in the UK or Ireland.

The shortlist is normally announced at a packed party in London, but this year, with the COVD-19 outbreak keeping everyone home, it was revealed in an online video.

At her home in Geelong, Shokoofeh Azar got an email from her UK publisher to tell her she'd made the shortlist. The first person she shared the news with was her 8-year-old daughter.

"And then I sent a message to my mother in Iran, my sisters in Iran and my best friends in Iran, so everyone was so thrilled and happy," she says.

As the first-ever Iranian writer to be shortlisted for the prize, Azar says she's getting a lot of support from home despite the fact that her book has not been published there.

"It's really feeling amazing that both Iranians and Australians are happy that I've been shortlisted," she says.

Azar joins on this year's shortlist an impressive line-up of authors, whose books have been translated from five different languages Spanish, German, Japanese, Dutch and Farsi.

The International Booker celebrates translators as well as authors, with the 50,000-pound ($98,000) prize split equally between author and translator. If Azar wins, she will share the prize with a translator who has chosen to stay anonymous for their own safety.

"They still go to Iran and back, and it would definitely be dangerous for them because my novel is all about critiquing Islam in Iran," she says.

The winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize will be announced on May 19.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is published in Australia by Wild Dingo Press.

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, books-literature, awards-and-prizes, novel, australia, perth-6000, geelong-3220, iran-islamic-republic-of

Read more:
Australian author Shokoofeh Azar shortlisted for International Booker Prize with novel inspired by Iranian history and folklore - ABC News

In some religions, chanting helps to settle the mind and prepare it for meditation. As much of the world lives in isolation due to the coronavirus outbreak, many have suggested using the time to meditate and be in the here and now.

Buddhists believe the path to enlightenment requires periods of detachment from the world soself-quarantine offers an opportunity.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo is a Buddhist nun and social activist who splits her time between India and the US. She is from California andwas an avid surfer growing up a practice that she says helped prepare her to embrace Buddist teachings. After being ordained in 1977, she has worked on nonprofits focused on Buddhist women and education.

Lekshe is also a professor of Buddhism and world religions at the University of San Diego. She spoke withThe World's Marco Werman about the role of meditation and reflection during the spread of COVID-19.

Related:'Kung Fu' nuns empower women at risk of climate-caused trafficking

Karma Lekshe Tsomo: It happened to me in India about 30 years ago when I got bitten by a viper, a poisonous snake, and my whole world changed in that one moment. I faced death head-on for three months, not knowing from day to day whether I would be alive tomorrow. This really taught me the value of these teachings on how to be completely in the present moment. Let go of the past. Let go of the future, and focus completely on this precious, present moment.

So the teachings on impermanence, for example, teach that all things change. Why are we surprised? The Buddha taught that beings encounter unpleasantness and suffering in life. It's unavoidable. So again, why are we surprised? Clinging to our expectations that life is supposed to be a bowl of cherries only makes us unhappy and dissatisfied. If we accept the reality of the human condition, then we can accept these things. We can understand.

Related:How AmericanBuddhismevolved into something distinct and its own

There are so many different teachings and so many of them apply to this situation. Like, for example, a lot of people are feeling restricted. They're feeling angry. They're not liking confinement. And yet, our situation, whatever it may be, can't be compared to the sufferings of refugees in the camps, who are struggling even for water and food. So loving kindness is an excellent method for cutting through our own anger and aversion. Also, the teaching on compassion for the sufferings of others not to turn away, but [use] whatever resources we have to try to contribute to relieve the sufferings of others.

Another teaching would be contentment. The Buddha said that contentment is the greatest wealth. So, no matter what inconveniences or sufferings that we are personally experiencing right now, contentment helps us to cope with unfulfilled situations and unfulfilled expectations. And it's a real remedy for dissatisfaction, the kinds of dissatisfactions that people are feeling by having to stay inside.

Well, the Buddhist teachings give us lots of practices for how to calm the mind. So it may seem a bit idealistic, on the other hand, it could be survival, to cultivate a calm and quiet mind. If we're frantic, if we're panicked, we can't really be a resource for those around us. So they have a practice of mindfulness, of breathing. It's a very simple practice that can be done by anyone of any religion or no religion, just simply to be aware of the gentle flow of our breath as it flows in and flows out. In other words, to just calm down, be completely in the moment and be aware of our own breathing.

Another practice would be to be flexible, to be able to flow with the circumstances, pleasant or unpleasant. This is called the practice of equanimity. You know, usually we reel from, you know, highs and lows, and we're on a roller coaster of emotions. And in this case, we bring a suffering to ourselves and also disturb those around us. So if we can handle any circumstance calmly, then we'll be happier campers. And the people around us will certainly appreciate it, too.

Related:When does life begin? It might depend on your faith.

Well, when I was young, my whole life was surfing. I mean, I dreamed surfing. So I am very grateful for being in touch with the ocean, having this opportunity to be in solitude. It gave me a kind of perspective. You know, when you're out in the ocean waiting for a set, you see the world from a different viewpoint. You recognize that you're basically alone in the universe, but also that you're not the most important thing in the universe. So I'm really grateful for that. You learn to be quiet in the present moment, to be prepared for any situation.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The World is a nonprofit newsroom that, at its core, produces fact-based, global journalism. The story you just read is freely available because readers like you support The World financially.

For the rest of the month of April, your donation to The World will be matched by an anonymous donor. That means when you donate $50 youre actually providing $100 worth of support, which ensures our coverage is freely available to all in perpetuity.

You trust the coverage brought to you by The World because of the intelligent, penetrating conversations you hear every weekday on topics from climate change to the coronavirus. When you support The Worlds Spring Fundraiser, you ensure we can continue this critical work.

Match my donation

Read this article:
Buddhist nun recommends calming the mind to cope with pandemic - PRI

When the poet John Donne was struck down by a sudden infection in 1623 he immediately found himself alone even his doctors deserted him. The experience, which only lasted a week, was intolerable. He later wrote: As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude.

Its hard to believe now, but until relatively recently, solitude or the experience of being alone for significant periods of time was treated with a mixture of fear and respect. It tended to be restricted to enclosed religious orders and was thus a privileged experience of a male elite. Change was only set in motion by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, when the ideologies of humanism and realism took hold and solitude slowly became something that anyone could acceptably seek from time to time. Most people in the West are now used to some regular form of solitude but the reality of lockdown is making this experience far more extreme.

I have spent the last few years researching the history of solitude, looking into how people in the past managed to balance community ties and solitary behaviours. This has never seemed more relevant.

Take the example of my own community. I live and now work in an old house in an ancient Shropshire village in England. In the 11th-century Domesday Book it was recorded as a viable community, on a bluff of land above the River Severn. Over the centuries, its self-sufficiency has declined. Now it has no services beyond the church on Sunday.

But it has long displayed a collective spirit, mostly for seasonal entertainment and the maintenance of a village green, which contains the ruins of a castle built to keep the Welsh in Wales. Planning was taking place for a formal ball in a marquee on the green this autumn, which has yet to be cancelled. In the meantime, the Neighbourhood Watch group, in place to deal with very rare criminal activity, has delivered a card to all residents, offering to help with picking up shopping, posting mail, collecting newspapers, or with urgent supplies. There is a WhatsApp group where many locals are offering support.

For the first time in generations, the attention of the inhabitants is not focused on the resources of the regions urban centres. The nearby A5, the trunk road from London to Holyhead and thence to Ireland, no longer goes anywhere important. Instead, the community has turned inwards, to local needs, and the capacity of local resources to meet them.

This experience of a small British settlement reflects the condition of many in Western societies. The COVID-19 crisis has led us to embrace new technologies to revitalise old social networks. As we begin to come to terms with the lockdown, it is important to understand the resources at our disposal for coping with enforced isolation.

This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

History can assist with that task. It can give a sense of perspective on the experience of being alone. Solitude has only become a widespread and valued condition in the recent past. This gives some support to our capacity to endure the COVID-19 lockdown. At the same time, loneliness, which can be seen as failed solitude, may become a more serious threat to physical and mental well-being. That failure can be a state of mind, but more often is a consequence of social or institutional malfunctions over which the individual has little or no control.

At the beginning of the modern era, solitude was treated with a mixture of exaggerated respect and deep apprehension. Those who withdrew from society imitated the example of the fourth-century desert fathers who sought spiritual communion in the wilderness.

St Anthony the Great, for example, who was made famous in a biography by St Athanasius around the year 360 CE, gave away his inheritance and retreated into isolation near the the River Nile, where he lived a long life subsisting on a meagre diet and devoting his days to prayer. Whether they sought a literal or metaphorical desert, the solitude of St Anthony and his successors appealed to those seeking a peace of mind that they could no longer locate in the commercial fray.

As such, solitude was conceived within the frame of a particular Christian tradition. The desert fathers had a profound influence on the early church. They conducted a wordless communion with a silent God, separating themselves from the noise and corruption of urban society. Their example was institutionalised in monasteries which sought to combine individual meditation with a structure of routine and authority that would protect practitioners from mental collapse or spiritual deviation.

In society more broadly, the practice of retreat was considered suitable only for educated men who sought a refuge from the corrupting pressures of an urbanising civilisation. Solitude was an opportunity, as the Swiss doctor and writer Johann Zimmermann, put it, for self-collection and freedom.

Women and the less well-born, however, could not be trusted with their own company. They were seen to be vulnerable to unproductive idleness or destructive forms of melancholy. (Nuns were an exception to this rule, but so disregarded that the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act, which specifically criminalised monks and monasteries, did not mention convents at all.)

But over time, the risk register of solitude has altered. What was once the practice of enclosed religious orders and the privileged experience of a male elite has become accessible to almost everyone at some stage in their lives. This was set in motion by the twin events of the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

Attitudes were changing by the time Donne, poet and Dean of St Pauls Cathedral, was struck down by that sudden infection and deserted by all and sundry. He wrote that the instinctive response of the healthy to the afflicted did nothing except increase his suffering: When I am but sick, and might infect, they have no remedy but their absence and my solitude. But he found solace in a particularly Protestant conception of God. He saw the supreme being as fundamentally social:

There is a plurality of persons in God, though there be but one God; and all his external actions testify a love of society, and communion. In heaven there are orders of angels, and armies of martyrs, and in that house many mansions; in earth, families, cities, churches, colleges, all plural things.

This sense of the importance of community was at the heart of Donnes philosophy. In Meditation 17, he went on to write the most famous statement of mans social identity in the English language: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

In the Catholic church, the tradition of monastic seclusion was still the subject of periodic renewals, most notably in this era with the founding of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, more commonly known as the Trappists, in 1664 France. Within the walls of the monastery, speech was reduced to an absolute minimum to allow the penitent monks the greatest opportunity for silent prayer.An elaborate sign language was deployed to enable the monks to go about their daily business.

But in Britain, the work of Thomas Cromwell had devastated the enclosed orders, and the tradition of spiritual withdrawal was pushed to the margins of religious observance.

In the era following Donnes time of anguish, the Enlightenment further emphasised the value of sociability. Personal interaction was held to be the key to innovation and creativity. Conversation, correspondence and exchanges within and between centres of population, challenged structures of inherited superstition and ignorance and drove forward inquiry and material progress.

There might be a need for withdrawal to the closet for spiritual meditation or sustained intellectual endeavour, but only as a means of better preparing the individual for participation in the progress of society. Prolonged, irreversible solitude began to be seen essentially as a pathology, a cause or a consequence of melancholy.

Towards the end of the 18th century, a reaction to this sociability set in. More attention began to be paid, even in Protestant societies, to the hermit tradition within Christianity.

The Romantic movement placed emphasis on the restorative powers of nature, which were best encountered on solitary walks. The writer Thomas De Quincey calculated that in his lifetime William Wordsworth strode 180,000 miles across England and Europe on indifferent legs. Amidst the noise and pollution of urbanising societies, periodic retreat and isolation became more attractive. Solitude, providing it was embraced freely, could restore spiritual energies and revive a moral perspective corrupted by unbridled capitalism.

Read more: Walking with Wordsworth on his 250th birthday

At a more everyday level, improvements in housing conditions, domestic consumption and mass communication widened access to solitary activities. Improved postal services, followed by electronic and eventually digital systems, enabled men and women to be physically alone, yet in company.

Increasing surplus income was devoted to a widening range of pastimes and hobbies which might be practised apart from others. Handicrafts, needlework, stamp-collecting, DIY, reading, animal and bird breeding, and, in the open air, gardening and angling, absorbed time, attention and money. Specialised rooms in middle-class homes multiplied, allowing family members to spend more of their time going about their private business.

And although monasteries had been explicitly excluded from the epochal Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, Britain subsequently witnessed a bitterly contested revival of enclosed orders of both men and women.

By the early 20th century, declining family size combined with council houses began to supply working-class parents and children with domestic spaces of their own. Electric light and central heating meant that it was no longer necessary to crowd around the only source of warmth in the home. Slum clearances emptied the streets of jostling crowds, and adolescent children began to enjoy the privilege of their own bedroom.

In middle-class homes, domestic appliances replaced live-in servants, leaving the housewife, for good or ill, with her own society for much of the day. The motor car, the aspiration of the middle class between the wars, and increasingly the whole of the population in the second half of the 20th century, provided personalised transport, accompanied by privately-chosen radio and later musical entertainment.

After 1945, society more broadly began to self-isolate. Single-person households, a rare occurrence in earlier centuries, became both feasible and desirable. In our own times, nearly a third of UK residential units have only one occupant. The proportion is higher in parts of the US and even more so in Sweden and Japan.

The widowed elderly, equipped for the first time with adequate pensions, can now enjoy domestic independence instead of moving in with children. Younger cohorts can escape unsatisfactory relationships by finding their own accommodation. Around them a set of expectations and resources have developed, making solitary living both a practical and a practised way of life.

Living by yourself, for shorter or longer periods, is itself no longer seen as a threat to physical or psychological well-being. Instead, concern is increasingly centred on the experience of loneliness, which in Britain led to the appointment of the worlds first loneliness minister in 2018, and the subsequent publication of an ambitious government strategy to combat the condition. The problem is not being without company itself, but rather, as writer and social activist Stephanie Dowrick puts it, being uncomfortably alone without someone.

In late modernity, loneliness has been less of a problem than campaigners have often claimed. Given the rapid rise both of single-person households and the numbers of elderly people, the question is not why the incidence has been so great but rather, in terms of official statistics, why it has been so small.

Nonetheless, the official injunction to withdraw from social gatherings in response to the escalating threat of the COVID-19 pandemic throws renewed attention on the often fragile boundary between life-enhancing and soul-destroying forms of solitary behaviour. This is not the first time governments have attempted to impose social isolation in a medical crisis quarantines were also introduced in response to the medieval plague outbreaks but it may be the first time they fully succeed. No one can be sure of the consequences.

So we should take comfort from the recent history of solitude. It is certain that modern societies are much better equipped than those in the past to meet such a challenge. Long before the current crisis, society in much of the West moved indoors.

In normal times, walk down any suburban street outside the commute to work or school, and the overriding impression is the absence of people. The post-war growth of single-person households has normalised a host of conventions and activities associated with the absence of company. Homes have more heated and lighted space; food, whether as raw materials or takeaway meals, can be ordered and delivered without leaving the front door; digital devices provide entertainment and enable contact with family and friends; gardens supply enclosed fresh air to those who have one (now made still fresher by the temporary absence of traffic).

By contrast, the pattern of living in Victorian and early 20th-century Britain would have made such isolation impossible for much of the population. In working-class homes, parents and children passed their days in a single living room and shared beds at night. Lack of space continually forced occupants out into the street where they mixed with neighbours, tradesmen and passers-by. In more prosperous households, there were more specialised rooms, but servants moved constantly between family members, ran errands to the shops, dealt with deliveries of goods and services.

The history of solitude should also encourage us to consider the boundary between solitude and loneliness because it is partly a matter of free will. Single-person households have expanded in recent times because a range of material changes made it possible for young and old to choose how they lived. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the most extreme form of modern solitude, penal solitary confinement wreaks destruction on almost everyone exposed to it.

Much will now depend on whether the state engenders a spirit of enlightened consent, whereby citizens agree to disrupt their patterns of living for the sake of their own and the common good. Trust and communication police the boundary of acceptable and unacceptable isolation.

It is a matter of time. Many of the forms of solitude which are now embraced are framed moments before social intercourse is resumed. Walking the dog for half an hour, engaging in mindful meditation in a lunch break, digging the garden in the evening, or withdrawing from the noise of the household to read a book or text a friend are all critical but transient forms of escape.

Those living alone experience longer periods of silence, but until lockdown was imposed, were free to leave their home to seek company, even if only in the form of work colleagues. Loneliness can be viewed as solitude that lasts too long. For all the science driving current government policy, we have no way of knowing the cost to peoples peace of mind of isolation that continues for months on end.

We must remember that loneliness is not caused by living alone itself, but the inability to make contact when the need arises. Small acts of kindness between neighbours and support from local charities will make a great difference.

There is an expectation that, for good or ill, the experience of the COVID-19 epidemic will be standardised. Outside the lottery of infection, most will endure the same constraints on movement, and, through quasi-wartime financial measures, enjoy at least the same basic standard of living. But by circumstance or temperament, some will flourish better than others.

More broadly, poverty and declining public services have made it much more difficult to gain access to collective facilities. Last-minute funding changes by government will struggle to compensate for underinvestment in medical and social support over the last decade. Not everyone has the capacity or income to withdraw from places of work or the competence to deploy the digital devices which will now be critical for linking need with delivery. The more prosperous will suffer the cancellation of cruises and overseas holidays. The less so are in danger of becoming isolated in the full and most destructive meaning of the term.

Some may suffer like Donne. Others may enjoy the benefits of a change of pace, as Samuel Pepys did during another bout of plague-induced quarantine a few years after Donne. On the last day of December 1665, he reviewed the past year: I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time.

David Vincents book A History of Solitude will be published by Polity on April 24.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversations evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

See the rest here:
Lockdown lessons from the history of solitude - The Conversation UK

One of the most hypnotic performers in the history of the box: Eric Morcambe, Observer Magazine, 8 September 1973. Photograph: Adrian Flowers/Adrian Flowers Archive

For the Observer Magazine of 9 September 1973, the legendary theatre critic Kenneth Tynan turned his attention to the comic genius of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise as they celebrated their 30th anniversary as a double act.

Tynan argued that they were at the point where sheer professional skill, raised to the highest degree by the refining drudgery of constant practice, evolves into something different in kind, conferring on its possessors an assurance that enables them to take off, to ignore, to achieve outrageous feats of timing and audience control.

But it was Morecambes mastery he focused on: Eric in particular has burgeoned into one of the most richly quirkish and hypnotic performers in the history of the box. And referring to the famous sketch in which Morecambe says hes playing the right notes but not necessarily in the right order He can even bully Andr Previn and the London Philharmonic.

He marvelled at Morecambes reflexes, which were among the wonders of the profession. He can modulate through a series like alarm/aggression/collapse/recovery/snide insinuation in about four seconds.

Ernie is the classic stooge, dapper and aggressive Eric is the comic off whose foolishness Ernie scores, he wrote. Huge black horn rims are a vital part of his persona. They highlight the look of suddenly dawning enlightenment, the blank stare aimed straight at the camera, the smug oeillade that accompanies asides like: This boy is a fool.

Tynan argued that they actually improved on the way from the variety stage to the small screen and noted how they had become two egotists in equal competition rather than simply comic and stooge. Ernie today is the comic who is not funny. And Eric is the straight man who is funny. The combination is brilliant, wholly original and irresistible.

See the original post:
From the archive: the genius of Eric Morecambe - The Guardian

Who knew in the early days of his career, when Simon Amstell was taking the mick out of celebrities on Popworld and then Never Mind the Buzzcocks, that he would turn into one of the cleverest comics of his generation, with a special talent for making existential angst funny?

And now the latest of his amusing navel-gazing stand-up shows isSet Free (recorded late last year). In it he turns his soul-searching for which read his search for his father's approval into a form of group therapy with a barrel of laughs thrown in.

The comic sets out by saying: The problem with humanity at the moment is that we all feel we're special. And for the next hour he chips away at all those things that he thought made him special and deserving of love being funny or intelligent or interesting but which he now acknowledges were never going to make those he wanted to love him, love him.

In a tight hour, Amstell describes his relationship with his largely absent father both physically and, it would appear, emotionally as he was brought up mostly by his single-parent mother.Our truth is, of course, our own but the fact his dad didn't see his two previous shows because they're not my kind of thing does rather give the game away. (Although there is a marvellous addendum to this story later in the show when we encounter his dad again.)

Amstell tells us about his therapy, his desire to overcome his intimacy issues and the need to stop chasing men who were, for whatever reason, mostly unavailable as well as what he calls a mild eating disorder when he was younger.

He describes, with several stories where he is the butt of the joke, his search for enlightenment, whether by taking MDMA, being game for a threesome, visiting a sweat lodge or following a guru who taught him meditation techniques. Where once he may have scoffed at meditation, Amstell now enjoys it; it has gone from from discipline to blissipline.

He's painfully honest, too, about bouts of depression and his attempt at cracking America. He felt lost" in Los Angeles rather than having found any sense of accomplishment about performing there, despite it being a notable achievement.

Despite the serious subjects he raises, none of this feels self-indulgent or heavy-going. Quite the opposite, in fact; he even has some poo jokes in the set, and hilariously recounts his overkeenness to lose his virginity on a teenage trip to Paris, where his schoolboy French wasn't up to snuff.

Some of this show is just wise, Amstell tells us at one point. Indeed it is, but it's very funny too.

Available on Netflix

Read more comedy on theartsdesk

Continue reading here:
Simon Amstell, Netflix - wisdom and wisecracks - The Arts Desk

Local News

Apr 10, 2020

BURT ANGELI

IRON MOUNTAIN Burt Angeli, a Daily News fixture who covered area athletics for more than four decades, 35 of those years as sports editor, died Thursday at age 65.

Angeli whose ScuttleBu(r)t column was a must-read for athletes, coaches, fans and dog lovers had battled cancer for the past year.

An Iron River native and St. Norbert College graduate, Angeli came to The Daily News in July 1976, serving as sports editor until 2011, when he took on a larger writing role.

He maintained an arduous work schedule during his 44 years at the newspaper, committed to giving attention to as many local young athletes as possible.

He won numerous awards over the decades from the Michigan Press Association and the state Associated Press, most recently earning first place for Best Sports Feature in the 2019 Michigan AP Media Editors contest. The story was a look back at Florence High Schools 1989 state championship boys basketball team.

Burt Angeli, April 14, 1954-April 9, 2020. Rest in peace.

When Angeli took the sports editor job at The Daily News, coverage of youth athletics mainly was limited to football, basketball, baseball and track. Under his guidance, and as Title IX came into play, the list expanded by a dozen more sports.

He kept close contact with coaches and athletic directors from 11 area school districts, laying a foundation for prep coverage that would span generations. He emphasized stories that went beyond scorekeeping, promoting values of dedication, discipline, fairness and teamwork.

He was colorful, too, unafraid to gently jab Iron Mountains favorite sons Tom Izzo and Steve Mariucci, even as they rose to national fame in mens college basketball and NFL football, respectively.

Angelis ScuttleBu(r)t columns offered quick observations on sports and life overall, quiet mixes of wit and enlightenment.

Angeli is survived by his family wife Regina, siblings, nieces and nephews along with his hurting colleagues and readers.

A tribute to Burt is planned for Mondays Daily News. Friends, former colleagues, coaches, past athletes, readers and others are invited to submit comments to news@ironmountaindailynews.com.

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

LANSING, Mich. (AP) Michigan public health officials reported a big drop in the daily number of COVID-19 cases ...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) The number of people testing positive for the coronavirus in Wisconsin continued to rise ...

LANSING Michigans self-employed workers, gig workers, 1099-independent contractors and low-wage workers ...

KINGSFORD The Kingsford City Council will seek bids to upgrade mechanical and electrical operations for wells 6 ...

Link:
Burt Angeli, longtime face of The Daily News sports, dies at 65 | News, Sports, Jobs - The Daily - Iron Mountain Daily News

As the final hours of Passover slip away, Jews in every part of the world celebrate the Feast of Moshiach (Moshiachs Seudah in Yiddish), a custom of the Baal Shem Tov and his students. Just as we enter Passover with a celebration of the liberation from Egypt, so we sign off with a celebration of a much greater liberation yet to come.

Usually, many people gather for the feast, everyone sings, the rabbi talks a little, and everyone imbibes four cups of wine (or grape juice). Since the vast majority of us will be home this year due to Coronavirus, this means that you and I are now taking the place of the rabbis and communal leaders.

Not sure what to do?

Heres a suggested program, comprising four readings, each of which may be followed by a cup of wine.

Pray the afternoon service on the final day of Passover earlier than usual, so you have enough time to set the table and wash for matzah well before sunset. The program is flexible, but we suggest you sing your favorite niggunim (Chassidic melodies) and read the following four articles, each one followed by a l'chaim over another (small) glass of wine or grape juice.

After night has fallen, don't forget to include the Passover inserts in Grace After Meals (and give the rabbi some time to repurchase your chametz before defrosting those bagels in the freezer).

Next Year In Jerusalem!

The eighth day of Pesach is traditionally associated with our hopes for the coming of Moshiach. For this reason, the haftorah read on that day contains many prophecies which refer to the era of the redemption. Among the best-known of these: The wolf will dwell with the lamb; the leopard will lie down with a young goat; He will raise a banner for the nations and gather in the exiles of Israel.

About two hundred and fifty years ago, as the time for Moshiach drew closer, the Baal Shem Tov instituted a custom which underlines the connection between the redemption and the eighth day of Pesach: on that day he would partake of Moshiachs Seudah, the festive meal of Moshiach.

Moshiachs Seudah is intended to deepen our awareness of Moshiach and enable us to integrate it into our thinking processes. The twelfth article of Rambams thirteen principles of faith is I believe with perfect faith in the coming of Moshiach. Even if he delays, I will wait every day for him to come. Though all believing Jews accept this principle intellectually, for many the concept of Moshiach remains an abstraction. Partaking of Moshiachs Seudah reinforces our belief in this principle, translating our awareness of Moshiach into a meal, a physical experience which leads us to associate this concept with our flesh and blood.

The Baal Shem Tovs linking of our awareness of Moshiach to the physical is significant, because it prepares us for the revelations of the era of the redemption. In that era, the Gdliness that is enclothed within the physical world will be overtly manifest. As the prophet Isaiah declared, The glory of Gd will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together. At that time, the glory of Gd will permeate even the physical aspects of the worldall flesh.

Chassidut explains that the preparations for a revelation must foreshadow the revelation itself. Since, in the era of the redemption, the revelation of Gdliness will find expression even in the physical world, it is fitting that our preparation for these revelations be associated with physical activities such as eating and drinking.

Moshiachs Seudah, as mentioned above, is held on the eighth day of Pesach. The Torah originally commanded us to celebrate Pesach for seven days. When our people were exiled, however, a certain degree of doubt arose regarding the exact date on which the holidays should be celebrated. To solve the problem of determining the Jewish calendar in exile, our sages added an extra day to each festival. In other words, the eighth day of Pesach had been an ordinary day, but through the power endowed by the Torah, the Jewish people were able to transform it into a holy day.

When Moshiach comes, a similar transformation will occur throughout all of creation. Even the material and mundane aspects of the world will reveal Gdliness. Celebration of Moshiachs Seudah on the eighth day of Pesachonce an ordinary day, now transformedanticipates the kind of transformation that will characterize the era of the redemption.

That the Baal Shem Tov originated the custom of Moshiachs Seudah is particularly fitting. Once, in the course of his ascent to the heavenly realms on Rosh Hashanah, the Baal Shem Tov encountered Moshiach and asked him, When are you coming? Moshiach replied, When the wellsprings of your teachings spread outward.

The goal of the Baal Shem Tovs life was to prepare us for Moshiach, and the institution of Moshiachs Seudah was part of that lifes work.

Like many other teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, the custom of conducting Moshiachs Seudah was explained and widely disseminated by the successive rebbes of Chabad. Moreover, in 5666 (1906) the Rebbe Rashab (the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe) added a new element to Moshiachs Seudah: the drinking of four cups of wine.

During the time of the Baal Shem Tov, the main ingredient of Moshiachs Seudah was matzah. The tasteless flatness of matzah symbolizes selfless humility, a desire to transcend oneself. Wine, by contrast, is flavorful and pleasurable, and thus symbolizes the assertiveness of our individual personalities. Combining matzah and wine in Moshiachs Seudah teaches us that self-transcendence does not require that we erase our personal identities. Self-transcendence may be accomplished within each individuals nature. A person can retain his distinctive character and identity, yet dedicate his life to spreading Gdliness instead of pursuing personal fulfillment. Once he has fundamentally transformed his will, an individual can proceed to a more complete level of service of Gd in which his essential commitment permeates every aspect of his personality.

This innovation of the Rebbe Rashab exemplifies the comprehensive contribution of Chabad Chassidut to the legacy of the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov taught each Jew how to reveal his essential Gdly nature and thus rise above his personal identity. Chabad, an acronym for the Hebrew words chochmah, binah and daat (wisdom, understanding and knowledge), brings the Baal Shem Tovs teachings into the realm of the intellect, allowing them to be integrated and applied within each individuals personal framework.

Our generation has been charged with the responsibility of making all Jews aware of Moshiachand this includes the custom of conducting Moshiachs Seudah. This mission is particularly relevant in our day, for the Jewish people have completed all the divine service necessary to enable Moshiach to come. As the Previous Rebbe expressed it, We have already polished the buttons. Moshiach is waiting: Here he stands behind our wall, watching through the windows, peering through the crevices. The walls of exile are already crumbling, and now, in the immediate future, Moshiach will be revealed.

There are those who argue that speaking openly about the coming of Moshiach may alienate some people. The very opposite is true. We are living in the time directly preceding the age of Moshiach. The world is changing, and people are willing, even anxious, to hear about Moshiach. It is thus our duty to reach out and involve as many people as possible in the preparations for his coming.

These endeavors will escalate the fulfillment of the prophecies of the haftorah recited on the eighth day of Pesach: A shoot will come forth from the stem of Yishai..., and the spirit of Gd will rest upon himwith the coming of Moshiach, speedily in our days.

Adapted from Likkutei Sichot, vol. 7, pp. 272278, and the Rebbes talks of the last day of Pesach 5722 [1962].

Every year, in honor of Passover, members of the Baal Shem Tovs household purchased a large quantity of new cups to be used for the duration of the holiday.

Of course, following Jewish law, the glasses that were to be used would first be immersed in a mikvah.

The glasses came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Now, in Jewish literature there is a system for measuring liquids, with specific names for the various amounts. In the Baal Shem Tovs home, the glasses were referred to by the Jewish name for the amount of liquid they were able to contain. Thus, a glass that contained three ounces or so was called a reviit glass, etc.

Before Passover, the Baal Shem Tov would look through the glasses and instruct which cups could be set upon the table and which should be set aside. He provided no reasons for his directives, but everyone knew that surely his reasoning was sound.

Thus passed the first seven days of Passover.

Now, the final meal on Passover, known as Moshiachs meal, was special. It was open to the public; everyone who passed through the sages door was free to enter and partake of the festivities. Before the meal began, the Baal Shem Tov instructed that a certain cup be removed from the table because it had not been immersed.

During the meal, a newcomer entered and asked for some wine. Sorry, he was told, but there are no more clean cups.

What do you mean? he asked with surprise, pointing to the cup that had been set aside, I see a clean cup right over here that no one is using!

Oh, he was told, that cup has not been immersed in the mikvah and must not be used.

It doesnt matter, he replied dismissively, reaching for the cup.

At that point, the Baal Shem Tov, who had hitherto been silent during the exchange, spoke with sadness. He just testified about himself.

The words were mysterious to everyone aside from the man himself. Hearing the rebbes gentle words of rebuke, he admitted his shortcoming. It was true. He and his wife were not particular about the laws of family purity, which require a previously menstruant woman to immerse in a mikvah before being intimate with her husband.

Inspired, they resolved to mend their ways.

Translated from Sefer Hasichot, 5702.

Every time you people talk about the messianic era, and the Moshiach (which I assume equates with messiah), you insist on talking about him as a king. Well, we started guillotining kings over two hundred years ago, and they havent really been in fashion since. We have found liberal democracies much more adept at protecting the rights of the individuals, and working for the maximum benefit of the maximum number of people. Kings were notoriously lousy at all that.

So how about we just call him (or her) an enlightened spiritual leader? The king title seems such an anachronism.

Looking forward to your response

Dear Looking Forward,

You raise an excellent point, but Im not sure whether you really understand how sharp a point it really is.

The prophet Isaiah describes an individual upon whom the spirit of Gd rests, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and heroism, a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.

What will this individual accomplish? Something quite different than what we are used to kings accomplishing. The prophet continues:

A wolf shall live with a lamb, and a leopard shall lie with a kid; and a calf and a lion cub and a fatling shall lie together, and a small child shall lead them. A cow and a bear shall graze, their children shall lie down together; and a lion, like cattle, shall eat straw.

An infant shall play over the hole of a viper snake, and over the eyeball of an adder, a weaned child shall stretch forth his hand. They shall neither harm nor destroy on all My holy mount, for the earth shall be full of the knowing of Gd as water covers the seabed.

Basically, what that means is that the messianic times are not simply times of love, peace and hanging out together. They are times when the earth shall be full of the knowing of Gd, so inundated with that knowing, that higher awareness, that state of enlightenment, that even the wild beasts of the field will behave.

If so, in such a state, who needs a king? Who needs any government at all? Let the people, so fully enlightened and aware of their Creator and their responsibility to His creation, self-organize and work things out between one another. I mean, do you really expect enlightened beings to hurt, steal, extort, or otherwise cause bodily or monetary harm to one another? So who needs government in such a world, never mind a king?

Okay, to get to that point, we may well need an outstanding individual, a great leader who could deal with the oppressors and dictators and other powerful shmendriks of the world. As Maimonides puts it, someone who will strengthen the Torah and fight the wars of Gdnot necessarily military wars, but actions that have very powerful political and social ramifications.

But once that mission is complete and the world is at peace, buzzing with wisdom until even the leopards and wolves are behaving and the very earth itself is full of knowledge, then everything changes. What would be crucial at such a point would be not a king, but a teacher. Yes, the world is enlightened, but it is still a world emerging into enlightenment. The Moshiach, as a teacher, would guide people to see and to understand this new world into which they had entered.

And yet, the very word moshiach means anointed. Anointed for what? Anointed to be a king. But who will need a king?

What really is a king? Yes, a king governs, but is that really what a king is?

The question was asked by several of the rebbes of Chabad. Heres how they answered:

A kingan authentic, genuine-to-the-core kingis an individual who stands head and shoulders above the people around him. Thats why a king who must force the people to accept him as king is not a real king. A real king is someone like King Saul, who, when chosen by the prophet Samuel and the people, could not be found, because he had hid himself, hoping that he would not be chosen.

About King Saul, the prophet says that he was from his shoulders up taller than all the people. Thats not just a vertical measurement. Shoulders refers to emotions. Sauls emotions were at the level of another persons intellect. His mind, then, was completely beyond, in a higher realm altogether.

This will also be the character of the Moshiach. Yes, he will be a teacherbecause thats what those times will be all about: learning, knowing, gaining divine wisdom. But a teachera good teacherlimits his lesson to that for which the student is ready and can handle. The Moshiach will be a teacher, but one with a kingly character: as enlightened as they may be, he will see far beyond. And yet, as a teacher-king, he will be capable of transmitting that transcendental knowledge to all of us as well. Perhaps not cognitively, but in some form in which it can be shared.

An interesting idea, because it fits so well into the idea of what the messianic era is all about and how it fulfills the purpose of creationas Rabbi Schneur Zalman writes, everything depends on our work throughout the time of exile.

Meaning that through the toil of our hard work, our struggle and persistence in the most trying times right up until that glorious era, we will draw into the world a deep light, an essence-light, such as could never have been revealed without that labor. It is that essence-light that the Moshiach will have the job of revealing to us. Something entirely transcendental, and yet, something that each of us touches; something from which each of us draws strength every time we defy the confusion and darkness of our present world to do what we know is right and beautiful.

This teacher, then, is the ultimate of teachers. A king teacher. For he will show us the very core essence of our souls, and how they are rooted in the Core Essence of All Being. He will reveal to us how we are all kings.

My husband and I had been married for three-and-a-half years, and we desperately wanted children. We were living in Jerusalem at the time. Passover was coming to an end, and although we had had a wonderful holiday, there was a sadness that clouded our joy. It had been another seder without a baby, another week of Chol Hamoed without a child to take around to parks and festive events. Another year of asking, When will our personal redemption come?

On the How could one more blessing hurt?seventh day of Passover, we ate what I thought was going to be the last holiday meal in the mid-morning, and I settled down to read and enjoy the last hours of Passover. (In Israel, Passover is celebrated for seven days; outside of Israel, an eighth day is observed as well.) All of a sudden, I heard a knock on my door. Two friends had come to visit. One of them was single, the other newly married.

Elana, come. Were taking you to my mother in-laws cousin. Shes married to a great tzaddik [righteous man]. Here was an opportunity for me to receive a blessing for children.

We wound our way through the twisted alleyways of a very religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, until we arrived at the tzaddiks home. His wife, the rebbetzin, opened the door. She greeted us as though we were old friends, although she didnt even know who I was or why I was coming to meet her and her husband. She rushed us to the dining-room table, which was laid out with salads and delicacies. Before I knew it, I was sitting at the table, surrounded by this incredible family and being served tons of food.

Now, just as a side note, by this point in the week I had had my full of meat and chicken and potatoes. I definitely was not hungry and had no idea that I was going to be eating yet another (mind you, delicious) Passover meal. I thought that I was done already. But no, the rebbetzin informed me that we were taking part in the Seudat Moshiach (Meal of Moshiach). I had no idea what she was talking about. She then turned to me and said, Im not trying to be nosy, but do you want a blessing from my husband for children?

I nodded yes. I had already received various blessings; undergone many, many treatments; and tried dozens of things to become pregnant. How could one more blessing hurt?

And, a Should they go back to Egypt? Should they fight? What now?year later to the day, I gave birth to my son. A few months after his birth, my single friend got married; five years later, she gave birth to her second son, also on the last day of Passover.

So, what is the Seudat Moshiach? What is its power?

Gd took the Jewish people out of Egypt, and seven days later, they stood before the Red Sea. The Egyptians were almost upon them; there was nowhere to go. They felt desperation. Should they go back to Egypt? Should they fight? What now? Moses stretched out his arm and raised his staff to the sea. Nothing happened. Then one man, Nachshon the son of Aminadav, stepped into the sea. Nothing happened. He kept walking until the water was up to his chest, then up to his neck, then his nose. And then it happened. The sea split, and the nation of Israel passed through. Once they reached the other side, their enemy came chasing after them, and the wall of water crashed down, drowning the Egyptian soldiers in the stormy sea.

What would have happened if Nachshon hadnt jumped in? What would have happened if he hadnt kept walking into the waters? Would Gd have split the sea open? I dont know. Maybe, maybe not.

What would have happened if you decided you couldnt meet one more person? What if you had turned down that opportunity to go on one more date, the one where you met your husband? Would you be married now? I dont know. Maybe, maybe not.

What would have happened if you decided that you had had enough, and you were done trying to conceive? What if you decided this when you had only one more chance to ovulate? Would you have a baby now? I dont know. Maybe, maybe not.

And what Its all about the one more good deedif you were tired of dealing with rejection and sending out resumes? If you hadnt sent out that last one, would you be working now? Maybe, maybe not.

The last day of Passover, when we have the Seudat Moshiach, is about the one more. The one more meal, one more blessing, one more date, one more try. Its about the one more good deed that will tip the scales and bring the redemption.

And for me, it will always be about the blessing I received on the last day of Passover, and the precious baby I was given on that daymy Avraham Nissim, for nissim means miracles.

Visit link:
Printable Program for Your Quarantine Moshiach's Meal - With suggested readings for each of the four cups - Chabad.org