Spirituality in Business: Trust in Money?

In his book The Garden of Bliss, Shalom Arush continues the topic of trust in the Almighty, versus trust in the "almighty dollar" (a topic of his bestseller The Garden of Emuna). Re-iterating some of his earlier points, Arush writes that it all starts at the beginning of the year, Rosh ha-Shana:

A basic principle of Emuna* is the foundation of all financial dealings, commerce, business and income, namely, that each person’s entire income is predetermined from Rosh Hashanah (New Year Day) for the entire year.

The practical application of this principle is to trust Hashem.** We know that it is the responsibility of the Creator to provide for all of His creations. One can certainly trust The Creator to fulfill His*** responsibility. Therefore, a person will undoubtedly receive all that is predetermined for him, regardless of his efforts, wisdom or even righteousness. In addition, no person can in interfere with what is coming to another, or detract in any way from what was determined in Heaven, as our Rabbis said, "A person cannot touch what is prepared for his friend."

Only when a person understands this principle, believing in it with full and simple belief, can he feel totally secure in all his financial matters, and successfully pass all the Emuna tests, with calmness and happiness, without getting angry or impatient and without committing theft or fraud.

On a practical level, a person who has trust in Hashem does not think about money. He knows Hashem provides, and dwells on it no further. His entire mindset in matters of income can be summarized in two words: Hashem provides.

What is predetermined for you – you will receive.

The entire world is a series of Emuna tests. At every moment, the businessman is undergoing a test – whether to believe that his income is predetermined in Heaven or to believe that it depends on his own efforts. If he chooses the former, he feels calm and happy and conducts all of his dealings in a fair and righteous manner. If on the other hand, he chooses the latter belief, that his income depends on his own efforts, he feels nervous and pressured to continually increase his efforts and ploys in seeking money, even resorting to dishonesty and outright fraud.

Everything depends on the simple faith that all of a person’s income is predetermined with precision in Heaven. He simply must choose the channel though which to receive his blessings. He may choose a golden pipe – a righteous manner, which comes with happiness and calmness, or a sewer pipe, which comes with stress, strife and fraud.

With no emuna, a person in business is easily tempted to violate laws, both Torah and civil. This life is Purgatory leads to complications of shady deals, debts, and a life fraught with worry and difficulty.

Trust in money is a trap that many aspiring business people fall into. Driven by lust to expand their businesses and make more money, they make severe mistakes and miscalculations, often failing to see that their expenditures are more that the profits. Sometimes they increase sales by recklessly undercutting their competition. Ultimately, blinded from their cash turnover when in actuality they’re losing money, they collapse under the weight of tremendous debts.

Obviously, the above scenario is the outcome of faulty emuna, when a person fails to run his business with good judgment, not letting things run the way that Hashem wants, which means, with whatever resources that Hashem provides. A person with emuna understands that if Hashem wants him to invest a lot of money, Hashem would have given him the full sum. He’s not foolish enough to think that Hashem is low on funds or that He needs financing, or maybe a killer-interest loan from a loan shark. If Hashem gave him a smaller amount than he wants to invest, it’s a sign that Hashem wants that he should run his business on a smaller scale. There will a Divine blessing on the small business, and he would be able to continue and do additional business. But without emuna, a person thinks that large investments will yield bigger profits, therefore he puts himself in great danger. He invests other people’s money in a business that won’t necessarily succeed. And even if it will succeed – it is doubtful whether he will be able to repay the loans that he incurred because of this business.

- The Garden of Bliss by Shalom Arush (translated by Lazer Brody)

* "Emuna" - a term denoting belief, conviction (especially in God and divine providence).

** "Hashem" - a Hebrew way of referring to God (lit. "the name").

*** While God is often described with masculine language, this is merely a human convention, as God does not have any gender, of course.

American Wisdom: The American Sense of Fact

We continue our series on Lin Yutang's masterpiece on American culture, "On The Wisdom Of America," with Yutang's presentation of a certain philosophical trend towards ungrounded abstractions, contrasted with a certain trend in American thought towards more solid conclusions found through experience and intuition:

One of the most remarkable and clearest facts about American thought is the strong American sense of fact. It would gladly sell its tons of encased philosophic systems for a strong touch of the fluidity of experience. It feels the ground cautiously as it advances and is not likely to accept or worship an Idea until its fingers can close around it, and test its color, texture, weight, and worth for possible manufacturing purposes. From Emerson to James, Santayana, and Dewey, it is all the same story. Take the famous question whether I exist, perhaps the idlest of all philosophic questions. Descartes proved the thinker by his thinking. How on earth, one may ask, did Descartes, who could not on prima jade evidence accept his existence as real, believe that his thinking was? That was the beginning of the dark ages of European philosophy, for even a European philosopher who denied his body accepted his consciousness without question as the final fact, and proceeded to build a universe entirely out of that consciousness, until with some maternal pride, it recognized the universe as its own child. The natural upshot or conclusion is, of course, that the universe exists in me, and not I in it.

How did some of the American minds respond to such preposterous German idealism? The facts are rather encouraging. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "Let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the 12th, on matter, spirit, motion, etc. Its crowd of skepticisms kept me from sleep, I read it, and laid it down; read it, and laid it down, again and again; and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, I feel, therefore I exist!" That statement, the emphasis on feeling, is one of the most reassuring things in a nation that was destined for a fructifying and abundant existence. In 1848, Henry Thoreau wrote to Harrison Blake, "I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past and anticipate the future. I love to live ... I know that I am." In 1854, Walt Whitman wrote ("Song of Myself"), "And I know I am solid and sound ... I exist as I am that is enough. If no other in the world be aware, I sit content. And if each and all be aware, I sit content." Those utterances, I think, are significant of the true American spirit. Probably Justice Holmes in his essay "Ideals and Doubts" sums up the position best. "If the world were my dream, I should be God in the only universe I know. But although I cannot prove that I am awake, I believe that my neighbors exist in the same sense that I do, and if I admit that, it is easy to admit also that I am in the universe, and not it in me. When I say that a thing is true, I mean that I cannot help believing it. But as there are many things that I cannot help doing that the universe can, I do not venture to assume that my inabilities in the way of thought are inabilities of the universe. I therefore define truth as the system of my limitations, and leave absolute truth for those who are better equipped." That is good enough for any American, as it is good enough for me. Elsewhere, in the essay on "Natural Law," Holmes signifies his content with this position. "If we believe that we come out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. . . . Why should we not be content? Why should we employ the energy that is furnished us by the cosmos to defy it and shake our fist at the sky? It seems to me silly."

The wise, thoughtful American is wistful enough. He shows a certain impatience with theories as such. The most famous case is perhaps that of Emerson. Emerson had no system, was notoriously without it, the critics say. It makes it somewhat hard for Paul Elmer More to trace the influence of Goethe, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Conceivably, if Emerson had been able to outline his thought into a speculative system the very thought of it is unthinkable it would help nobody except some postgraduate student to write a doctoral dissertation with greater ease and precision. But what would have happened to Emerson the thinker then? Emerson's thoughts, which were always fluid and in open and intimate touch with reality, would have become all "solid," and his universe with it which would have scared William James. What they gained in sharpness of outline they would have lost in fluidity and the varied contact with the fresh experiences of life. Far better his impatience, his distractions, his refusal to yield final ground and become solidified! The adjectives Santayana applied to William James may well fit Emerson; he was "restless, spasmodic, and self-interrupted," lest the real life escape and we become encased in a dead car cass of a system where rigor mortis has set in. Perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually afraid of not having the whole truth and suspicious that the facets of truth served up by classificatory systems were only slices of reality, Emerson was famous for interrupting himself. He was for ever distracted, though by nothing except real life itself. What troubled him was the sight of a girl passing in the street, and being a Yankee, he felt he had to square his thought with such a reality, such a piece of life. He speaks his mind most clearly on this subject in his essay "Nominalist and Realist," where at the end he makes a confession of his mental processes. "There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care! insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others." That was why when Emerson came out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous atmosphere of the lecture room, he heard nature whispering to him, "Why so hot, little sir?" That little whisper, "Why so hot, little sir?" was the salvation of Emerson, as it was of William James later.

Is Your Path The Way Of Peace?

In a world of negativity where it seems that it becomes easy to fall under the shade of war and hostility, there is always peace to brighten up our paths. When we have peace in ourselves, it spreads through our actions and thoughts onto others and thus fixing this planet one person at a time.

Below is a warm article relating the aspects of peace with our personal lives and the lives of our fellow brothers and sisters. Deepak Chopra gives simple tips on how to get a clear outlook on peace in our world today by saying:

If people could achieve satisfaction without destruction, I believe they would. Millions of us want to live without destruction already. Now we are looking for a way to make our will and desire more powerful than war. Fortunately, that isn’t complicated.

For further reading, see the article at Care2.

American Judaism: Our Starting Question - What Does It Mean to Be Jewish in America Today?

Jacob Neusner, prolific author and controversial scholar of both rabbinic and contemporary Judaism, compiled an anthology - "American Judaism: Adventure in Modernity" - on "the Judaism of the American middle class"; the beliefs and world view of the many Jews "who may join synagogues but rarely go to them, are 'for Israel' but do not want to live there, like 'Jewish food' but do not keep kosher, and do not believe in God but know for sure that the Jews are God's chosen people."

In his introduction to the volume, Neusner wonders,

What happens to religious traditions in modern times? Historians describe the development of institutions and doctrines, while sociologists uncover their social foundations. Historians of religions, however, tend to concentrate attention on archaic, or pre-modern, religious life, particularly in the Far East, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. They have developed questions about the nature of archaic religions and provided illuminating perspectives. Here we shall ask the questions of historians of religions about people heretofore neglected by them: religious men in modern America. The data differ from all others studied by historians of religions because they derive from a secular, modern, technologically advanced and intellectually sophisticated civilization. And that is why for the study of the history of religions, America, with the contemporary West it represents, is a new and unexplored field of inquiry.

If we were anthropologists studying the religion of a pre-literate tribe, we should ask about the rituals and myths of that tribe, the character of its religious leadership, the social structures that embody its religious traditions, the way in which individual identity is defined. So too of America. We want to know about the religious rituals, beliefs, and stories that shape people’s minds, the religious leaders and their place in those beliefs and stories, the religious institutions, the role of religion in the larger society. But with this difference: America is no tribe, but a complex and heterogeneous society. Americans are not pre-literate, but in their masses highly educated. Religiosity in skeptical, modern America is a different sort of thing from the believing in an archaic society that takes for granted the central propositions of religion, as of the broader culture, and knows nothing of doubt or unbelief.

What does it mean to be religious in America? The question is too abstract, the data insufficiently digested. Here, we focus on a small part of that question, on a group that is both well-documented and intensely self-concerned, the Jews. They form a coherent group in American society. They generally regard their group as religious, though doing so requires the revision of commonplace definitions of religion. And their intellectuals have articulately addressed themselves to what it means to be a Jew in America.

Still more interesting, the Jews came from a society that stood on the threshold of modernity to a country that had long before become its bastion. Central and Eastern European Jewry, which supplied the vast majority of emigrants to America, had experienced no Renaissance to focus attention on man and his achievements; no Reformation to revise the traditional religion and to purify and articulate its doctrines; no Enlightenment to impose on the tradition the astringent criteria of reason and rationality; no Romantic recovery of tradition in a post-Enlightenment reaction; and no Darwinian age of Progress. The five formative centuries of Western civilization passed unnoticed, with little effect, over Central and Eastern European Jews. They came from agricultural villages to the American metropolis, from traditional patterns of human relationships to impersonal ones, from a primitive to a highly developed economic system, from a society where the stranger was an outsider to one in which all were alien to one another, from an intensely religious to a secular world. These changes produced a vast transformation of their religious life, and that is the problem of our study: What has happened to Judaism, and what does it mean to be a Jew today?

The answer to that question does not lie in the study of the history and sociology of American Jewry, or even of American Judaism. We are not going to rehearse the oft-told tales of how in 1654 a few Jewish families came to New Amsterdam, or of the three "waves" of immigration, Spanish, German and Russian, or of the role of the Jews in fighting for America, or of the founding various synagogues and national religious movements. Among the several good introductory studies of American Jews and Judaism, Nathan Glazer’s American Judaism is outstanding. But all that is needed to answer our question lies in the pages of this book, though many works not quoted here deepen and broaden the inquiry. On the whole, such works concentrate on outward things: the place of Jews in American society and culture; the development of their institutions, synagogues, and community organizations; the way in which Jews became Americans. These issues dominated the interest of scholars for whom what it meant for a Jew was generally clear and readily defined. What was problematical was the way in which Jews fit into the larger picture of American life.

Today Jews are sufficiently well integrated into that picture so that one need not wonder whether and how a well-defined foreign body is to be assimilated into a stable and equally well-defined social and cultural structure. After four generations, to be Jewish is a mode of being an American, taken for granted by Jews among other Americans, and no longer problematical. The dominant patterns and institutions of American Jewry have been established for nearly a century. What now remains to be explored is, What do Jews now do because they are Jewish? What do they think, how do they respond, when they do as Jews, to the issues of human existence in America? What has happened to their religious tradition — the whole of it, not merely the theological surface? What of the inner life of people who superficially are the most modern of men?

Spirituality in Business: Teaching Business Students the Alternative to Greed

In Vienna, Austria, business students at the University of Applied Sciences and Technology are getting more than an education in profit-making and corporate management - Dr. Lyly Rojas is teaching them about how to approach business itself from a humanitarian, peace-oriented perspective. From the Ode Exchange:

...Rojas' aim is to make peacemakers of her students by showing them alternatives to adopting the predatory and aggressive nature of the corporate environment. She maintains there is an alternative to the caveman mentality, to the bullying and domination that prevails to maximize profit and get ahead in the business world. Rojas is promoting a culture shift.

"We are in our minds, not in our hearts. We buy clothes made by Taiwanese slaves and chop down 2,000-year-old trees. We don't need more knowledge about problems; we know how to solve them," she explains. "What we need is encouragement that we will prosper without greed."

She gives her students the example of how child slavery relates to the business world; she tells them about the dresses that child slaves make in a far off land and companies sell for €4,000. In response, her students’ develop projects to change this. "Can you imagine how this makes me feel?" she asks excitedly. "Students come from different countries. Some are children of politicians and will have influence when they return home."

Whatever the background and nationality, Rojas explains that students need to learn to get along with each other and deal with conflict in a constructive manner. She provides them with the tools to realize this through assigned tasks; case studies, cross-cultural simulation and group projects, some based on her time with the UN. "Some students refuse to work together because of nationality; men team up against women and some students from former dictatorships ask 'can't we bribe people?'. The experience is about finding a collaborative point," she reveals.

You can read the full article here.

American Wisdom: The Philosophers' Blindman's Bluff

We continue our series on Lin Yutang's masterpiece on American culture, "The Wisdom of America," with Yutang's critical review of the fruits of modern philosophy:

"Suppose I arrange the works of the essential philosophers leaving out the secondary and transitional systems in a bookcase of four shelves; on the top shelf (out of reach, since I can't read the language) I will place the Indians; on the next the Greek naturalists; and to remedy the unfortunate paucity of their remains, I will add here those free inquirers of the renaissance, leading to Spinoza, who after two thousand years picked up the thread of scientific speculation, and besides, all modern science: so that this shelf will run over into a whole library of what is not ordinarily called philosophy. On the third shelf I will put Platonism, including Aristotle, the Fathers, the Scholastics, and all honestly Christian theology; and on the last, modern or subjective philosophy in its entirety. I will leave lying on the table, as of doubtful destination, the works of my contemporaries. There is much life in some of them. I like their watercolor sketches of self-consciousness, their rebellious egotisms, their fervid reforms of phraseology, their peep-holes through which some very small part of things may be seen very clearly: they have lively wits, but they seem to me like children playing blindman's buff; they are keenly excited at not knowing where they are. They are really here, in the common natural world, where there is nothing in particular to threaten or allure them; and they have only to remove their philosophical bandages in order to perceive it."

That was George Santayana soliloquizing in Europe on the progress of philosophy, after he had retired from Harvard. We are grateful for such confidences on the part of a professor of philosophy and only wish more of them had the same charm of candor and the same wit to know what they are about. "Seem like children playing blindman's buff . . . keenly excited at not knowing where they are" - what an apt characterization of the joys of philosophizing in the last three hundred years of modern subjective philosophy! "Fichte and Nietzsche, in their fervid arrogance, could hardly outdo the mental impoverishment of Berkeley and Hume in their levity: it really had been a sight for the gods to see one of these undergraduates driving matter out of the universe, while the other drove out the spirit." That Santayana's summing up of the burden of modern philosophy is both fair and accurate, in regard to its general preoccupation with laboratory examination of self -consciousness with a self-conscious mind, all students of philosophy today must admit.

Almost exclusively, the problem attacked by modern philosophy is the problem of knowledge, of how we can know reality. The net outcome of three centuries of such inquiry is that we know nothing and can know nothing of reality, of the thing-in-itself. Through the long gray corridors of modern learning, one hears the frightened cries of these philosophers "Where am I?" "Do I exist?" "Am I real?" "How do I know that I exist?" cries that reverberate with increasing exasperation and are echoed by the gray-plastered hallways until it seems the only thing which remains real is the fear of the unknowable.

Two men in the present generation seemed dissatisfied with this state of affairs; while admitting the excitement of the game of blindman's buff, they also had the wit to tire of it and call it slightly unfair, unfair to themselves, unfair to the world of reality, and unfair to the business of living. One, William James, completely an American, with Irish wit under his red head, and the other, George Santayana, as good as American but with a European and generally Catholic background, were seen constantly cheating their playmates by stealthily lifting their philosophical bandages to have a peep at the sun and the trees and the birds outside. This habit of lifting their bandages was generally deplored; unless all played at the game of pretending not to know where they were, the illusion would be destroyed. William James was always regarded with some suspicion; he was described as "making raids into philosophy," by which it was meant that philosophy was not his mansion. I would admit that; to me, William James was a man who happened to drift into teaching philosophy as a means of making a living, of which means in his later years he rather tired, and who, locked up in a room with his hundreds of books on continental philosophy and psychology, was all the time pacing the floor and peeping through a keyhole at the outside world of sunlight, who heard the still inner voice, "The world is real for me, real enough for my purposes." The two men were not too close together; it was not James's fault, and yet when Santayana wrote in 1918, we "are really here, in the common natural world, where there is nothing in particular to threaten or allure us," the ghost of James must have been gratified.

The situation, I think, may be summed up in a paragraph. Since Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, began to question his own existence and fell back on his consciousness to prove that he existed, this branch of human knowledge has been occupying itself, very principally, with the problem, whether reality is real and whether we can know it at all. There grew then a paradox: how can matter, which is not mind, produce consciousness, and how can mind, which is not matter, reach out to establish connections with the external world? Having artificially separated mind and matter, which were nothing but the philosophers own concepts, they were confronted with an unbridgeable chasm, across which no flight of speculative fancies enabled them to fly, until quite lately, thanks to the progress of modern physics, Whitehead pointed out the falseness of their basic assumptions that mind and matter were independent substances and declared somewhat triumphantly that consciousness is but a function of an event and therefore necessarily an integral part of reality. This is just another of those "fervid reforms of phraseology" that, played strictly according to the rules of the game, seem to save the situation and rescue the world of reality for us. To be sure, it is playing with words again, but as it is played according to Hoyle, the evidence is admitted, and the layman watchers of the game like myself heave a sigh of relief. It had been a game of concepts and words and definitions all along. More recently, Northrop of Yale marked an important advance in thought by readmitting the value and validity of immediate, intuitive perceptions, which are the only approach God has given us for knowing the outside world, and which the willful men in their intellectual arrogance have chosen to ignore.

To be sure, these impressive structures of thought, from Kant and Hegel down, were a mirage; yet they held men s speculative thought for ages. Many inquiring minds studying the nature and validity of thought and reality and spirit have derived great pleasure in their contemplation, for they fairly scintillate with the multicolored cobwebs these magicians wove around them. The students of thought were for the most part so desirous of emulating their fellows and anxious not to be thought stupid that each was ready, individually, to try to see what he could see and discover what he could discover in the filaments of light and color in their intricate schemes. They never stopped to ask, If the sum total of philosophy was the impossibility of knowledge, was not something fundamentally wrong? If the material world was perceptually, morally, socially, and aesthetically real, but logically unreal, was not something wrong with the tool of thought itself? Clearly something was not right in our definition of truth itself. The nature of truth as philosophers argue about it is one thing. The nature of truth as a hillbilly says to himself, "The skies are dark on the north west; I must finish planting the potato patch tonight, before supper," is clearly another. How to bridge that gap is no mean task for a philosopher who wants to satisfy both his sense of fact and his intellectual pride.

Since we have decided not to occupy ourselves with formal philosophy, we may enlist the help of William James and George Santayana to polish off the systems in a few paragraphs and then escape with them to the fullness of living. Both James and Santayana betrayed professional secrets of the philosophers. What James said amounted to a confession of total ignorance of the philosophers, that they were all subjective guessers without their pretended objectivity, according to James, and without love of truth, according to Santayana. William James was an American phenomenon, crude, free, forever curious and undisciplinable. When he applied his American sense of fact and robust sense of life to the academic disciplines of European structures, some thing was bound to happen,

"But practically one's conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational through and through, its existence is an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God, a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known, the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists, obligation is only the resultant of ideas; a permanent spiritual principle is in everyone, there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes, there is an absolute first cause; an eternal necessity, a freedom; a purpose, no purpose; a primal One, a primal Many; a universal continuity, an essential discontinuity in things; an infinity, no infinity. There is this, there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in his grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or not."

The final stab at philosophic systems is given by George Santayana, who wields his weapon of irony with as much finesse as the matadors of his race wield theirs, plunges it straight into the heart of the matter, which in this case is the heart of a European bull, and draws blood from it.

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As a philosopher has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians. . . . But professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or semblance of evidence they an gather for the defence, and how much prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution; for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should any one who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?"

Elsewhere, in the essay on "Masks," Santayana continues his pinpricking of professional philosophers. "No one," he says, "would be angry with a man for unintentionally making a mistake about a matter of fact; but if he perversely insists on spoiling your story in the telling of it, you want to kick him; and this is the reason why every philosopher and theologian is justly vexed with every other." I am informed that at the UNESCO Conference at Mexico City, some one made an attempt to call a conference of theologians and philosophers in the foolish hope that they might come to agree upon some common denominator of beliefs, unaware that it would be easier for the president of Palmolive to concede the virtue of Ivory soap than for an Episcopalian bishop to concede merits in Baptist theology.

In viewing man s attempts at philosophy, there is really only one important distinction, pertinent thinking and impertinent thinking. That thinking which concerns itself with life is pertinent, that which forgets or abandons it is impertinent. Man s instinct, even in the field of thought, is a quest for life, even though philosophers frequently forget this. Is not barrenness in itself a sufficient condemnation of a philosophy? In the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastics enjoyed the "benefit of clergy." Isn't there in modern society also a demoralizing, corrupting benefit of the university professor which exempts him from the trial of everyday living for pompous untruths? Would that the benefit of the savants were abolished and that a general conviction be established that writers on philosophy should not be exempt fromtrial at the secular court of common human life! Certainly, modern philosophy has the gift of missing the obvious. At the same time, its lack of adaptability is immense; it shows an inability to shift its pastures and move away from barren grounds to more fertile valleys, at which primitive cattle and sheep seem superior.

Derusha Update: "What Can We Learn From Esau?"

The Derusha Update 2.05

"WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ESAU?"

21 November 2009

Toldoth

4 Kisleiw 5770

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"Every book shares with its readers a glimpse at what once was, what now is, and what - eventually - could be."

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Below are selected clippings from various sources that have been hand-picked to add some spice to your Shabbath reading. We hope you find these selections interesting and informative. Remember, there's always more to learn and another page to turn!

=== The Miseducation Of Esau (Hirsch)

=== He Sought The Solitude Of The Fields (de Leon)

=== The Man Who Killed The World's First Tyrant (Midrash)

=== "I Am Going To Die" (Leibtag)

=== Helping Esau To Realize Who He Is (Touger)

=== Empathy Without Approval Of Murder (Shamah)

=== Harnessing The Power Of Esau (Morrison)

=== This Week In The Derusha Notebook (Blog)

=== Looking For Something Good To Read? (Derusha)

=== Upcoming Derusha Events (Calendar)

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The Miseducation Of Esau

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We see, then, how our Sages interpret the implications of the Torah's words. They tell us that Jacob and Esau alike could have been preserved for their Divinely-ordained destiny as descendants of Abraham if their parents would have noticed the difference between them at an early age. They could then have reared and educated both lads for the same goal by following a different approach in each case, taking into account the fact that these two brothers were basically different from one another. Because, unfortunately, an identical approach was followed in the rearing and education of these two boys, even though they were two totally different personalities, Jacob and Esau in manhood developed attitudes toward life that were fundamentally opposed to one another. Had a different approach been adopted, with due consideration for the differences between them, the two contrasting personalities could both have been trained to develop the same loyalty to one and the same goal. But this is not what happened. As long as Jacob and Esau were lads, they were treated as twins. It did not occur to anyone that, even though they were twins, Jacbo and Esau might be completely different from one another in their inborn character traits. Both were sent to the same school, both received the same instruction, both were given the same course of studies to pursue. They were educated as if both of them possessed the same abilities and personalities. But, in fact, these two brothers were simply not suited for the same studies.

...Esau, already in early boyhood, was driven by the latent impulses of the one "who knows how to trap," the "man of the field," the future hunter who delighted in challenging the forces of nature, in confronting the perils and hazards of life, and in using his physical and mental skills to overcome anything or anyone that stood in his way. He had neither the taste nor the talent for making conquests in the realm of knowledge or in the quest for moral self-refinement; he had no appreciation for the joys or the problems of domestic life.

Unfortunately, the manner in which he was educated could only fill him with loathing for the Abrahamic tradition.

[From "Thoughts on Education III: Lessons from Jacob and Esau" by Samson Rephael Hirsch]

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He Sought The Solitude Of The Fields

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"And Yitzchak loved Esav, for he relished his venison" [Bereishith 24:28].

This verse has been explained, as it is written [about Esav]: "A man who knows entrapment, a man of the field," while elsewhere it is written [about Nimrod], "he was a mighty trapper, a man of the field" - to rob people and to kill them.

He said that he prayed [alone in the field] and [with this lie] he entrapped [others] - with his mouth.

"A man of the field" - because his lot was not in the settlement but in the ruins, in the wilderness, in the field; and it is for this [that he is called] "a man of the field."

[Adapted from "The Book of the Zohar: Toldot" 9:75 by Moshe de Leon]

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The Man Who Killed The World's First Tyrant

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Esau at that time (after the death of Abraham) frequently went in the field to hunt. Nimrod, king of Babel (the same as Amraphel), also frequently went with his mighty men to hunt in the field and to walk about with his men in the cool of the day.

Nimrod was observing Esau all the days, for a jealousy was formed in the heart of Nimrod against Esau all the days. On a certain day, Esau went in the field to hunt and he found Nimrod walking in the wilderness with his two men. All his mighty men and his people were with him in the wilderness, but they removed at a distance from him, and they went from him in different directions to hunt; Esau concealed himself from Nimrod and lurked for him in the wilderness.

Nimrod, and his men that were with him, did not know he was there; Nimrod and his men frequently walked about in the field at the cool of the day to know where his men were hunting in the field. Nimrod, and two of his men that were with him, came to the place where they were when Esau jumped suddenly from his lurking place and drew his sword; he hastened and ran to Nimrod and cut off his head. Esau fought a desperate fight with the two men that were with Nimrod, and when they called out to him, Esau turned to them and struck them to death with his sword.

All the mighty men of Nimrod, who had left him to go to the wilderness, heard the cry at a distance; they knew the voices of those two men, and they ran to know the cause of it - when they found their king, and the two men that were with him, lying dead in the wilderness. When Esau saw the mighty men of Nimrod coming at a distance he fled, and thereby escaped; Esau took the valuable garments of Nimrod (which Nimrod's father had bequeathed to Nimrod, and with which Nimrod prevailed over the whole land) and he ran and concealed them in his house.

Esau took those garments and ran into the city, on account of Nimrod's men, and he came to his father's house weary and exhausted from fighting; he was ready to die of grief when he approached his brother Jacob and sat before him. He said to his brother, Jacob, "Behold! I will die this very day - and why, then, do I want the birthright?" Jacob acted with wisdom with Esau in this matter and Esau sold his birthright to Jacob (for it was so brought about by the Lord); and Esau's portion in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham had bought from the children of Heth for the possession of a burial ground, Esau also sold to Jacob - and Jacob bought all this from his brother, Esau, for a given value. Jacob wrote the whole of this in a book and he testified the same with witnesses, and he sealed it; and the book remained in the hands of Jacob.

When Nimrod the son of Cush died, his men lifted him up and brought him in consternation and buried him in his city, and all the days that Nimrod lived were two hundred and fifteen years, and he died. The days that Nimrod reigned upon the people of the land were one hundred and eighty-five years; and Nimrod died by the sword of Esau in shame and contempt, and the seed of Abraham caused his death, as he had seen in his dream. At the death of Nimrod, his kingdom became divided into many divisions, and all those parts over which Nimrod had reigned were restored to the respective kings of the land, who recovered them after the death of Nimrod; and all the people of the house of Nimrod were for a long time enslaved to all the other kings of the land.

[From "The Book of the Yashar" 27:1-17]

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"I Am Going To Die"

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In your opinion, is Esav's health situation so deteriorated when he asks Yaakov for a bowl of soup - that he would have died had Yaakov refused to give him soup? In other words, is he simply tired & hungry (but not in any danger of dying), or is starving to death?

Based on either understanding, how can you explain Esav's statement of "hine anokhi holekh la-muth" ("behold I am going to die") in 25:32?

[From "PARSHAT TOLDOT: QUESTIONS FOR THE 'SHABBOS TABLE'" by Menachem Leibtag]

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Helping Esau To Realize Who He Is

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Isaac knew who Esau was; he wasn't fooled that easily, but Isaac was "digging wells."

As a father, he was involved in an ongoing endeavor to enable Esau to fulfill his spiritual potential. He knew that to get results in education, you have to invest and he thought that granting these blessings to Esau would help Esau realize who he really was.

Isaac, however, erred. He didn't appreciate that the blessings were destined for Jacob. Ultimately the descendants of Esau, the brother who is deeply involved in the material dimensions of worldly existence, will manifest their spiritual potential. But Esau will not do it on his own. Esau's refinement will come because of the arduous labor of Jacob's descendants who dedicate themselves to teaching spiritual truth and therefore, it is Jacob who deserved Isaac's blessings.

[From "Keeping In Touch: Torah Thoughts Inspired By The Works Of The Lubavitcher Rebbe" by Eliyahu Touger]

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Empathy, Without Approval Of Murder

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Esav's reaction upon discovering that Yaaqob had "stolen" his blessing was a sincere cry, which exhibits a degree of caring to stay connected. It stirs our sympathies on his behalf. However, his response to his victimization is not a sign of self-control or true respect for his father. He resolved: "Let the mourning days for my father draw near and I will kill Yaaqob my brother" (27:41). Although we appreciate the depth of anger and bitter feelings that one who was deceived by his brother may have and empathize with him, homicide is never an appropriate response.

[From "On Esav's Character" by Moshe Shamah]

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Harnessing The Power Of Esau

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Esau represents the raw, base forces in the world. His reddish complexion indicated the violent and brutal nature of his personality. Jacob did not prevent Esau from coming into the world; after all, the world needs Esau and his raw power. Rather, Jacob held on to Esau's heel, holding him back. The name Jacob refers to this aspect of restraint, reining in the fierce forces.

Ultimately, however, our goal is not to simply hold back these negative forces. We aspire to gain control over them and utilize them, like a hydroelectric dam that harnesses the vast energy of a raging waterfall for the production of electricity.

[From "Toldot: Harnessing the Power of Esau" Chanan Morrison]

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This Week In The Derusha Notebook

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* "American Wisdom: The Wisdom of Living - The Scope of Wisdom" [11/15]

* "Whole Foods and Health Care: A Battle for Our Health" [11/16]

* "Spirituality in Business: God Determines the Sale" [11/17]

[Read the latest posts @ "The Derusha Notebook" today!]

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Looking For Something Good To Read?

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"The Naked Crowd: The Jewish Alternative to Cunning Humanity"

by José Faur [ISBN 978-1-935104-02-5]

Thousands of years ago, the Jewish nation became what Nobel laureate Elias Canetti called a "naked crowd"; a society built on transparency and inclusiveness, impervious to the attempts of would-be tyrants to control the "crowd" through mind-games, linguistic manipulation, and mass hysteria. While the Jewish people have, over the course of history, occasionally lost touch with this foundation of their society, they have never lost the dream of a truly free society for all. In this book, José Faur articulates the essence of the Jewish alternative to the cunning societies of world history.

[Derusha's books and authors are changing our world]

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Upcoming Derusha Events

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Sunday, November 29 - Teaneck Holiday Boutique

(4:00 pm to 8:00 pm)

@ The Richard Rodda Community Center

(250 Colonial Court / Teaneck, NJ 07666)

[Entrance to parking lot is from Palisade Avenue, adjacent to Votee Park]

Come join our first annual inter-cultural Teaneck Holiday Boutique for a unique collection of beautiful (and affordable!) gifts for loved ones. Featuring artwork by Tintawi Charaka, Natalia Kadish, David Masters, and Ettie Sadek. Books published by Derusha Publishing will be available for purchase.

Sunday, December 13 - "Goy" Launch Party

(7:00 pm to 9:00 pm)

@ The 92 Street Y

(1395 Lexington Avenue / New York, NY 10128)

[Directions available at http://www.92y.org/content/directions.asp]

Celebrate the publishing of Ranjit Chatterjee's spellbinding spiritual autobiography "Goy" with us on Sunday, December 13, at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Author to speak, followed by a "question and answer" session and book signings. Refreshments will be served throughout.

Hope to see you there!

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Have a question? Contact us!

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As always, we are eager to hear from you. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, comments, or suggestions.

Regards and best wishes for a meaningful week,

Gil Amminadav

gil.a@derushapublishing.com

Elana Amminadav

elana.a@derushapublishing.com

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About Derusha Publishing LLC

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Derusha Publishing is a dynamic and versatile company that prints poetry and philosophy, history books and prayerbooks, translations of traditional texts and post-modern commentaries on our common culture.

Derusha Publishing is working with readers everywhere to make the world a better place, one word at a time. Publishing is more than just our business - it's our vision.

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Thank you and Shabbath Shalom!

Spirituality in Business: God Determines the Sale

In his bestselling book The Garden of Emuna, Shalom Arush discusses the overarching Divine providence governing the sale of any item:

A merchant with emuna needs to know that every article in his or her inventory is under the influence of absolute Divine providence. Hashem decides when a certain object – whether a twenty-room mansion or tube of toothpaste – is sold, to whom, and at what price. According to Kabbalistic thought, each object has spiritual sparks of holiness that belong or gravitate to a certain soul; that soul will ultimately acquire the object, as a soul correction both for the object and for itself. Elaborating on this concept, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov writes (Likutei Moharan I:52) that everything has its hour, when it ultimately returns to its spiritual root.

For example, if the sparks of holiness in a particular carrot are rooted in the soul of a tzaddik, the tzaddik's wife will eventually go to a certain vegetable stand on a certain day and pay a certain price for a certain pound of carrots. She'll then come home and feed her husband the certain carrot whose spiritual sparks are rooted in the tzaddik's soul. Once the tzaddik makes a blessing over the carrot and eats it, the carrot attains a lofty spiritual correction. In the case of a carrot or another foodstuff, it physically becomes a part of the tzaddik!

In light of the above example (which is none other than a drop of water from a vast sea, for the subject of soul corrections necessitates an entire volume in itself), any business deal – barter, trade, purchase, or sale – occurs only when and where Hashem decides. When the time is ripe for a certain commodity or piece of merchandise to reach the domain of a particular soul, the transaction is completed – not before and not after. To facilitate our understanding, let's see an additional example:

Suppose that certain inanimate objects, such as a certain tiny nuts, bolts and screws, must attain their soul correction by way of Benjamin. When the time comes for those objects to be corrected, or to elevate their spiritual status, they became parts of a watch. Hashem gives Benjamin the desire and the wherewithal to purchase a new watch; this particular watch is the exact model he wants at the exact price in the store of his choice. No one else will be able to obtain the watch, unless it's destined to be a gift for Benjamin. Either way, Benjamin and the watch come together. The watch now helps Benjamin wake up in time to pray, to reach the synagogue on time, or to perform any number of other mitzvoth. As such, the watch attains its soul correction by way of Benjamin.

If a purchaser and an object don't have a spiritual common denominator, they won't come together at any price or under any circumstance. Therefore, it's senseless for a pushy salesman or overpowering merchant to try and force something on a customer that he or she doesn't want.

Many businesspeople have related stories about seemingly useless merchandise that they sold at a tremendous profit, or about products that they thought would be best sellers that ended up collecting dust on the shelves. Realtors have all experienced prospective buyers that turn their noses up at a certain house or piece of property, and three months later end up purchasing the very same piece of real estate. Every field has its own examples of divine providence. Everything has its hour.

- The Garden of Emuna by Shalom Arush (translated by Lazer Brody)

Whole Foods and Health Care: A Battle for Our Health

As we see, in the grand scheme of things there are many out to offer the best solution in regards to assistance in our personal health care. With different options proposed for our health care, we have the choice for responsibility or dependence on an outside entity, with other possibilities in between. Which is the wisest? This is up to each fellow human to decide, with his or her own best interests considered, for both themselves and for humanity.

Below is a short article and a video showing what Whole Foods and labors unions along with left-wing activists are going through as they bring their own opinions to share. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey argues that we should rely more on our own "individual empowerment" for our healthcare responsibilities, while the labors unions and activists are trying to boycott Whole Foods, stating that the solutions Mackey is offering are not attainable and pose issues for employee:

In August, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey argued in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that the solution to America's health care crisis was to be found in "less government control and more individual empowerment." His own company's unique health care plan, Mackey wrote, covers 90 percent of employees, costs less than health insurance plans, and provides a "very high degree of worker satisfaction." But for the sin of not supporting a government take over of health care, labor unions and left-wing activists called for a boycott of Whole Foods, claiming that Mackey's solutions were unworkable and his employees were unhappy.

Reason.tv talked to protesters, Mackey, and employees about "the Whole Foods alternative to ObamaCare":

American Wisdom: The Wisdom of Living - The Scope of Wisdom

Continuing our series on Lin Yutang's masterpiece on American culture, Yutang's thoughts on the American philosophy of life are presented:

The only important problem of philosophy, the only problem which concerns us and our fellow men, is the problem of the wisdom of living. Wisdom is not wisdom unless it knows its own subject and scope. That scope cannot be, must not be, may not be other than the field of living for living men. I would reduce it to this utter simplicity and not tolerate the intrusion of that most unfortunate branch of knowledge, metaphysics. The problem of the living man is a vast field enough, of which we know so little, vastly alive with human entiments, hopes, and longings; with our animal heritage, of which we now and then try to be ashamed; with our primordial, dark, subterranean urges, known in Christian theology as the demon in us, and with our inexplicable nobility, inexplicable considering our background, known in Christian theology as the God within us; with our fantastic cleverness and what to do with our cleverness; with our noble patriotism and love of the national flag and the excitement of brass bands and the not so noble slaughter of international warfare. The world, the living world, is a subject much to be thought about, sometimes too much. Can we not leave alone the problem of immortality, which is the proper subject and precinct of the dead? They are dead in our sense, and if they are not dead, they will be in a better position to discuss what they know; we know necessarily so little about it until we cross the frontier. I hope they have better luck with their subject than we do with ours. Emerson noted in his Journals, "The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution" a much quoted line. It may well stand; the evidence is of a negative character and appeals to a kind of subjective compulsion within our minds. But its chief merit is literary, consisting in the use of the adjective "blazing"; otherwise it would not be so much quoted. But a Chinese may, with just as much felicity, say, "The blazing evidence of mortality is that we all turn up our toes." The scope of wisdom, whether American or otherwise, is therefore a simple proposition; we all die, but in this short span what can we do best with life?

"Knowledge of the possible is the beginning of happiness," says George Santayana. This seems to sum up in a line for me the best that Americans have said or thought about the proper field of wisdom. I am aware that Santayana is a continental Latin in his intellectual make-up and an American in that he was born of an American mother and grew up and taught in Boston and Cambridge, but he is a cosmopolite and I want to include him because American wisdom would be immeasurably poorer without this titan of human and naturalistic wisdom. His thoughts have the character of a city built high on the top of a mountain plateau; the air is rarefied, but the atmosphere is still intensely human.

But knowledge of the possible in human life has not been the characteristic of Western philosophy. Idle speculations, with few concessions to the realities of living, seem to me to occupy the content of Western formal philosophy speculations about immortality, about free will, about absolute truth and essence and substance, and the possibility or impossibility of knowledge. John Dewey once dryly remarked, "There is something ironical in the very statement of the problem of the possibility of knowledge. At the time when science was advancing at an unprecedented rate, philosophers were asking whether knowledge was possible." Dewey might have added correctly, "and denying that it was." How the question of free will was even posed is itself indicative of the idle speculative temper. Any man asked by a waitress whether he will have tea or coffee, with or without cream, cold or hot or iced, Ceylon tea or China tea, with lemon or milk, and one, two, or three lumps of sugar, knows that he is free. Any murderer, after perfecting his plans, knows that at the last moment the decision to do it or not to do it is dependent upon himself; even an abnormal temporary paralysis of the will through hatred or jealousy or fear only proves that a normal will functions. Yet the ink that has been wasted in the discussion of free will and determinism is enough for a hippopotamus to swim in comfortably.

There is a complete separation of the intellect and the senses in such Western philosophers; in fact, there have been a feud and a distrust and mutual suspicion for the last three centuries. The Western philosopher is a man who, by the evidence of all his speculations, is stamped as one who distrusts his senses. He cannot even observe his own mental process in ordering tea or coffee; probably only William James ever said quite plainly that after a lecture in Cambridge he was free to go down Divinity Avenue or Oxford Street as he chose. Perhaps it would be simpler to describe a Western philosopher merely as a man who doubts he exists; perhaps we may even say it is the business of Western philosophy not to know. How the robust American sense of fact staged a persistent revolt against this sort of idle futility we shall soon see. But I may quote here one of the wisest of modern Americans, Clarence Day, who had the humor and the perception to remark, "Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality; a dislike of men as they are. They are free to dislike them, but not at the same time to be moralists. Their feeling leads them to ignore the obligation which should rest with teachers to discover the best that man can do, not to set impossibilities before him and tell him that if he does not perform them he is damned."

Wisdom is principally a sense of proportion, more often a sense of our human limitations. Let those who will rack their brains about whether the ultimate absolute is spirit, or essence, or matter; they will rack their brains only for the pleasure of it but will not wreck the universe. The universe will go on, and life will go on in spite of them. Some one has wittily remarked that Bertrand Russell is angry with God for not existing, for he would like to have the pleasure of smashing him if he did. Wisdom for me, therefore, consists in a keen sense of what we are not that we are not gods, for instance coupled with a willingness to face life as it is; in other words, it consists of two things, a wistfulness about living and common sense. John Dewey, a typical American spirit, is only trying, by the heavy and ponderous road of abstract philosophy couched in sentences of sustained dilution, to tell us to rely on experience and have faith in experience, which he once identified with common sense.

Long ago there was an American who did not have to recover his common sense but had it with him all the time. He was a man singularly gifted by God and perfectly born of his mother, who looked at the world, enjoyed it and was content. He was not distracted. Benjamin Franklin, that charmer of lightning and ladies, was wistful. He knew what he was about, what the world was about, and what America was about. How few of us can say that of ourselves!

It is, therefore, with that wisest of Americans (perhaps also the greatest) that I wish to begin my selections of American wisdom, awakening a sense o wistf ulness about living. All philosophy, all depth of human thought, must begin with a facing of the short span of man's life on this earth and its vanity, and once that is faced honestly, common sense goes with it.

One day in 1778, while living in Passy, then a suburb of Paris, Franklin went out in the company of Madame Brillon to Moulin Joli, an island in the Seine about two leagues away, where a society of cultivated men and women spent a pleasurable day together. Franklin observed there a kind of insect, the ephemera, whose life span was less than a day, and wrote the following piece, which was rapidly passed round and became well known among his friends in Paris society. He composed this for Madame Brillon, whom he was courting gallantly and whose husband was still living. The result of the courtship was that Franklin did not get what he wanted, the favors of the French lady what he called "Christian charity" but he did compose a number of bagatelles, often under her direct inspiration, which must rank among the best of his writings and show him as a gifted writer.

"What will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists?"

by Benjamin Franklin

You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joli, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians, one a cousin and the other a moscheto; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly harmony.

"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin Joli, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labour in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! for in politics what can laws do without morals? Our present race of ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joli, shall come to its end and be buried in universal ruin?"

To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante. . . .

- "The Ephemera" (addressed to Madame Brillon)

It may be appropriate to mention here that the insect juyu, whose life span was less than twenty-four hours, was mentioned by the Chinese philosopher Chuangtse, who often used the monstrously big and the absurdly small in birds and animals to illustrate the relativity of the phenomena of life. Once he tried to drive home the sense of futility of wars by his story of the "Battle of the Microbes." The King of Wei, like many modern rulers, was caught in the dilemma of war and peace. The enemy had broken a peace treaty, and he desired revenge. One general suggested assassination of the treaty breaker, another suggested a punitive expedition, and yet another regretted the destruction of cities that were built with so much human labor. Both preparedness and unpreparedness for war seemed reckless, and the King was puzzled as to what to do. I permit myself for once the telling of a Chinese story here because modern man finds himself in the same dilemma. A Taoist philosopher went up to the King and told him that the solution lay in Tao. On being asked to explain, the Taoist asked the King, "Have you heard of a thing called the snail?"

"Yes."

"There is a kingdom at the tip of the left feeler of a snail, and its people are called the Chus. And there is a kingdom at the tip of its right feeler whose people are called the Mans. The Chus and the Mans have constant wars with one another fighting about their territories. When a battle takes place, the dead lie about the field in tens of thousands and the defeated army runs for fifteen days before it reaches its own territory."

"Indeed!" said the King. "Are you telling me a tall tale?"

"It s not a tall tale at all. Let me ask you, do you think there is a limit to space in the universe?"

"No limit," replied the King.

"And if you could roam about in the infinity of space and arrive at the Country of Understanding, would not your country seem to exist and yet not to exist?"

"It seems so," replied the King.

"Now," said the philosopher, "in the center of the Country of Understanding there is your country, Wei, and in the country of Wei there is the capital of Li and in the center of the city of Liang there is Your Majesty. Do you think there is any difference between that King and the King of the Mans?"

"No difference," said the King. The philosopher withdrew, and the King of Wei felt lost.