CHAT: Kwisatz Haderach (was: Hi from Ukraine)

Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Steg Belsky wrote:
>> > Steg Blesky wrote:
>> > >  "kwisatz haderach is a strange way of saying qefitzat
>> > hadderekh."
>>
>> > What does "qefizat hadderekh" mean?
>>It's a Hebrew phrase meaning literally _a jumping of the path_.  It's the
>>'technical' term for a type of miracle in which a journey that should
>>take a long time only takes a very short time.
Jorge Luis Borges must have had this in mind in his story "The Secret
Miracle".  (He often referred to, and was presumably familiar with, various
works of the Jewish mystical tradition.)  In the story, a Jewish writer is
about to be executed by a Nazi firing squad; his main regret is that he
won't be able to finish a play, which he feels would have been his
masterpiece.  He hears the order given to fire; then, in his mind, he
completely rethinks, revises, rewrites, and finishes the play, and is
satisfied...then the bullets hit him.

 re "Kwisatz Haderach" (sp?)
>It's a kind of Messiah that the "Bene Gesserit" (may've misspelt that)
No, it's right.  Latin:  'It will have done well'-- though I think the
official version is incorrectly passive:  it will have been done well.
Somehow out-of-place Latin (was the  BG supposed to be some sort of
descendant of the Roman Church?) in that sea of slightly odd Arabic.  (My
first pb copy of Dune didn't have a glossary IIRC;  I assumed Bene was some
sort of corruption relatable to Hebrew "Bnai".)

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