Part of the reason I’m ‘slow-blogging’ at the mo is because I am totally sick of speculation.

I know people with ‘Histrionic Personality Disorder’ – or caught up in its traits – love all this pointless, energy-sucking ‘speculation’ about what’s happening right now, but personally, I’m totally sick of it, and I’m trying very hard not to keep giving in to the impulse to add more pointless speculation to the enormous, towering pile of ‘pointless speculation’ already online.

If the Rav says something, I will share that.

But otherwise…. I’m just trying to continue with simple emuna, that whatever God wants to do, He’ll do it, and it will be for the best.

==

Our job down here is to recognise God is behind everything, whilst working on developing our own emuna and humility, and doing our best to acknowledge and rectify our bad middot.

That’s it.

That’s not a popular message, I know, which is why the so-called frum Jewish world is full of endless, pointless, speculation, and ‘pseudo-Torah’, and worse, ‘pseudo-cabbalah’ – but woe betide the person who actually starts to talk in detail about actually working on our bad middot and lack of emuna.

Woe betide the Rav that keeps telling people to up their tznius and praying, and to ‘down’ their internet and smartphone use.

Funny, how you just don’t see that stuff being widely shared online….

====

Instead – speculation.

Endless, pointless speculation, with every Tom, Dick and Harry throwing their hat in the ring based on something they saw on Youtube or found in their social media feed.

I’m so, so sick of it.

But if you like wasting your time with all this stuff, going round in circles following ‘influencers’ who have been wrong about just about everything so far (remember all the fear prn from just last shabat?)- go right ahead.

Free choice is the whole reason God created the world, after all.

But personally?

I have about 15 trillion better things to do with my time (including…. cleaning my toilets….)

Shabbat shalom.

 

Yesterday, I finally managed a walk with a friend I haven’t seen for ages.

We were talking about a bunch of stuff, and then she mentioned how she thinks she got PTSD from the attack ‘by Iran’ back in April – when we woke up to weird flashes and strange booms, with no sirens blaring.

Having the sirens don’t really help…. I told her. I think they just make people conditioned to feel even more fear, like Pavlov’s dog.

She told me:

I know, but I think I would have still felt safer standing in my stairwell.

==

Back when I used to quite enjoy R Amnon Yitzhak (like, at least 15 years ago), he had a great video up where he went through what had happened to the residents of an apartment building that was destroyed by a scud, during the Gulf War.

39 scuds fell on Israel, I think two people died – and the miracles were enormous.

So, R Yitzhak literally went through the inhabitants of that building in Tel Aviv destroyed by a scud, one by one.

==

When the person was standing in the hallway – their whole apartment was destroyed.

When they were in their apartment – stuff around them was destroyed, but the room they were in stayed standing.

He literally went from floor to floor – and showed how Hashem did a miracle for every single person in that apartment, that where they were, they were OK.

This was before the advent of ‘safe rooms’.

And of course, we see how helpful all those so-called ‘safe rooms’ were on Simchat Torah…

==

Before I go on, one of my friends in the English-speaking Shuvu Banim Whatsapp group just sent me this, a statement from Rav Berland, from yesterday:

 

The Rav said that 1 tikkun haklali is against a million missiles

==

You want to know where ‘the war’ went?

Where ‘the war’ keeps going, so they have to turn on the Iron Dome and just keep it shooting at itself, in order to keep the pretence of ‘hostilities’ going, here in Israel?

This is the answer.

Keep going with the 7 TKs a day, it’s literally transforming everything for the better – at least, here in Eretz Yisrael.

==

So, back to my friend.

I told her what R Yitzhak had written, and she said, that’s amazing! But I’m still feeling anxious about every little sound I hear at the moment. I mamash think I have PTSD from April….

My friend doesn’t listen to the news.

But then as we were speaking, she told me there’s a ‘friend of hers’ and she’s in this friend’s whatsapp group, and all this ‘friend’ does is post fear-inducing war prn headlines about ‘war with Iran’….

==

So, why don’t you leave the group then? I asked her.

I don’t want to insult my friend…. She told me. (She’s much nicer than I am. Obviously.)

==

That discussion yesterday was rolling around my brain in hitbodedut today, and I got the idea that I should talk a bit more about the negative personality traits that are the calling cards of the ‘Erev Rav’.

Again, doesn’t mean that everyone with these traits ARE Erev Rav, just means that the Erev Rav have created a world where the media, society, cultural norms, education is all working together to INDUCE these types of bad middot in otherwise good, healthy souls.

Via learned behavior and negative reinforcement of what’s ‘normal’.

==

So today, let’s head back over to the archived version of the Light’s House site, back into the ‘Cluster B’ personality disorder page, HERE.

And let’s take a closer look at something the secular world christened HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY DISORDER.

Here’s are a few snippets, to set the scene. Light’s House focuses on parents, but the truth is, this description fits a whole bunch of people – particularly, social media ‘influencers’:

Histrionic parents are among the most frustrating and perplexing parents to deal with.

Their need for attention is central to all that they do, and they seek and develop high-conflict situations and relationships.

Though the methods by which they attempt to gain attention may be ever-changing to suit different situations and possibilities, the end goal – dramatic attention – never changes.

==

Another snippet:

People with HPD do not like it when others are at the center of attention, and are likely to make attempts at shifting the dynamics in their favor.

Depending on circumstances, histrionic people are either the life of the party – your instant best friend – or the one causing a scene, whichever will work best for their needs at the moment.

When fishing for negative attention, if these [HPD people] cannot find something wrong, they will make something wrong (and if that’s not possible, they will proclaim something imaginary is wrong to get the drama started).

==

And you know what?

‘War in Iran’ is a great way to continually get the drama started.

And if it’s not ‘War in Iran’, then it’s ‘stock market crashing’. ‘Race riots in the UK’. ‘Famine looming next week.’ ‘Global warming’ and melting pole caps. ‘Nibiru’. ‘Donald Trump is Moshiach’.

The list goes on and on.

==

Our whole ‘news’ culture is basically built around toxic ‘Cluster B’ personality traits.

The point, is to get your attention (and sky-rocket your anxiety) by predicting negative stuff, amping-up every little drama into a massive crisis, the End of the World!!!! The End of the World!!!! The End of the World!!!

==

Now, you can (and definitely SHOULD) turn off the news.

And, you should also turn off any ‘influencers’ online, on social media, who are also pumping your adrenaline sky-high in their never-ending quest for attention and relevance.

But when it comes to ‘histrionic’ friends, and especially, family members – well.

Things get very tricky, very fast.

==

No-one is saying stick your head in the sand and whistle.

Clearly, there is stuff going on all the time, and clearly there are ‘bad’ things we have to recognise, acknowledge and deal with.

But every time you find yourself in an exchange with someone where all they talk about is ‘War with Iran’ – and there is literally no God in the picture, no helpful suggestions to take it all back to God, understand that Hashem is in control, say some Tikkun Haklalis, develop a spiritual coping strategy for ‘the fear’ –

Then you should do your best to walk away from that conversation.

==

Sadly, there are a lot of ‘histrionic’ drama queens, and drama kings, out there, who get the emotional energy and attention they are clearly lacking in their personal lives by continually:

proclaiming something imaginary is wrong to get the drama started

==

When there is REALLY something ‘wrong’, then our real rabbis and our true Tzaddikim will give us a heads up in advance – and give us the spiritual instructions required to weather the storm, BH, with minimum drama.

Every single time the Rav saw a decree on the horizon, he told his followers something was coming, and gave instructions do hold a prayer atzeret, start doing a certain number of TKs, learn specific schedules of Torah etc, work on a particular trait, or bad middah (like tznius, chucking out I-phones) etc etc.

Right now, he’s saying do 7 TKs a day, come down and pray with him on Ido HaNavi (8.30 pm, most nights) – that the singing and clapping and jumping before and after the prayers is mamash sweetening everything – and to work on tznius.

And, he’s also saying very encouraging, emuna-boosting, things like this:

1 tikkun haklali is against a million missiles

==

This is the ‘practical emuna’ approach, where people really do believe in God, and really do believe that their prayers, Torah learning and actions make all the difference.

It’s the total opposite of the ‘Hysterical’, drama queen approach of our news cycle, and people who are exhibiting ‘Cluster B’ traits, mostly learned from our toxic culture.

==

Tov, we’ll stop there.

I just got a call from a friend whose parents in chul are freaking her out about what they’re hearing on the news about Israel getting bombed in Tisha B’av.

Bombed…. Nuked….whatever.

God decides what happens to us, no-one and nothing else.

We can’t run away from God.

And Eretz Yisrael is still the safest place in the world for a God-fearing Jew who is trying to have some real emuna to be.

Regardless of what the ‘Cluster B’ news and ‘influencers’ are saying.

Shavua tov!

On Shabbat, (which btw, was one of the nicest I’ve had for quite a while, thank God I’m not buying into all the ‘fear p*rn’ and running off to buy a generator…) – I went to learn some Rabbenu with a new chevruta.

We opened it up ‘randomly’ to Likutey Moharan 2:2.

It’s a long lesson, and we got through about 4 pars, but here’s how it starts:

“The days of Chanuka are days of thanksgiving, as stated:

“They instituted these eight days of Chanuka for thanksgiving and praising.” (Al haNissim, Tractate Shabbat 21b)

==

And days of thanksgiving represent the delight of the World to Come, for the essential delight of the World to Come is to express thanksgiving and praise to God’s great Name and to acknowledge Him.

In this way, we come closer to Him, for the more that we know and acknowledge Him, the closer we are to Him.

==

Everything else will disappear in the future, as in, “All the sacrifices will be abolished except for the korban todah” (Vayeira Rabbah 9:7).

Only thanksgiving and praise will remain in the future – thanking and praising God….That is the essence of the delight of the World to Come.

==

This is the destination we’re aiming at.

Being able to thank Hashem for all the good things, and seeing how everything is totally for our good, after all.

BUT – and it’s a huge, massive but – trying to say thank you for all the good in our life doesn’t mean that we pretend there is no bad.

No suffering.

No pain – no days where we are so weighed down by misery and despair, we find it hard to even get out of bed in the morning.

(This is describing a serious FREEZE response, btw, where the initial reactions of FIGHT or FLIGHT either didn’t work, or aren’t on the table, so now, the snake brain is flooding the body with the chemicals designed to ‘FREEZE’ a person in place, in hibernation, to numb them until the danger passes, one way or another.)

====

Problem is, in our superficial world, where real emotions have been pathologised to the point where a person feels they need medication, or self-medication in the form of cannabis or alcohol any time a ‘real emotion’ pops it head above the parapet, there is a tendency to wave off another person’s real pain with platitudes about ‘just be grateful you’re alive.’

On a very deep level, this is of course true.

But when a person is stuck under a huge amount of misery and pain, and actually trapped in a bio-chemical ‘FREEZE’ response, they often just can’t get to that point.

At least, not immediately.

====

I’m going to bring some relevant stuff from Pete Walker in a mo, but before I do, let’s continue with one more par from Rabbenu’s lesson 2:2:

(It’s a puzzling par. Me and the chevruta chewed it over for an hour on Shabbat, and looked up all the stuff being referenced by Rabbenu. In the process of doing that, we learnt some amazing insights, which I’ll bring below, so hang on, if this is sounding like gobbledy-gook.)

“This corresponds to, “Four people are required to express thanksgiving.” (Brachot 54b)

They are listed in Psalms 107, which concludes with, “He who is wise and observes these will understand God’s kindnesses.

‘God’s kindnesses’ correspond to halachot, as Chazal said, “Whoever does not allow his student to serve him is as if he denied kindness from him, as written: “He who withholds kindness from another.” (Job 6:14; Ketubot 96a).

Serving the wise corresponds to halachot, which correspond to, “David’s kindnesses.” (Isaiah 55:3), in that the halachah is according to his opinion, as Chazal said: “God was with him”, (Samuel I, 16:18)….

==

“God was with him” means that he was close to God, which represents the World to Come, which corresponds to halachot.

==

The four people who have to give ‘thanksgiving’ are those who cross a desert or ocean, get freed from prison, or are healed from a life-threatening illness.

I.e. they say ‘thank you’ just for the gift of still being alive.

They don’t cross a desert and then get a million bucks to pay off their debts, or buy a house in Jerusalem.

They don’t get off the boat and someone is waiting to propose. No-one is curing their infertility, their shalom bayit issues – or ending ‘the war’ in Gaza.

Nope.

But they have an obligation to say thank you – simply because they came through a dangerous situation, and they are still alive.

==

Chazal are setting the bar really low, here, when it comes to finding things to say ‘thank you’ for.

==

But as this is Rabbenu, there is a much deeper dimension to all this, that takes it out of ‘fake gratitude / fake emuna’ mode, and puts it in a way more deeper place that can work and resonate for so many of us who are actually struggling to say ‘thank you’ for being alive, at the moment.

Because the pain is overwhelming.

Because we are suffering so greatly.

And because we are stuck in a ‘FREEZE’ response to all the stress, that is literally keeping us trapped in mochin de’katnut, and all the bad middot and difficult emotions that hang out in that place.

==

When we looked up the reference to Job, we got to the passage where Job’s ‘best friend’ Eliphaz (not coincidentally, the name of the son of that arch-religious hypocrite, Esav) is trying to ‘help’ Job like this:

(These are some of the key arguments that begin Eliphaz’s ‘speech’ to Job, in Chapter 6 of Iyov):

“If He tests you with one thing, are you going to be tired out?!…Remind me, please, which innocent person ever died? When have upright people ever been obliterated?…Destruction does not emerge from the the dust, and nor does misery grow from the earth….

Behold! Fortunate is the man whom God rebukes!!!”

==

In other words, Eliphaz is telling Job:

Suck it up man, and stop whining! You totally deserve what’s going on right now! And not only that, you are ‘lucky’ that God is doing this to you, so SAY THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUFFERING!!!

==

You know why I love Rabbenu so much?

Because Rabbenu gives real advice, for real people.

Straight after telling us that ‘gratitude’ is the ideal destination, our taste of the world to come down here in this lowly world that is so full of suffering – he then throws in a hint about what Pete Walker calls: FLIGHT INTO LIGHT.

But what I usually refer to as ‘fake gratitude’ or ‘fake emuna’.

==

There is a whole bunch of important nuance here, let’s try to tease it out.

First, here is Walker’s description of ‘FLIGHT INTO LIGHT, which you can find online HERE, but which I actually read as part of his biography ‘Homesteading through the Calm Eye of the Storm’:

Flight-into-Light

Like many survivors, my recovery process began unconsciously with a spiritual quest. I needed to find something profoundly good about life to counteract the soul crushing effects of my family.

But striving for enlightenment was a salvation fantasy, and only helped marginally with my CPTSD. My Icarus-like flights into the Light did however give me powerful subjective experiences of a Benevolence at the core of life.

Trying to permanently merge with this Light however, melted my waxen wings and repeatedly sent me plummeting into the sea of my abandonment depression.

The Icarus in me won some and lost some. When I caught enough glimmers of the Light to know that an ultimate good exists, I felt buoyed enough to journey inside – to search for something worthwhile at my psychological core.

When I finally learned to meditate effectively, I gradually found Spirit within.

Now my flights-into-light are sojourns inside to find an inner glow. My ongoing meditative practice regularly brings me helpful insights, restores my equanimity and self-acceptance, and occasionally provides me glimpses of THAT which is so much greater.

==

My ultimate flight-into-light was an eight hour Enlightenment experience with LSD – an experience of feeling transcendently at one with a loving God that permeated everything….

This LSD journey impassioned me to search for permanent enlightenment.

Luckily my quest short-circuited two years later, but I had enough tastes of God as Love to convince me that life is a stunning gift from an unfathomable and generous Creator. Like Walt Whitman and other poets, I increasingly saw love and beauty in life’s ordinary and myriad details.

Delusional or not, I feel lucky to believe in a Benevolent Creator.

This is not a choice but a profound subjective sense of knowing. The years before my huge epiphany – especially the Catholic ones – were desolately empty without this deep sense of a Higher Power…..

It blessed me with an increasing capacity to appreciate being alive.

==

Walker came of age in the 60s, when so many good people started ‘experimenting’ with drugs as the ‘shortcut’ to enlightenment – and especially weed and LSD.

Walker himself dabbled – but when he saw how many of his hippie friends literally went insane from regular use of CANNABIS, all by itself, or spent their days totally ‘drugged out’ of reality – he stopped doing drugs cold turkey, and now he counsels people to avoid using drugs to escape their emotional pain.

Over time, he found that ‘meditation’ – i.e. hitbodedut, where you talk to God and also check in with your own soul, and let your real feelings surface and be expressed – was a WAY better way of dealing with his ongoing pain.

The reason I’m quoting him here, is because his books were one of the best resources I found, for helping to figure out and overcome C-PTSD – something that I think most people today are dealing with, one way or another.

==

Rabbenu teaches, feel your pain for one hour a day, in hitbodedut! But the other 23 hours – be happy!!!

==

So, one example of ‘FLIGHT INTO LIGHT’ is trying to turn off the pain and suffering of reality, and ‘run away’ by using drugs – and that includes prescribed medication that alters a person’s mind.

But another way of FLIGHT INTO LIGHT is where you still try to ‘duck the pain’ by covering it all up with ‘just say thanks!!!!!’

Or by trying to change the subject some other way. And so many misguided therapists and even, so-called ‘frum’ mentors and rabbis,  also encourage this – especially the ones who don’t do regular hitbodedut themselves, and don’t have God in the picture in any real way.

====

Here’s another snippet from Walker:

My first foray with Kleinian[1] Dr. L was awful. To avoid repeating this, I had test- sessions with seven highly touted therapists.

In one interview-session after another, each renowned therapist tried to distract me from venting pain.

It was so hard to believe.

Each paid lip service to welcoming grief, but when my feelings surfaced, they [the therapists] apparently could not go where they had not been [themselves].

==

We all have painful stuff going on inside.

All of us.

If we aren’t talking to God about what’s going on, the pain overwhelms us in a million ways. And even if we’re going to a shrink regularly – if that shrink isn’t encouraging us to turn to God, to put God in the picture, and to develop a more emuna-dik approach to what’s going on, then even the best shrink is very limited in how much real ‘help’ they can provide.

==

Sometimes, it’s OK to open our hearts to another person who can actually deal with it in a healthy way. We all need some encouragement and human warmth, sometimes.

And it’s important to find people who can really empathise with us, without trying to shut us up with pat answers about ‘gratitude’ or ‘having emuna’, like Job’s ‘friend’ Eliphaz.

==

At the same time – the real answer to our problems actually isn’t dumping it all on to other people – and not even the people we pay a fortune to, to listen to us.

The real answer is talking to God, honestly, and regularly, every single day.

==

The time we spend in hitbodedut is where we find the courage to really face our inner pain.

And the strength required to really work through our ‘stress’, our anger, our fear, our disappointment, our unmet expectations, for how we hoped life would be.

That’s where we start to get some real, soul-satisfying answers, about why does it have to be like this?! Why am I suffering so much?! Why are you putting me through all this stuff, God?!

Because everything really is a message from God, even – especially – the stuff that comes wrapped in very difficult circumstances.

==

When we start to finally unwrap ‘the message’, and to learn the lessons, that’s when the real feelings of gratitude can start to bubble up, naturally. Without being forced or faked.

For me personally, I only got into doing hitbodedut for an hour a day because I thought that was the way to ‘force’ God into giving me what I thought I wanted, especially, more children.

About five years into the process, no more kids were forthcoming, and that’s when I had a crossroads moment, when I could have jacked the whole thing in, God forbid, as “not working out as planned.”

But instead, I started to realise how many enormous benefits I was getting, from taking the time to talk to God for an hour every single day.

==

The really bad FREEZE depressions I use to get all the time, even when life was externally ‘great’, pretty much totally disappeared.

I started to make some big inroads on my awful temper and anger fits, and that literally transformed the atmosphere in my house, and especially, with my kids.

And more and more, I started to realise that even though life was so very difficult, so much of the time – there was still so much to be grateful for.

And still so much that could and would improve, when I stopped running around to ‘other people’ for the answers and the comfort and the insights I needed – and instead, I dealt direct with God, and started to take responsibility for how I was really feeling about stuff.

==

God gets us.

God loves us unconditionally.

When God tells us ‘hard things’, He still does it with so much compassion and kindness, so we can actually hear it, without feeling even more gross about ourselves.

 

God is simply the best shrink you could possibly ever have.

And He’s available 24/7, and free.

==

Tov.

Let’s pull this back around to where we began.

Rabbenu taught us in Lesson 2:2:

The essential delight of the World to Come is to express thanksgiving and praise to God’s great Name and to acknowledge Him.

In this way, we come closer to Him, for the more that we know and acknowledge Him, the closer we are to Him.

==

Being close to God is the biggest present a person can give themselves, in the crazy circumstances we currently all find ourselves in.

Sometimes – actually, at all times – the only way God can take down our ego enough to get us to come closer to Him, and to start really talking to Him, and including Him in our lives, is by literally crushing our yetzers into the floor, with difficulties and hard circumstances.

The point is not to kill us, God forbid, (although sometimes, it can feel like that.)

The point, is to bring us closer to Him.

==

When we try to ‘short’ this pain, by disappearing into medications, cannabis, never-ending ‘shrink’ sessions etc etc, we just end up prolonging the agony.

Because the point, the only point of the suffering, is just to bring us closer to God, in a real, raw, honest way.

When we get close to God like that, that is when we find the courage and support required to really face our ‘inner demons’ down, and to stop running away from ourselves, and our own hard, difficult feelings about life.

When we let our real feelings surface and pass through and out – that’s when the real healing begins.

And that’s when we start to understand that hard as everything is, it’s not stam.

==

Life is a process, ad 120, and there are no quick fixes.

Our mad world is bringing so much pain and hard feelings up to the surface at the moment.

God is designing things to do exactly that.

To finally get us to understand that we can’t do this without God, without regular hitbodedut, without trying to come closer to Hashem.

We can’t do this, without following the advice of Rabbenu.

And without drawing closer also to the real Tzaddikim of our generation, like Rav Berland.

==

So, do yourself a favor, turn this off, and go to some quiet place where you can talk to God for a while.

All of us are stuck in a paradigm that we can’t seem to change from with-out, or with the ‘power and strength of our own hands’.

All we can do, is to take responsibility for ourselves, and to begin the process of trying to change things from within.

But ultimately, that is what is going to change everything.

====

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Melanie Klein advocated a therapeutic approach where this is almost no interaction at all between the client and the therapist, with the therapist even sitting behind the client’s head to avoid eye contact, or anything that could be construed as empathy, human warmth or encouragement.

 

Hold onto your hats…. This is a great post for ‘real Jewish history’ aficionados.

The story begins when I was trying to track down a bit more about R ELIYAHU MANI, of Baghdad, then Hevron (with some places in between).

There is a lot of strangely conflicting information, about when he was meant to have been the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Hebron, and who came before him. And after him.

==

So, I was looking through more of his descendants, to try and get a ‘feel’ for where the truth may lie, when I noticed that his son, the ‘Chacham Bashi’ SULEIMAN MANI married a woman called REINA PEREIRA.

Reina’s father is R MOSHE FEREIRA (= PEREIRA) of HEVRON, who was meant to be the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Hevron before ELIYAHU MANI took over.

Or something like that.

Except, the guy’s been mostly scrubbed out of the history books, and what remains are just faint traces of something interesting.

==

You’ll recall from the first post in this series about Sabbateans in Hevron that AVRAHAM PEREIRA, the wealthy patron of MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL in Amsterdam:

a) built a yeshiva in Hevron called CHESSED L’AVRAHAM.

And b) was a massive Sabbatean himself, and had notorious Sabbateans like MEIR HIYYA ROFE running his yeshiva in Hevron.

You’ll also recall that AVRAHAM PEREIRA was a converso, had a ton of cash, and was rubbing shoulders with royalty and nobles all over the place.

==

After he died, his son YAAKOV PEREIRA took over funding the Sabbatean yeshiva in Hevron, and renamed it CHESSED L’AVRAHAM V’EMET L’YAAKOV.

It seemed like a no-brainer that this ‘MOSHE FERREIRA’, scrubbed Chief Rabbi of Hevron, was a descendant of this family of wealthy converso Sabbateans from Amsterdam.

So, I started checking around, to see if the facts fit the theory.

==

When I started tracing back REINA FERREIRA on Geni, I learnt some interesting things straight out the gate.

Like for example, her sister PERL married a very Ashkenazi man from Hungary named SHMUEL KORNFELD.

And their son, ABRAHAM KORNFELD, happened to marry MIREL, the sister of that same R AKIVA YOSEF SCHLESINGER who was trying his hardest to buy land in Eretz Yisrael, to start up agricultural colonies – a full 50 years before anyone had even heard of Herzl.

==

We will come back to R AKIVA YOSEF SCHLESINGER again, but as usual, I am just pointing out that when it comes to Eretz Yisrael, it’s always the same people.

And they are all tightly related to each other, however it may look from a distance.

(BTW, the Schlesingers are great-grandchildren of R AKIVA EGER – who has more Frankists in his family tree than most of us. At some point, we will deep-dive on him, too.)

==

Tov, back in Hevron, as I’m chasing REINA FERREIRA’s family tree back down the centuries, it looks ilke this:

ABRAHAM ISRAEL PEREIRA (SABBATEAN FUNDER OF HEVRON YESHIVA) ? > ? > ABRAHAM FERREIRA  > R MOSHE FERREIRA, CHIEF RABBI OF HEVRON (1820-1864, moves to Israel in 1851) > REINA FERREIRA (m SULEIMAN MANI)

Strange, that such a prominent family should have such big gaps in its family tree….

==

I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say I spent 4 hours today trying to fill those gaps in – and I hit ‘Sabbatean-Frankist-Freemason’ gold, in the process.

First, I went back to a different family tree for ABRAHAM ISRAEL PEREIRA, the Sabbatean funder of MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL in Amsterdam, and CHESSED L’AVRAHAM yeshiva in Hevron, and filled in more gaps.

Here’s some of what I learnt.

==

His son YAAKOV ISRAEL PEREIRA (who continued to fund the yeshiva in Hevron) was apparently married to one REBECCA DE PAIVA.

If you cast your mind back four years to when we were discussing the crypto-Jew from Wales, ELIHU YALE, for whom Yale University is named, the name of his converso mistress was HIERONIMA DE PAIVA, widow of the converso diamond dealer and Paradesi Jew, JACQUES DE PAIVA.

You can read more about Eliahu Yale, Golconda diamonds and the East Indies Company HERE – but REBECCA DE PAIVA is close family.

==

This is a snippet from HERE, about JAIME DE PAIVA’s last voyage, and last will and testament:

Jacques notes in his will that his cousin Moses (Pereira de Paiva) should marry Mariana Gonzales. According to E.R. Samuel (see above) the mother of Moses was Ribca de Paiva, this is possibly Ribca de Paiva (b. 1631 in Seville) who in 1651 married Jacob Pereira (b. 1629 in Madrid).

==

YAAKOV PEREIRA and REBECCA DE PAIVA’s kids are interesting.

One of them is called SALOMON PEREIRA – and he causes a massive scandal in Amsterdam high society when he carries on a public affair with a non-Jewish noblewoman called SOPHIA VAN NOORTWIJCK, (1675-1710).

 

Van Noortwijck (and also her mother….) are prosecuted by the State…. But not before she bears SALOMON PEREIRA a son out of wedlock.

Read more about that HERE (translate from the Dutch):

Snippet:

On 1 July 1700, Sophia van der Maa and her daughter were taken to the prison gate and each imprisoned in their own cell. Sophia van der Maa was accused of inciting her daughter to illicit behavior, but she refused to confess. 

Her daughter, on the other hand, immediately confessed everything that was charged to her, although she firmly denied that her mother had played any role in this. In the end, the court ruled that Sophia Van noortwijck’s actions were the result of her youthful age and the insistence of other persons. 

She was fined ten thousand guilders because of the legal costs incurred – which, incidentally, amounted to 5246 guilders for mother and daughter together – and was allowed to serve her detention at home. Sophia van der Maa was sentenced on 7 October to life imprisonment and a fine of 68,000 guilders for inciting her daughter to an affair with a married Jewish man.

==

And this snippet from HERE tells us more what happened to SALOMON PEREIRA:

Salomon Pereira showered Sofia Van Noortwijck and her mother with gifts.

However, he played too much fair weather with his father’s fortune, and in early 1700 he had to flee from his creditors.

Father Pereira [i.e. YAAKOV PEREIRA – funder of the Hevron yeshiva] asked and received permission from the Court of Holland to lock Salomon in a reformatory. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned in Delft.

Sofia visited him regularly and also kept sending him letters. Meanwhile, following father Pereira’s request, the court delved into the case and into what it called the’vexatious life ‘of Salomon Pereira, Sofia van noortwijck and the widow of Noortwijck.

====

So we learn from this that the person who had SALOMON PEREIRA locked away and investigated was….. his own father.

Lovely!

====

Meanwhile, SOLOMON’s brother is called MOSES ISRAEL PEREIRA (1651-1702).

He is the cousin of JACQUES DE PAIVA, mentioned above (as is the infamous adulterer, Solomon Pereira of Amsterdam).

Moses son marries MIRJAM MACHADO, and she links us straight up with a bunch of the most prominent Frankist-Reformer bankers in Berlin and Vienna.

MIRJAM’s brother is JACOB HISQUIAS MACHADO (1686-1750) > HANA MACHADO m ELISHA DE DAVID PEREIRA > HEINRICH ARON VON PEREIRA-ARNSTEIN (1774-1835) m HENRIETTE ARNSTEIN (1780-1859).

Henriette Arnstein is the grand-daughter of DAVID ITZIG, the mint master of Berlin who lived in this palace:

To say her family tree is absolutely, totally, heaving with Frankist-Reform-Masons is still a massive understatement.

==

Both ITZIG and BERNHARD ESKELES – another one of ITZIG’s sons-in-law – are ardent Bros of the ASIATIC BRETHREN, amongst many other masonic endeavors.

If that was all that was hiding out in this family tree – dayenu!

But we’re still just getting started, and the best is yet to come.

==

Once I realised the PEREIRA family tree is literally converso-Sabbatean royalty, I spent a couple more hours seeing who else is hanging out there.

Another of ABRAHAM PEREIRA’s sons is called AARON ISRAEL HISQUIAU PEREIRA.

The tree has been messed-around with, so while it says he married his niece – and these people did stuff like that all the time – I think he probably married someone else they are trying to scrub out of history.

Either way, his son is JOSEPH HAIM ISRAEL PEREIRA, who marries DEBORAH FONSECA.

And his children marry into the TOURO family – who two generations later spawn the famous American (masonic….) philanthropist JUDAH TOURO.

JUDAH TOURO leaves a fortune behind him, and appoints (fellow mason and Rothschild B-I-L) MOSes MONTEFIORE, to go and spend the money buying up land and building stuff in Eretz Yisrael.

==

But NOT just for Jews….

Here’s another snippet about JUDAH TOURO, from Wiki:

He was a major contributor to many Christian charities in New Orleans, as well as to such varied causes as the American Revolutionary War monument at Bunker Hill, and the relief of victims of a large fire in Mobile, Alabama.

In a New Orleans fund-raising drive for Christians suffering persecution in Jerusalem, he gave ten times more than any other donor.

It’s these small details that really underline who we are dealing with, here.

====

Meanwhile, DEBORAH FONSECA’s niece, DONA SIMHA de FONSECA, also marries a very interesting person, namely:

BARON DIEGO LOPES PEREIRA D’AGUILAR.

I am going to quote a fairly lengthy description of him from HERE, so you start to get a feel for:

a) how much money and influence these people had

b) how ‘xtian’ they actually still were, even though they were parachuted back into the Jewish community, where they effectively used their wealth and connections to take it over.

==

Snippet:

Baron Diego Lópes (Moses) Pereira d’Aguilar, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire (cr 1726), banker, financier and confidant of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.

[Ed. Note: she is the mother of Marie Antoinette of France, and Emperor Josef II of Austria, who was a massive ‘mason’ and satanic-secret-society adept. You can read more about all this HERE.)

==

Snippet continues:

Background

“Diego Lópes (Moses) Pereira d’Aguilar, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1699….

He was a Marrano financier, born in Porto, Portugal, where his father held the tobacco monopoly. He himself farmed the tobacco revenue in Portugal before establishing branches of his banking house in London and Amsterdam.

==

“After the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1722 Diego Lopes Pereira followed Charles VI to London, where he established a firm in the City called Pereira and Lima.

It was one of the Jewish firms which imported gold from Portugal (other Jewish merchants who did so included Francis Salvador and Moses Mendes da Costa).

The firm continued to prosper when in 1736 he went to Vienna, to make proposals to the then Empress to farm the tobacco and snuff duties, in which he was very successful, so much so that the Empress appointed him her cashier.

==

“Immediately on his arrival, he reverted to Judaism (ie probably he was circumcised; he probably practised Judaism privately already), adopting the name of Moses and championing other Jews whenever persecution threatened.

To this day they hold an annual service in his honour in the Sephardi synagogue in Vienna.”

====

Snippet continues:

Baron D’Aguilar (1726)

“In 1726 the Emperor created him Baron D’Aguilar.

Empress Maria Theresa

“Maria Theresa made him a Privy Councillor, and he was responsible for building the imperial palace at Schönbrunn.

“Ultimately, the Spanish government requested the extradition of ‘this wealthy renegade’ for trial by the Holy Office. In order to avoid being returned to Portugal to face the Inquisition, in 1757 he moved, with his fourteen children, together with his retinue of servants and slaves, to London, where he was active in the Sephardi community.

==

The notes give us more details, about who this MOSHE PEREIRA, BARON D’AGUILAR, really was, quoting a Jewish Families Claim Legacy dispute, from August 29, 1931, that happened in Vienna:

A story about a claim by a number of Jewish families in Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, and other countries, to a vast fortune estimated at about 42 million pounds, said to have been left by the Jewish banker, Baron Moses d’Aquilar, or d’Aguilar, who fled from Spain, where he had been a Bishop in the Catholic church, while secretly practising Judaism, and went to London, where he died in 1759, is the sensation of the day here.

==

The account continues:

The d’Aquelar family is stated to have owned enormous estates in Spain.

At the time of the Inquisition, they outwardly adopted Christianity, but continued secretly true to the Jewish faith. The Baron in question became a priest and after-wards a Bishop.

The Empress Maria Theresa, who had interests in Spain, entrusted her diplomatic missions to him, but when it was discovered in Spain that he was acting for Austrian interests, he had to fly. He went to Vienna, where he obtained admission to the Royal Court, and in Vienna he again became a Jew.

He lent the Empress 300,000 Taler, and applied the rest of the huge fortune he brought from Spain to speculation and it grew enormously. He then settled in London.

The brother had his wine distillery in Kosteletz, on the estate of Count Sternberg. His grave has been located in Wamberg, in Bohemia. The Spanish Synagogue in the Zirkus Strasse, in the Vienna Jewish quarter known as Leopoldstadt, has a memorial slab on the front of the building, with a gold inscription reading: Turkish-Israelite Community, founded in Vienna, in 1737-5497 by Moses Lopez Perera Diego d’Aquelar.

==

[Now I’m going back through this, I see I need to take a closer look at the ‘War of the Spanish Succession’, and Charles VI of Spain, who ends up in London….There is a lot there that could probably shed more light on what’s really going on in the world today.]

====

Who is MOSES PEREIRA’s anonymous brother, also said to have been ‘spectacularly wealthy’?

He’s called EPHRAIM in some accounts, he’s said to have changed his surname to WEINBERG in other accounts.

But one thing I’m sure of, is that this MOSES PEREIRA, spanish-catholic bishop, is directly related to ABRAHAM PEREIRA, enthusiastic Sabbatean and supporter of MANASSEH ben ISRAEL and Hevron.

The DOBRUSHKA family of Brunn – cousins of the false messiah ‘JACOB FRANK’ were also meant to have held the tobacco monopoly in Moravia under Maria Theresa at this time.

We are dealing with exactly the same family – just sometimes they have a sephardi name, sometimes they have a spanish-catholic name, and sometimes, they have an ‘ashkenazi’ name.

Let’s continue, we aren’t done yet.

==

In the first post, we already realised that ABRAHAM PEREIRA’s brother was also a ‘big deal’ in the spanish-catholic world – including being a Knight of the secret society of the ALCANTARAs.

====

That brother – SALVADOR VAEZ MARTINEZ – had a grandson called MOSES MARTINS (born in London in 1671) – who married into the NUNES HENRIQUES family.

One of his nephews was called ISAAC TEIXARA D’ANDRADE.

We’ll get to him in a minute.

Meanwhile, MOSES MARTINS’ niece by marriage was one RACHEL FRANCO…. Who married one YEHUDA LEIB ESKELES FUERTH….

And their son was the false messiah, ‘JACOB FRANK’.

It’s a small world.

==

OK, so now, who did this ISAAC TEIXARA D’ANDRADE (1705-1730) marry, and why should you care about it?

Read on.

Isaac marries a woman called RACHEL ISRAEL SUASSO, in the Hague.

When I go to look up her family, that’s when all the bells and whistles start tootling, because I am finally pinning this down in the real world.

==

First things first.

If you go HERE, you’ll open a PDF of the AGUILAR-PEREIRA family tree.

BARON D’AGUILAR, MOSHE PEREIRA (erstwhile catholic bishop and purveyor of fine tobacco) is the grandson of ‘CATARINA MARTINS / ALVERES’.

But there is somone important missing off this PEREIRA / AGUILAR family tree.

Another grandson of CATARINA MARTINS / ALVARES by the name of:

DON ISAAC ANTONIO FRANCISCO ISRAEL LOPES SUASSO (1614-1685).

This guy:

==

To cut a very long short – this is the guy who gave William III of Orange 1.5 million guilders to go and ‘invade’ England, back in 1688.

Snippet from HERE:

“Like his father Antonio, Francesco Lopes Suasso was also a moneylender to the King of Spain.

He regularly supported King Charles II of Spain financially in his fight against the French king. He also lent money to Stadtholder William III, among other things to finance the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) and gave financial assistance to William III when he wanted to claim the English crown from his father-in-law.

Francesco supported William III’s passage to England with an amount of one and a half million guilders (about 17 million euros today).”

==

William III was grateful to his Jewish donors. Constantijn Huygens enviously remarked in his journal that the Jewish financiers were very prominent in the first support boat when the stadtholder of the Republic crossed to England.

Stadtholder William III’s important financiers were Portuguese Jews who had good contacts with the court and the government bodies, such as Antonio Lopes Suasso and his son Francesco.

Salomon de Medina and Jacob Pereira from The Hague also gave a lot of money to the stadholder for his ‘Glorious Revolution’.

==

The link for JACOB PEREIRA is misdirected to a different page.

They tried very hard to scrub him out of this story.

But, this ‘JACOB PEREIRA’ seems to be one and the same as the YAAKOV PEREIRA above, who funded the Hevron (Sabbatean….) yeshiva, and arranged for his own son to be locked up for having an affair with SOFIA NOORTWIJCK.

====

One more strange snippet, and then I’ll tell you one more interesting detail about all this, before we close for today:

In 1685 Francesco [SUASSO] bought a house on the Juffrouw Idastraat. Seven years later, the family moved to Korte Voorhout 11.

Here the rich Francesco had bought the large house for ƒ27000, – where originally Maarten Tromp lived.

==

Hey look!

There’s another historical Tromp / TRUMP link up with the people who are pulling the strings here, behind the scenes.

Here’s his picture (left), and this is a snippet from his Wiki page, HERE:

“In 1610, after his father’s discharge because of a navy reorganization, the Tromps were on their way to Guinea on their merchantman when they were attacked by a squadron of seven ships under command of the English pirate Peter Easton.

During the fight, Tromp’s father was slain by a cannonball, where after the battle his body was thrown overboard by the boarding party.

According to legend, the 12-year-old boy rallied the crew of the ship with the cry “Won’t you avenge my father’s death?” The pirates seized him and sold him on the slave market of Salé where he ended up serving as a cabin boy. Two years later, Easton was moved by pity and ordered his redemption.

Set free, Tromp supported his mother and three sisters by working in a Rotterdam shipyard. He went to sea again at 19, briefly working for the navy, but he was captured again in 1621 after having rejoined the merchant fleet, this time by Barbary corsairs off Tunis.

He was kept as a slave until the age of 24 and by then had so impressed the Bey of Tunis and the corsair John Ward with his skills in gunnery and navigation that the latter offered him a position in his fleet. When Tromp refused, the Bey was even more impressed by this show of character and allowed him to leave as a free man in 1622.”

====

Strangely, this story is also dinging off the ‘BS’ bell loudly….

Perhaps more on ‘MAARTEN TROMP’ another time.

==

OK, we have one more item to address:

BARON DE SUASSO’s son, ANTONIO LOPES, marries one RACHEL MENDES DE COSTA.

Her sister, SARAH SIMCHA marries the second BARON D’AGUILAR – son of MOSES PEREIRA D’AGUILAR, who runs away to London apparently to avoid being extradited and burnt at the state in an auto da fe.

And RACHEL and SARAH SIMCHA’s father is MOSES (ANTHONY) MENDES DE COSTA (1668-1747) – who sets up the Bank of England.

==

Snippet from HERE:

Moses was a very successful banker and owned substantial shares in the Bank of England, though he was never on the board.

In 1727 he took an action against the Muscovy Company, a trading company, that had refused to admit him as a member on the grounds of his Jewish background. Although the Attorney-General decided that he should be admitted, the Company petitioned parliament to change the law so that they could refuse membership to Jews.

Mozes was Governor of the Bank of England (in fact he wasn’t)

==

Let’s just recall that snippet we saw above, about ‘BARON D’AGUILAR’:

After the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1722 Diego Lopes Pereira followed Charles VI to London, where he established a firm in the City called Pereira and Lima.

It was one of the Jewish firms which imported gold from Portugal (other Jewish merchants who did so included Francis Salvador and Moses Mendes da Costa).

====

This ‘I own the Bank of England’ guy is this same MOSES MENDES DA COSTA who was importing gold to the UK from Portugal.

All the people that like to talk about ‘conspiracy theories’ hate the suggestion that catholic-former-Jews financed the take over of the UK, via their front men MANASSEH ben ISRAEL and OLIVER CROMWELL, and then via all the conversos in Amsterdam who paid for William of Orange to ‘invade’ – while their family members got to set up ‘the Bank of England’….

But that is just what we’ve discovered in this post, in real time.

=====

In the past, I would stop here.

But, I am 100% sure at this point, that all these ‘catholic-Jews’ were actually just agents of the Jesuits.

ANTONIO SUASSO didn’t just get 1.5 million guildens to ‘give away’ to William of Orange to invade England all by himself.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to start researching the Jesuit angle more to see what shakes out.

But in the meantime, we learnt a lot in this post.

Didn’t we?