I was doing some talking to God, about why I reacted so badly yesterday, when someone pushed in the queue.

At the head level, I know everything is from God, everything is for my good, it’s just mamash a message for me to explore something on my side of the equation, that I need to acknowledge and try to rectify.

At the heart level, when that woman pushed in so aggressively and unfairly, I suddenly got ‘flashed back’ to that horrible feeling of powerlessness I had when I was a child, and people used to bully me.

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I got bullied a lot.

The only Jew in school… Going to a posh school where people had regularly ski-ing holidays and I had holes in my socks that had me living in fear of ever taking my shoes off in public… I had a knack of attracting attention, even without trying to, and saying or doing things that set me apart, and set me up to be bullied.

A lot.

Even by the teachers.

And that was just at school…

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Point is, the last few months since I’ve been unpicking another layer of all this old, old stuff from childhood, I feel like I’ve got sensitized now to any hint that someone is trying to bully me.

It’s part of the process.

You have to swing from one side to the other, to find the right balance.

The problem is, if you stay ‘on the other side’ too long, or think it’s OK to turn into a rude, bullying old bag yourself, because at one point you were a ‘victim’.

At that point, the ‘victim’ becomes the aggressor, and they cycle starts up, all over again.

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So where I got to yesterday, is I was having a flash-back to when I used to be bullied, a lot, and I couldn’t get away from it, or really fight back.

Now, I’m an adult, so I could walk away, and perhaps God arranged this whole palaver yesterday, simply to bring it to my attention that I am now an adult, and I have plenty more tools available to move away from being bullied.

That’s a very helpful insight.

It’s moving me forward a lot in this process, of trying to figure out how I can deal with yucky people in the world, with emuna, and without getting ‘flash-backed’ into a negative mochin de katnut state.

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Something else that come up, is that I feel as the world is getting more and more ‘controlling’, in a billion different ways, the human need for freedom, to have ‘free choice’ is welling up more and more.

This is another process that has been going on for a while, and really ramped-up during Covid, with all the deep state enforcement and masks and lockdowns, that people just want to live freely.

Without a whole bunch of the laws of Sdom to contend with.

I only want to be subservient to Hashem and to His Torah, and to nothing and nobody else.

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Rebbe Nachman teaches that free choice is the only reason God created the world.

All of us, from the youngest to the oldest, from the richest to the poorest, from the cleverest to the dumbest, from the ‘biggest success’ to the ‘biggest failure’ – all of us have a need to be able to express ourselves, and to choose for ourselves, without being controlled, bullied and manipulated from the outside.

Sometimes, that control and manipulation comes from parents, siblings, friends, the school bully, the yucky boss or teacher.

These days, we are also getting a heavy dose of it at the State level, reminiscent of communist times in the former Soviet Union, when everything was manipulation and lies to keep the population quiescent and controllable, cowering in fear.

But deep down, and also not so deep down – the human soul was built to be ‘free’, to be free to choose to serve Hashem, or not. To do good, or not. To think for itself, or not.

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So, this is where I’ve got to in unpicking more of this ‘bad middot’ onion I’m currently still working through.

Ad 120.

I apologise, if anyone got offended that I called rude, selfish old narcissists names.

That’s very bad middot on my part, I’m working on it.

Ad 120.

But in the meantime, I also want to encourage us all to stop taking things too seriously, to lighten up, slow down, and understand that we are all down here because we have some serious work to do, to develop some real emuna and recognise our own bad middot.

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The problem is not so much that we have bad middot.

We all have bad middot, and God gave them to us and created us exactly that way.

The real problem is that not enough people are admitting that yes, I also have this problem… I’m sorry I’m acting this way…I admit I’m also having unhelpful ‘flashbacks’ that cause me to react in less than optimal ways…

Instead, they take a page out of the NPD playbook, and turn into holier-than-thou hypocrites who severely criticise everyone else for their bad middot, but can’t admit that at least sometimes, they also aren’t perfect. They also hurt other people. They also do stuff wrong.

That’s the real problem here.

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My supermarket is full of those people.

They are really yucky to be around, or even just to stand next to in line, by the till.

You can feel all their anger, and hakpada, and projected self-hatred shimmering around them, like a malevolent force-field, just waiting for the next poor sod to put a foot wrong and get ‘zapped’ with their wrath.

God forbid, I don’t want to turn into one of those people.

God forbid, I don’t want anyone else to, either.

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So, I will continue to share what’s going on with unpeeling my own ‘bad middot onion’, here on the blog.

I know, I know, everyone else is perfect, and ‘normal’, and simply don’t have these issues (God bless the weed, wine and meds!)

But what can I do?

I don’t smoke, drink or take prescription medications.

So, I am stuck experiencing my bad middot in full force, and trying to figure out how I can really deal with them, with God’s help, and overcome them, mostly by following Rabbenu’s advice.

Ad 120.

(And then, plus another 800 reincarnations…)