Baruch Hashem, I made it to the prayer gathering yesterday.

It was very good to be there, but the Rav unfortunately couldn’t come to join, as was advertised, because he is currently unwell again, and is in the middle of a course of 50 daily treatments for his condition at the hospital.

How the Rav stands up for hours and hours, in cold, rain, wind, heat, outside on his mirpeset during the evening prayers is something truly astounding.

But I would say a couple of thousand people came, and recited the 7 Tikkun Haklalis at the Me’arat HaMachpela.

That has to be a good thing, and BH, the prayers will help ‘sweeten’ whatever else is going on at the moment.

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I go through cycles of trying to go totally ‘cold turkey’ on the news, even the two sources of information I still look at, because as things progress, the lies being told are just so big, and so obvious, they can totally ruin my day before it’s even begun.

The truth comes from within a person’s heart, within a person’s soul.

And it’s really a fool’s game, to keep trying to ‘persuade’ soul-dead morons into challenging even some of the lies we’re all being told.

That’s true of everything – but doubly true about any discussion about  making aliya, or making real teshuva.

At the end of the day, a person is led on the path they want to walk on.

If a person wants to stay stuck in their lies, there is absolutely no piece of information, no argument, no overwhelming fact, that can change their mind.

That’s the bottom line.

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So, how do we ‘get out of Chelm’ in our own dalet amot, how do we start to see what’s true and what isn’t, tachlis?

The answer is: an hour a day of hitbodedut.

And if an hour is too much to start with, start with a minute, five minutes, ten minutes, every single day  but start, already!

Our time, our energy, is so precious.

We spend hours and hours ‘doom scrolling’ through internet crud that is nearly all concocted and scripted and staged (clearly, I’m talking about the ‘news’)… and then hours and hours more engaging with pointless speculation, to try and quell that uneasy feeling in the soul that ‘we’re being lied to, what’s really going on?’

The shortcut to clarity is to do hitbodedut.

And to just ask God, to show us what we need to be thinking about, focussing on, understanding.

God will give the answers, if a person keeps on sincerely asking for clarity.

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For example, all this research into the ‘Badd – do you know how many times I go into hitbodedut and I’m really asking God what He wants from me with all this, because so often my personal inclination is to let sleeping dogs lies.

As outlined above, you can’t win arguments with soul-dead morons, no matter how much good information and archival documentation you might have.

So, why should I just carry on upsetting soul-dead morons by dragging skeletons out of 200 year old cupboards?

What’s the point, the tachlis, the positive outcome, from this?

In my hitbodedut, I keep getting the message: continue, and don’t give up.

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Last week, before the first night of Chanuka, I started reading the scholarly book on the Alter Rebbe, that one of my readers managed to track down and send me (thanks!)

It was Friday night, and suddenly, I started to feel like I was going to throw up.

I went to bed, started to do some serious hitbodedut about what was going on, because I felt it was connected to that Alter Rebbe book.

Long story short – I had the distinct feeling I was under attack from the Alter Rebbe of ‘Badd, and that only Rabbenu, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, could save me.

I asked my husband to stick that Alter Rebbe book in a large copy of the Likutey Moharan – and within five minutes, I felt way way better.

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So now, I did some more hitbodedut on what all this meant.

Clearly, it meant I should forget about that book and just carry on doing other stuff with myself.

Right?

Apparently not right.

In hitbodedut, I just got the same message over and over again: proceed with the research, but tread very carefully, as you dealing with things that are really evil.

I was kinda surprised myself, to be honest, at how ‘vehement’ this message was.

Sure, there’s a lot of mishandling funds, financial deception, ties to Frankists, Sabbatean theology that hasn’t been ‘rectified’, spying for the deep state, ties to the Catholic and Russian Orthodox church, ties to the evangelicals – but ‘evil’?!

That’s very strong language.

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The next day, what happened, happened.

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I am talking to God about this all the time.

I am trying to figure out what He wants me to do.

It could be, my own biases are still tripping me up, even so, that’s very possible.

Unlike a lot of the people who like to comment here, or send me holier-than-thou emails, I am not pretending to be a tzaddik, or anything approaching one.

And I can guarantee, that my critics are not doing hitbodedut themselves, because if they were, they’d at least be phrasing their criticisms with a tad more humility and self-awareness.

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So, this is where we’re up to.

About to dive back into to another ‘saga from Chelm’, whether it’s ‘Covid 25’, more ‘war with Iran’, more ‘false messiahs’ – it’s all just on a loop, that goes round and round and round again, giving more people the chance to finally wake up, realise what’s true and what isn’t, and make the changes, the teshuva, God is requiring of them, to step into the world of truth.

A lot of people are not going to manage that transition, it seems.

I hope that I’m going to manage it, there are no guarantees here for any of us.

All I have going for me is my efforts to try to stay connected to real tzaddikim, the True Tzaddikim, especially Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, and Rav Berland.

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But that counts for everything.