Mrs Amalek
After a month of feeling pretty ill, I finally managed to get back to my art chug yesterday in Jerusalem.
Before I continue the story, I did another serious bout of ‘teshuva hitbodedut’, two days ago to try and figure out what’s been underneath all this excrutiating pain and the most painful cough I had in my life.
What turned up was this:
I’ve been finding so much since October 7th so hard to deal with, emotionally, I have just switched off from it all.
Apart from that first month when I was doing a whole book of tehillim a day for the soldiers, I try not to think about what’s going on in Gaza. Or with the hostages. Or with the refugees who still don’t have homes to go to.
It’s just been too painful.
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But what came up, is that I still have a duty to pray on them every single day…. And I haven’t been doing that, because I didn’t want to deal with the ‘pain’ of the situation.
So instead, that internalised as the most excrutiating physical pain and cough I’ve ever had to deal with.
For sure, ‘stress’ is at its root.
But I have to deal with the stress all around by acknowledging it, at least in my prayers, and only then continuing with ‘business as usual’.
(BTW, I got this insight after my husband paid another small pidyon for me, as the pain and cough was starting to ramp up again.)
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OK, so yesterday, I felt the best I’ve felt in well over a month, so I headed off to my art chug.
I really like the lady who runs it. She’s an anglo who has been here for decades. But the other students who come – which changes every week, as it’s a drop-in schedule – are quite the mixed bag.
I wrote about that a few weeks ago, when a super-nice lady from England literally ran away from me, when I started telling her 0.0000002% of what’s going on with the Sabbatean-Frankist-Masons in our community….
I haven’t seen her again.
So now, I just keep my mouth shut.
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Yesterday, another new face showed up, an American who lives here but jets all over the place visiting her children.
The usual expensive designer black, diamond tennis bracelet and what looked like one of those super-expensive wigs that looks just like hair.
I knew she was bonkers from 10 seconds in.
She kept asking people questions, ke-ilu she was interested in the answers, but she would then just cut the person off mid-sentence, and say something totally unrelated.
This happens to all of us sometimes, especially when we we are preoccupied and stressed, but this woman did it all the time. And that’s already a ‘red flag’ that you are probably dealing with someone so caught up with themselves, there is no ‘room’ in their head for anybody else.
So, I tried to ignore her, tried to avoid getting into any conversations with her, and just intently focussed on my art project.
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Then, she started up with all the ‘isn’t what’s going on so very awful’.
Because of course, constantly harping on about how ‘awful’ it is helps everyone to get through their day.
After 10 minutes of this, and seeing how she was literally dragging everyone down emotionally, my vow of silence finally snapped, when she started going on and on and on about how there is no solution to this!!! No solution!!! It’s totally awful, bad, horrible, and there is no solution!!!!
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At that point, I said to her:
The only solution to this is to put God back in the picture. Otherwise, you’re right. There is no other solution.
Because she has ‘narcissism-induced deafness’, she of course misheard me, and thought I said ‘good’, not ‘God’.
Of course there is good!!! She started screeching. I am a good person!!! All the soldiers are good people!!! Of course I am putting good in the picture!!!
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No, I said, ‘God’, not good.
If you want to boil everything down to the ‘body’, then it’s very hard to deal with what is going on. But we are souls, not just bodies. And everything that’s happening here is part of the soul’s journey to rectify itself spiritually.
When we put God back into the picture, we’ll find a solution to what is happening.
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At that point, her eyes narrowed to slits, and this is what she said:
I used to believe, but not any more.
The holocaust still happened to good people!!!!
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And then, she started spewing out a whole bunch of heresy and kefira that was literally sickening to hear.
(I won’t repeat it here, for many reasons.)
At that point, I already understood I was dealing with ‘Mrs Amalek’, a person who had thrown herself 10000% into blaming God for everything that was ‘bad’, whilst taking zero responsibility for herself, and her own bad middot, and the way she was just steam-rollering over everyone else, in the name of being ‘an angry enlightened victim’.
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While she was doing her best to kill everyone’s belief in God, and belief in emuna – that God is behind every single detail that occurs to a person, and everything is just part of an ongoing Divine conversation with us, to hint what we need to work on, fix and change – she was also complaining non-stop to the poor art teacher.
The glue is too sticky…. I just hurt myself on the board….This isn’t going as fast as I wanted….
All with that ‘undercurrent’ of being the angry, enlightened ‘victim’ who everyone else had to dance around, to keep happy.
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Wow, I thought to myself, as I watched just how miserable and yucky this ‘enlightened’ person was.
I am so blessed, that I have the teachings of Rabbenu, and the teachings of Rav Berland. I am so blessed that instead of blaming everything and everyone else for my problems, I have the tools and the teachings to know that the very first place I need to look for “the problem” is inside myself.
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As a side point, it came out that she learnt most of the awful ‘pseudo-Torah’ Amalekite ideas she was spewing out at Nishmat.
The Reform-funded ‘ortho fems’ are continuing to do a wonderful job of destroying the souls of Am Yisrael, one stupid, ‘angry-enlightened-victim’ at a time.
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On the way home, my cough started up again, and the beginnings of that horrible pain started to pulse.
Uhoh.
For sure, spending time around ‘Mrs Amalek’ had been pretty stressful. Having to share airspace with narcissist Amalekites is never fun.
But after all that teshuva on the pain, I knew that it was more connected to me not praying enough for Am Yisrael.
And ‘Mrs Amalek’ is still externally part of the Jewish people.
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I called my husband up.
You have to find the good point in her! He told me. That’s how the cough will go away!
Man, talk about a challenge. How to find ‘the good point’ in Mrs Amalek?
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After a few minutes, it finally hit me: she’s making a point of only flying El Al now, even though many of the other airlines are re-starting flights to Israel April 1st.
(According to her. I have no idea.)
It was kind of a flimsy ‘good point’, but it was the best I could do.
And I think it was the effort of at least trying to do Azamra, that made the cough die back down again.
==
I honestly don’t know if people like Mrs Amalek can make teshuva.
As we said at the beginning, even without all the kefira and ortho-fem heresy, she was already clearly bonkers and not a ‘fun’ person to be around.
Before the cough, I simply wouldn’t have wasted any time trying to do Azamra on such a yuck person.
But now…. I guess I have to ‘feel God’s pain’ a little more, and pray for all the narcissist psychos He’s dropping in my path to make some real teshuva.
At least, for ten seconds.
Excuse me, Rivka: can I please ask you to explain what Azamra exactly is? Sorry I am so ignorant!
Yeah, I know: narcissists are so very difficult to deal with; they have a lot of blockages. Where is all of this coming from: how do they become such narcissists: because of their mothers, maybe? Because of lack of love in early infancy?
And what is the spiritual connection; how can we explain narcissism on a spiritual level? What’s going on with these people? Maybe you know something about it…..??? Thanks.
Azamra is Rabbenu’s Lesson 282, to find the good point in even the most wicked person (or at least, most wicked Jewish person….)
And the process of doing that lifts the spark of good that wicked Jew contains back to Hashem – and then the ‘bad’ kind of disappears all by itself.
There are many different discussions of what that actually looks like, tachlis.
Re: narcissists, the bottom line is this:
It’s a spiritual klippah, and a v. v. tough one.
There are many people who adopt narcissist traits without realising (usually, because they are being raised and / or surrounded be real narcissists) – those people can and do change once they understand what is really going on.
Although, it’s still a choice to carry on living in the ‘narcissist-defined’ paradigm, and if they choose to do that, then sadly they will also carry on acting like narcs.
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The hardcore narcs probably got that way thanks to trauma – that’s a ‘this world’ explanation of the problem.
But really, it’s a spiritual klippa, one step up (or down…) from other mental and emotional issues like autism – there is a lot of overlap between high-functioning autists and narcissists.
It basically revolves around a total lack of empathy for others, but where autists are obviously ‘in their own world’ and don’t care what others think about them so much, narcs care very, very much what others think about them, and so they manipulate and orchestrate ‘drama’ and guilt festivals and all the rest of it way more. Because people don’t realise that narcs are also mentally impaired, they can do way, way more damage to the people they come into contact with (especially, their own children.)
(This is all hugely oversimplified of course.)
But to boil it down: outside of the spiritual realm, hardcore narcs are said to be ‘unfixable’.
My view is that they are very big, hard massive klippah. But with tremendous spiritual effort to tackle the problem at its core, especially by doing pidyon nefesh for them, the issue can improve.
And outside of the pidyonot, it also boils down to us taking responsibility for ourselves, and our own mental health, and to stop letting narcissists dictate the terms of the social engagement.
That usually takes a lot of courage and self-awareness to pull off.
But it’s one of the most liberating and spiritually and emotionally helpful things you can do for yourself.
Yes, I know what you mean Rivka – re: narcs.
I have one narc in my life, and on my end I have been able to free myself of her shtick. But I am a lot more worried for other people of my family whom I really care about; not everybody has the emotional ability to free themselves from the influence of the narcissist, scared of the harming ability of the narc.
So from the outside, I wish I could help – to protect the innocents in this situation. But I can’t do anything directly.
However indirectly I might be able to follow your suggestion. I can mention what you said: ” taking responsibility for ourselves, and our own mental health, and to stop letting narcissists dictate the terms of the social engagement.” Very good way to put it. Thanks!
I think that with this perspective, maybe the adult among them might be able to at least protect himself. But what about the young ones???? That’s where the problem begins. As you said, if you are surrounded by narcs it can affect you. And I want to make sure the young ones don’t suffer from this for the rest of their lives. What to do besides giving them a different experience of relationships? Any idea? Not easy. They don’t know anything else, that’s their reality.
But as you said, on a spiritual level you can do a pidyon…. I don’t know; some people are tough nuts to crack!
Thanks!
Pidyonot are pretty much my ‘go to’ method for dealing with narcs I can’t get away from.
And also to remember, they are also just tests from God. The more we uproot ‘narc tendencies’ in ourselves, including things like using anger and guilt to manipulate others to doing what we want, and harsh judgement to ‘shame’ people into complying with us, and vindicative measures to ‘punish’ others when they go against us – the more we do that work in ourselves, the less we have to deal with it in our outside environment.
The whole world is just a mirror.
Well for sure you have a menshadik husband. Hope you will heal soon Rivka!
I can totally vouch for what u said about narcs . I’m married 27 years to one. Mine is covert by the way so it’s a little easier. When I work on myself spiritually my husband gets better too. Something happened last week that proved it to me once and for all I started having these thoughts that I usually get here and there and instead of squashing them down I let them fester and push me to the edge. So when I got home I exploded. Now usually I do not allow myself to give in to the yetzer hora like that. My husband comes out and voices the same thoughts I was having at the time that I never said aloud It was so spooky that it stopped me in my tracks ! I immediately did teshuva which brings me enormous simcha. Coming closer to Hashem is a life long process and the struggle is real but I’m doing my part to bring moshiach.
Refuah shleima Rivka completely quickly & sweetly!
I am speechless about your comments about narcs…it pains me that you or any of your readers going through this…I feel it too in my familial relationships. I am emotionally spent too…the roller coaster keeps going up & down. Fine line between being down to being depressed! Sometimes I feel it’s too much to bare, all this “tikkun” stuff. Looking fwd to Hashem’s enlightenment for all.
Rosh Chodesh tov uMevorach & leKol haYeshuot!
Ah Talia, we are all suffering from an epidemic of the klippa that I’m referring to with the word ‘narcissists’.
All this is very closely related to the klippa of the sabbatean-frankist-masons who took over our community on so many fronts, and their main modus operandi is to split the reality of who they really are, and what they really believe, away from the ‘appearance’ of the pious, good Jew.
The State also borrowed this modus operandi. It spends huge amounts of time, effort and money trying to convince us all of its ethics and morality and goodness and even, unquestionable ‘holiness’ (if you were unlucky enough to grow up in the educational framework for the dati leumi here in Israel….) – but in the meantime, it’s rotten to the core and just finding new ways to hurt good Jews, destroy yiddishkeit, and sell us out to our worse enemies.
I think when enough of us have got to grips with this klippa on our personal level – which basically just boils down to recognising what is really going on, and to stop making excuses for people and lying to OURSELVES most of all – the power of this klippa will finally be broken, at least in our own lives.
And then it will also fall away nationally too.
Hold on Talia!
Do things that make you truly happy, spend some time investing in YOURSELF right now, as we’re all so exhausted from what’s been going on. And spend as much time offline as possible right now.
The storm wind has nearly blown itself out. But the last few moments are probably the most dangerous and confusing.