More than 20 years ago, now, I was attending a whole bunch of parenting classes, as a new mother.

My kid was barely one year old, but I already understood that I had a whole bunch of stuff I needed to figure out and fix, if I didn’t want to totally screw-up my kid.

So there we were, my husband and me, sitting on the parenting woman’s coach, surrounded by a bunch of unfriendly Jewish Londoners, all pretending they had ‘no problems with their kids’ and were just there because they were bored, or something.

Plus ca change.

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Long story short, I was there to figure stuff out and to fix stuff, and I didn’t so much care about making a spectacle of myself, as long as I could start improving my parenting.

(This was way before Rav Arush put out ‘Education with Love’ – still the best parenting book ever, in my opinion.)

But you know, when you’re without authentic Breslov, and without authentic advice from a really holy place, that really helps to you change and fix a whole bunch of stuff, you just muddle along, trying to find one be-wigged or be-bearded ‘guru’ after another, who seems to be making at least a little bit of sense.

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My be-wigged ‘guru’ was called Rivkie, from Israel originally, and had that refreshing Israeli directness that is so foreign to most interactions between London Jews.

One time, I was moaning about how I was doing all the hard work at home, taking all the responsibility for stuff, everything was falling on me, blah-blah-blah.

She threw a cushion at me, which I caught.

Then she told me, this cushion represents all your ‘responsibilities’. For as long as you are clutching it, no-one else can pick it up.

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Simple as this sounds, at that time in my life I was in a mindset where I felt I couldn’t trust anyone, and that if I put that cushion down, there was no-one around who was going to come and rescue it. Or me.

Of course, the bit of the puzzle that was totally missing from this ‘cushion experiment’, back then, was God.

Specifically, the idea that God is running the world, and we individuals have to do the tasks that God expects us to do, without shirking or running away – but also, without taking on all the ‘burdens’ of the world, and of other people, in a misguided attempt to try to help or ‘fix’ them.

It’s literally taken me about 23 years, to finally get the cushion idea.

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What does that mean, tachlis?

It means that I am trying to let go of problems that are not really ‘mine’, dramas that are not being written by me, or for me, worries about ‘what’s going to be in the shtachim’, or ‘what’s going to be in Gaza’, all of that stuff.

Sure, I can still pray for other people.

And honestly? As time goes on, I am understanding that praying for other people, sincerely, is really the biggest ‘help’, and the truest ‘gift’ I can give them.

Because bottom line: when we’re not in alignment with God’s plan for us, and we’re not doing our own work to ‘fix’ all the middot and other crud we came down here to fix, then our lives are going to be full of suffering and pain and ‘drama’.

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I know that was my own experience, until I finally hit real Breslov and finally understood that I wasn’t just suffering stam.

I was suffering, because I had a ton of bad middot I needed to fix.

I was suffering, because I had a ton of grudges I was holding against God, about hard stuff I’d experienced, and difficulties I’d had to go through – to achieve my spiritual tikkun down here.

I was suffering, because I was very, very far away from really having emuna, defined as doing my best to see God behind every single circumstance in my life, and understanding that God was sending this stuff, or arranging the hardships, as a tikkun to fix my soul – and also, as an invitation to drop the mask and finally start talking to Him.

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This stuff doesn’t come overnight.

And to keep this ‘real’, I am still very much a Work In Progress (W.I.P.), and I am still even today fighting the battle to have emuna, and to not get lost in blame games, self-righteous ‘anger’ and fallen fears about my teeth falling out…

It’s a war of emuna, and I am on the frontlines of it, most days.

(Guess what: so are you.)

Actually – so is everybody.

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Back to the cushion.

Sometimes, particularly with people you care about, like children for example, there comes a time when you have to ‘put down the cushion’ of taking responsibility for them, and you have to encourage them to live their own lives, and to make their own mistakes.

That’s the only way people really grow.

It’s the only way they really become ‘them’, instead of just a robot that’s processing ‘commands’ from their parents, however well-intentioned the programmers may be.

Also, it’s the only way people ever really start to walk that path of developing emuna, and getting closer to God.

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Mamash, I hate all the suffering that’s going on in the world, in all different ways.

Engaging with the ‘news’ literally makes my eyes go funny, because all it is propaganda, lies, or deliberate fear-inducement designed to plunge us back into a PTSD response.

And all the ‘influencers’ that feed off that stuff, and spread it around just so they can feel ‘important’, and like they’re doing something – I would really urge us all to stop for a moment, and to really explore if sharing this crud around is doing something positive. Or the very opposite.

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But the point is: suffering is happening all around.

And if you’re a caring, thoughtful person, it can literally be overwhelming and ‘sick’ making.

Until… You finally understand that God is behind all this, and it all turns around for the best, literally, the second a person makes the sort of teshuva God is requiring of them.

Working on overcoming the bad middot is the first line of action, because the whole world is really just a mirror. And if we’re surrounded by certain types, certain ‘issues’ we can be sure that we’ll find some trace of that inside ourselves, too. If we look closely.

But working on developing real emuna is also a crucial part of this, again, defined as understanding that every little thing is coming from God, and isn’t ‘stam’.

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In our world, where ‘victimhood’ is encouraged and rewarded, playing the biggest victim often seems like a good idea.

But, this is the opposite of the emuna approach, where we understand that God is behind every last single thing, even the most horrible, and that there is a tikkun of souls going on here, that stretches back to the beginning of time.

This is what helped me, myself, to come to terms with so much of the crud I had to deal with, especially from childhood: the understanding that if God arranged all this for me in this lifetime, I sure must have been a really yucky person in previous lifetimes, that I had to experience all this on the side of being the ‘victim’.

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That doesn’t mean we just roll-over and let the baddies and bullies continue beating us up, not at all.

NOT AT ALL.

But, it means that we move out of ‘victim’ mode, and we start to take responsibility for ourselves, and our own lives, and our own happiness.

And the main way we do that, is by talking to God for an hour every single day, and making God part of the solution to our problems.

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For example, I hate that our evil government is finding ridiculous pretexts to destroy Jewish villages in the Yehuda and Shomron.

It’s bad, it’s evil, it’s totally wrong.

But – it’s also from God.

And as someone with kids in these areas, I know there is a lot of stuff that needs ‘fixing’ in Yehuda and Shomron right now – not least, the cosying up to the Notzrim that’s going on all over, and a total over-reliance on ‘guns’ instead of God.

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The drive to violence comes from a lot of anger.

From what I have learned the last few years, Hilltop youth, for the most part, come from broken homes. There’s a lot of dysfunction, a lot of divorce. They gravitate to places where they can kind of ‘camp out’ when they’re teens, which tend to be the farms in YeSHa, and then many of them stay, settle down and get married.

But the anger?

That really should be directed as their divorced parents (as the first stage in the healing process), and then, at God, as part of working it all through and finally letting it go?

The anger stays.

Until it’s dealt with properly, via hitbodedut and prayer, and Uman and pidyonot – and BTW, that’s one of the reasons Rabbenu is so big with the hilltop youth, because many of them have already figured out that without Rabbenu, they’d sink under the weight of all that anger.

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Angry people don’t make good spouses.

They don’t make good parents.

They may make good ‘settlers’, in some ways – but I highly doubt that this is the only way of accomplishing yishuv ha’aretz, and I am sure that once the anger is addressed and worked through – the yishuv ha’aretz bit will also get way easier and more gentle, too.

Once the media can stop pointing fingers at ‘angry and violent hilltop youth’, and the government can no longer use them as convenient cover for the violent actions of their own agents provacateurs, it will be way, way harder to keep getting public buy-in for bulldozing Jewish homes. Even in Tel Aviv.

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Tov, of course I’m over-generalising to make the point.

But the point is: we are suffering because God wants something to change.

And just pointing fingers at Lefties, or America, and yelling ‘Kahane was right’ doesn’t mean we don’t also need to take a long, hard look at our own bad middot, to try to figure out why is GOD doing this to us?!

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If I upset you by saying this (especially you, Dean Maughvet) – I apologise.

But take a deep breath, and think about what I’m really saying here.

It’s empowering on such a deep level, to understand that everything that’s happening to us – it’s not stam. It’s exactly, 100%, tailored from God, to get something to change inside.

If you want to argue that the ‘answer’ is more violence, more guns, more anger, more ‘the power and strength of my own arm’ – it’s a free world, go right ahead.

All I know, is that the day before October 7th they State took all the guns away from the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, and all that remained was God’s protection.

It’s not for nothing, that the Shabbat-respecting yishuvim had their gates closed and were mostly unharmed that day.

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So.

Bottom line.

We are only responsible for ourselves, and our own avodat hamiddot.

I can only fix myself, by asking God to help me do that. And this is also true of everyone else, too.

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It’s not easy to learn that lesson.

It usually requires a lot of suffering, lo alenu, to break our arrogance, and to overcome the yetzer that tells us ‘we can do this without God’.

But we can’t.

At all.

And that message is only going to get louder, going forward.