When I heard last week the failed State was closing down Meron again for L’ag B’omer, I told my husband: we need to get there ASAP.

So motzash, straight after havdalah, we got in the car and headed North.

Before we left, I asked one of my kids if anything is meant to be going on up North, at the moment, as I’m basically ignoring the ‘news’.  She told me, Ima, they fired 150 rockets at Har Meron, they are having azekot all the time.

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Does it strike anyone else as strange, that there are massive cities right next to Meron, like Karmiel, like Tsfat, and yet ‘Hezbollah’ has made Mt Meron it’s main focus?

Sure, there’s that army base, ahem, on the top of the mountain, but there are no more than 2,000 people living in the yishuv itself, and the Zion itself is pretty quiet at the moment.

It’s kind of a strange target for ‘Hezbollah’ to be focussing so much fire power on.

Two weeks before L’ag B’omer, when our failed State is looking for yet another excuse to close RASHBI down.

(I’m sure that’s just a CO-INC-ID-ENCE).

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So, we got in the car and headed north.

As it’s the Omer, I’d downloaded a bunch of the latest Rav Elmaliach shiurim for us to listen to.

Now that I’ve got used to his style of speaking, I have to say the level of his Torah scholarship is superb. He brings sources from all over the place, and he manages to describe even very complicated kabbalistic ideas in a way that are at least partially understandable.

(For people like me, who don’t know a lot of kabbalah. My husband knows a lot more, and he’s getting a lot out of these shiurim, some of which he then has to explain to me.)

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It was all really solid Torah stuff, and very impressive scholarship.

I thought to myself, how can anyone hear these shiurim, and not understand that the Torah discussions around the Rav are just on a totally different level than the crud being served up online, especially in the Anglo world?

I guess it’s part of the ‘hester panim’, where the truth is being hidden in front of people’s faces, and the main barrier to accessing it is a person’s own arrogance and bad middot.

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So, we get to the Rashbi.

It’s pretty quiet there, for a motzash two weeks ahead of L’ag B’omer, but the ‘feeling’ there was the nicest it’s been in years and years.

For the first time since the failed State murdered 45 people in 2021, I actually just felt a happy, calm, joyous vibe there.

I said my three Tikkun HaKlalis, then we started the drive back home.

The North was totally calm, and didn’t feel ‘scary’ at all.

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We stopped at the main gas station on Route Six, to get coffees and some petrol.

As we’re filling up, a chareidi man comes over to my husband, and asks him if he can get a lift to Jerusalem with us.

He’s one of the ‘evacuees’ from the Northern border, he’s been living in a hotel in Jerusalem for the last seven months, because all they hear where he lives is ‘booms’.

We were in the middle of listening to Rav Elmaliach’s shiurim, and I wasn’t going to turn it off just to give someone a tremp.

But I figured to myself, R Elmaliach is just talking Torah, it’s OK, the guy will manage.

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Dear reader, within a minute of the hitchhiker buckling his seat belt, Rav Elmaliach was singing:

Yehi Melech HaMoshiach, HaRav Eliezer Berland, shlita.

He was describing what had actually ‘gone wrong’ on that famous Purim night, when there was meant to be a big revelation of the Rav as MBD, with 250 tattooed drug addicts from Tel Aviv.

Except…. there was so much push-back from certain elements of the Shuvu Banim kehilla that R Elmaliach ended up cancelling the party that was meant to have happened…. and then the open ‘revelation’ apparently also got cancelled. 

(More on this in a moment.)

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So all of a sudden, we’re sitting in a car where R Elmaliach is ‘re-enacting’ the singing, and what was meant to have happened at 8.55pm that Purim night.

And it was kind of embarrassing.

I personally really don’t like that ‘yehi’ song, just because I associate it so much with Chabad and the Rebbe, and all the poisonous, misleading stuff that is still going on about him being ‘MBD’.

I was sitting in the back, so I just pretended to be asleep.

My husband was driving, so he couldn’t pull the same stunt.

We were both trying very hard not to laugh.

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The poor guy!

He signed up for a lift with a relatively normal couple of frummers, and now, he’s worrying he got kidnapped by a couple of crazy Breslov mesichistim….

Tov.

The rest of the trip, Rav Elmaliach is describing what went down that Purim night, including more snippets of singing the ‘yehi’ song, that the Rav had instructed him to only begin at 8.55pm.

Except, the guy with the sound system totally disappeared, so what happened, happened.  

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Then, R Elmaliach was talking about how everyone came after him, post-Purim, accusing him of all sorts of things.

He said he cried so many bitter tears in the mikva in Hevron, the water rose by 30cm.

But this week, after six weeks of radio silence, the Rav finally said something publically about what happened then.

Rav Elmaliach quoted him word for word, but the following also appeared in the Shivivei Or Newsletter 359, and I was planning to translate it anyway, this week.

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Excerpt of a shiur given by the Rav on 28th Nissan, 5784, after the Ma’ariv prayers:

They said that I was Moshiach, and that I will reveal myself on Purim.

In the end [text is missing in the newsletter] with the tikshoret (communication / speaker system), I don’t know what.

I didn’t reveal myself.

Now, they are still makpidim against me (holding a grudge, judging harshly) because of this. They aren’t forgiving me.

It was publicised that they should come with tattoos, they should come with nose rings, they should come with earrings – nobody came.

This was a very big mashber (‘shattering’, breaking).

It was also a mashber for me.

And I ask for forgiveness, that I didn’t reveal myself.

And there will be a wait for another 200 years.

The Gaon said that the Moshiach will come, really, in another 200. Only in another 200.

Only at the end of the 6,000.

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Again, this is what the Rav himself said openly, from the balcony, after the evening prayers last week.

Rav Elmaliach has just been giving over ‘hidden messages’ from the Rav the last few months.

He’s not doing anything under his own steam, or from his own ‘ideas’.

At least that’s starting to become more obvious now.

I have a lot more stuff to translate from the Rav this week, BH, but in the meantime, let’s get back to the hitchhiker.

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So, he’s sitting there, saying nothing, as all this strange information about Rav Berland revealing himself as MBD / not revealing himself is being discussed.

He’s hearing all about the 250 tattooed drug addicts that actually were ready to come – someone called Keren Mor actually organised a whole group and they were ready to come.

But then, the people within Shuvu who appear to not have as much real emunat tzaddikim as they perhaps pretend put an end to that whole request of the Rav.

And every now and then, Rav Elmaliach breaks out into another demonstration of ‘yehi Melech HaMoshiach HaRav Eliezer Berland, shlita’.

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The minute we get to Jerusalem, he asked to be dropped by the next bus stop.

He was really nice about it. You helped me so much, thanks so much. I think I just need to get a bus from here to Talpiyot…

It was 2am.

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As soon as we pulled away, me and my husband started laughing hysterically.

I giggled for half an hour straight, and I am still laughing as I type this.

Of course, we looked like totally crazy, whacked out Breslov mesichists!

Of course.

And all of the amazing Torah that Rav Elmaliach had been given over for 3 1/2 hours before we got to that particular shiur – this guy didn’t hear a word of it.

No wonder he ran away as fast as his legs could carry him.

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I realised, that from now on I am taking the ‘high road’ with the debate of the Rav being MBD.

I am not wasting any more time with people who are going directly against Torah sources about who Moshiach is.

No politician, former spook, dead guy fits the bill – at all.

The people pushing these candidates just don’t know the Torah sources, and there is no point arguing with them.

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Then, there are other people who have ‘their own candidate’ for Moshiach, who isn’t in one of the categories above.

And if ‘their own candidate’ is an orthodox Rabbi who is still alive, with some sort of track record with bringing people back to observant Judaism, who doesn’t teach obvious heresy, and who is widely reviled by the general public, obvious suffering on behalf of Am Yisrael, and being continuously persecuted by the secular authorities – then good luck to them! They are welcome to think that person is a hezkat Moshiach, even if it’s not Rav Berland.

I have totally no problem with that, none of us know where all this heading, until we finally get there.

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And then, there are the bitter, cynical people who even though they wear a kippah on their heads, or are ‘super-duper-frum’, really, they don’t believe in anyone being Moshiach.

For these people, ‘redemption’ is a myth, a daydream.

They experience that in their own lives, due to their own lack of emuna, arrogance and bad middot, and then they graft their personal experience onto the national psyche.

And I’ve realised there is just no point engaging with people in this category either.

I don’t need to drown my emuna in God’s goodness, my emunat tzaddikim, in their bitter pool of cynicism and despair. This process is tough enough as it is.

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So going forward – I am not commenting on anyone else’s fake moshiach.

I am sticking to sharing the Rav’s words and light – and prayers.

And if you don’t like that, you are welcome to leave the vehicle at the next bus stop.

I promise I won’t hold it against you.