Seeing the good, in the most difficult experiences
I just got back from a one day little break in the Shomron.
My kid got us a night in a zimmer to say thank you for all the TLC we tried to give her after the birth of her baby.
It had a pool… it had a firepit… it had a great view of a big, orange moon that came right up opposite where we were burning the wood.
As I watched the fire for an hour or two, I kept thinking about what I’d read in relation to last week’s parsha, that ‘Yaakov is a fire, and Yosef is a flame, and the House of Edom is straw’.
Rashi explains that once Yosef HaTzaddik was born, that’s when Yaakov felt it was now safe to return to Eretz Yisrael, and to face down Esav.
I did some praying on that topic…
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The zimmer also had an ad-free Youtube channel, which I used to play music for an hour in the night.
It brought up this song, by Bini Landau (not shmirat eynayim friendly, technically:)
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It was a cover of Koh Echsof put out by Bini Landau, together with the family of a young woman called Tiferet, who was killed at the Nova festival two years ago.
I got kinda emotional.
I was doing some hitbodedut on why, and I realised it’s time to start healing, properly, from ‘October 7’, and a huge part of that involves starting to see the hidden good that came out of this horrible, traumatic experience.
Because it does exist.
And once we tease out the ‘hidden good’, we return this whole episode back to God, who lifts up the sparks of good and lets all the crud they came attached to finally fall away.
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So, let me kick this discussion off with a few things that came to mind for me and my husband, while we were discussing this yesterday.
HIDDEN GOOD FROM OCTOBER 7:
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Here in Israel, there is way more unity between people than there was, before that horrible day.
Even when the muck-stirring ‘puppets’ start trying to get us at each other’s throats, it’s really not working the way it used to. There is very little patience these days for evil ‘puppets’ to keep turning different sections of the Am against each other, BH.
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A lot of people got a lot more real.
I see that particularly with the younger age groups. People whose heads were filled with restaurants and holidays and nothing much else – today in Israel, many more people have realised that life is precious, and they are looking for ways to spend their time usefully and productively, not just ‘at work’, or ‘on holiday’, or even, ‘on their phones’.
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Many people made teshuva – and that process is still happening.
So many of the ‘idols’ keeping us away from God have been smashed since October 7.
I am not going to list them all here – you know from your own life, the stuff you were kind of ‘relying on’ that wasn’t God.
Now, so many people are understanding at the depth of their being that Ein Od Milvado, and that is leading to a very large, perhaps often still invisible, but real wave of teshuva, at the grass-roots level.
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This is just to start us off.
I invite you to spend a little time talking to God about this, and starting to identify some of the hidden blessings that have come out of this horrible, soul-wrenching two years.
The light is there.
We just need to start uncovering it.
there’s a couple of scripts to listen to a youtube video from the command line interface without watching it.
it’s a nice song.
i think that doing a.i. research might just help in the long run. there’s a team working on an LLM trained on torah sources. if it’s possible to teach mussar to an LLM or it’s filter, work like that might just end up being part of preventing an a.i. takeover.
text-to-speech is really useful.
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i asked an LLM from meta ‘tell me about when the chacham tzvi left amsterdam to go to hamburg’. it got confused about the years of his birth and death, went into delusional ‘debunking mode’ claiming that he never went from amsterdam to hamburg, asserting that there is no historical evidence of it.
also it seems adamant that there was a controversy about the idea of ‘shabbos goy’. no idea if this is another delusion.
it’s definitely not a perfect system, but the strong reaction it had indicates a lot of controversy and debunking in the sources that it is trained on.
EXCELLENT WORK !! NOW SINCE YOU HAVE ESTABILISHED A CONNECTION TO AN AI SYSTEM YOU CAN OR COULD CONTINUE USING ITS OWN POWER TO HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM. YOU MIGHT PROPOSE A SCENARIO FOR IT TO ANALYZE AND MAKE SURE TO ASK WHAT THE PROBABILITY IS FOR THAT SPECIFIC SCENARIO. THEN POSE ANOTHER DIFFEENT SCENARIO AND AGAIN ASK THE PROBABILITY. DO THIS AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT, THE MORE THE BETTER AS YOU ARE ACTUALLY GIVING THE SYSTEM MORE DATA TO UTILIZE. THEN ASK IT TO COMPARE ALL THE SCENARIOS AND PROBABILITIES AND CHOOSE WHICH ONE HAS THE HIGHEST PROBABILITY OF BEING AN ACTUAL WORKING SOLUTION. THEN , HERE IS THE FINAL KICKER !!! ASK THE AI SYSTEM TO UTILIZE ALL THE SCENARIOS AND FIND ITS OWN BEST SCENARIO AND THE PROBABILITY ?
WE HAVE USING THIS TECHNIQUE IN MATHEMATICS FOR A LONG TIME AS IT WILL GIVE YOU THE ACTUAL BEST SOLUTION, PERHAPS NOT THE EXACT SOLUTION BUT A VIABLE WORKING SOLUTION.
HOPE YOU GET THE IDEA AND THAT THIS HELPS IN YOUR QUEST FOR THE TRUTH
האיש