Shabbat Shalom
I went to the Rav’s prayers again yesterday night, BH.
The last few days, the prayers have been V. strong – lots of singing, quite a happy atmosphere (!) and the Rav himself seems to be in a good mood.
He wasn’t like that before Simchat Torah, 5784.
For a couple of months before Simchat Torah 5784, the Rav seemed very subdued, and dare we say it, even ‘depressed’.
He’d been telling us all how very important it was for him to get to Uman for Rosh Hashana 5784, and that terrible destruction would follow if he couldn’t get there to ‘sweeten’ the judgements, with Rabbenu, on Rosh Hashana.
But in the end…. the cholkim and the State got their way, and the Rav was barred permanently.
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Also before Simchat Torah 5784, usually a wild night of dancing and hakafot until the dawn, at Shuvu Banim, the whole thing was VERY subdued this year.
Usually, Shuvu rents an empty migrash on Ido HaNavi, puts up a sukkah there, and that’s also where the Simchat Torah celebrations and hakafot hashniot take place.
So this last year, when that didn’t happen, we were all a bit surprised. I thought maybe it’s because the financial situation at Shuvu was so dire….
Instead, the Rav said that Simchat Torah would be done down by the Kotel, this year.
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Even then, the police and the State tried to block the Rav from getting to the Kotel.
They had a million and one ‘excuses’ for why he couldn’t be allowed to get there (all illegal….) and why the ‘celebration’ had to be over, strictly, by midnight.
You know why?
Because they knew what else was meant to be happening that night, over on the Gaza periphery.
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There was such a ‘heavy’ atmosphere by the Kotel on Simchat Torah.
I actually left it for a bit, to go and sit upstairs in the main plaza, next to the giant Golden Menorah donated by a Russian mafioso in exchange for an Israeli passport, next to the rebuilt Churva.
I don’t what the time was, maybe around 11pm, there was suddenly a crazy wind that blew up out of nowhere, and was strong enough to blow the skach of some of the sukkahs there.
It lasted for less than two minutes, then everything returned to calm and stillness.
It felt like a ‘wind of bad tidings’.
It was.
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Why am I writing all this today?
Because right now, I’m not picking up a ‘down’ vibe from the Rav.
Of course, who knows what tomorrow brings, but the Rav really can ‘see’ what’s coming down the pipe, and he’s not currently acting or reacting like someone who is seeing another shoah, God forbid.
The Rav is not shy about warning about danger.
The last few decades, most of his energy has gone into waking us all up, about the harsh judgements hovering over us at this period of time. His lessons and shiurim and full of allusions – going back many decades.
The last few weeks, I’m just not getting that ‘vibe’.
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So, you can decide how you want to spend this Shabbat.
Either you can stress yourself out to the max with more half-baked ‘prophecies’ from people like St Pollard and his acolytes.
And ruin your shabbat (and your health….) by constantly pumping up the ‘fear porn’.
Or you spend some time talking to God, and trying to do some real teshuva on having real emuna, and knowing that everything is in God’s hands.
Everything!
The only thing left in ‘our hands’ is the free choice to have some emuna, make some real teshuva – and do some more praying, learning Torah and mitzvot.
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This is a spiritual war, primarily.
All this ‘fear porn’ from secular sources is playing into the hands of the Evils.
The klipot are circling all the time, looking for when a person’s emuna and happiness gets weak enough for them to swoop in and drag the person away from God, and into the swamp of despair.
Just yesterday, my friend told me about a head teacher of a mamlachti dati school who just went out to a field, and shot himself.
He leaves behind a wife and five children.
We don’t need to be scared about ‘Iran’, or Hamas, or Hezbollah – or all the other agents of the satanic-masons, including those running our own failed State.
We need to be scared that our own energy, emuna and joie de vivre will be weakened so badly, we’d prefer to be dead.
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So, do what you want, dear reader.
If you want to waste your last bit of adrenaline waiting to get bombed by ‘Iran’ over Shabbat – that’s up to you.
Personally, it’s a big haval.
Shabbat is the day of rest.
The day of peace.
The day of prayer and rejoicing, that we were created Jews, and we get to serve God without any ‘lowly’ distractions, for a whole day.
That’s why ‘Iran’ always apparently schedules their bombs for Shabbat.
And why ‘Hamas’ scheduled their invasion for Simchat Torah.
It’s a spiritual war, fundamentally.
And when more of us realise that, and stop wasting time with all this pointless ‘fear porn’, it will bring us a massive step closer to finally leaving this bitter galut.
Shabbat shalom!
I was at the Arvit on Wednesday evening. It was hard for me to hear the Rav (it never sounds clear to me) but on our whats app group the next day, someone showed the part where the Rav said he should be getting a new Visa on Rosh Chodesh Elul to go to Uman.
B’ezrat Hashem, that is great news!!!
I hope they don’t manage to block him this time around….
Ein yeoush be’olam klal
Thank you for this excellent reminder. Vital reminder. Let us beH make choices for emuna and bitachon whenever the fear begins to make its attempts to steal our Menucha and shalom that Shabbos comes to gift us with. Thank you thank you. I am so thankful that I read this early and still can infuse my Shabbos cleaning and cooking with simcha and connection with Hashem much more than I would have had I not read this. Thank you. Sing and clap and dance into Shabbos. (You know this ‘we will dance again’ slogan I hear is maybe a hidden reminder for us to be sure we are dancing, holy dancing and lifting of our legs, Like Rabeinu taught us the importance of…. ) thank you holy rivka. Shabbat shalom umevorach to you and all the holy neshamos out there. Grab onto Hashem and the great gift of Shabbos. Keep on choosing Hashem instead of fallen fear… together we can guard the gift of Shabbos and beH bring its gifts of shalom and menucha and all yeshuos into revealed expression for our selves and the greater world. Again, thanks so much for this healthy infusion of the power of Hashems gift of Shabbos.
I knew the man, a neighbor, who allegedly killed himself. It has been devastating to his family and the entire yishuv where we live. I have a hard time believing the official story.
I too was there for maariv last night, and want to second what Rivky said — very happy mood, very upbeat. My advice for everyone is, ‘Turn off the news.’ Just ignore it. It’s not just a waste of time, it’s downright a negative influence and a tool of the Samech-Mem.
bs’d
Would Rav Berland approve of the term “fear porn”.
You don’t hold by the Rav, so what’s the point of the question?
Hi Rivky
From someone who does hold by the Rav, considering that Chazal teach that techelet in tzitzit leads us to think of the sea, which leads to thoughts of the sky, which leads to thoughts of the throne of glory, which leads to thoughts of Hashem … I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to consider that the word p*** has obvious associations, especially for those with an X and a Y. Perhaps you could come up with an alternative expression?
Thanks.
Thank you,
It’s a fair point, thanks for taking the time to make it.
I’ll do some hitbodedut on it. I guess that term grabs people’s attention, in the best tabloid fashion. More bland terms probably won’t have the same impact, but I certainly appreciate what you are saying.
regarding the above question, i’m not really qualified to have an opinion.
maybe ‘psychological terrorism’ has a similar impact, if the toxicity filters allow it – which suggests another (less succinct) phrase ‘toxic stress psy-op’.
….
by the way, one of the biggest specializations in A.I. research is assigning a toxicity score by machine learning to the giant amounts of text and transcribed audio uploaded to the internet every day, a task that perhaps the analysts were having limited success with, thus bringing an economic demand for more ‘open’ A.I. research to crowdsource the problem.
….
designing news to provoke more serious stress responses is a science now, and of course sometimes a shock can be helpful? i don’t know.