I have to admit, that I’m still feeling a little ‘down’ at the moment.

I’m not 100% sure why. Of course, there are a million things I could point to that aren’t going my way, but that’s nothing new, and we all have some version of it. Mostly, my life is full of blessings and brachot, mamash.

But when I was sat at the Rav yesterday for the prayers, a feeling of sadness started to creep over me, or maybe, I just recognised it, for once, instead of batting it away with all my chores and ‘stuff to do’.

In Uman, I feel I finally reconnected back to that bit of myself that has been feeling pretty lost, for a long time, in the mad world we live in.

Mad, and at the same time, so predictably the same, in so many ways.

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More elections…more Bibi…more ‘viruses’ on the horizon…more fake threats to humanity, from a place of very real human malice…more pretending…more wasting our life on stuff that really doesn’t matter very much, or at all…more ‘war with Iran’…

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A bit of me just wants to kick free of all this, but can’t.

We are all stuck in ‘Groundhog Day’, on some level, repeating all the mundane, apparently pointless details of life, until we finally work it out, and work it through.

I spent some time reading the Wiki page for Groundhog Day just now – strange to say, as I have so many other things to do, and it doesn’t sound very spiritual, or ‘uplifting’. And yet, even there, I found some spark of something holy, that is kind of helping me make more sense of what I’m feeling at the moment.

It was talking about how Bill Murray’s character goes through the five stages of grief after a big ‘shock to the system’, as defined by Kubler-Ross, namely: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally – acceptance.

Something about that procession rang a big bell for me.

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The ‘denial’ about how hard things have been the last few years was taking a lot of energy to keep up.

So a few months ago, it morphed into anger – such anger, that I was having to read the Rav’s anger prayers all the way through every morning before I even got out of bed, just to (try to…) keep a lid on it.

That stage lasted three weeks, or so.

And then, it morphed into ‘bargaining’ with God, about what I was prepared to do, and stop doing, to get my own personal madness to stop..

I got to Uman in that state.

And I seem now to have moved forward, into the feelings of sadness and occasionally, even a little depressed and ‘paralysed’ by it all.

I hope this stage doesn’t last too long, but now I’ve seen this procession, I can pick out the forward movement in all these negative emotions and bad middot, so it’s not troubling me the way it was.

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We’ve all been through so much, the last seven years.

Seven years, since ‘Covid 19’ started, and the mask finally got ripped off our ‘wonderful’, G-dless, modern world, where the essence of the human being, the soul, has just been so deliberately degraded, dumbed-down and coarsened.

In so many ways, Covid 19 did us all a favour.

I used to feel way, way weirder and ‘alone’ before the scamdemic, the loony in the corner trying to argue with people that something is very, very wrong with the world.

That the soul dimension was lacking.

Now, BH, I have that problem way less than I used to. And the war in Israel has also helped to fast-track the spiritual awakening that has been going on here, hidden underneath the surface, but so real, nevertheless.

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So on that front, Covid 19 and the war did us all a favour.

But, there is a part of me that is yearning to rest under my fig and under my vine, and that stage just seems so very far away, still.

The key to reaching it appears to be ‘acceptance’.

Accepting, that God is running the world, that God is doing everything, that God is only good, and that this whole fake world was just set up by Him as a sort of film set, for us to come down and finally figure out our bad middot, and lack of emuna.

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I still have my work cut out for me.

We all do.

But strange to see, reading the plot of Groundhog Day gave me a derech again, where I’m headed:

Out of the sadness about everything that’s gone on, and everything that hasn’t, towards simple acceptance, that God is good, and the world is running exactly the way it should be, appearances not withstanding.

It’s a big ask, honestly.

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And probably, I can only get to this level of deep acceptance when God gives it to me, as a present.

And until then, my job is to not get too confused, or too depressed, and to just work on ‘accepting God’s will’, with the big things, and the small things, and to make as much teshuva as I can, and to do as many good deeds as come to me, while I’m waiting.

Just like ‘Phil Connor’, in Groundhog Day.