Or, yeridah le’sorech l’aliya.

I know there are some people reading this that have been with me for a couple of decades, almost, when I started off writing for Rav Arush’s website, once a week, about my struggles to try and acquire some real emuna.

I was writing over there for about eight years, as my life was imploding in a million different directions, and I really got to a place where I thought ‘the madness’ was never going to end.

I don’t know if this is a stage that every person has to go through, the ‘12 years of Yosef’, where you feel so stuck in some sort of yucky prison, or matzav, and can’t see a way out or through. In the meantime, even Yosef HaTzaddik had to work on his emuna every single day in prison, until God finally said enough! – and he was rushed from the deepest pit in Egypt to ruling the country.

Tachlis, my turnaround wasn’t that dramatic, but after 12 years of crazy, yucky stuff happening all the time, after about 12 years, we finally got some respite, and things moved into a much better space, BH.

What got me through all that was following Rabbenu’s advice, especially to do hitbodedut an hour a day, and to go to Uman at least once a week, and pay pidyonot to a real Tzaddik, whenever things hit another patch of really difficult, or really ‘stuck’.

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The turnaround coincided with us ‘finding’ Rav Berland.

And then a whole bunch of other things started to happen, in the ‘post 12-years in prison’ phase.

For example, I’d decided to stop writing, and to retrain as an aromatherapist / energy worker. I learnt a bunch of really useful stuff at a very high level, I set out my shingle, including ads on Janglo (remember that?!), I even started up a new blog, called ‘Emunaroma’, and a ‘Jewish Emotion and Mental Health Institute’, together with its own blog, call ‘Spiritual Self Help’…

I plugged away for two years.

And I had 2 1/2 clients to show for it all, one of whom decided they couldn’t afford to pay me, one of whom stopped because ‘the treatment is working too well’, and one of whom kinda turned her whole life around in a fantastic way.

I understood, after two years, that I should probably go back to the writing. So I did, trying to do books like Talk to God and Fix Your Health, and small guides on Causes and Cures of Depression, and then moving back into more spiritual stuff, like Unlocking the Secret of the Erev Rav.

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And then….Shuvu Banim and the Rav started to be attacked from all sides.

We’d actually only really heard about the Rav, initially, from the same fake news smear stories everyone else was hearing.

As a journalist, those stories smelt off to me, they didn’t make sense in a whole bunch of ways, so I started checking them out, as you’ve seen me do here with stuff like Covid, and with stuff like ‘Meron’, and on a more minor level, stuff like ‘Trump’s Ear’ – and after months and months of investigating, I came to the conclusion the Rav was being framed by the State for crimes he never committed in a billion years.

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So then, me being me, I had to tell people that.

And that lead to me being publically attacked by all sorts of low-lifes, many of whom had beards and Toy-rah and public platforms; it led to me losing a whole bunch of ‘friends’, who so believed the news they’d rush round to argue with me about all this fake information like they’d just thrown down the winning hand in a round of poker.

It led to massive arguments with my kids, whose friends were telling them we’d ‘joined a cult’. (BTW, we had that ‘you joined a cult’ when we got more religious, in the UK; and then again, when we made aliyah; and then again, when we first found about about Breslov and Rabbenu, and now here it was happening again with the Rav… Personally, I took that as a good sign.)

And professionally – it lead to all my efforts to get the Secret Diary of a Jewish Housewife book a bit more traction online sinking like the proverbial stone.

Writing publically in favour of the Rav killed my professional journalism career dead as a dodo.

Thank God.

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The next three years, I was just doing Shuvu Banim / Rav Berland stuff non-stop.

That lead to a whole bunch of books in English, like Rav Berland’s Advice, a few books of translated Prayers, the Miracles book, Conversations, and of course, One in a Generation.

When I get up to shemayim, and they are weighing my life in the scales of merit, I am sure Rabbenu is going to show up with armfuls of those (unsold…) books and just like that, I’m off the hook.

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This process also led to massive amounts of real teshuva.

Teshuva about my arrogance, and belief that I know everything, when every day with the Rav, I was discovering I knew nothing at all, really.

Teshuva about my relationships with others, and especially my kids, as I started to understand more and more that the role of a parent for a growing child is to give and support – and to take all the ‘teenage troofs’ they throw at you with equanimity, and without holding it against them or trying to take revenge for the massive dents they inflict on our cast-iron egos.

Teshuva about understanding this world is really only a corridor to a much better place, and that ‘home’ is in the heart, not the massive structure that costs a million bucks (hahaha, like you can even buy one for that much, these days.)

The more of these insights I had, the bigger the ‘weirdo’ I became to all the normal people, who just knew that life was about making a ton of money, staying skinny and being popular and successful, permanently ‘on holiday’, and ‘on facebook’.

And then, Covid 19 came to town.

And literally overnight, everything changed.

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Well, not quite ‘everything’.

Because so many of the people who were stuck in the lies, and the lying news, continued to be stuck in it, and telling everyone else we had to mask up, stand 6ft away, and avoid all physical contact with other people, while the government worked on their green passport strategy to ‘save the world’.

Remember all that?

Remember how much you bought into it yourself?

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In my house, I threw everything into helping my kids avoid being spiked by the ‘experimental nanotech’. And trying to break the narrative down, on my blog, and also anonymously in the comments sections of any lying news site that wouldn’t ban me.

And trying to keep sane, in the process.

It was very challenging, and that is the point where so much of my yiddishkeit life-cycle stuff started to falter. Before Covid, my husband tried very hard to always daven with a minyan, he learned Torah many days in the morning, in yeshiva, we had a routine of learning stuff on shabbat etc.

The Covid 19 lockdowns blew all that ‘structure’ to smithereens.

It’s really only started to come back this year.

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Other things that ‘Covid 19’ blew up was my faith in nearly every ‘famous rabbi’ you care to mention, except those connected to, and / or publically in favour of, Rav Berland.

And my ability to listen to vacuous, theoretical ‘shiurim’ that are either basically just a frum version of a secular history listen, or a frum version of a scholarly debate of philosophical apikorsim in universitiy, or a frum version of Joe Rogan (but sadly, never as funny and usually way more political).

The acting that goes on in the ‘sponsored content’ section of the Yeshiva World News is very impressive.

For all the wrong reasons.

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More and more, I came to understand how Rebbe Nachman’s path is really the only way out of the suffering and difficulties that is ‘modern life’ for all of us, today.

And more and more, the Evils have been trying to close it down, by placing Uman and Meron ‘out of bounds’, going after the Tzaddik HaDor in a million different ways, and making core things to Rabbenu’s path like ‘doing pidyonot’ literally illegal.

At least, ‘illegal’ with Rav Berland, the Tzaddik HaDor.

If you still want to donate your money to the actors and fakers promising you yeshuot on behalf of their dead ancestors, or from their magical hafrashat challah on YWN, the Evils would love that tremendously.

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After Covid 19, Meron, war in Ukraine, October 7, war in Israel, ‘Iranians-Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthis’ (also spelt: U.S.A) – my ability to think about my soul proactively, and to start to make some real teshuva again has been battered to pieces.

Just getting through the day has been enough of  challenge.

Until now.

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I don’t know what exactly, but something inside seems to have changed the last few days.

I am really yearning for some real teshuva, some real proactive thinking about where I’m heading, spiritually, and how best to try to get there, with God’s help.

The last few days, I sat down and read through Rebbe Nachman’s Tzaddik. I’ve read that book scores of times, but hardly at all the last five years.

I’m also feeling like I want to return to writing way more about simple emuna here on the blog, not exactly how I did before, updated for the much harsher circumstances we are currently seeing unfold in the world.

What I don’t want to do, any more, is waste any more of my life breathlessly following ‘bad news’ that has been designed by the Evils to manipulate my state of mind, and keep me in mochin de’katnut.

Whether it’s ‘news’ about our evil government here in Israel, the evil government there in [fill in the blank], evil celebrities being evilly ‘assassinated’, the ‘scariest weather ever – AGAIN!!!!’, space aliens, global antisemitism, yucky stuff happening to and by yucky people all over the world….

I so, so, so want to switch that all off, and move forward to a place of writing more emuna stuff again.

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This is my prayer for the new year for the blog.

It’s not a new prayer.

I don’t know if God will grant me the koach and ability to do it, tachlis.

But at least, that’s the direction I want to head in.

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I still don’t know if the Rav got to Uman.

BH, at least my husband did this year, and he’s very happy he’s there and already having a few of the life-changing ‘insights’ you really only get by Rabbenu.

Also, I wanted to add a couple of Breslov things that are customary before Rosh Hashana:

1. To try to confess the sins of the year on erev Rosh Hashana, at the grave of a True Tzaddik. People in Uman do it at the Tzion of Rabbenu, people in Jerusalem usually go to Shimon HaTzaddik. If you live in Israel, you have a lot of options for other True Tzaddikim you can do this by. If you don’t, try to ‘connect yourself’ spiritually to the Tzion, and do it anyway.
2. It’s also a custom to give a small pidyon before Rosh Hashana, to a True Tzaddik.

You can do that on the RavBerland.com site, OR, donate to the Shuvu Banim Kollel Chatzot, who the Rav himself said is equivalent to giving a pidyon directly to him.

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One way or another, things are going to change this year.

BH, in a very good way for all the sincere people who have done their best to stick to God and their yiddishkeit through all the ups and downs of the last few years.

There is nothing left to say, except Shana tova u’metuka.

May Hashem sweeten all our suffering this Rosh Hashana, judge us with great mercy and kindness, and sign us in the book of life.

The book of real ‘life’, where we work on our emuna, work to overcome our bad middot that are the cause of our suffering and start to feel that deep peace and inner contentment again that has been missing for all of us, for a very long time.

Amen.