Shavua Tov!

So…. What happened yesterday, motzash, down on Ido HaNavi?

The short answer is: nothing much.

Me and my husband got into our glad rags, we got there an hour later than planned, at 9.30 ish, because my daughter was running late and that’s when she could take us….

And the Rav had already gone in for the night.

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We drive down to Meah Shearim before Shabbat every week and leave our car there, and then we go back down motzash to do a few more Tikkun Haklalis with the Rav during seuda shlishit / melave malka (the Rav keeps Rabbenu Tam) – so that part of things was business as usual.

But when we got there this motzash, it was very quiet.

What, did it all get cancelled and we just didn’t know that? I asked my husband as we walked up Ido HaNavi.

Then, someone told us the Rav had gone in 10 minutes earlier….

So, that’s it for the night then?

Nobody knew.

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It was not a ‘rocking’ atmosphere.

By 10pm, a few more people had come, including a coach of people that looked like they came from Rav Elmaliach’s shiur in Tel Aviv.

But I was mostly just sitting there, saying some Tikkun Haklalis, like I do every motzash.

On the men’s side, there was some dancing, and more ‘action’. They were singing Moshiach songs – and honestly, that made me a little uncomfortable.

It had that ‘chabad’ vibe, a little, that has now tainted every other revelation of Moshiach – even a real one. With a real Moshiach. That really happens.

Someone I knew came and sat next to me, and we both just kind of waited there, feeling a little deflated, until 11pm ish.

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At that point, Rav Elmaliach appeared, did the brachas on greeting Moshiach publically, without the Shem Hashem, passed around some arak and water from the Beer Shel Miriam – and that was that.

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Honestly, I was more than half-expecting it to be a super-flop.

As I’ve written about previously, we’ve been at the Rav on many previous occasions when there was said to be an imminent ‘revelation of Moshiach’.

And as I’ve written about previously, nothing happened obviously, at least that we could notice – but in some subtle way, our life seemed to start going in a better direction afterwards.

BH, that will happen again this time.

But in the meantime, we both came home feeling a tiny bit disappointed – and also worried that our kids were going to start laying into us for being freyerim, for continuing to believe, and for continuing to try to have emunat tzaddkim, and to just not take all this stuff too personally.

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At the end of the day, what really happened here?

I spent three weeks making a ton of teshuva. And thinking seriously about what it would mean for ‘Moshiach to reveal himself openly’ right now.

And that whole process showed me that while a lot of me ‘wants Moshiach now’ – a significant part of me still really doesn’t.

I woke up Shabbat morning with a stomachache, and after I did some hitbodedut on it, I realised it’s because I was actually worried that Moshiach would openly reveal himself – and then I probably wouldn’t get those books on the healing properties of gemstones that I’d just ordered on Amazon.

I am still so stuck in ‘this world’, in all the gashmiut, all the stupid stuff that we all keep ourselves busy with, and running in circles around.

And even for me, the prospect of ‘Moshiach really coming’ is a very mixed bag.

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That was kind of surprising to realise.

And I understand now, I still have a whole bunch of internal work to do, before I could really say I am 100% ready, prepared and happy for the open revelation of Moshiach.

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Again, Moshiach is not going to show up and solve all our problems.

The people who want ‘Moshiach Now!!!!’ are usually in that state of mind because their own life is horrible, and they are suffering terribly.

I went through something like that myself, 10-15 years ago – and I had to learn the hard way, that nearly all of my suffering was self-inflicted, and was occurring because I was stubbornly refusing to work on my own bad middot.

With all my ‘frum efforts’, with skirts down to the floor, my no internet in the house, my giving shiurim to women every week, my Toyrah at the shabbos table – I was not serving Hashem happily, as the real me, and I was stuffed full to bursting with ga’ava and what I now call ‘fake emuna’.

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Fake emuna is when you do six hours of hitbodedut, and then think God owes you something.

It’s when you tell yourself ‘think good and it will be good’ – instead of knuckling down to working out why things are getting so hard in the first place.

Really, ‘think good and it will be good’ sounds great – but it doesn’t work in practise. It just disconnects people from their true feelings, their true experience of what is happening, and makes them secretly bitter and angry on such a deep, deep level, spiritually.

A much better maxim is: ‘do some real teshuva, and it will be good’.

But that’s not as catchy, is it?

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Point is: Moshiach is not coming to magic away all our problems, and buy us a house with a pool in Jerusalem; or let us win the lottery; or make that horrible person in our life that is making us suffer so much suddenly drop dead with a heart attack.

(If they took the shots, tho, the chances of that last thing happening are no longer in the realm of ‘miraculous’.)

Moshiach is coming to teach us how to purify ourselves from our bad middot, how to pray sincerely – and how to serve God with everything we have.

From a very ‘low’ place.

And that’s what Rav Berland and Shuvu Banim excel at.

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So yesterday, I sat there in my new dress.

It was cold. I was still a little disappointed, even though I mostly knew it was going to be a ‘Rav Special’, where a person’s ego pipes up and starts questioning what’s going on here?! Why is the Rav doing this?! How could the Rav create such an awkward situation for me?!

Because now, I’ll look like an idiot again – to my kids, to my readers, and in some small, dark corner of my heart, also to myself.

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But then, I did some hitbodedut, to try to figure out what really happened here, tonight?

1. I got the chance to buy a new dress, and my husband bought a very nice new suit.
2. I had the time to read 7 Tikkun Hakalis instead of the usual 3.
3. My daughter’s formerly ‘chiloni’ husband danced for half an hour on the men’s side singing ‘Moshiach songs’ and enjoyed himself tremendously.
4. I made a whole bunch of serious teshuva, before, during and after the run up to yesterday, including writing about all this in the first place, when I had a good inkling it was just going to lead to some public humiliation.
5. I identified that in some ways, I am still not ‘ready for Moshiach to come’ – and there is still a lot of work today.
6. And yes, I got another dose of bizayon, to scrub off at least some of my many sins.

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I’ve been going to the Rav’s prayers for 6-7 years, very regularly – but I don’t dress ‘chareidi’, and I probably never will.

Yesterday, there were a few people looking at me funny, cocking their eyebrows as if to say, ah, so THIS is the tattooed chiloni drug addict from Tel Aviv that all this is for….

It was kind of insulting.

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And then, there was the mild bizayon from my children, about belonging to a cult and doing dumb things like sitting outside in the cold for hours on a Saturday night before Jerusalem’s Purim, waiting for Moshiach to actually show up.

Yah, that’s REALLY arak from the Baba Sali….Yah, that’s REALLY water from the Beer Shel Miriam…. Whatever, Ima.

Thank God, the intensity has reduced greatly.

After one of my daughters met her husband literally three days after I finished praying the Rav’s prayers for her to be a bride…. And after they’ve seen with their own eyes how many ‘issues’ have disappeared after paying a pidyon to Shuvu….And now they can compare and contrast us to others, and see that in so many ways, we are sheltered from the madness engulfing the world….

The bizayon about being aboard the Shuvu Ark has got way, way less.

And in some subtle ways, my children are also starting to inch forward along the Ark’s gangplank, albeit very cautiously.

Because no-one wants to look like a frierite.

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So.

Did Moshiach openly reveal himself yesterday?

Not that I could see, or honestly, not that I could even feel.

It was pretty ‘flat’ in a whole bunch of ways.

Is that a test of emunat tzaddikim?

Yes.

But really, it’s just another test of my own middot.

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It’s another opportunity to ‘ditch’ the Rav, to break with Breslov, to ditch yiddishkeit, because where was God in the holocaust??!?!?!?

And where was God on October 7th?!?!?!?!?

And why isn’t God giving me exactly what I want, whenever I want it?!?!?!?

And all the other heretical kefira that people who really just want to totally ignore God and His laws use to justify why it’s OK to do that.

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Ein Od Milvado.

It’s all just one big test – absolutely everything that is happening all the time, but especially around the Rav.

God doesn’t owe me anything.

Moshiach doesn’t owe me anything.

And the bottom line is, today, I just have to carry on working on my own lack of emuna, my own bad middot, and my own incredible arrogance.

And the Rav is simply the very best ‘route’ of doing that, for so many reasons.

(Which is also why so many of those ‘fake emuna’ people keep end up running away from him as fast as their legs can carry them…)

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UPDATE:

I got sent this from one of the Whatsapp Groups:

מוצ”ש זכור ליל יד’ אדר ב’ תשפ”ד
שאלו את הרב אלמליח לגבי מה שהיה היום בגילוי עד 12 בלילה בהתחזקות מיוחדת ממש כמו באומן בערב ראש השנה ואמר שיש 4 שלבים בהתגלות, שלב ראשון עשינו ,והיום רשמית הרב נחשב משיח בן דוד לאחר שנשמת המלך התעברה ברב בשלימות ולא כמו שהיה עד עכשיו רק בחלקים, שלב שני בשביעי של פסח, שלב שלישי ט’ באב שלב רביעי ואחרון כה’ באלול שיהיה אטומים והרבה דם ואז הרב יתגלה בגלוי בעזרת השם יתברך.
וכל זה לאחר מלחמות גדולות של הצדיקים בשמיים שהרב כבר ית והרב לא רצה עכשיו אלא עוד 6 שנים בשנת השמיטה הבאה בשביל להציל עוד ועוד נשמות שעדיין לא חזרו בתשובה וישנם עולמות שתלויים בהם אי אפשר לבנות אותם בליהן נשמות שהרב מחכה שיחזרו בתשובה ואז אחרי עקשנות. רבה של הרב הגיע עם הרב לפשרה בשמיים.
ובין היתר הרב מחכה לחולקים שלו שיחזרו בהם צריך להגיד 7 תיקון הכללי במצפה מקום שהשבטים הקדושים חלקו על יוסף הצדיק ומשם נמשך כל המחלוקות בעולם.

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To very roughly paraphrase, Rav Elmaliach explained there are 4 stages of revelation.

Yesterday was ‘Phase 1’.

Phase 2 is scheduled for Shvi’i Shel Pesach.

Phase 3 is scheduled for Tisha B’Av.

Phase 4 – and concluding – is sometime in Elul, and will come with a lot of blood, God forbid.

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Bottom line: there is a bit more time to make some real teshuva, before the world of lies totally disintegrates.

And a bit more time to get on the Shuvu Ark.

But in the meantime…. the world continues on it’s semi-normal, increasingly deranged, and often scary path.