What do you think it felt like, a few weeks before Rome imploded?

There had been a succession of crazy and crazier Caesars, with Claudius the semi-normal break in the dramatic spiral down into literal insanity.

Here’s a 20 minute history lesson on what was happening in the last days ofRome:

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Bottom line:

There’s a growing gap between the rich and the poor, that can’t be bridged.

There’s a ‘two party’ system going on.

There’s a ‘Citizen Militia’, aka ‘the Reserves’, but also more emphasis on ‘Professional Soldiers’ who are only loyal to their general / commander, and not the State.

Bread and circuses was the name of the game – stimulation cheques and ‘entertainment’, the more disgusting and titillating, the better.

Politicians got ‘elected’ by bribing people, then trying to pay that back with massive taxes and dodgy investments, where ‘the State’ just looked away, as long as they got their cut.

Basically: corruption, corruption and more corruption, at every level.

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Does any of this sound familiar?

Sure, no ‘great leader’ has (yet…) announced they are marrying their horse, but I think we can already tick the box where the ‘Caesar’ is claiming to be a divine being:

Trump deletes post depicting him as Jesus-like figure after backlash

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What’s coming next, what’s happening tomorrow?

Nobody knows.

It’s really, really tiring, on so many levels, if you try and engage with it, if you try and keep ‘figuring it out’, if you keep trying to graft your own ideas, or hopes, onto the current circumstances.

Bottom line:

We need to get real, make a ton of teshuva, stop looking to ‘geula’ as a crutch to keep trying to dodge what we ourselves need to do the work to fix and ameliorate, as God decided.

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God forbid, I’m not talking about ‘giving up on Geula’.

Every day, we are meant to live in anticipation of geula and moshiach.

BUT – that doesn’t mean we sit there ‘anticipating’ that moshiach is going to come and solve all our problems, while instead of knuckling down and making some real teshuva, and taking some responsibility for the mess our lives are in, we just keep surfing youtube or Instagram for more ‘bread and circuses’.

More AI-generated content (already, I’m at the point where I literally CAN’T STAND all these AI generated thumbnails on Torah content, that maybe even would still be quite good…)

More pointless, baseless, ‘predictions’ of ‘when moshiach is coming’, by people who are acting far more like xtians than believing Jews.

Evangelical Xtians are obsessed, literally with the ‘end of days’, because they already think they have a ticket to the ‘rapture’, so they won’t suffer when all hell is meant to break out down here on earth.

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An authentic Jewish response to what is going on right now is NOT to waste more precious time and energy ‘predicting stuff’ that honestly, no-one on Youtube has the slightest idea about.

An authentic Jewish response is this:

WHAT DO I NEED TO WORK ON AND FIX TODAY?

WHAT BAD MIDDOT ARE RUINING MY LIFE, THAT I NEED TO FINALLY ACKNOWLEDGE AND ASK GOD TO HELP ME OVERCOME?

HOW MUCH ”GOOD’ COULD I BE DOING FOR THE WORLD, AND FOR MYSELF, IF I SPENT MUCH LESS TIME ‘GEULA WATCHING’, AND ACTUALLY SPENT MUCH MORE TIME BUILDING REDEMPTION IN MYSELF, AT THE SOUL LEVEL?

At the ‘real life’ level.

At the level of taking responsibility for my own unhappiness, and finally starting to understand that I am not a victim.

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(Even if in the past we’ve been very badly victimised… that’s all still from God. Bottom line, if we go through life just moaning all the time about how bad we’ve got it, all we’ll end up doing is alienating more good people, bringing ourselves down in the dumps, taking ourselves further away from God – and then, having even more stuff to moan about.)

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You want geulah, really?

Let’s start here:

WHAT DOES GEULA LOOK LIKE TO YOU, IN YOUR OWN DALET AMOT?

Would you stop worrying so much?

Stop beating yourself up for not being ‘perfect’ all the time, and accept that you sometimes get things wrong?

Would you have better relationships with some people?

Would you have ‘no relationship’ with others?

Would you move country?

Change careers?

Start working out?

Learn how to bake a fantastic cake?

Plant some flowers in the garden?

Take a kid or a grandkid away to somewhere interesting for a night?

What you pray more?

Or even, just a little bit?

Would you stop getting wound up every time things don’t go exactly to plan, sending your stress through the roof and increasing your chances of heart disease by a whole, hefty amount?

The list goes on and on…

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One of my friends told me this week, that she feels people don’t really change until they finall hit rock bottom.

That’s where she got to this week – and that’s where I’ve been hanging out for a while, already, after everything ‘exploded’ around 12 years ago, for me personally.

Rock bottom is the place where you finally understand ‘there is only God’.

It’s where you finally put up the white flag, wave it around, and tell God I am finally ready to do things Your way, Hashem.

It’s actually a really nice place to be, once you get acquainted with what’s really going on.

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So, one massive silver lining from the last days of Rome is that more and more of us are landing in ‘rock bottom’.

If we take things back to God at that point – our life can only get better and better, going forward.

And if not?

Hel-l0 more pills, drugs, alcohol, bad middot, yeoush and unhappiness.

It really is that simple.

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To keep this real, the last week I was really struggling within myself for a few days to deal with the backlash from the last few weeks, coming as they did over Purim and Pesach.

I ended up going to the Dead Sea with my daughter for a night, to try and relax a bit, and start to unpick more of the ‘stress’.

I was floating there, when the thought popped into my head, from tehillim:

BE STILL. AND KNOW THAT I AM HASHEM.

I cannot tell you how ‘relaxing’ that idea was.

You can’t fix the world’s mess, and neither can I.

That’s God’s job, and He’ll do whatever He sees fit to do, whenever that might be.

But, you and me both have a responsibility to fix our own mess.

By holding God’s hand, and stopping the blame game, and the pity party, and the thoughts that tell us that everything that is wrong in our own life, it’s all because of someone or something else.

Bottom line: The world right now is exactly the way it’s meant to be.

Just, we need to figure out what God is expecting from us, spiritually.

And stop using moshiach and geula as a ‘crutch’ to try to dodge the whole work, the whole point, of why God sent us down here, in the first place.

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Not easy, not easy at all.

And, the work continue until 120.

I give us all a blessing that we should get on with the task happily – and start to enjoy our lives more again, from that real, responsible, place.