About 6-7 weeks ago, a massive grasshopper appeared in the window of the downstairs toilet.

It was four inches long, unmissable, and just perched itself on the iron railing that covered the toilet window. The first week, I was worried it was going to try and make a break for it into the house, but it never did.

Then, I started wondering if it was dead, and from that point on, it was careful to move an inch or two in various directions every single day, to assure me it was very much alive and kicking. But inexplicably perched in my window, and not going anywhere.

==

After two weeks of this, I went to look up the ‘Song of the Grasshopper’ in Perek Shira. This is what it said:

The Grasshopper says: “I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where shall my help come?” (Psalms 121:1)

The verse really resonated with me, for a few different reasons, but I didn’t really understand what that grasshopper was coming to tell me.

==

At the same time all this was happening, baruch Hashem, my first grandchild was being born, and my daughter and family moved in with us for 2.5 weeks after the birth.

The day after the birth, I spent six hours with my daughter in the hospital, as she was kept in for observation for 3 days. I came out with the worse migraine I think I’ve ever had, and just felt totally crushed into the floor.

Even at home, even the next day, the migraine persisted.

I did a lot of hitbodedut on it, to try and figure out what on earth was going on, and eventually I realised I’d been ‘flashed back’ to all the trauma I’d carefully stored away and forgotten about, from when I’d been the one giving birth to my first child.

I got the pongers out, spent a good hour cleaning up the energetic traces of having to be at the mercy of the NHS, and felt way better, physically.

Except…

==

While all this was going on, I developed some weird ‘sore’ on my right hand, by the base of my thumb.

Initially, I just thought it was dry hands, or something, but then after a week, it refused to go away. And then it started oozing and crusting and looking really, really weird, but at the same time, wasn’t painful at all.

What the heck is this?!

I stuck clay on it. Stuck more clay on it. But it continued to spread, and I started to freak out. I started looking up things all over the place, and eventually, I came to believe it was ‘ringworm’ – which isn’t actually a worm at all, but a fungus that causes circular traces on the skin.

All this stuff ‘erupts’ when people are severely immuno-compromised from being stressed out of their skulls 24/7.

==

So, I try to live my life by doing my best to ‘decode’ all the hints Hashem is taking the trouble to send me all the time, like the grasshopper in the window, the weird ever-spreading sore on my hand.

I reached for Christine Beerlandt’s book, The Key to Self-Liberation, to see what she she said about ‘ringworm’, fishing for the clue God was sending me.

Here’s a bit of what she said:

“You are not able to set up your own structures, to border off your own terrain, because you don’t listen to your own authority, feel powerless, don’t build your life enough on your own basis…you feel restricted under the observing eye…you don’t really live freely and openly the way you would like, because you are afraid – possibly, also of the boss looking over your shoulder, or…a director who’s spying on you…”

==

Basically, powerlessness, powerlessness, and more totally overwhelming feelings of powerlessness. And I knew exactly which ‘director’, which ‘boss’, what ‘authority’ this was talking about.

I looked around the house we’d been renting for five years, which in and of itself, is a fantastic house.

Except…

==

Our landlord has been an abusive narc from day one, and refused to fix anything that broke.

As the house is 40+ years old, things break all the time. In the beginning, we entertained delusions that maybe one day, God would help us to buy it, so our attitude to fixing it up ourselves was very different.

Covid 19 began two weeks after we moved in, so we got the landlord’s permission to try to make the yard full of mile-high ancient weeds – so old, they had gnarled roots and half a trunk – into a livable garden.

That was our ‘Covid 19’ project, when I had a house full of frustrated teens.

We spent a fortune doing it, but it saved my sanity, and also, gave us another good outside place for the teenagers and others to ‘hang’, at the height of the lockdowns.

Our landlord didn’t appreciate all that time, money and effort, although he really loved the garden, because now it meant he could finally try and rent the downstairs ‘granny flat’ that was attached to our house – and our water and electricity bill.

==

In the meantime, more leaks, more cracks, more really bad mould, half the kitchen floor dug up by Sami, the cheap Arab handyman who could do magic with his screwdriver just by waving it a floor tile and muttering something in Arabic.

The aircon stopped working two years ago.

We asked the landlord to replace it, a few times, he ignored us.

And we, for our part, just swallowed it, because there was always too much going on in our own lives to add ‘moving house’ to the list. And the house itself was fantastic, not including the mould, lack of aircon, massive cracks, electric shocks you’d get randomly from very old sockets and inability to use half the kitchen.

We worked around all this, and in the meantime, my kids both got married, baruch Hashem, and all of a sudden, I found myself rattling around that space like a lone pea in the proverbial pod.

==

A year and a half ago, our landlord managed to rent the downstairs flat – also full of mould and cockroaches, but with the lovely, awesome garden that we’d planted and tended, to a new tenant.

Her contract stated that her water and electricity were included in her rent.

The landlord stuck an extra 500 shekels on her rent bill to cover utilities – and we were the ones paying for it. In the meantime, he’d told the new tenant she had exclusive access to the garden we’d planted – but both of them were expecting me to carry on being the (free…) gardener.

I did that for the first six months, trying very hard just to see all this as an advanced test of my middot.

(I didn’t always pass with flying colours, let’s be clear.)

But then, my second daughter got married, and I went back to school, and all of a sudden, I didn’t have the time to do anything with the garden any more. The downstairs neighbour put up a fence to ‘keep her dog in’, which also had the effect of ‘keeping me out’ – and so, I wished the garden downstairs goodbye, and planted a few containers on the mirpeset upstairs instead.

==

So, the grasshopper, the hand, all this going on, feeling lonely in the house, ‘Project Blue Beam’ every night, twice, straight into my window from the Peace Forest – and then to top it all off, my new downstairs neighbor asked me one day if I’d ever seen any people in the apartment directly facing mine.

It had the mamad iron window-covering permanently closed, the other window permanently with a drawn, heavy-duty blind – and two cameras installed underneath each window.

At that point, I realised in the summer I’d seen them installing those cameras, but never thought anything about it. And with the ‘Houthis’ (ahem…) I hadn’t paid attention to the permanently-barred mamad.

But my downstairs neighbor spent a lot of time in the garden, looking at stuff and being nosy.

I think they are military, she told me, with an arched eyebrow.

I think she’s right.

==

My anxiety tripled overnight.

I don’t think they were there for me, I think they are there to oversee the Project Blue Beam part of the fantastic final performance, over Jerusalem’s Peace Forest.

But no-one wants to live next to a closed military facility even when they’re not digging into deep state history. I stopped going out onto the balcony, and started to keep my own blinds half down during the day.

==

But…. The house was fantastic!

Not including the mould, lack of aircon, massive cracks, electric shocks you’d get randomly from very old sockets and inability to use half the kitchen, paying the utilities for the downstairs flat, Project Blue Beam, and now, spooks with surveillance cameras peering straight into my salon.

==

The last straw came four weeks ago.

That’s when yet another leak started up in some ancient pipe, and after two months of continuous seepage, the upstairs ceilings started developing interesting green, grey and sandy-orange coloured mould patterns.

And the cracks in the walls and ceilings started to multiply, and bits of plaster started flaking down on our heads in the bathroom.

That’s when I realised, without some serious, serious, remedial work, the house was literally coming down around our ears. If not this month, then next. But soon.

I sighed a deep sigh, and contacted the landlord about fixing the issue, and putting in a new aircon, as a precondition for us renewing the lease again, in July. (We’d been there five years, on a long term lease).

==

He responded with his usual abusive, narcissist-landlord shtick, ignoring what I’d said about the house needing urgent fixing etc, and said something like:

I haven’t been in Jerusalem in a while. I need to come and check the prices I’ve heard they’ve gone up a lot.

==

Two years ago, I had a feeling that when we’d leave the place, things were going to get tricky with him. The last tenant ended up suing him in court – and won a large amount.

So, for the last two years, I’d been putting everything on email that he owed us, including the neighbor’s bills, and stuff we’d had to fix ourselves, because otherwise the place would be unliveable. It came to around 17,000 shekels. Just in case, things were going to get ‘legal’, when we ended up finally having to call it a day.

==

But… The house was fantastic!!!

And moving is so expensive and exhausting and disheartening, especially when you see no end in sight to having to ‘squat’ in a property you don’t own, being controlled by abstentee landlords who only care about how much money you are paying every month.

The (only…) upside of living with that particular abusive narc landlord is that we never had to ask permission to hang a picture up, or drill into a wall. And that helped us to feel more ‘at home’.

We were still teetering between staying and going, when we got a ginormous water bill.

Why?

Because the never-ending leak had turned into a water feature, mamash, a trickling stream ithat gurgles prettily into the garden, and we were footing the bill for it. At that point, even we started to realise that the rent we were paying was only part of the real cost of staying in the house. When we did the comparison, we realised we could find somewhere ‘OK’ for the same sort of money.

But there was still the landlord to navigate, and because he’s such an abusive, passive-aggressive narc, we were honestly both scared of standing up to him.

==

Long story short…. The grasshopper came to tell me I could no longer put up with being the landlord’s whipping boy, and we had to take the plunge and move.

The hand came to tell me that while everything is up to God, ultimately, He still expects us humans to play an active part in resolving our own problems, too, and to not ‘rely on a miracle’ to save us, when we can actually do something ourselves, or at least, try to.

Rebbe Nachman says exactly the same thing, about needing to even pray for Hashem to send us a new button, if that’s lacking. I can’t find that quote right now, but here’s a related one, from ADVICE, that is also really speaking to me:

One should get into the habit of always praying for whatever one needs, be it livelihood, children or healing for someone who is sick at home, etc.

The main recourse should always be to prayer, in the faith that God is good to all. One should always put one’s main effort into searching for God and not go running after all kinds of other solutions.

==

Bottom line, God was sending me a whole bunch of hints that –

It was time to move.

==

I had a very emotional chat with my husband that Friday night, not least, because I know how much he loved the house, and I was scared he wouldn’t understand that things had moved into the realm of we need to move ASAP, I can’t take this any more.

BH, he graciously accepted the argument, and supported the decision to move.

The next day, the grasshopper disappeared, after a month of living in my window, and never came back.

==

I am typing this offline in my new apartment.

We moved two days ago, and it was the second hardest move I ever had. That’s a tale for another time.

The ex-landlord was the abusive narc he always is – except, God did a big miracle for us. It turns out the contract actually lapsed last year, not this year, and no-one realised because of the war.

We had no contractual obligation to him for his three months’ notice, and the bank released the 20,000 deposit to us, which we were worrying he’d just hold and not return, on one pretext or another.

With the 20,000 nis off the table – he’d lost his main weapon.

And for our part, we wrote him a big, long letter, listing all the expenses he should have paid us for (and that we’d actually asked him for, repeatedly) and didn’t, showing he was flagrantly in breach of the contract. (Like, a million times over.)

Even he realised things had got to the stage where he couldn’t just ignore our claims.

Because he can’t just continue bullying us now, he’s gone quiet instead. And that suits us both just fine.

==

I had huge mixed feelings leaving that house.

I came with two teenagers, and left with two married daughters and a grandson, bH.

I came before ‘Covid 19’ and now this war, which have both totally changed the picture of what is going on in the world, and just how evil the people controlling all this really are.

I came still hoping one day, we’d be able to buy a home of our own in Jerusalem, something that seems further off than ever.

And I came with more optimism and hope, that redemption was round the corner, and Moshiach was imminent.

==

And now?

I am feeling more and more, that God wants us to knuckle down, and to take responsibility for our lives, and our problems, and our own bad middot and fears.

And not just wait for Moshiach to show up and wave his magic wand, to fix everything that is so, so wrong with the world.

We have to stand up to the bullies ourselves. We have to stand up for what’s right, ourselves. We have to take a stand. We have to face down our own fallen fears and bad middot.

We have to do that, for the situation to finally really improve, and turnaround, with God’s help.

It seems to me, that was the main message the ‘song of the grasshopper’ came to tell me.

So now, I’m passing it along to you.