Yesterday, my bad mood broke.

You know how that happened?

BH, I went and booked myself a trip to Uman. 

Sure, it’s more expensive than it used to be. Sure, it’s more difficult travelling, in some ways. Sure, who knows what’s going on with the airport being open, the airport being shut.

Yadda yadda yadda.

The point is, I was starting to feel more than a little ‘trapped’, and it was taking me a long time to figure out that as usual, Uman is the antidote to the fear and the bad middot and the lack of emuna, that’s underlying all that.

It’s not for a while, but even just booking it is working the magic, and I am starting to feel happier and a little more optimistic, again.

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That has always been one of the special qualities of travelling to Uman, that whatever is holding a person back in their actual life, they have to get over that to get to Uman, in some way.

It could be money issue (I paid on tashlumim – when you chunk it into 6-12 monthly payments, it’s affordable for pretty much anyone.)

It could be relationship issues.

For most people, it usually boils down to all those inner fears, worries and ‘demons’ that are keeping them so stuck in their real, actual life, too.

Like, what’s the point?…It’s too complicated…It’s too expensive…Who is going to do [fill in the blank] if I’m not around for a few days…What if I get stuck there for weeks…Uman doesn’t work, to solve my issues…There’s a war going on in the Ukraine, it’s dangerous…

That last one is kinda a joke for Israelis at this point.

I was telling my brother in the US, how nuts the world is that I booked a trip to the Ukraine to give me a break from ‘the madness’…

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Point is, whatever the yetzer you manage to break, that’s holding you back from going to Uman, somehow, that same yetzer starts to diminish in your ‘real life’, too.

It’s actually the journey itself that’s doing the heavy-lifting work, not so much arriving at the final destination.

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Someone asked me last week if the Rav has mentioned Uman Rosh Hashana 5787 yet, the last few months.

To my knowledge, he hasn’t.

It could be that we are still bit too early for him to be talking about it, but I recall from previous years, especially with the madness going on, that the Rav has been encouraging people to make plans to go for months and months in advance.

This year, so far, he isn’t doing that.

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While I was thinking about all this, it struck me that since the Rav’s own last trip to the Ukraine, where he was let in to the country, but still didn’t get to Uman, he has kinda stopped talking about Moshiach coming imminently.

I don’t know what all this means, btw, and I am personally so sickened by all these Youtube ‘prophets’, that I don’t want to even begin to speculate.

But, in my own dalet amot, while I was trying to figure out the last couple of weeks why I’ve been feeling quite bleak about the future of Eretz Yisrael, it struck me that my belief that Moshiach is coming imminently has receded dramatically now.

No more using ‘Moshiach’ as a mental crutch, who will magically sweep away all the crud, all the evil in the world, while I sit on my couch and watch more pointless Youtube prophets.

So then, that left me grappling around for an answer to how does this all resolve itself, then?

And honestly, I still don’t know how to reply to that question.

Other than to say, Ein Od Milvado, and whatever God decides, will be.

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But tachlis, back in my small spiritual space, the recent implosion of ‘Rivka HaTzaddika’, combined with the Rav’s recent emphasis on everything except the coming of Moshiach, combined with my own sense of just feeling exhausted by this whole mad process we’ve been going through for years…

That’s been causing a lot of the bad mood.

And I’m hoping, that Uman will provide at least some of the koach required to get on top of all this again, develop some new, fresh emuna in the goodness of the world, and of life, generally, and to reboot, and move forward happily.

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Which segues me in to the last thing I wanted to write about today, which is the ‘dead internet’, and how more and more people I know are ‘mind-melding’ with Claude and other AI chatbots to write emails, term papers, online content, ‘news’, and who knows what else.

Just when I thought the fake world couldn’t get any more fake, I started getting emails from very different people, who suddenly all sound the same, i.e. punctuation-perfect ‘fake Claude’.

Initially, it was kinda funny.

Especially, when a certain psycho I know started sending out ‘Claude’ emails, which were totally unlike hs real personality, and yet, still managed to convey a sense of angry demento.

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In this fake world, staying real is getting harder and harder.

Between the censureship, the bots, the ‘AI generated content’ (like, just look at all the thumbnails on ‘Rabbi videos’ now on Youtube. Identikit cut-and-paste, often with some big lion, in lurid colours that makes everyone look like they should urgently up their heartattack meds.

Yuck.

Point is, also totally cutting off from everything ‘bad’ is a form of ‘unreal’.

Maybe, a person can totally disconnect from the war in Israel, and the huge suffering it’s causing here, if they live in chul.

Maybe, they continue happily sniffing the roses, oblivious about the sirens going on, the soldiers dying in one ‘bizarre incident’ after another, where Hezbollah apparently always knows which tank the senior commanders are travelling in, and how to take it out…

Maybe, people in chul can just limit themselves to worrying about which branch of organic oatmeal to buy, and what colour their gel lac should be, if they really want it to match their sheitel…

But, I’m not a person in chul.

I literally ‘feel stuff’ in the air, when we’re hit with mass casualty events, as happened a couple of days ago in Lebanon. I was teary all day, and I had no idea why.

It’s only when I did my one minute round up of what’s going on in Israel, that I started to realise I’d picked up the sadness of those soldiers being killed.

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Like many people here, I’ve had to try very hard to go numb, the last couple of years, to try to deal with what has been overwhelming, never-ending stress and worry.

That’s been a very necessary coping strategy, and staying off the news, and away from the ‘bad’ has been very helpful.

At the same time – it can’t be a permanent mindset.

The real feelings have to be acknowledged and processed at some point, the fake ‘reality’ has to be engaged with, when there is a little strength to do that again, not least, because Rabbenu taught that a Jew’s job in this world is to see what is lacking in his world, and to pray on it being rectified.

That’s our job, our responsibility.

Regardless of where we live.

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The last three years, I probably aged at least 10.

The sleepless nights and ‘stress’ do that to a person.

I would love, in theory, to have nothing else to worry about except what brand of organic oatmeal to buy, or where to go on my next glatt-kosher holiday.

But that’s not real.

It’s not real for anyone, anywhere.

We are down here to work, to strive, to feel our hurt, and to ask God to heal it. Our pain, and the pain of those around us.

Sure, it’s a very fine line, a very exacting balancing act, between feeling the pain, and getting swamped by it.

I get that.

But, if Moshiach isn’t coming any time soon, after all, God forbid, then the question becomes more urgent, of what can we ourselves do, to improve this cruddy world we currently live in?

To start to stand up for good and holiness and God?

To start to uproot the evil habits, thoughts and behaviours hiding away in the crevices of our own hearts and minds, that make our patch of the world darker than it was designed to be?

If Moshiach isn’t coming any time soon to fix the mess – how is that going to change how we act and react to what is going on?

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It’s a big question.

I’m still chewing it over, thinking it through.

And I invite you to join me in that important, and sometimes painful, process.

Each person has their light to share.

And the world needs that light now, not in another 200 years.