Baruch Hashem, I spent today hiking around Tel Arad with my husband and a bunch of other people.

The sun was shining, which after all the rain was very nice.

The wind was blowing.

The hills around Arad where sprouting green wheat, or green barley, it all looked not a little bit like North Wales.

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I walked around today in nature for a few hours, and I just felt happy and ‘uncomplicated’.

Like my mind didn’t have to keep up with pedo politicians apparently playing 8-D chess, or worries about the Evils, and what they are trying to do next, or despair about the state of the world.

Out there, away from the little screen that is really obscuring so much for so many, and distorting so much more, the world is actually still pretty good.

Here in Israel, the world is good.

The sun is shining.

Tens of thousands of new homes are going up at a super-normal pace all over the country.

New roads are being built, or widened, particularly in Yosh (and particularly in the Shomron bit of Yosh.)

And I have realised the last few weeks, that living in permanently angry / fearful / worried / anxious / hysterical mode, which is where you get stuck so, so quickly, when you spend any time at all engaging with ‘online’, is playing into the Evils’ plan, more than anything else a person can do to destroy themselves, and their mental health, and their optimism.

Doing this only fills us all up with the despair that keeps us so far away from God.

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The war is spiritual.

How you and me perceive ‘reality’ is what makes ‘reality’ real for us.

If we want to carry on squishing our souls into a tiny screen 4 x 6 inches, God is not going to stop us from doing that, because free choice is the only reason God made the world.

But, do you know how ‘great’ a human soul actually is?

A Jewish soul? What a person could really be accomplishing in the world, at the very least, for themselves and their own immediate families, if they would step out of the world of dimayon for a long while, and see how beautiful the world still is, outside?

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I learnt a new term last week: Doom-scrolling.

That’s where you just flip form one thing to the next, trying to inflate your innate fearfulness / anger / anxiety/ worry even more, by feeding your yetzer all kinds of imaginary nonsense about ‘what is going to happen’.

Of course, there are bad gezeirot in the world, sadly, because so many people, so many Jews, are still very far away from their tachlis, the real reason they are down here in the first place.

I.E. to work on overcoming our bad middot, and to get to know Hashem, mamash, as a real proposition in our lives.

In the meantime, there are harsh gezeirot, and no-one is denying it.

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But do you know what a real Jewish response is to ‘harsh gezeirot’?

It’s to know that we are ‘above the stars’, and that we can have a personal conversation with the Creator of the world at any moment, and ask Him to please sweeten that harsh decree, and to show us what we personally need to change and fix, to feel happier trying to serve Him, in this lowly world.

Nothing is ‘fixed’, everything is a movable feast, and God is just waiting for more of us to stop ‘doom-scrolling’ and instead to spend at least a 100th of that time actually talking to God, about getting the world fixed.

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Rebbe Nachman teaches that if you see something ‘lacking’ in the world, you should pray about it.

That’s the whole frigging point!

That’s how we really partner with Hashem in rectifying creation, tachlis, the whole job we were sent down here to do.

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Step out of the screen, lock the phone away for a few hours, turn off the computer, go and live some life, some real life, outside that 4 x 6 little space, where all fears and bad middot are magnified, and the Awesomeness of God, and His world, are hidden.

Life is too short, to spend it arguing with morons online.

Life is too short, to keep filling our heads with half-baked ‘theories’ and pernicious influences, or much worse, coming from people who are not at all close to being authentically holy and good individuals.

If you live in Israel, there are so many beautiful sites to see, and you don’t have to deal with yucky weather, for the most part, and can find a kosher sandwich anywhere you care to go.

If you don’t drive, take the train – it works fantastic and is pretty cheap.

Take a walk in the park.

Sit on a bench by the sea and inhale some of that clean air.

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Make some time for your soul again, and start to feel how much happier and relaxed and optimistic you become, when you step out the 4 x 6 prison, and stop the ‘pursuit of knowledge for its own sake’ that is coming straight from the Primordial Snake.

Your soul will thank you for it.

Your perspective will start to change.

Your mood will start to lift.

And you’ll start to remember about that beautiful ‘real world’ that didn’t go anywhere, after all.

And is just waiting for us all to put down the screen, step out of the ‘illusion’ – and start to live a good, contented and ‘real’ life again, where we can see God’s hand in every aspect of our life.