The ‘chametz’ stickers just came off the kitchen cupboards.

The Pesach plates and cookware got washed and put back in their boxes, then back in their cupboard upstairs.

The plastic table cloths were removed.

We are back to ‘normal’.

Whatever that is, these days.

I was waiting for the ‘sea to split’ today.

If that happened, I missed it.

==

I went down to the Kotel today, Shvi’i shel Pesach, to recite some Tikkun Haklalis.

I got right up close to the wall, and even got a seat there (!), even though it was pretty busy.

Then, we headed off to the Rav, for the ma’ariv prayers of post-Shvi’i shel Pesach.

It was also pretty full there.

I sat on a broken plastic chair at the back of the courtyard, and looked up at the Rav’s balcony, which is literally always full of white light.

I used to think it was just the big fluorescent strip lighting that’s up there, but there is a massive difference when that light is on and the Rav is not on the balcony, and when the Rav is actually present.

==

Even though Pesach was actually pretty ‘good’, by nearly all standards, this year, I couldn’t help feeling a bit sad.

God, I was hoping that sea was going to split this Shvi’i shel Pesach, and that the Jews were going to walk across to dry land….

The small voice whispered back:

How do you know that didn’t happen, Rivka? Just because things aren’t obvious, it doesn’t mean things aren’t happening under the surface.

==

The olive trees in Jerusalem this year are more full of blossom than I have ever seen them.

The branches are weighed down with a mass of white flowers that I think are pretty unusual – I am a ‘tree watcher’, and I have never seen so many olive trees so fully in bloom.

My husband thinks it’s a good sign.

Jews are equated to the olive – that is so battered and beaten-up, in order to extract the good stuff, that healthy, golden oil.

As we walked past a few blooming olive trees today, he said to me:

It’s a good sign. Things are happening underground that are being reflected in the blossom…

That thought cheered me up.

==

BH, I know I say this at least once a week at the moment, but I will say it again, that I have no idea what’s going on.

Here and there, I sometimes think I’m picking up some clues that things really are about to change for the better, that the ‘revealed good’ is really going to start in earnest, that the time of open miracles is truly beginning.

But then, it all just seems to dissolve and disappear again, and again I have no idea what’s really going on.

==

My soul was whispering some answers to me again today, in hitbodedut.

If there were open miracles, like there were in Egypt, then the ‘judgement’ against the sceptics would be so harsh, most people wouldn’t make it through the process. Like what happened in Egypt, when four fifths died in the plague of darkness.

Redemption is happening much more gently, much more subtly, much more slowly, it seems.

The miracles are still happening, every single day – but they aren’t ‘dramatic’, the way they were in Egypt.

They are more ‘Breslov miracles’.

==

Someone once asked Rav Natan, Rabbenu’s main student, why Breslov wasn’t into publicising ‘Rebbe miracle’ stories the same way as was happening by other chassiduts at that time.

Rav Natan explained that Rabbenu was doing ‘open miracles’ all the time, but it wasn’t the Breslov way to talk about them, because the ‘open miracles’ was not the point.

“The biggest miracle is me,” Rav Natan explained.

That he now had emuna, that he now had the tools to deal with his bad middot, that he was now feeling much, much closer to Hashem….

==

Those are the type of miracles that are happening right now.

All across Eretz Yisrael, hundreds of thousands of Jews are understanding we only have God to rely on.

Not our puppet-politicians.

Not our corrupt army leaders.

Not our ‘friends’ in America.

Only Hashem.

==

But still.

I was kind of hoping the sea would split obviously, today.

I was a little disappointed that didn’t happen, honestly.

But God knows what He’s doing.

And in the meantime, we are back to normal.

Whatever that means.