Collective Insanity

Has it ever happened to you that you were in the middle of a conversation with someone, when the penny suddenly dropped that the person was not at all what they seemed?

I’ve had that a few times recently, and it seems to be going up in frequency, the nearer we get to Moshiach and the world of truth.

Say it’s a person who’s really into healthy eating and the holistic life-style. They know all the latest stats and they aggressively spout them at you all the time; they quote chapter and verse about how bad sugar is for you; and how poisonous coffee is; and how evil cheesecake can be – and then you spot them in the local Café Café munching a Danish and drinking a Moccachino (with extra cream).

What’s going on with that?

Or, say it’s someone that just spent a whole hour telling you about the struggles they have to get their teenage daughter to stick to the basic guidelines for dressing modestly. They tell you about how much they researched the issue, how many rabbis they spoke to, how much it’s distressing them that their daughter’s skirt has gone knee length – and then the next day, you see them jogging around your village in tight lycra pants and short cap tee sleeves, and your eyes fall out of your head.

I mean, that’s breath-taking hypocrisy, isn’t it?

Or, say you have someone that claims to be a big Breslever. No raw garlic or onions for them, no siree. No alcoholic beverages, except on Purim and Pesach; no trial or tribulation they can’t easily sail through with no sweat; all emuna, all the time. But then, the email you promised to send them never arrives, through no fault of your own, and they phone you up full of barely concealed anger, irritation and blame.

And you think to yourself: whoah!! What’s going on there? How can someone go around preaching to other people about having emuna, and knowing that everything’s coming from G-d, and is good, and then get to so angry, irate and judgemental so fast when something so small doesn’t go their way?

What do you think, dear reader?

One of my pet obsessions at the moment is the gap between the reality of our world, and the rhetoric. The rhetoric has never sounded better: the whole of humanity wants peace and love, and to save the chimpanzees. We want freedom, and happiness, and health for everyone. We respect everyone. We’re all good people. We can cure any illness. We can solve any problem.

The reality? The reality is pretty dark. The reality is, that so many of the people I know are lying to themselves about a whole bunch of fundamental issues, and are completely disconnected from what’s truly going on.

In my three examples, the health guru really does believe that they are entitled to act superior around people who don’t eat sprouts for breakfast; the mother really does believe that the problem with dressing modestly begins and ends with her daughter; and the big Breslever really does believe that they’re on a very high spiritual level, and that they’re only getting angry and critical because that’s what G-d wants.

Of course, it’s all lies. But such a big part of the problem today is that there are literally millions of deluded people walking around who believe that their lies are 100% true. And because they believe their own lies, they can be sooooo convincing to others.

Few things are more stressful for a soul then being caught up in a world of lies, because souls are drawn after G-d, and G-d’s seal is truth. All the lies out there are enough to make you think you’re the one who has lost the plot. But you haven’t.

How do I know? Because Rebbe Nachman predicted all this 200 years’ ago. In his story about the Tainted Grain, he described a world where the King and his viceroy could see that everyone in the world was going to go mad, from eating all the MSG-laden pot noodles that are apparently ‘safe’.

After much deliberation about what to do, the King and his viceroy decided that they, too, had no choice but to eat the poisonous pot noodles, if they didn’t want to starve (the local store was out of whole-wheat pasta…) But then, they would each put a sign on their foreheads, to remind themselves that they’d actually gone mad.

Dear reader, I am mad. The gap between reality and rhetoric grows wider with each day, and I fall down it in almost every conversation and interaction I have. People think I’m mad for not having internet; they think I’m mad for believing the economy is going to jump off a cliff; they think I’m mad for believing – with every fibre of my being – that the world doesn’t have a lot of time left, to get fixed, before World War III starts in earnest and Moshiach comes.

They think I’m mad for admitting all this publicly…

But what can I do? We’re all mad. But my only consolation is that at least I know it.

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You’re welcome to visit Rivka Levy’s personal website at www.emunaroma.com