Awkward conversations
Even if I tried to avoid calling or speaking to friends, Hashem fixed it that I’d get into an awkward conversation; He wanted me to spread the word...
A couple of years’ back, when I was still quite a ‘fresh’ fan of Breslev teachings and Rabbi Nachman, I had what you’d probably call a number of ‘sharp’ conversations with some very dear friends of mine.
This was happening quite a bit at that time in my life, because one of the things that happens to you when you start to work on your emuna and talk to Hashem, is that you realise just how very pathetic you and pretty much everyone else around you is.
If you have better developed middot than I do, you quickly learn to focus only and exclusively on your own shortcomings. But, that isn’t what happened to me: as much as I learnt about my own limitations, vested interests and egotism, the more I saw it just about everywhere else around me.And just as I was fighting it within myself (or trying to…), I found myself trying to fight it in other people too. Which – for the record – is never a good idea. But it’s very hard when people keep talking about: ‘my plan’; ‘I will do….’; ‘I won’t do…’; ‘I want I need I must have’; ‘me me me me’; ‘my career’; ‘my house’; ‘my pesach vacation plans’ etc etc etc.
And you know, just know that it’s all a bunch of rubbish. You know – often for the very first time in your life – that all there is is Hashem, and His plan for your life. And that His plan very rarely includes making tons of money, wasting it in five star hotels or forcing your kids to read at the age of three so that they’ll grow up to be brain surgeons.
A good friend of mine who has recently been going through something similar explained it this way: you are working so hard to try and take all the rubbish out of your neshama; and while you are busy trying to track it all down, bag it all up and take it all out, one conversation with a ‘me me me’ ‘I I I’ person dumps it straight back through your front door.
When I was going through this stage, for a long time, all I wanted to do was go and live in a cave. In my cave, I wouldn’t have to talk to people who were still so wrapped up in their careers and jobs that you couldn’t even suggest that maybe, just maybe, a career wasn’t the main reason for being alive without being considered a first-class crazy person.
In my cave, I wouldn’t have to continue justifying why I wasn’t ‘making it happen’ ‘trying something else’ ‘making more effort’. I wouldn’t have to try to explain that G-d runs the world – all of it, even the bit they lived in – or feel bad that I had nothing shallow to talk about.
In my cave, I could wear the same (tznius) outfit four days in a row, without feeling that I’d really come down in life. In my cave, I could easily keep all the smut, muck and filth away from my kids. I could keep my mouth shut, never speak another word of lashon hara or negatively judge another Jew ever ever again.
Cave living rocked!
But there was one problem: Hashem didn’t want me to live in a cave. He wanted me to be ‘out there’, having awkward conversations with every Tom, Dick and Harry I happened to bump into. Even if I tried to avoid calling or speaking to friends, Hashem fixed it that I’d get into an ‘awkward conversation’ with the man in the framing shop; or with my ex-gardener, or with the parent of one of my kids’ friends.
Particularly at this time, people that never called me, called me. Long-distance. To talk about ‘delicate issues’ that inevitably would develop into yet another awkward conversation.
I didn’t do it on purpose. But it’s just that so very many people – even so-called “religious” Jewss – are so unused to hearing Hashem being referred to as an active player in their lives that it nearly always gets a negative reaction the first time it happens.
It was a tough stage to go through. At times, I felt like me and my husband were on one side of reality – based on Torah, Hashem and emuna – and on the other side, was pretty much absolutely everyone else we knew.
I got accused of acting like a baal teshuva; of being judgemental; of being simplistic; of acting like a missionary; of being naïve; of becoming a religious fanatic (eek!); of becoming a weirdo….
I got really disheartened for a while. But then, after I spent a lot of time in my hitbodedut trying to make teshuva for a lot of different things, things started to turn around.
After four years of buying people emuna books, and sending people emuna CDs, and encouraging people to attend emuna shiurim, a really amazing, wonderful thing started to happen: more and more people started to come round to the idea that Hashem existed; and not only that, He was actively running every single facet of their lives.
People who used to roll their eyes at me when I talked about G-d started saying ‘Bezrat Hashem’ in their conversations, and really meaning it. People who used to judge me so harshly for not being more ‘active’, and ‘doing more’ to make more money or have more kids or live in the ‘right’ place suddenly started to realise that they also aren’t in control of their lives.
Hashem, in His kindness, sent them situations which they couldn’t wiggle out of or work out by themselves, as hard as they tried, and all of a sudden, it dawned on them that they, too, had hit their limit.
This is a painful realisation. Egos, especially western-educated egos, can’t stand the idea that they can’t ‘make it happen’. But what made their impotence even worse was the fact that they knew that those people who didn’t have emuna and who didn’t believe in Hashem would be standing on the sidelines and judging them very harshly for being ‘failures’.
So it was that my awkward conversations gradually gave way to some amazing, stupendous, astounding conversations. Over the last year, I have seen people who were completely encased in shallow, pointless lifestyles take one gigantic step after another, towards Hashem.
In my own small circle, I have seen so many people rise to the challenge of really trying to live their lives with emuna, and really trying to make Hashem much more a part of their every-day decision-making process.
Now, when I tell someone that I didn’t answer the phone because I was doing hitbodedut, I don’t get a long, awkard silence in return. People don’t change the subject when I tell them I’ve missed going to Kever Rachel because I’ve had the kids home for summer holidays, or look at me funny when I tell them I’ve gone to Uman.
I know more people in my small circle than I have fingers on my hands who are now trying to do hitbodedut, or trying to listen to more Rav Brody or Rav Arush CDs, or trying to read more emuna books.
And I know that in another year or two, they in turn will have influenced their small circle to get closer and closer to Hashem.
If you are relatively new to Breslev teachings, and are going through your own stage of having awkward conversations with friends and family members, don’t lose heart. It’s a sort of down payment, for all the amazing, wonderful, tremendous, life-changing benefits that a person gets from learning about and trying to live with emuna.
Keep handing out the CDs to whoever will take them; keep giving out books to whoever is even remotely interested (or not…); and keep praying for Hashem to open their eyes – and He will. And once they really start to see which way is truly ‘up’ in this upside down, back-to-front, topsy-turvy world, I guarantee you’ll get closer to them, and together, you’ll get closer to Hashem, then you ever thought possible.
10/28/2010
Tshuva through love
This doesn’t sound to me the way we are supposed to influence people. This is a generation making tshuva through love, not judgment and in yer face spirituality. Anyone who is making tshuva can influence others by truly loving them, and being meticulous in the Torah law for interpersonal relationships.
10/28/2010
This doesn’t sound to me the way we are supposed to influence people. This is a generation making tshuva through love, not judgment and in yer face spirituality. Anyone who is making tshuva can influence others by truly loving them, and being meticulous in the Torah law for interpersonal relationships.