The Queen’s Fault

A few months' ago, my husband signed up for a workshop, that was billed as the thing to help him find out what was causing all the ongoing problems he'd struggled with for years. For once, the workshop delivered on a lot of what it was promising, and my husband had some massive clarity about what was holding him back and keeping him stuck, fearful and 'small'.
 
(You can pick the correct answer from the following list: a) horrendously bad parenting b) crazy family members or c) Queen Elizabeth II).
 
 

Above image courtesy of Shutterstock
 

Part of the workshop involved my husband going to see a (sincere, G-d-fearing) 'mentor' once every week, where the mentor's job was to basically press all his buttons. The mentor did an amazing job; he got my impossible-to-rile-up husband mad at him for at least three weeks straight, which is when we (or at least, I…) knew he was really on the right track.
 
My husband would come back from those mentoring sessions literally turned inside out, emotionally. Who knew that Queen Elizabeth II had been playing with his head for so many years, and filling him full of self-doubt, self-loathing, confusion and heretical ideas! Trying to get it all unpicked was completely exhausting, because when you've been subject to that kind of pervasive brain-washing since you were born, you have no boundaries defining were 'you' begins, and where Queen Elizabeth ends.
 
But if it was hard for my husband, I understood it also wasn't a picnic for the mentor. Going to bat against people's internalized 'bad' is one heavy, fraught, difficult job, and you need nerves of steel and an awful lot of help from Heaven to do it successfully.
 
It didn't sound like my cup of tea at all. All that responsibility? All that effort? All that exhausting soul-searching to make sure that you were really just trying to help the person sort out their own issues, and not just off on your own power trip? No thanks…
 
Last month, someone called me for a 'chat'. Long story short, we now 'chat' at a fixed time every week. A couple of weeks' after that, someone else called me for a 'chat'. Ditto. A week later, a couple of other people called me for a 'chat'. This week, two more people got in touch with some issues they wanted to talk about.
 
Long story short, I seem to be chatting, on an ongoing basis, to a bunch of people about some of the most profound, life-changing, difficult, sensitive issues that we all have in our lives.
 
After one particularly fraught 'chat', where I had an agonizing day of wondering if I was really helping the person, or just pointlessly dragging up stuff that would be better off staying under the carpet, I went off for a frank conversation with G-d about it all.
 
While all my 'chats' were going well, and seemed (or at least, appeared) to be helping people, I'd been telling myself that it was all G-d, and the teachings of Rav Arush, and nothing to do with me. When things are going well, it's so easy for us to lie to ourselves, and to pretend that of course we know it's all coming from G-d, and not really anything to do with us.
 
But G-d called me on it, and presented me with a situation where it appeared that I might have made things much worse, at least in the short term. The person had just wanted all the pain to go away, and I'd told them that without getting to the root of what was hurting them, any relief would only be temporary or illusory. It was a tough thing to hear, and the person crashed down even further for a day or two.
 
Talk about a tough test! For half an hour, I went into 'hyper self-blame' mode: "That's it, Rivka, stop writing for Breslev.co.il; stop teaching emuna classes; stop all your 'chats' and move to a forest somewhere 50 miles away from the nearest neighbour. You have no idea what you're doing, and you're just making a big mess."
 
Then, I remembered Rav Arush's three rules of emuna: 1) Everything comes from G-d; 2) It's all for the good; 3) G-d is trying to communicate something to me, about what He wants me to work on, improve, or change.
 
To think that 'I was to blame' was complete arrogance. There is only once force in the world: G-d. Every time before my 'chats' I ask G-d to help me be a good messenger for Him. Once I've made an effort to include G-d in the picture, I don't need to worry about the outcome.
 
My chats are teaching me so much humility. I'm learning that when 'I'm helping', I'm not really and there is nothing to get big-headed about. And I'm learning that when 'I'm not helping', that's also nothing to get depressed about. And finally, I'm learning that Queen Elizabeth II is behind an awful lot of the world's problems…
 
 
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Check out Rivka Levy's new book The Happy Workshop based on the teachings of Rabbi Shalom Arush