Go Back and Do It Right

Back when I used to watch dumb Hollywood movies, I saw a film called ‘Groundhog Day’, where the protagonist had to keep reliving the same day over-and-over-and-over again, until he finally got it ‘right’.

There is Divine wisdom in everything, even the odd Hollywood film. Groundhog Day was kind of showing mankind how things work in the world, spiritually. We keep coming back down here, we keep having the same experiences, the same situations, the same challenges – and we carry on repeating the same, often incredibly painful, experiences until we get it ‘right’.

The last few months, my husband and I feel that we’ve been living in ‘Tikkun (soul-correction) City’. We’ve both been bumping into people we haven’t seen for years. We’ve both been shoved back in to situations that we thought would simply never occur again. And this time, we both know that G-d is behind it all, pulling all the strings, and encouraging us to ‘please, get it right this time’.

Case in point: when my husband’s business failed five years ago, and we had to sell our house because we couldn’t afford to live in it any more, we both felt that we’d had enough of being in business for ourselves.

The stress, the worry, the paperwork – who needed it? And when it ‘worked’ – the arrogance, the smugness, the overspending on things we didn’t need and that weren’t good for us – who needed it?

Baruch Hashem, G-d was very kind to us, and once we’d moved community and started to shift our mindset and lifestyle into the emuna mode, He sent my husband a great job in Jerusalem with a great boss – and we never looked back.

Except now, my husband is about to hand in his notice and go it alone again. There are lots of minor, ‘nothing’ reasons as to why he’s doing that – in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression – but the real reason is because that’s what He feels G-d wants him to do now.

“Go back, do it again, but this time do it ‘right’!”

What does that mean? That means praying a lot. That means making G-d the real Boss of the business. That means working daily on our emuna that G-d provides for us, not my husband’s current boss.

I’m having something similar with my ‘career’. When my communications business bombed, I swore to myself I was never going to write for a living again. By the end, I was so burned out and so burned up by all the effort to keep meeting impossible deadlines, to keep my difficult clients happy, and to keep my failing business afloat, I simply couldn’t imagine even opening the laptop again, let alone typing on it.

A year later, I wrote a story for the Breslev Israel website, and I kind of felt like that story – alone – was my tikkun, or repair.

G-d had other plans. Three years’ later, I write – a lot – for the website, and sometimes, I think that even this is maybe ‘too much’.

But then, I went back to the UK, and I came back with an amazing realization that because I don’t belong there and I don’t ‘fit’ here, I kind of ‘bridge’ two worlds that otherwise have very little to do with each other.

I understand a lot of Hebrew now – but I speak and write less than a three year old. I certainly couldn’t be a journalist in Israel, in Hebrew. And the only things I want to write about in English are G-d and emuna.

Until a few weeks’ ago, I felt I was well and truly stuck, unable to write about the things I want to write about, for the audience that would actually want to read them. And then…

G-d put it in my head to write a book, in English, taking some of what I’ve learned from Rabbi Brody and Rav Arush, and making it ‘accessible’ to a much wider audience, in a way that I used to be so good at in my old job.

Even worse, if it sells at all (which I know is a big ‘if’) – it’s potentially got the mass-marketing appeal to sell big. If it sells big – we arrive at the point in the process which has always stopped me cold.

If it sells ‘big’, I’ll be back in that horrible world of competition, and materialism, and money and ‘success’. The place that I never, ever, ever wanted to even try to look at again, much less enter.

And yet, in my personal prayer, all I’ve been getting from G-d is encouragement.

“Go back, do it again, but this time do it right!”

The same thing is happening with my personal relationships. Arguments I thought were resolved years ago; clashes that I resolved to avoid at all costs; confrontations that I realized had been caused in great part by my single-mindedness and tendency to see everything as black-and-white – they all seem to be reappearing.

Dear reader, you know how much I’ve been trying to make teshuva for my arrogance, bossiness, and inability to see the ‘other side’ of arguments.

I’ve literally worked on it for years and years. I’ve literally spent hours and hours asking Hashem to help me only judge favorably, to only see the good in my fellow Jew, to only be a tool for good in the world.

And despite all that, me and my husband are currently in the middle of the biggest ‘disagreement’ we’ve probably ever had with certain people.

I keep running off to do more personal prayer, to double-check that my evil inclination hasn’t managed to pull the wool over our eyes in a really sneaky way. No-one is infallible. I know I have ‘issues’ all over the place still, and I am petrified of potentially doing all the things I used to do so much of again.

But every time I ask G-d to show me if I’m fooling myself, and if I need to make a whole lot of teshuva again – I get a very calm feeling, and a sense of warmth and reassurance.

I’m not fighting for my own ego, or convenience. I’m fighting for people’s souls – not least, the soul of my own husband and kids.

I’m fighting a world-view that says that a person can spend their whole life mocking Torah, and disdaining or ignoring G-d – and still expect to have the red-carpet treatment when they get Upstairs.

I’m fighting an attitude that says there are no consequences for our actions; that there is no reward or punishment; and that the most important thing is that it ‘looks good’ – no matter how it actually is. No matter how it actually feels, or how it actually hurts, for the people involved.

A few years’ ago, I would have loved this fight. Today, I really hate it. Today, I really appreciate that the consequences for me, if I’m ‘wrong’, are enormous. Today, I wish it was different, and I keep looking to see if there is a way it can be defused (albeit, with a lot of ‘humble-pie eating’ from yours truly…)

But the answer I keep getting is:

“Go back, do it again, but this time do it right.”

But what does that mean? Does it mean that sometimes, you have to fight? Sometimes, you have to stir things up so badly it’s unlikely people will ever speak to you again? Sometimes you have to keep restating the truth, even when the truth seems to put more and more distance between you and people you really care about?

The answer, at least for me, at least right now, seems to be ‘yes’.

Sigh.

I just keep praying that G-d show me and my husband what He truly wants from us; and that He will help us to ‘do things the right way’ – because we have no idea what we’re doing in a million different directions at the moment.

I’m putting all my effort into trying to stick close to G-d, because then I know wherever the road takes me – and it’s taking us into some crazy places at the moment – I’ll still be under His wing, and OK. However it all turns out in the end.