The Post That Started it All...

B"H

I'm so stressed out, I'm beside myself because I'm in stinkin' chutz l'aretz working my you-know-what off so that I can make it back to the Holy Land and start living my life again. I'm not in a Jewish community right now (though I must give a shout-out to my Rabbi, student of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ZT"L, and his wife and seven kids who have hosted me in their Shomeir mitzvot home every Shabbat. Yes, EVERY Shabbat, since I landed here two months ago). I'm juggling five clients at once, and two projects are HUGE ones (for little me, they are anyway) and of course I'm procrastinating on those.

I can hardly stand being here anymore. It's all so phoney and cheap and fake. I'm surrounded by sad, lonely and confused people who exist in their private infernal-yet-heavenly dreamlands thinking that it's all Real. I'm in Hell.

All the glitzy in-your-face T&A, sex, junk food and useless pretty shiny things are like some sort of chichi and expensive-looking gifts that are nothing more than thinly disguised empty cardboard boxes.

Raw pleasure with no limits... cheap imitations of the Real Thing.

"It's not Real," I say; but everywhere I look, I'm being told "This is real. There is nothing more real than this. In fact, there couldn't possibly be anything better... it's just so mindblowing."

G-d, it hurts.

You know how sometimes all these very closely related things that you forgot about for the longest time suddenly start coming at you from very seemingly different and unrelated places? It feels like the Universe just grabs you violently by the hair and shoves your eyeball into the corner and shouts "LOOK!"

There's no getting out of it. No turning away. No feigning ignorance. No forgetting. It's getting me to think about...

to think about...

my desires.

What I really want. Do I dare to ask for it? Could it ever really happen? Will I live to somehow find that ever-elusive wormhole and birth myself out of this crazy universe, mere seconds before it gorges itself to death and violates itself to pieces?

Will I quietly slip into that sweet Life of Kedushah where I stand before my beloved and gaze deeply into his knowing eyes and ask, "So, it wasn't real, was it?"