Hear your humiliation and be silent
When I was two years old, the Six-Day War broke out. My mother says I declared that when I grew up and served in the army, I would enlist in the submarines — and if a war broke out, I would hide underwater until it was over.
In high school, when all my peers were loading rocks into their backpacks and running up and down the hills to train for the elite combat units they so desperately wanted to get into, I sat in the desert for hours in meditation, practicing Zen. I couldn’t understand their excitement about becoming fighters. Wasn’t it obvious to them that they were about to become cannon fodder in wars managed by generals and corrupt politicians? I wasn’t willing to kill others over a piece of land, and it never crossed my mind to be just a pawn in the military machine’s game.
I knew I’d probably end up in prison over this, or be discharged from the army under some psychiatric clause. I accepted that. Being declared “not normal” seemed to me far more sane than being “normal” and swept along with the Israeli militant current.
Eventually, I became religious. I entered a yeshiva (a sort of voluntary prison…) and studied Torah and Kabbalah 14 to 16 hours a day for several years. A kind of submarine… I dove beneath the surface into the ocean of Kabbalah.
I was released from military service completely when our child was born with a health condition that required constant, 24/7 care. Yehoo was born, and immediately freed both himself and me from military service for good. Praise be the Goddess.
When I eventually broke free from the ultra-Orthodox world, I began paving unconventional paths. Since the end of the 90’s, Every few years, there were those who chose to publicly slander me. It probably helped them sell newspapers and rally public opinion behind whichever narrative they supported.
I never fought back. Even in the recent years, when marvelous lies about me were written in the press or on social media, I chose to follow the advice of my late Hasidic masters, who themselves often suffered persecutions, who wholeheartedly recommended: “Hear your humiliation, and remain silent.”
Against much of what was said about me, I could easily have brought screenshots as proof that those who spoke ill of me were not telling the truth (not because I’m such a saint, but because I am also not such a villain — the truth is always complex, multi-faceted, never simplistic. Righteous indignation and self-righteous fury usually sit upon the repressed shadows of those same angry people. But that’s their journey. I don’t want to fight them. I chose instead to pray for the inner awakening of everyone who fights me, and that is what I do every single day. May my prayers be heard).
That’s why I’ve never filed a libel suit. Of course I considered it when I got upset, but each time I came to realize it was a call for me to go deeper into my inner journey. Another invitation to pass through a bit more shamanic death and emerge on the other side of this initiation with a life no longer dependent on what others think of me.
So thank you, slanderers. Even if you tag me, I choose right now not to enter the fray.
I also don’t identify with the right or the left. It’s clear to me that the self-righteousness of the left is no less violent than the violence of the right (which at least doesn’t try to disguise it). It’s clear to me, for example, that the Israeli government commits awful acts of cruelty in the West Bank and Gaza. Any war, in my eyes, is murder. But it’s also clear to me that the other side is not so cute and innocent. The Palestinians, their leadership across generations, and their organizations of murder and terror have, let’s just say, at the very least, played their part in creating the reality they live in today. The hell they endure is not solely someone else’s fault — even if Israel’s government is indeed occupied by mafiosos and outright psychopaths. The global left doesn’t see the full picture, and in its self-righteousness and inability to honestly face the mirror, it projects its shadows outward and blames others. If, for example, the sweet Californians of the American “woke” culture were to give a true account of the country they live in and the countless millions of lives it has taken so they could live safely in America while preaching morality to the world — the massacred Native Americans tribes, the slavery of Black people, America’s wars from Hiroshima to Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and on and on — perhaps they would have less mental space to blame others for what they themselves are afraid to see when they look in the mirror regarding the morality of their own presence on the American continent.
The left and “cancel culture” adore victim consciousness. They love to feel like the savior-heroes, righteously correct bright knights and cancel others.
that’s just not my thing. It feels sad and funny to me at the same time.
May we all awaken to recognize the hidden ways in which we are bound together — beyond borders, languages, ideologies, and beyond the absurd struggle over who is more of a victim and who gets to point the accusing finger at others.
When we grow tired of this game, perhaps we’ll be able to establish a new culture for humanity. For the generations to come.
I say that also to those who call themselves “the conscious community” or the global tantric community or the global ISTA community.
As my elder Rabbi Zalman, used to say:
“The only way to get it together, is — Together!”
