hang in there

"If you stay at the table long enough, the chips come to you."

Skip Brittenham

 A little while back, a neighbor of mine, a rabbi, gave me a lift in his car. He asked me what I have been doing lately. I said "mitzvos." He countered, "Torah and mitzvos." Evidently, it was not exciting to him that a Jew is doing mitzvos (even though Torah study is a mitzvah). You know and I know that if I had answered, "Torah," he would have said, "great, what mesechta?" He wouldn't have said, "What about mitzvos?"

I was at bar mitzvahs simcha, and the father kept talking about how his son is shteiging in Gemara. We heard nothing about the boy doing mitzvos. Even a bar mitzvah isn't about mitzvos anymore. I wanted to tell the father, it's not a bar Gemara, it's a bar mitzvah. Of course, the main subject of the Gemara is mitzvos, but people have found a way to get around that by turning all Gemara study into abstract lomdus. I don't blame the father really. He has been conditioned to ignore mitzvos. He gets propagandized constantly. 

It is quite amazing that a person should be made to feel like an apikoros only for asking that mitzvos be mentioned from time to time in the yeshiva world. As for mentioning Hashem, that's a dream. I have sat through multi-hour fundraising dinners for yeshivas where Hashem wasn't mentioned even 1 time! That includes Ohr Yehoshua dinners. 

The Chofetz Chaim, who was a yeshiva man, wrote an entire book for baalei batim about mitzvos. Evidently, he deemed the topic worthwhile. Times changed from the days of the Vilna Gaon, in whose time everyone did mitzvos, but maybe didn't study enough Torah. 

And long before that, Shlomo the king wrote, "The end of the matter, everything having been heard, fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the entire man." So I am going with Shlomo, the wisest of men, and with the Chofetz Chaim. We must value the mitzvos. And we talk about whatever we value. And if we don't talk about it, we don't value it. 

A Russian describes the BT experience

 "Hoped for better, turned out as always." Viktor Chernomyrdin

the difference

 This woman did a prank on her mother, asking people to honk and flip off her mother during a drive. Here are some of the hilarious and clever comments people left.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Rx6cfGtDyoA

She went from angry driver, to the Road Rage Warrior, to full on conspiracy theorist in one short drive.

She went from mildly annoyed, to truly angry, to genuinely concerned for the entire planet

“You know what? Fuck you! You goof!” Has got to be the best mom line in history

If I did this as a child I probably wouldn't be an adult right now.

You would not see funny and fun comments like this if the commenters were frum. You'd hear, what about civud av 'vaim? This is a chilul Hashem. It's not respectful. It's a sakanah.

All shame and being uptight. 

There's no humor, no fun, no happiness in the frum world. 

Doesn't have to be that way. But it is.  

In my view, narcissistic abuse means essentially that you are living in somebody else's world, prevented from being or developing yourself. Your own ability to think is crippled and your emotions twisted and repressed. This can happen when a megalomaniac has significant power over you. A parent certainly has significant power, but so can a religious leader or team of them with whom you have daily contact, particularly if you surrender your free will to those people as baalei teshuvah sometimes do. It’s that much worse if all this happens in a controlled and isolated environment. When religion is imposed on you forcefully, playing on your sense of guilt and fear, tremendous damage can occur to the psyche. You are trying to reconfigure your entire life to match a demanding religion to which you have opened the doors to your soul. However, when that religion is portrayed to you in a distorted way, a way that robs you of your individuality, autonomy and perhaps even your basic humanity, then you can become a kind of cripple. You are no longer you, and you can’t even make basic decisions about your own life. Your judgement has been undermined and your instincts shut out of the room of your life.