Shavua tov!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and a lot of praying, the last couple of days, on how to deal with ‘life in 2023’.

Very  long story short – it boils down to understanding that God is behind absolutely everything, without any exception to that rule.

If God wants my car hacked into, God forbid – then that is what will be.

And so on and so forth, for all the other ‘potentially scary’ stuff going on all around.

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The corollary to this is:

If God doesn’t want something to happen to me – it can’t, no matter how much other people or circumstances may be trying to make that occur.

And as 99% of what happens in this world is a function of our relationship with God, and our ongoing attempt to make teshuva, improve our bad middot, pray, do good deeds, reveal God’s Kingship in the world and learn Torah, etc, the more I put my time and effort into these spiritual endeavors, the better off I will be, on so many levels.

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Tachlis, after spending a day looking at manual transmission old cars, I realised that I can’t just side-step the challenges here, by trying to ‘buy’ my way out of them.

Once I realised that, I moved some pictures of tzaddikim into the new car, and I spent a fair bit of time praying very sincerely that God should keep me, and everyone else using the car and driving the car safe.

And also, everyone else safe on the roads, in whatever way that needs to happen.

I am also having in mind now ‘hackers’, when I say my tefillot haderech, and also saying that prayer with a lot more kavanot.

This approach has cheered me up immensely.

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Something else I realised, is that all this ‘soul hacking’ stuff has been going on since time immemorial – at least since Ancient Egypt, and probably way before.

Just back then, their ‘tech’ was much more spiritual and not as crass as the tech we have to deal with today.

R Avraham Sutton actually wrote a book about all that, called Spiritual Technology.

Point is: while there are some very challenges things going on right now, they are not NEW in the way they appear to be.

I am thinking of that rabbi from the Gemara, who the witches were trying to cast spells on, using the dust they would gather from under his feet.

He said let them gather the dust!! If God doesn’t want their spell to succeed, they can’t harm me!

This is the paradigm I need to be operating out of, going forward – focussing way more on spiritual solutions, and bringing more of the practical teachings of Rabbenu and the Rav, BH.

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I hope you have a good fast.

And we’ll pick things up again next week.