Have you ever had the need to speak something out, to let out a thought or idea,new exactly what to say and how to say it, but then when it come to air over the vocal box or pen to paper its gone?
That's what im going through right now. so if rambling monologues aren’t your thing, you can skip this and i wont mind.
so picture the scene. its a Thursday night and im on my way to go to listen to a lecture by a very famous rabbi who you all probably know very well. when i show up for the mincha maariv before the speech, he shows up for maariv, the whole celebrity mentality ensues, fine. Not to mention im probably the only single guy at this lecture followed by the entire bais yaacov and seminary population of the town, but i digress.
im siting there, listening to this man speak, and i have the same thought that i have about this time of year, elul time. " ive done this thing for the last 11 years of my life, more then HALF of my life has been involved in this. im here right now listening to a shmuz when i could very well be off doing my normal thing of ditching night Seder and playing video games or watching a stupid TV show. whats going to change now? what will make this years yom niraim any better or different then the other ones where i have a emotional break down, reignite my greatly untreated depression and anxiety issue, comfort my self by playing the victim and go into a existential funk for a week or two un till im back where i started. and then something funny happens. at the beginning of the video there is an add for the rabbis foundation, and they show another speaker, not the one that’s speaking, and something about what he says hits me. not even what he said, just the way he spoke. so after the shmuz, having some hisorerus form it but not really, i go online ( where else) and Google the name of the guy who i say speak for less then a second. and then i found a shmuz he gave on torahanytime.org ( highly recommended). and then i literally was hit in the face by the back of my head. a long story short, the idea of the shmuz i listened to was " god loves you, he WANTS you to succeed" and i was in tears, balling my eyes out.
Now most of you have probably heard such and idea before. God is our father, he loves us, yadayada. But not once in my life did i stop and TRUELY understand what this means. Ill explain
With out making this into a true life confessions on my first post. even though i would consider my self a normal yeshiva guy, i have recently been in a "relationship" for lack of words with a young lady. it went no where of course, i didn't even really like here in the end i realized it was an absolute night mare; suicidal thought, the whole shebang and after the long and hellish event i look back and realize i have learned a very valuable lesson from this. see in a nutshell, i was helping this girl out with her problems and as you can guess, i had feelings for her, i actually cared about her more then my self or other friends. i would spend night and day trying to make her happy, make her feel better, show her that there was someone in this world who cared about her, even if it was only me. her being a immature 17 year old didn’t know what to do with that and that’s where things went down hill. but the point im trying to make here is that in a relationship, when you give to someone, you will automaticly become attached to them to the point of madness and this koach, harnessed in the right way, is where marriage comes in. the idea that i am comited to you and to making you happy and making you feel like you are worth it, in return for the same, is how relationships work.
so for all of you married people this probably isn’t earth shattering. but im sure that a big majority of people on this site are single yeshiva guys. the life of a single yeshiva guy is is a very selfish one. and ive come to realize that until you have actually been in a relationship, you truly cant understand what it means to love or be loved by someone. when you love someone, you will do literally anything for that person, your life becomes theirs, everything you think about is how can you make the other persons life better. this is also i think (not from experience) what it must be like to have children. my point being is that this is the relationship that god has with us. so what hit me so hard was the realization that, no matter what i do, no matter how low i have fallen, god still loves me, because god doesn’t love me for what i do or don’t do, he loves me because of me, because there is something inherently holy and great about me that he created and want to become the best it can be. so when we fall and do bad things, god is sad just like we are when we see a loved one do the wrong things. and god might punish us or put us through things that we don’t understand, but ARE ultimately for our own good, so that we will have a chance to become great. and furthermore, and this is what really got me, is that we are never alone, and ill expound upon this and what it means. through out my life, i have always had this feeling that i was going to be alone for a lot of my life. i was never really the popular one in high school or bais medresh. i was friendly with everyone but i only had one or 2 close friends. and because of me tendency to become depressed and anxious, which had a lot to do with my problem, i isolated my self from people, thinking i was a not good enough to be around people. and i also did this to god. i said go doesn’t want to hear from me until i get my at together. when i didn’t wake up for shachris, i would just go back to sleep and tell my self," you cant expect to have a good day in seder if you cant start it off right, just go back to sleep, better luck next time."
and so we come back full circle. one my ask" what are you doing here? you cant stop and even if you stop for a little bit, who cares? your just putting a band-aid on a bullet wound? so ill tell you this. i don’t know if or when i will be over my problem. but i do know this. i have a lot to offer this world. i have been zoche to help a lot of people in this world with there problems, and if i had to give any piece of advice to my self its this advice i got from my rebbe. " you know your doing the right thing if you are in a struggle. not if you are winning or loosing the fight, but if your in a fight, that's when you know your where you should be. so idk if ill win, but im in a struggle, and i feel this is the next step in that struggle.
so here i am, joining this program in hope i will be that much closer to changing my life and turning it around for the better. and so far its been a pleasure being here.
