Can you listen to insults to your family, your god, your country and be unphased?
Can you watch death and grieving and be unphased?
I am unphased 91% of the time. Very few things pull me out of the equilibrium, where I need to recover so I can return to being well and unphased. All of them I self-created, none of them are real.
I cry a lot. I feel people’s grief, I feel centuries old sadness, I feel the pain of not being allowed to grow, or even to live.
I am re-reading an book about the story of a family, the Levis, through 800 years of persecution.
I first read it 35 years ago. I remember it pulled me right out of equilibrium then… I had a very little idea who I was, and the book added to it in an unsettling way: I decided that I was one of the 36 men who were bearing and absorbing all the suffering of the world.
I felt proud, I felt justified, and I was sad. I cried myself to sleep night after night. I was self-righteously indignant.
It was just before I took off for Israel.
I also had the thought, in the back of my mind that the story of the Lamed Vov is a story the majority invented to not have to be responsible for their suffering.
But I was pulled out of my equilibrium, to the direction my soul correction dictates: I am special. And into the direction my floor dictates: I am useful for something, you can’t kill me now.
What is real thinking, as opposed to having thoughts, or recalling what someone said someplace?




