It was the second day of my stay at the mental hospital.
I had almost died from a manic episode where I thought I was Jesus, tried stabbing myself with a knife because I thought I was invincible, was convinced I could divine when the next terrorist attack would be, thought the FBI was bugging me, and stopped eating and drinking for so long that I had a near death experience.
I was a bit out of it.
But I had a lifeline. While I was going through my episode, I had an experience that gave me some hope. I don’t remember what led to it, but at one point during the episode I went into the campus computer lab and got on AOL Instant Messenger where I saw one of the rabbis at my college online. I messaged him to say hi, something I hadn’t done since we met as I was extremely suspicious of organized religion in any form. But I was inspired: I was talking to God and I was Jesus, so talking to a rabbi seemed like a logical next step.
He replied immediately, saying, “Wow, it’s so nice that God connected us!”
That was exactly what I was thinking! What a coincidence.
Since that moment, I had been dying to speak to him in person, so when I went to the hospital, I begged my mom to have him come speak with me. I was feeling alone, confused, becoming aware that so much of what I had experienced was actually an illusion brought on by a manic episode so intense that it had turned psychotic. I was hoping that maybe that one incident, that at the time felt so powerful, a rabbi who also felt God in the way that I had, would be able to at least provide me with some guidance. Could separate spiritual fact from spiritual fiction.
My mom agreed to ask him to come, and almost immediately got back to me saying he had agreed. That he would be in shortly.
And now it was the second day, and he was coming, and I was waiting in my room for him to come by. I had asked my roommate, a sweet but grumpy meth addict, to give me some space for this chat, so I would have as much time as I needed. I was so excited.
And then, there he was.
Or, to be more specific, there he wasn’t.
Or, to be a bit clearer, it was someone else. Another rabbi. A different rabbi. The other campus rabbi, the one I specifically didn’t want to see because, in my view, he was the one who wasn’t as spiritual or deep. He wouldn’t be able to give me any spiritual facts, and I knew immediately I was screwed. What a waste of time.
And I was right. More right than I expected to be, actually.
I tried to keep my calm. After all, maybe this itself was also some sort of spiritually pre-ordained thing (although that sort of thinking was feeling less and less helpful since I started coming down from my episode).
“Can you help me? I just… I had this crazy experience,” I said, “I had this near death experience, and I could have sworn that God was telling me it wasn’t my time when it happened, and that felt real in a way, but then there were these other times when I thought I was Jesus and that wasn’t true obviously, but honestly I just wish I could have some guidance, all that has been happening has been that my head has been bouncing around thinking about it and I was wondering if maybe you could give me some guidance and…”
It went on like that. I still hadn’t gotten ahold of my speaking, which seemed to be like a hose that was only fully off or on full blast once it was turned on.
Finally, he put his hands up, almost like he was trying to slow the gushing water hitting him.
“Elad…” he said. And I managed to hold myself back because I was thinking that maybe I was wrong. It looked like he was about to tell me something really deep. I couldn’t wait.
“I can’t help you with this now,” he started, and my heart sank, “Not that you shouldn’t be asking these questions. But now is not the time. I’ve had a few people in my life where you are now, and let me tell you what they all needed at this stage was to just heal. Thinking about this stuff will make it worse. You need to take care of yourself, get better, really work at it, and then you can think about these questions with a clear mind.”
I thanked him despite feeling a growing seething anger. I just wanted him to go, honestly, which is why I was being nice. If I expressed how I was feeling, it would have been an explosion, one of pain and frustration. Why had this idiotic man been sent instead of someone who could give me some answers? I couldn’t believe a rabbi of all people was telling me not to think about God. I wanted to scream.
He left, and I stayed upset for a few more minutes, but then my brain got distracted by something and I rejoined my fellow hospital-mates in the rec room, and that was that.
Part of what was so hard about that moment is that God and I have always been very close. Meaning to say that I always kind of felt God in a way that took me a while to even understand because so few others seemed to feel it.
I don’t mean to say that I felt like I had an imaginary friend or that He was walking alongside me or whatever the Christians like to say. It was more like an intuition. There was something there, something larger than all of us, and it was alive and real.
One moment that woke me up to realizing that this intuition might be different for me than for others was when I took a winter philosophy class for middle schoolers (can you tell that I was popular?). During our last class, we had a discussion about whether what we learned made us believe more in God or less. Every student said less except for me.
When I was a kid, I would lay up late at night thinking about death, and while non-existence petrified me, it was more that whatever came next would be so different from my life that bothered me. It wasn’t the lack of God, it was the lack of understanding. And that lack of understanding just made me more convinced that existence was so utterly absurd that it had to have meaning.
When I was feeling lost in high school, I would retreat into the books I was reading and dream that I was like one of the characters in the story. Going through some conflict, but part of a bigger narrative that I would see one day.
And before the hospital, I had multiple experiences in college that made me start to overtly believe in God as opposed to simply the idea of meaning. For example, there was the time I was caught by police smoking pot in my room, but avoided them finding the two ounces I was planning to sell (enough to land me in prison for a few years in Arizona at the time). There was the way I discovered Taoism and it guided my life for years to come. There was the mushrooms.
So when this rabbi came into my room and told me to stop thinking about God right after the most intensely spiritual (if also traumatizing) experience of my life, I felt insulted. I felt disgusted. All my life, I had been searching for God, or some idea of spirituality and truth at least, and I had tapped into… something. I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know what was real and what was in my head. But I knew that something in it had to be real and true.
And so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that it took me 15 years to realize how truly important those rabbi’s words were, and why there is a good chance that this mistake may have saved my life.
15 years later, I am 36. And I have recently escaped another situation that has left me confused and scarred, unable to tell spiritual fact from spiritual fiction. A few months ago, I left my spiritual home after a number of years taking the steps to fully distance myself from it.
That home was Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where I had decided to lay down roots. In that neighborhood, I had spent close to 10 years trying to join the Hasidic community, building a community for creatives in the neighborhood and beyond, and working as an activist both within and outside the community.
The first half of my time there was relatively beautiful, a story of a Jew who had been wandering along as a secular person for much of his life finally finding his home in a world of others who felt the same. I’ll never forget one of my first days in the neighborhood, hearing some other Hasidic Jews on the street discussing a talk of the Rebbe (the late leader of the community), in which he dissected the nature of reality and God Himself.
It was like a dream. To live in a place where people spoke about God offhandedly was something I had been literally dying for in my past life. Now here it was, handed out for free for me to live off of.
Indeed, that was what had first attracted me to Hasidic Judaism, after my forays into Taoism, Eastern religion at large, and near death experiences. I would hear the Hasidic rabbi (the one who I had asked for) talk about infinite, time, existence, the meaning of it all, whether reality manifests differently on different planes, the beauty of how science reveals what we don’t understand as much as what we do, and I fell head over heels for the philosophy. It took a few years after the hospital, but I had found my way back to that rabbi.
But then, when that halfway point in Crown Heights passed, things started to turn sour, and all the talk of God and beauty and depth were no match for the pain of realizing that this same community that you loved so deeply was also deeply, maybe irredeemably, broken.
I’ve written about it so many times now, that I don’t think I have it in me anymore to go through the details with you. I’ll share, however, that my time in the community started turning sour the moment I started calling out issues within it, and especially as the leaders in the community learned how to weaponize certain issues to punish outsiders like myself.
This worsened when the 2016 came around. Before the general election, even, I was fighting against what I saw as a pernicious rise of Trumpism among other Hasidic and Haredi (usually referred to pejoratively as “Ultra-Orthodox”) Jews. I wasn’t sure what it would lead to, but let’s just say that 4 years later, I was not surprised to learn about a Hasidic counter-protestor getting beaten for calling out a pro-Trump and anti-mask rally. Or that it happened again to a Haredi journalist a day later.
It seemed that the more I spoke up, the more I was labeled a traitor. And the more I was called a traitor, the more I saw issues, which led to me speaking up more, which led to…
It’s hard to express to people who have not felt deeply attached to a community like a Hasidic one how painful it can be to feel yourself being torn away from it. Because to understand it, you have to know how much life in these communities becomes part of your identity. How it surrounds you, envelops you, becomes your reality.
Almost all of my friends were in the community. More than once, I worked for a company or organization that was part of the community. This new community I was working on was originally just a natural outgrowth of all the beautiful people and artists I had connected to since joining.
And so, when I spoke up about an issue, whether it was a debate about how Jewish law should be followed or about politics, seeing how not toe-ing the line would suddenly lead to friends I was close with villainizing me publicly, or hearing about a mentor of mine who was a huge part of my choice to become Hasidic chasing people through the streets and calling them Nazis because of an issue I was on the other side of, or suddenly seeing a-once invisible PR apparatus come to life to smack me and others down who spoke up, it devastated me. More than that: it tore straight into my spiritual self, and took something with it.
In my whole life, the only comparable experience was the time I was in a mental hospital because I had almost died from a manic episode.
But even then, at least the only person to blame was me. And God, I guess. And while it took me a long time to adjust, it was an internal adjustment I had to make, not one that encompassed me as deeply as this community. So, oddly and counter-intuitively, this experience in my Hasidic community was even more traumatizing than the time I had almost died because I wasn’t eating or drinking in Arizona in the summer because I thought I was Jesus.
Which brings me back to the wrong rabbi walking into the room and saving my life.
My wife and I had a difficult talk a year or so ago that led me to letting out a rant that ended with “Fuck God!”. It was about how I had been skipping some Shabbat observance, and how this discussion had helped me realize that the trauma in me had built up all this resentment against God. At the time, it was hard to fully process where that would lead.
A week or two ago, my wife checked in with me to see how things were going. From her vantage point, I had become even less observant since then, and while she was supportive of any religious choices I had made, she had trouble understanding what was going on.
The truth was that I did too.
I wasn’t feeling anything as dramatic as that first talk. I don’t hate God, I don’t think. Not only that, I still believe deeply in God and Judaism. They feel like unshakeable, unchangeable parts of who I am. I will, in other words, always be that kid who felt God deep in his bones even when everyone around him didn’t seem to. God is there, and that’s just a fact, even when I don’t feel it.
I grasped for words to describe what I was feeling. I hardly had them. I found it almost impossible to explain how I had lapsed in observance despite the fact that I still believed, still cared, still knew.
Finally, I tapped into some part of me and pulled out whatever was hiding: “I just… I don’t want anything to do with God right now.”
It wasn’t exactly “Fuck God,” but it felt blasphemous all the same. Not religiously blasphemous exactly, but personally blasphemous. As if I was insulting an entire life devoted to searching for God. Throwing it aside for… what? To follow fewer Jewish laws? It seemed so lazy.
But it was precisely this awareness of the fact that becoming lax in observance didn’t seem to have any logic to it that opened me up to thinking about things differently.
Why didn’t I want anything to do with God, my wife asked?
Because I want to just get healthy again, I said. I’ve been so focused on trying to find spiritual answers for so long, trying so hard to make this fucking religion fit into my life so that I could convince myself that all this sacrifice was worth it, that it made sense, that it was worth the heartache, that I haven’t taken any time off. I haven’t just said: God can wait. I need to take care of myself. I need to heal.
And there it was. I needed to heal.
And that was what brought the rabbi’s words back to me, and I shared the story with my wife. I explained how I thought I needed to understand God back then, to devote myself to Him, but the truth was that what I needed was to heal. And trying to figure out God, as I have now learned in many different ways, when you are vulnerable, in pain, and scarred from trauma, only results in less healing. And, in the long term, less true spiritual connection.
Within all of that is the deepest irony of that moment when I sat with the rabbi and got so angry at him.
Because, in that moment, when all I wanted was to connect to and understand God, God was taking care of me. He was there with me, connecting to me in His own way. Telling me through this “accident” that He would always be there, and that, for now, we needed to take some space so I could get to a better place.
And so now, today, 15 years later, I can finally see the wisdom of my rabbi as well as how pushing God away can sometimes be exactly what God wants.
So I’m pushing God away. And it sucks. But I also know, deep down, that this is what God wants.
