How, Without my Rabbi?

A few years back, we moved house just so we could get our kids into a particular school. But there was just one problem: the school was full, and had a massive waiting list. Full of despair, I turned to my Breslev Rabbi, and he told me to cheer up: G-d cared a lot more about my kids’ Jewish education than I did. He was right: within two months, two places magically opened up, and my kids got into the school.

When I crashed my car last year, I hit rock-bottom, emuna-wise, and I called my husband’s Breslev Rabbi for some guidance. He told me that the only thing I was doing wrong was not saying thank you for what happened. “Start saying thank-you, and you’ll see it all turns around.” I took his advice (it was REALLY hard, especially the first day…) – and within a week, friends of ours had paid off everything we owed from the collision, and I got my car back in working order without having to shell out a penny.

When I completely ran out of money a few months’ ago (are you spotting the theme, yet?) – I called my Breslev Rabbi in complete and utter depression and despair. He didn’t berate me for not having enough emuna; he didn’t have a go at me for complaining. He gave me some quiet sympathy, validated that it was a difficult test, and told me he was going to pray for me. Dear reader, I felt so, so much better after we spoke, like I’d got some hope back, and it was all going to be OK.

You may not believe this, but I don’t call on my Rabbis a lot. I talk to G-d every day for an hour, and that usually gives me the guidance, strength, and emuna I need on the every day stuff. But when I hit those massive dips in my life? Those ginormous pot-holes, where everything looks so bleak and I just can’t see a way out of the problem I’m in, I call them, and every single time, the simple advice they give me turns it all around.

If I actually do what they say.

I was pondering this today, after I’d called my Breslev Rabbi for a quick chat about yet another ‘big’ situation, and I started to wonder: ‘How on earth do people manage when they haven’t got their own Rabbi to talk to?’

We might like to pretend that we can work things out by ourselves, or that we’re ‘objective’ when it comes to our own issues, but that’s really just baloney. We’re really in a subjective darkness if we don’t have the guiding light of our personal rabbi. When we hit those big tests in life, most of us get completely blown away by them. Whatever emuna we had evaporates, whatever clarity we had crumbles. We’re left a bag of confusion, sadness, anger and even hate. And this is usually dafka when we desperately need a cool head, a long view, a lot of emuna, to understand what G-d is requiring from us.

If I didn’t have my rabbis to turn to, I simply don’t know how I would have coped with so many of the big issues I’ve had crop up in recent years. We can never know for sure, but I can guarantee that I’d be a whole lot more bitter, a whole lot more stressed, and probably very far away from where I actually am today (not that I actually know where that is right now. Come back to me in five years and I might be able to tell you.)

I know that none of us likes being told what to do. What if I call my rabbi wanting answer X, and he gives me answer Y? What if he tells me things I don’t want to hear? Or points out something that I really don’t want to look at right now?

These are good points. But if the rabbi is sincere and spiritually connected, then it’s not him that’s telling me stuff I don’t want to hear: it’s Hashem. And if I pay attention to the message Hashem is trying to give me, then for sure my life is going to turn around for the better.

We don’t have to do it all alone. We don’t have to struggle through those really dark times in life by ourselves. G-d wants us to have a rabbi; he wants us to have a spiritual guide, to show us what’s really going on and shed a bit of light on our circumstances, and help us to find the way out of our difficulties.

Having a rabbi is really priceless – but it does come at a price: namely, that I swallow my pride and listen to someone else. Again, I can only talk for myself, but it is SO worth it. Left to my own devices, I would have completely stuffed things up so many times, already.

So swallow hard, pray to G-d to send you a sincere, G-d fearing, kind spiritual guide, and then wait and see how all the problems in your life start to turn around (especially if you actually listen to them 😉