Category Archives: Spiritual

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 9: Remembering

Leave a comment

Today in Israel is Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day when we remember the horrors that occurred not long ago in Europe during World War II. I’m positive you are acquainted with what happened during that time, right? And so I’m taking a step back from my personal suffering and going more global than usual, but the questions are more or less the same… Well, it is actually only one question: Why?

It is written that you are a God of justice. But you make it very hard for us to understand what is the meaning of your justice. There were many bad people killed during that war, evil people who wanted to harm, destroy, an annihilate entire nations. But most of them were not like that. Millions of children who did nothing wrong, who just made the mistake of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And what about all of the righteous people who died? Those who prayed for you every day and every night, even when they saw the fires near them, even when they could not sleep from hunger and cold, even then they kept on praying. And they prayed until their last minute.

After what I have lived the last two months, I have a better understanding on why they prayed. But I still don’t understand why this is needed from us. Believing in you means that all of this world has a purpose, that we are on a journey to somewhere. Today it actually came to me that the Holocaust should be sadder to non-believer humanists than to believers. Because if you think we humans have evolved over animals, that we have grown to think, things like the holocaust (and other atrocities that keep on going every day) just don’t make sense. But for believers this is just the way that you have set things, and it is good. Sorry, but I don’t see how this can be defined as good.

Oh dear God, please open our eyes so that we can understand all of this suffering and all of this pain. We want a world of love, a world of abundance, a world of peace and quiet. A better world that the one we currently live in.

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 8: Pesach

Leave a comment

We jews live from holiday to holiday. We finish Rosh HaShana (New Year) and start preparing for the fast of Yom Kippur (Day of Attonement). When this one ends we begin building the Succa. After Succot we have a bit of rest, but fairly fast we start thinking of Sufganiot (kind of donuts) for Hannuka. and then some dried fruits for Tu BiShvat, then costumes for Purim, and after this comes the great craziness of Judaims – Pesach.

Every year that Pesach comes I ask myself once again if this is what you meant for us to do. We are told not to have anything that leavens in our houses. But you know, we humans always think we don’t understand what you said, and maybe you also meant that we have to go crazy and buy food like world is going to end, and clean our houses as if we have loaves of bread hidden under the staircases. Oh, and changing all of the dishes, pots, pans… While sitting here at 11pm washing the Pesach dishes, I imagine you looking at us and shaking your head from side to side. But what can we do. This is how you made us.

Every year in Pesach I do my yearly Gefilte Fish for Pesach, and I shared some pictures of it with my friends. But this year I am exempted from doing it, because we are doing the Seder in the Rehab Hospital with my son. So I am doubly happy, both because we can have a family Seder all of us together, and because I don’t have to do any cooking!

But seriously, today I read again the summary of the first operation my son had when we took him to the hospital, and my skin crawls as I understand again how close we were to losing him. Every moment we have with each other is blessed. It is hard to see it this way all the time, but it is the truth. And it takes extreme events like this to make us understand this. And we keep on forgetting it.

Oh well, the dishwasher finished so I have to go and clean some more plates to be ready for the upcoming holiday. Thanks G-d for all the work you have given us. It really makes us happy 🙂

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 7: Purim

1 Comment
source: http://kosherinvenice.blogspot.co.il/2012/03/its-jewish-venice-purim-time.html

Yes God, I know Purim was a while ago, and an eternity for me. But you know I’ve been busy and I also managed to destroy my computer last week… So just now I managed to sit down to write.

What can I say, Purim, the most waited festival for the children. Everyone puts on a costume, we all read the Megila together, give each other sweets (and let our children intoxicate on them for one day). A fun day overall.

But as you know, this Purim we had to stay with my son in the hospital. And what was very interesting is that this wasn’t a sad Purim. For me, it was the best one ever. For starters, my son is alive and getting better each day, which by itself is something that keeps me happy. But more than that, while in his room at the hospital, about every 10 minutes someone came by to give their blessings. Some came with a guitar and sang, some gave candies and more intoxicating sweets, another group of youngsters had almost a full orchestra in our room. I saw mothers with their kids come and spend their “vacation” day on visiting the ward and giving each child a drawing and a get-well gift. It was so inspiring, so energizing, so wonderful!

Seeing so much love gives so much strength… Than you God for this great day you gave me.

But next year, can you please arrange for me something with a BBQ in it?

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 6: Unconditional Love

3 Comments
source: http://thelongestisland.blogspot.co.il/2011/03/check-out-bernard-schweizers-blog-post.html

It seems like ages ago, but only 12 day have passed since my son gave me this lesson. We were driving home from his weekly treatment, and he was in a very bad mood, with no explainable reason. Probably because we said no to something he wanted. Yea, I think it was that.

As we were driving down the road he started saying bad things, and hitting my chair, so I stopped at a bus station and sat with him there to understand what is happening. He was so mad! And then he started crying, because he could not control himself. He said he was bad, and that he made me mad with no reason. We cried together for some time, and I told him that I love him always. That he can be angry at me, and its OK. And that sometimes I can also be angry at him, and that this is also OK. We are humans, we are full of feelings that we can’t fully control, and anger is one of them.

But that day I learned about unconditional love. The love you have for your child is like this. No matter how angry you are at him, you still love him. And no matter how angry he is at you, he still loves you.

And yes, I have been angry with you. And a part of me is still angry at you. For all the suffering, for all the sickness, for all the pain.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love you.

And even if you do things that I don’t understand, and that make me very angry, there is a reason for everything. But as I am a child, I cannot understand it.

And I know that you love me.

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 5: Crying

1 Comment
source: http://formybeautifullove.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/poem-6.html

Life is tough. Not only having to deal with what we have but also being always afraid of the unknown, and of the future and what it will bring us. Knowing that we don’t know a thing.

Trying to maintain a normal life with this burden you gave us, or as a good manager would say, this “challenge”. But we have more in our life, and they need our attention, our love, our caring. The world doesn’t stop because we have to take care of things. It keeps going and we must play catch every single day.

We think that life changes us, but we are a tough nut to crack. And even knowing that the most basic things in life cannot be taken for granted, the small details of life make us angry. And this makes us even angrier.

And sometimes we just want to cry.

And this is OK.

Because sometimes this is the only thing that we can do.

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 4: Punishment

Leave a comment
source: http://wobble-house.blogspot.co.il/2012/03/concept-of-god.html

Last week I started a new ritual in my daily: I come early from work (before sunset) and walk around the block with my son, while he has a patch on his good eye. Last week we found out (once again by chance) that he lost almost all of his sight in one eye :-(, so I want to do a more daily follow-up on this, and also use this time to talk to him and understand how he feels.

Yesterday was tough. In the middle of the walk, while talking about an eye exam he was doing today (and after doing it once, hates it), he asked one question: Why was I punished with this? Why did God punish me?

Tough one, ah?

First I had to stop myself from crying. After I managed this, I tried to explain to him that he was not being punished. That we simply don’t understand what God wants from us and that if he gave him what he did, it must be for a purpose, but we are simply too dumb and simple to understand this.

The conversation went “uphill” from that point, and we talked about all of the bad things that happen in the world (well, not all but many), and how, if I was to make the world, people would never get sick and would never die. He thought this would be boring, having all of the time the same people around, doing the same jobs. So we settled on having no sickness and when people got bored, they would simply go to sleep forever. Deep thoughts for a seven-year old kid.

So God, tell me. Just between you and me. Are you punishing us or is this really the way you meant the world to be?

Spiritual

Scott Adams on Religion

Leave a comment

If you are an engineer, you must know Dilbert. If not, please go there now and come back after you have read all of it. I’ll wait.

You’re back? good. Now you should also subscribe and read to the blog of Scott Adams, the creator if Dilbert. I don’t agree with all of his views, but he does make the mind exercise. And since lately I am talking about religion and reality and how things work, this phrase in one of his posts (at the bottom) just “clicked”:

I’m not a believer, but I’ve evolved to be pro-religion because I observe religion to be a functional interface to a reality our brains aren’t designed to understand.

So maybe we’ll never understand.

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 3: A Theory of Everything

1 Comment

Hi God. It’s been a long time since my last letter, but I have been thinking a lot about how to write this post and what would be the best way to explain what I want to say. And just like they say, perfect is the enemy of good… So let’s just get started and see how this goes.

The saying goes that “Everything is for the good” is a typical Israeli/Jewish saying that is told to people in hard times. Many people also read/hear this as “everything is for my good”, but I think they are wrong. Everything is for the good, but not personal, but general. For the goodness of your general plan of which you still don’t want to share any details.

But if you have a plan, what about our free will? How can you decide the direction in which the world is/will go but at the same time let us do whatever we think our mind chooses?

I think both can be done at the same time. And this is my “Theory of Everything”. If we look at the world around us, what are we? We are our reactions to our inputs (yes… I’m a software developer…). And what are our inputs but the creation of our brain? If you take a look at what surrounds us, take a deeper look. Deeper. There is mostly empty space. Even the densest of materials in the world is composed of atoms that are composed of a nucleus and a cloud of electrons with LOADS of space in between. Therefore when we touch something there is no real contact between elements. What we feel is the force that is applied between the two things, the energy that one has against the energy that the other one has.

So the world is energy. Nice. But let’s go back to us and our inputs. I am now sitting in the train, writing this post. Every second, microsecond, picosecond, $epsilon$, is a point where I have made a decision. Maybe not a conscious decision but a decision anyhow. And there are millions of possibilities every second. Will I write an ‘a’ or a ‘b’? Will I click the keyboard with my first finger or my second finger? Will I breathe now or in one millisecond? We can visualize this as a graph (for the CS grads out there, a tree):

Every point in time is a jump that moves you forward in this decision graph. And every decision you make changes the possible path that you can take in the future:

And we are all just traveling together in this graph, moving forward as we take multiple, infinitesimal decisions. And we are all moving together because the choices we have at each step are not only affected by our decisions, but also by the decisions taken by all of the people in the world (yes, the butterfly effect). At every step there is a “decision plane” with all of the possible paths that everybody can take, and each move creates a new plane of choices for the whole world (or universe). I have a great picture in my mind of how this should look, and I’ll try to reproduce it:

Now how is this related to the existence or absence of free will? And how is this related to “everything is for the good”? First, while we have free will to make the choice of how we move from one decision plane to the other, we are not the creators. And while each decision plane may seem to us as random, it is predesigned to take us in a specific direction of all the real possible directions. Even if the next decision plane is infinite, it doesn’t have to contain all of the options, but just the option that will take us on a journey to the final destination. So we have free will, and we have infinite choices, but there is some force that is directing us (all of us) towards a final destination. And this destination is by definition good. So “everything is for the good”. Not my personal good, not any private personal good, but the good of the destination (by definition).

There are yet more things that can be explained using this theory, such as deja-vus and prophecy, but this letter is getting long so I’ll leave this for next time. As usual, it was very nice writing to you, and as like always, I await your answer, even if by my theory, this will never happen. Or maybe already planned. Who knows…

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 2: In The Beginning

1 Comment
source: http://touchpractice.com/the-brilliance-of-kindness/

Good night God. How are you? I’ve been doing fine since our last conversation (and while to have a conversation you need the other person to answer, maybe I’m getting answers but I have no “matching input device” to take them, so I’ll just assume we are having a conversation). The world hasn’t changed much, both for the good and for the bad. Sun is still shining, moon is still in its place, the sea hasn’t evaporated. Same as usual.

There are a couple of things I wanted to talk about today, hope you have some spare time.

Let’s talk some Torah (Bible) today. This week in the synagogue we read Parashat Bereshit, the first weekly bible reading, and also the first part of the first book of the Torah, which I always find to be a thorough treatise into human behaviour. It’s all there: lies, backstabbing, treason, murder, cheating, you name it. And all done by our great forefathers, read every week with awe, and taught to our children at school (somewhat censored, but less than expected). Every time I read it I learn new things. Great work man! I mean, God!

So let’s talk about Adam and Eve. Two interesting things came to my mind when reading Bereshit. First, you took Adam, put him in Gan Eden, and told him not to eat from the forbidden fruit. Did you really expect him not to eat from it? You are our father and we are your children, right? Adam was also your child, right? What you did is against every parenting 101 book (and as you are omni-know-all-something, you surely read all parenting books, right?). It’s like putting my girl in a room with a bar of the most delicious chocolate just sitting there in the middle of the room, and telling her that she must never, ever, eat the chocolate bar. Nope, won’t work. And as you surely know that, you are probably teaching us something. I’ll keep that in mind next time I put my girl in a room full of chocolate.

Second, after eating from the forbidden fruit, both man and woman hid in the garden awaiting for their father (you) to come and shout at them. The funny thing here is what they do: you say (my liberal translation) “WHERE ARE YOU”, to which Adam responds “heard you are coming and since we are naked, we hid”, to which you answer “WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU ARE NAKED! DID YOU EAT FROM THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT?!?!?!”. And what does Adam say? “this woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit“. So you go on to the woman “WHAT IS THIS THAT YOU DID?!?!?” to which she answers “the snake made me“. Impressive! they just ate from the fruit a minute ago and they already learned one of the basic necessities of humans – having someone to blame for our problems.

So maybe that is your real task in this world, dear God? Are you here just so that we can blame you for all of the bad things that happen to us? It actually makes life a lot simpler. But I don’t believe this is the case, so the search will continue.

This letter is getting a bit long, but I just wanted to add another thing. Today I visited with my son a great place that helps families cope with tumor treatments (we go there after him having his chemo, and that really changes the color of the day). They have so many cool things for children: a playground, a petting zoo, art classes, music classes, you name it. But this is not the point. As I was there, a couple with a kid appeared and they looked really, really familiar. After 5 seconds of looking one at the other, she remembered that the three of us had worked together some 12 years ago. What a coincidence! And why is she there? she looks fine. But things were not fine. She was diagnosed with breast cancer 5 years ago and had been treated. After 5 years she was pregnant with twins and the cancer returned, and now a lot worse. So no more twins, and back to treatment. But she wears a great smile, talks positive, looks and feels very positive, with impressive energies.

So God, the joke is on you. And we’ll talk about this next time.

Spiritual

Letters to God – Part 1: Why?

1 Comment
source: https://christophermattix.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/the-dark-night-of-the-soul/

Hi God. Since you haven’t answered my prayers lately (or as some say, you have answered them and it is me that is not accepting the answer), I decided to switch channels and start writing to you here. I hope you are subscribed to my RSS feed since you are not my friend on FB and I didn’t see you as one of my stalkers followers on Twitter (but maybe your using a pseudonym). But people say you are everywhere, so this will surely get to your inbox somehow.

Ever since my son was diagnosed with a tumor in his brain, I’ve been asking myself (and you) one question: Why? I mean, I’ve been bad here and there (and there, and there…), but what has this child done? How can you explain this in any reasonable and comprehensible way? And if you are testing me, is he just “collateral damage”?

But hey, I have it easy. If I have learned one thing in the last couple of months is that the meaning of “good news” can get very, very low. Oh yes, it is a tumor, but it is treatable (“good news”). Not only is it treatable, but the treatment doesn’t cause  hair loss and stuff like that (“good news”). And I really have to say that we have been fortunate to have a lot of “good news” with my son’s treatment. So thank you God, if that was you.

But looking around, I see many kids that didn’t get so many good news. So many faces with no hair, tubes going out of their little bodies. Most of them wearing a smile, getting their chemo/antibiotics and watching TV or playing on a pad/smartphone. And these are the fortunate ones that sit with us in the day-care clinic. Those that stay for the night have a harder time. And some don’t make it.

And I ask again, why? Why all the suffering in this world? What are you trying to teach us? What do we have to learn?

I have so much more to say, but this letter is getting long and research tells us that most people will never read to the bottom of the page (are you like that?), so I’ll leave some more for next time.