It's been awhile since I last posted. But that hasn't stopped me from thinking about you all and frummydbt. In fact, I've been busy at work on the first draft of my forthcoming book on borderline personality disorder. It's exciting since this book gives me a chance to set some things straight about borderline and yiddishkeit and the misrepresentation of the two. So stay tuned!

The thought that I would like to post tonight is about the pain of existence that is in fact our greatest savior. The idea actually began with a reflection on the Talmudic legend of how God went to Yishmael and Esav and offered them the Torah before He turned to the Jewish people. It struck me as odd that there is no record of those "offers". That led me to posit that perhaps God's offer to Yishmael and Esav was not so much a solicitation akin to those which I receive in the mail or by phone. Rather, the offer was couched in existential pain and confusion. It is the kind of bone-breaking-cancer-causing pain that is born of the tug of war between our desperate instinct for self preservation and the great question of why should I tolerate all of the misery of existence? The pain was an invitation: either transform the pain and longing by finding meaning in Me or try and distract yourselves from the pain by gung-ho materialism. Yishmael and Esav took the latter option because, as the Talmud tells us, they believed that their hard wired personalities could never, ever change. They failed to see the magic in the human ability to transform and to undergo metamorphosis. Perhaps, they slipped into the same self idolatry that ruined Narcissus' life and doomed him to a loveless life. Whatever it was, it the Jew's belief in the ability of human transformation through action, as reflected in Naaseh VeNishma, we will do and then we will hear, that carried the day. From that fundamental optimism the Jew was able to accept the only logical path out of misery and into bliss: the surrender to God.