Every now and then, I get the urge to run away.

To just drop all the ‘grind’, all the responsibility, all the annoying people, upsetting circumstances, arguments, scandals and chores, and to just run away.

People do this all the time.

Some people escape down the neck of a bottle of red, others go up in a puff of illegal smoke, or down the hatch with completely legal prescription meds. Still others chant themselves into an absence of feeling, or run themselves into a high, or work themselves into a place of oblivion, or amateurly act like nothing’s really going wrong under the surface.

And then, there’s always the escaping from self that comes from watching Netflix and Youtube, or surfing Facebook, or diving into the pages of a fiction.

Sadly for me, I don’t do any of these things (not including Mr MMB333, who I think it’s fair to say doesn’t exactly count.)

So then what?

How do I run way from all the arguments, injustices, people telling lies to the world and most of all to themselves? How do I find that space, that place, where I can finally just stop worrying about the evil that’s eating up the world, and just see the good? How can I get away from all the baggage I still seem to be dragging along within myself?

I’m stuck wishing I could be a little more ‘normal’ and a little less weird again, even though barely a week goes by without some other corner of neighborhood ‘normal’ exploding.

Last week, it was another couple we used to be close to who recently divorced. This week, it’s another argument with a good friend who is seriously losing her marbles and living in a fantasy land that I doubt will last much longer than the end of the month, when all the credit extended finally and completely runs out and the bailiffs come knocking.

The evidence is everywhere:

For as long as we don’t acknowledge our own problems, our own issues, all the lies we’re choosing to tell ourselves, all the people we’re actually hurting with our behavior, nothing can really change, transform or improve.

But I know, this is not the normal approach to life.

The normal approach to life is to strive after nice-looking houses, and fancy cars, and expensive holidays, and stunning yom tov tables and outfits, and to try to fit a few mitzvahs and a bit of Torah learning in around all that important stuff.

Working on our own bad middot is simply weird. Admitting our own errors is unthinkable. Talking to God regularly is something only eccentrically strange people do. Trying to peek past all the very ‘normal’ lies we’re all telling ourselves about how things really work in the world, and how much responsibility we actually bear for our own misfortunes, is just abnormal.

I know that, I really do.

And yet, I can’t seem to get more ‘normal’, hard as I try.

​Which is when I really want to run away, because maybe in that different place, I’ll finally find others who are also strange.

Every year when I’m about to get overwhelmed by the mess, the expense, the cleaning of Pesach, I ask myself: ‘isn’t there some sort of short-cut I could do, to just get the fun stuff out of this experience and leave all the yuck behind?’

Because Pesach routinely comes along with SO MUCH yuck. Even when you’re working on yourself. Even when you’re trying your hardest to just have emuna, and to just let God get on with running the world.

I’ve had Pesachs when I tried so hard to clean everything just so, and even a week earlier than usual, so I could take my girls away for a short break with the neighbor’s girls up the road. That was a disaster. Pesach seemed to last for three months that year, the ‘break’ was a stressful fight-fest, and then on seder night my husband got completely knocked out by the first glass of wine and was practically comatose.

Recently, my Pesachs have gone in the other direction, where it’s been hard to muster up the energy required to actually clean. Anything. The first couple of years this happened, I just kind of pushed through the weariness and fatigue, because I had enough OCD going on about chametz that it gave me the energy required to actually do something about it.

But this year, my chametz OCD has receded considerably (which is probably a good thing…) but it also means the ‘panic button’ has been disconnected from cleaning for Pesach. Add to this a very nice article in Hamodia a couple of weeks’ ago making it clear that most of what we consider ‘essential’ in cleaning for Pesach is actually OCD-induced chumras, and voila! I really haven’t felt like doing much.

So then, I started exploring other shortcuts to getting Pesach done, like:

a) paying someone else to do it or
b) expecting my kids to act like the adults in the house.

I know many, many mothers manage to off-load all their household chores onto their children, and that the children even don’t mind it (OK, I made that last bit up, but the first part of the sentence is definitely true.) But in my house, I’ve never quite managed to pull that off. The more I expect of my kids, the less they do.

The less I’m in their face about cleaning and helping, the more they actually start volunteering to do all sorts of things around the house. But when it comes to Pesach, I forget this rule and start to expect things from them - and this is where the problem really begins, because we are just talking a completely different language.

To me, ‘morning’ means sometime before 11am. To them, ‘morning’ means ‘some time after I wake up’ - which could be 2pm in the afternoon. So I’ll ask them to clean something, or arrange something in the morning, and because it’s Pesach, each chore is carefully nested and stacked within 15 others, so choreography is key.

So I CAN’T cook, however much I want to, until the kitchen counters have been cleaned and covered. If the person assigned to do that job doesn’t wake up on time, doesn’t feel good, can’t figure out how the sponge works - there are millions of obstacles, you simply wouldn’t believe what can happen - then I get stuck having to do it myself.
​

​Unless….

I can just completely let go, and let things happen in their own sweet time.

And I’m not there yet, although each year it gets closer and closer. I know this is just a test from God. I know the real cleaning for Pesach is all my bad middot and Pharoah-nic tendencies to slam around the house muttering about how ‘lazy, lazy’ my kids-cum-slaves are.

Don’t they know this is the whole point of having children?!? So I won’t have to do the chores myself?!?

Apparently not.

So in the meantime, I get stuck with some huge bad middot issues that I know is the real work to be done, because honestly apart from Pesach, my kids are actually really sweet, and really lovely, and would really put themselves out tremendously to help me.

There’s just something about this time of year that makes all that goodwill evaporate, and that seems to pit me against them in a really ucky way that no-one ever comes out of happily.

Last year, we had people putting their feet through bathroom doors in a rage because no-one had set the seder table (and no, that wasn’t a kid.) I understand they also have bad middot to ‘find’ and dispose of. I understand that just as my mini-Pharoah is waking up in me, it’s doing that inside of them, too.

We all think that someone else should be the ‘slave’, and we’re all upset that the ‘slave’ isn’t working hard enough….

Sigh.

I so want geula. I’m really sick of cleaning for Pesach. Not just this year, but every year, because I don’t have a cleaner, and my kids-cum-slaves apparently always get liberated BEFORE Pesach, and because sometimes, I really can’t understand why I have to work so hard to get to that tiny bit of ancient pretzel that’s down the back of my couch.

I know, all this stuff is achieving wonderful spiritual rectifications that I can only guess at, because I certainly can’t grasp them in the here and now. I don’t want my bad middot anymore. I don’t want to have unreasonable expectations anymore. I don’t want to be lazy and apathetic, and I also don’t want to be enslaved and worked to the bone.

So what’s the answer? What’s the shortcut to the joy of the festival without all this back-breaking work and grumpy power struggles?

Maybe this Pesach, I’ll finally find out.

​Six weeks’ ago, when I was starting to pack up the tiny flat, my kid and her friends decided to rearrange all the furniture. They did a really good job, except they ended up shoving one of my huge, solid wood dining chairs in the corridor-room on the way to the back bedrooms.

That fateful day, I groped my way over to my kid’s bedroom to go and wake her up - and slammed straight into that massive piece of wood. I think I probably broke my toe.

Because we were in the middle of packing, I couldn’t find my helichrysum oil, I couldn’t find my sujok stick, my lentils  - none of the things I usually use to deal with these minor emergencies. I was also so stressed from the move (because we still hadn’t found a place to rent, and we also were in the middle of trying to find a place to buy) that I couldn’t really pray on my toe to figure out what the message was.

Because God puts messages in everything, we just have to try and decode them.

So it took a month for the toe to heal up, and it’s still been a bit puffy and sore, but Baruch Hashem, on the mend!

Until that fateful day two days ago, when I stubbed it again, this time against the broken glass top of my oven that had been shoved somewhere for safe keeping.

Let’s be clear, I dealt with this situation with something approaching zero emuna.

I was so angry that I’d just stubbed that same poor toe that I banged the glass top away from me - and it smashed into a million shards. And I had nothing on my feet. So it took me half an hour to sort that particular mess out.

Then, I ended up having to take a kid to school again, like has been happening all year if I want her to actually make it there. And there was tons of traffic and I needed a wee. And then, 20 minutes away from home I got a phone call from the other kid, who had missed the bus to her school that was even further away and was now waiting for a bus that simply hadn’t come in an unfriendly Arab part of town.

So I made a U-turn, drove to pick her up - and quietly started to fume.

Just that morning, I’d written a sanctimonious post (draft....) on how a parent’s self-sacrifice, or mesirut Nefesh, is what really helps their kids to get through their issues, and for their kids’ souls to heal. Rav Arush wrote that in ‘Education with love’, and it’s been a credo I’ve been trying to hold by for the last seven years.

But two days ago, God showed me that yet again, my yetzer was causing me lots and lots of problems by taking things to extremes. Even something good, like sacrificing yourself for your kid, can end up being warped and unhelpful.

After I spent five hours taxi-ing my teens around before I’d even had breakfast, with a newly-swollen toe and a feeling of increasing anger and dissatisfaction, I started to realize that once again, I am approaching a ‘change point’ in my life.
​

​For two days solid, I stomped around my new, bigger apartment feeling really awful, yelling at everyone and everything and emitting ‘dangerous Ima’ vibes.

Part of the problem was that I just realized that while I’d been blaming a lot of issues on my lack of space and cramped living quarters, many of the problems are actually much deeper than that.

I may have left the rented dump behind, but I was hugely disappointed to find that I’ve brought the ‘rented dump’ mindset of constriction, complaint and lack with me.

But life is so good!

So why have I been feeling so ucky the last few days?

The feet always allude to emuna. The feet are the place that the dark forces grab on to, to pull a person to oblivion. That’s part of the deeper spiritual reasons for dancing, and picking our feet up off the floor, because it breaks the hold of these evil forces.

So I danced a bit around the flat yesterday, and started to feel a little better.

Then, I sat down and tried to work out what message God is giving me, and this is what I got:

1) Sacrificing ourselves for our kids, especially our teens, doesn’t mean we give them a ‘get out of jail free’ card. They also have to learn responsibility and accountability, and if the price of missing the right bus because they got up too late is an hour of uncomfortable waiting in an Arab neighborhood of town, so be it.

2) I’m over-protective of my kids because I sometimes get scared about all the ucky people out there. But I need to trust Hashem more, that He will look after them, and send them the help they need whenever they truly need it.

3) I am running myself into the ground by trying to smooth out other people’s issues. Even though I love those other people so very much, this is not what God wants. He sends each of us tests to help us grow closer to Him, and to work on our emuna, and sometimes the highest help you can give a person is to step out of the way and encourage them to take everything back to God.

4) I still feel half-stuck. True, the gashmius side of things is now looking up, Baruch Hashem, but spiritually and emotionally, I’m still dealing with a bunch of things that aren’t really getting anywhere fast, or obviously improving.

5) I need to start going to more Kivrei Tzaddikim again. Kever Rachel is up the road from me, and it’s high time I paid it another visit.

There’s more insights popping up too, but I can see that change is on the horizon.

​I can’t carry on the way I have been.

​You know, I hadn’t realized just how cramped I was feeling, or just how suffocated, pressured and squashed I was in the small apartment we just left.

We moved into that apartment 3 ½ years ago to get away from our neo-nazi landlord who bumped up the rent after just three months, and mamash had storm-trooper tendencies, especially when it came to the cardinal sin of me hanging my washing up in ‘his’ designer house.

And for that first year, that tiny apartment was like a sanitorium, or a rest-home for broken and battered-by-life people. I didn’t mind that I couldn’t have guests, because I had no energy for guests. I didn’t mind that I didn’t feel like cooking up big feasts in the pokey kitchen, because I’d lost my appetite anyway.

Then the second year, I got some energy back and I tried to have guests (wedged awkwardly around our too-big table) and it was always a hassle, for a lot of reasons. The final straw came when we tried to do a sheva brachot for someone my husband used to learn with, and even after we moved the massive sofa and the rest of the furniture out of the salon, there still was scarcely any room to breathe.

That evening was so stressful for me that I told me husband ‘no more! We can’t do any more sheva brachot, we can’t invite any more people! This apartment really won’t let us.’

In the meantime, my kids supplied the lack.

Teenagers don’t mind sleeping piled all over the floor; they don’t mind squashing two people to a seat; they don’t mind that none of your plates match, or that everything is plastic. So for the last three years, pretty much the only guests we had in that house were aged 16 and under.

Every now and then I’d pine for a place where I could swing a cat, and not stub my toe on all the furniture blocking the path to my kids’ room, and where I could do an exercise routine without rapping my knuckles on the back of a hard wooden chair, or knocking all the ancient dust off my (low down) light shade.

But mostly, I just tried to grin and bear it. Because we were in a situation where I couldn’t see anyway to get out of it, and I knew the test was to work on my patience and emuna, and just try to accept God’s will.

BH, a couple of months’ ago, God finally threw us the key to get out of that particular prison, and I’m writing this from an apartment in a different part of town, that is costing us around the same in rent but is nearly twice as big.

It has two toilets!

​It has a utility room, so I don’t have to worry about electrocuting myself with the washing machine every time I take a shower (and yes, I did actively worry about that at least once a month - more at the beginning.)

​For the first time in years, both my sofas can be in the same room, which means there’s enough space for everyone to cosy-in on a Friday night. And you can actually walk around my table - all the way around it - which is also something that hasn’t been possible for 4 years.

When you rent, you can’t change much in the house to your taste. The first two years, I didn’t want to even paint the kids’ room a different colour (like they were begging me) because I didn’t want the hassle of changing them back to white when we left. Imminently.

Which we didn’t do.

So by year three, I painted one room duck-egg blue and the other pink with one wall of purple ‘natznatz’, or glitter paint. And on the one remaining white wall in that room, my daughter copied out - by hand! - all the words to her favorite song, and wrote it on the wall in permanent marker.

Hey, if you’re going to do something, do it the whole way.

Within two months of finishing her room, the pillar of cloud lifted and we got the signal that we needed to move on.

Thank God, we managed to find something to buy before we left Musrara, and it’s a lovely flat even though it definitely needs some work. So in the meantime, we are renting in a different neighborhood for a final six months, and all my pictures and mirrors are staying packed, and nearly all my books are staying boxed, because I don’t have the koach to do it all twice between here and August.

So I feel happy that the house test is hopefully nearly over, and also relieved that Hashem has taken us out of a very narrow place, and also a bit sad that the last few years have been so difficult, in some ways.

I know we all had to go through it all. I know my family is now much less spoilt and far more appreciative of our blessings. I got over my ‘toilet kooties’ (mostly…) and past my snobby arrogance about being a home owner (mostly…) and I tried really, really hard to see the good and to focus on the good of my situation (mostly…)

Sometimes it was easier than others. It took me years to realize why I’d hear strange male voices accompanying the single man upstairs in the wee hours of the morning. Once that particularly penny dropped, I was so grossed-out I had a ‘leave now’ urge pass over me for a good fortnight.

Then there was the fight between two families in my block - a chareidi version of the Crips and the Bloods, except they were fighting over a bike, not a person - which resulted in the police being called and a quite a lot of bad blood sloshing around afterwards. One of those families moved out a couple of weeks’ ago, shortly before we left.

Before my old neighborhood went mostly Breslov, it was mostly gangsters, and sometimes that vibe is still vibrating in strange ways throughout the walls.

But here’s some of what I’ll miss:

​boys with massive payot and na-nach kippas playing football in the local migrash (court) next to my window. Apparently secular neighbors who quote the Zohar at you by heart. Conversations between old friends where one of them is a chassid on a motorbike with his tzitzit flying, and the other one is walking next to him in jeans and T-shirt.

The little neighborhood Nachmans setting the recycling bin on fire pretty much every Pesach, when they burn their chametz (it’s mostly accidental. I think.)

I’ll also miss the eccentric makolet man who sometimes asks me to hand him bottles of Arak to help him stock the shelf; and the Kotel being a 10 minute walk away, and strange this, the sound of the muezzin blaring away at 5.30 in the morning.

And of course, I’ll miss the madness and kedusha that is the Rav’s shteibel, where I routinely got run over by ladies with strollers, and kids with strollers, and even toddlers with strollers (when a toddler runs straight at you with their stroller and it’s a direct hit, it really hurts, let me tell you.)

It’s another new stage. Another new start. Another new house.

This time it struck me that while moving is really, really hard, when you’re stuck in a place of constriction and limitation, the hardships of moving are actually still an enormous blessing.

​I just hope I can remember that when it takes PazGas another two weeks to send round a technician to hook up my gas burners.
 

​Last Wednesday, as the boxes started to mount up in the small apartment and as the floor space (and table space and counter space and every space…) started to disappear under cardboard, I asked my husband if we could go away for Shabbat.

Both the kids were out for Shabbat anyway, and there was nowhere to sit, or cook, anyway and the Rav was also doing his ‘big gathering’ in the North, that I felt like going to, for a change.

The husband, tzaddik that he is, agreed, so I rang around a few places and ended up booking Hotel Ron in Tsfat. Thursday, I continued to pack like a crazy person and around 8pm, we headed up North.

The Rav does his gatherings late, and the plan was to try to stick with the program as long as we could, then drive on to Meron and sleep in the car until day break, when we’d make our way to Tsfat.

Finding the location was an adventure in itself. Thanks to the ongoing persecution of a bunch of people who have taken it upon themselves to threaten every hall that hosts the Rav with bankruptcy and closure, these gatherings are happening in increasingly unusual locations.

The last time I went to one, in Beer Sheva, they put up a massive marquee last minute in someone’s tile warehouse. This time round it was a proper events hall - in the middle of an Arab neighborhood.

It’s hard to know who was more surprised, the local Arabs who suddenly had a whole bunch of Breslov chassidim descend on the hall (with their own refreshments, natch…) or the Breslovers who had to drive past a bunch of xtian effigies in glass boxes and huge light-bulbed crucifixes while trying to find the place.

Never a dull moment…

We got there around 11, the Rav showed up around 12 midnight, and less than an hour later, word went out that the gathering was re-locating to Meron. So, we got back in our car, joined the throngs of people driving off to Rashbi - and somehow managed to lose everyone.

I anyway was so knackered I fell asleep in the back of the car, but my husband tried to find everyone for a bit, before also falling asleep in the front. I woke up at 6am, went to do an hour of hitbodedut in the tomb, and ended up spending most of the time perched overlooking the beautiful greenery, wondering where all my ability to do six hour prayer sessions has gone, these days.

Life has been so busy for months, it’s hard to catch my breath.

​The hotel said we could book in at 12pm, and it was only 8am, so I said to my husband: ‘Let’s go to Lake Montfort!’ We headed out, got lost, took a wrong turn - and ended up driving by Rashbi’s cave in the now Arab village of Peki’in. So of course we stopped!

​
The village seemed like it was deserted at that time of day, so we went and had a wander around, found Rashbi’s cave, and saw the massive Carob trees that are still sprawled all around it.

It was really cool. I’ve been wanting to see Rasbhi’s cave for years already.

Next stop was ‘Lake’ Montfort which was impressive for Israel, but about the size of a large puddle, for people who come from rainy Britain. Still, we walked around in the sunshine and enjoyed the view before heading off to Tsfat - which someone told me ages ago is one of the biblical cities of refuge.

And in many ways, it still feels like that.

After checking in, we went for a walk around the Old City, through the artist’s quarter and then down to the old Tsfat cemetery. I’ve been going to Tsfat for a decade already, and this is the most bustling and alive I’ve ever seen the old city there. It really seems to be going through some sort of renaissance.

The husband went for a dip in the Ari’s mikva while I went to do some praying by his grave.

There’s a lot going on at the moment, and I came with some heaviness of spirit and upset which very quickly lifted after an hour in the cemetery.

I heard someone talking about Chana and her 7 sons being buried in Tsfat, so I decided to try to find them. We were headed in completely the wrong direction when a couple of yeshiva boys with a guide to graves in their hands passed by. I asked them if they knew where Chana was buried and they gestured to the other side of the massive cemetery, and told us to try there, instead.

My husband gave me his quizzical half-eyebrow - finding a grave in Tsfat is not so easy, particularly if it’s not so well-known - but I told him let’s try anyway! If God wants us to find it, we’ll find it.

As it happens, God wanted us to find it.

As we got close to that side of the cemetery, where people are buried in the caves under the mountainous dips of Tsfat, we heard this gorgeous harmonizing coming from one of the caves. It was so beautiful, and the cave acoustics were amazing. We drew closer to see what’s going on, and my husband turned to me and smiled: the writing above the cave entrance proclaimed ‘Chana and her 7 sons’.

Who 2,500 years later is still being remembered and serenaded by Am Yisrael. Unbelievable.

We packed a lot into a day and a half, including praying in Meron, praying by the Arizal, finding Chana and her 7 sons, praying in Rav Yosef Karo’s shul, and visiting the grave of Rav Yehoshua ben Chanina, and Rebbe Nachman’s shamash Reb Shimon, who moved to Tsfat and was murdered by Arabs in the surrounding hills whilst doing hitbodedut.
​
It reminded me how much I’ve missed visiting the holy graves the last couple of years, caught up in a pace of life that’s been really, really crazy.

​Like everyone.

I got a lot of clarity in Tsfat, I got a lot of inner strength, and I got the energy to come back home and to carry on packing, and to carry on writing, and to carry on trying to shine light into the world, even when sometimes it’s hard and I’m tired of dealing with psychos.

Am Yisrael is so beautiful.

And we are so blessed to be part of this beautiful Jewish story, that is continuing to unfold in all of our lives, linking us back to our ancestors and forward to geula and Moshiach and true peace in our times.
​
Ashreich!

One of Rebbe Nachman’s followers was once asked whether he could recount any of the open miracles that Rebbe Nachman was reputed to have done. He turned to his questioner and told him:

“Me! I’m the biggest miracle of all. You had no idea what Rabbenu did with me!”

I have to admit that when I first heard that, I wasn’t so impressed. I mean really? What’s the big deal that now someone started eating kosher, or even grew some impressive side-curls? Lots of people do those things without Breslov, so how was that meant to be a proof of Rabbenu’s
spiritual powers?

These days, I have a different view.

Around three years’ back, at the time when I was writing The Secret Diary of a Jewish Housewife, things seemed so very bleak. Me and my husband had been broken into a million pieces by everything we’d gone through, from the finances turning sour through to losing our home, through to having no-one to talk to - at all! - because we’d both turned into holier-than-thou martinets.

By God’s grace, we managed to hang on to our marriage, our kids and our sanity, but it was a very close call.

I look back at that awful, absolutely awful, time, and I wonder: How on earth did me and my family come through all that in one piece? And not only in one piece, with more equanimity and genuine simcha than we had before everything fell apart.

How did that happen?

Rabbenu.

Or more precisely, following the advice of Rabbenu, which includes talking to God for at least an hour every single day, knowing that everything that happens is 100% determined by Hashem and for our own good, and going to Uman every time you think you’re really going to crack up because you simply can’t take it anymore.

There’s other stuff in there too, like working on your bad middot, understanding that everyone, even the psychos, are just a mirror reflecting your own ‘uck’ back at you, and doing your darndest to have no despair in the world, even when really, you’re drowning in it.

All that stuff really, really helps.

But ultimately, it’s Rabbenu that got me through the last few years, and into a space where things are really starting to turn around, BH.

Yesterday, we signed on a house in Jerusalem.

We can’t move into it for another six months (long story…) so I have to go live somewhere else for a while, but who cares?

A home of my own in Jerusalem!

I had really given up on owning a house of my own anywhere, let alone the holiest city in the world. Let alone, one of the holiest neighborhoods. Let alone, a place where you can literally see Har HaBayit out your window if your apartment faces in the right direction. (Mine doesn’t).

But who cares?!

My husband sighed a big sigh today, and told me he couldn’t believe how far we’ve come the last three years, what miracles God has done for us.

There’s a mitzvah to publicise the nes¸ so let me end with this: Two days ago, after two months solid of wrangling with our seller, it really looked like our house was going to fall through. Her horrible lawyer wanted to put a clause in the contract that no person in their right mind would ever agree to, as it basically amounted to underwriting a blank cheque.

We’d given in on every other matter, so our hopes weren’t high that our seller and her horrible lawyer would back down, and for once, we simply couldn’t be the ones to compromise.
We really needed a miracle for things to move.

Luckily, we live in Musrara, so my husband nipped over to Rav Berland’s shteibel and amazingly managed to get near enough to his podium to ask him what to do, and whether to continue.

“Continue!” the Rav told him.

Although frankly, we couldn’t see how that was really possible.

The next day, all by herself, the seller came around and pulled the impossible-to-agree-to clause so we could actually close the deal.

We got the house.

But the biggest miracle is still me.

Over shabbat, I was doing quite a bit of praying, about quite a few things.

It struck me that I am way too 'over-invested' in Emunaroma spiritually, in a way that I hope to explain more about in a future post.

All the internet gurus out there make us feel as though we have to keep endlessly churning things out online to have any 'weight' in the world. But what really remains of digital stuff that remains purely digital?

So, I've decided to start over, to let go of all the ego investment that's gone into Emunaroma the last 3 1/2 years, and to make a new start. I will be fiddling with the site over the next few weeks and making some more tweaks, but the other thing I decided is that I'm going to carry on printing my best posts out as books.

The best of Year 1 of Emunaroma became The Secret Diary of a Jewish Housewife, and I'm going to continue printing those books, I decided this Shabbat, even if only for my kids to know what life was like at this stage of the world's development.

It was pretty scary, in theory, pressing delete on my blog.

But I have to tell you, I know that so many blessings are going to flow from this.

To be continued...