Spread I dreamed I was the Prime Minister and I was deep underground. And I was giving a speech to an empty hall. This is a recorded message. At this moment, the Air Force is taking off on its way to Iran. God will judge me, but I decided to go to war because of grandmother. At that time, the Germans had two orders: forbidden and permitted. Somewhere in Europe, a new idea was about to sprout in the mind of some Jew, which would ignite an entire spiritual revolution. But it wasn't enough to kill just him. Because as is the way of truly great ideas, they end up sprouting in the mind of another Jew, and then another and another, and you can never prevent the plague from spreading. It was necessary to kill an entire culture. And see what kindness Satan did for us, he didn't kill even one unnecessary Jew. Only those who had potential, even in the deepest depths of the subconscious, to conceive the idea of horror. My grandmother was born very far from the idea, but in the long years I slept, in which I had nothing but to dig deep inside myself, I began to rediscover it, to uncover it, slowly, from within. But when I finally digested its meaning, I wanted to scream and scream, because I understood why Satan and God united together to murder and murder, all to bury it in the ground.
Not Hard to Guess I dreamed that on the eve of Lag BaOmer [Jewish holiday] there were bonfires in Hell, and all the groups of wicked people were competing to see who could steal more wood from Heaven. And with every trip they made, their audacity grew, only one tree they didn't dare touch. And so they went up and down until finally they sawed down all the trees. And all the holy animals were left naked and fled. There were no more trees to take, and only the one last tree remained. And then wicked Haman calls out: Guys, look at this big branch that "fell" from the Tree of Knowledge, so I took it. And wicked Pharaoh says to him: You Torah scholar, that's a twig compared to the trunk I hauled from there. And suddenly Balaam falls upon them: Have you lost your minds, you stole from the Tree of Knowledge? And Pharaoh exchanges glances with Haman: What, I didn't pick it, it was on the ground. Is that a crime? And Satan takes a giant doll of the Rebbe, and looks for the tallest tree to hang it on, to be at the top of the bonfire. And they can't find any tree anymore. And Satan gets angry what, they didn't leave me anything?... The Holy Pig tells this around the fire and cries like a woman: You think there was only a Holocaust down below, there was also a Holocaust up above. You waited for the resurrection of the dead - we're waiting for the resurrection of the living. And the Messiah of blessed memory sits there, and apparently thinks he's still in yeshiva, and needs to show how smart he is, and challenges him: Why not the death of the living? And the Holy Pig gets angry: You are material creatures, they killed you in spirit. With gas. They are spiritual creatures. They killed them with matter. In the earth. And he continues to tell: And then they said to Satan (I don't believe it - but this isn't a bad dream) - some unimportant wicked person said to him, who wasn't even written about in the Bible, some low-level landowner who almost ended up in Hell by mistake, and whose only sin was that he once kicked a Jew, and they let him do community service in Heaven, and he said to him: Once I went for a walk with the dog of some important landowner, who lent it to me so I wouldn't be embarrassed to walk around outside like that, a landowner without a dog. Because even my dog didn't make it to Hell. It was such a righteous dog that refused to touch pork, ran to the synagogue all day and licked Jewish women's hands, only ate food with the strictest kosher certification and was careful about non-Jewish cooking. It wouldn't touch what I prepared for it, until it finally died of hunger. And the dog I borrowed was a great wicked one and immediately ran away from me. And how could I return to the senior landowner with just a leash? So I went to look for it, and I got lost, and I went far from the heart of the forest, and slowly there started to be fewer trees, and I thought what, is God starting to go bald? Until I reached a land that was completely bald and smooth. A desert. And then suddenly in the middle of nowhere I met a man. I mean not a man but I met his beard, the end of his beard, and I know that if you follow the beard you get to the head, but his beard was long long and I walked along it for days, and I said that this man must be very old and the giant pig in the Torah who sat the whole time close behind the Holy Pig snored in a horrifying voice: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but according to the spiritual emergency instructions I forbid you to continue. And the Holy Pig started to scream: The tree of kn... kn... And the fat pig took out a ritual slaughter knife and slaughtered him as properly as possible for a pig. And his soul departed in life.
Heaven for Jews I dreamed that I was dreaming that there was something huge moving in my wife's bed, shaking the whole bed, moving and stirring in it... and because of this I don't wake up, even though there's an earthquake in the middle of the night, and the huge holy book cabinet next to the bed, more than forty se'ah [measure of volume], falls on me and buries me. While my wife, who reads trash before bed, comes out unharmed. Is this the reward for Torah in bed? And I ascend to heaven and they send me to hell. And I start arguing with the sorting officer: But why?
- You know why.
- But tell me why?
- You know.
- No I don't know, it can't be, there's been a mistake!
And he turns over the forms again and again, over and over, and I'm already thinking what a fuss I'll make in heaven about this negligence, oh boy, I don't envy whoever's responsible for this. And then he says: Look, you know why. You just might not know that you know. And outside a hardened and experienced sinner waits in the long line of the earthquake, and he encourages me: Here you don't get what you deserve, but what suits you. And for you apparently what suits you best is - hell. You need to understand the system. I don't even have time to open my mouth and answer, and already veteran prisoners take us from there, apparently towards the crematoriums, judging by the smell. And I see on the hand that grabs me a number that can't be mistaken. A Holocaust victim - here in hell. What's one of the holy ones of the Holocaust, the supreme holy ones, doing in hell? But his mouth is stuffed with a pig's snout. That is, instead of a mouth he has a pig's snout, like a gas mask. And he just sees me in black ultra-Orthodox clothes among all the sinners, and immediately slips me a page written in blood, on a torn piece of human skin, and hints to me to pass it to kkk, kkk, kkk. Is he laughing? I don't understand, what's kkk? And I understand from this silencing of mouths that there's something he's not allowed to say, that is - there's something I'm not allowed to know. And already Satan arrives to throw me into the fire of hell, and I quickly read:
The Witness
I deny the Holocaust. It wasn't a Holocaust, it was heaven. I enjoyed every moment. The great game - who will live and who will die? Who by water and who by fire? Etc. etc., and the finale in the gas chamber - amazing, unbelievable. Those who weren't there won't understand. Think about it, playing for your life. For real. Just that alone inflames, drives the heart wild. But it's much more - you discover that everyone loses! Everyone you know dies, or will die soon, everything perishes: parents, friends, children, rabbis, everyone - wow, what a release, God! I could turn from a woman to a man to an animal to a plant to an inanimate object to earth to a city. And by the way, God was with us everywhere. I am a witness. We ate from the same plate with him, showered in the same shower. We swallowed snow together, and drank sewage water. And in general, many of the prisoners were angels. One night of chess with terminally ill patients, in the last nights before the end, is worth all the previous life. Because what was there was truth, truth you won't understand, that you didn't know, truth not of this world pouring from all the holes. Complete strangers were closer to me than brothers, more than my wife in the most intimate, most sacred moments. Oh if only you could, just once, once only! There's no name for this feeling. There was some kind of, enormous love there, a pure youthful love burning and consuming, after which there's nothing. Every moment had a mythical quality, every movement had meaning, these were the days of the Messiah. And all the world that remained - a superfluous aftergrowth. A trivial addition to the world to come that already was, that we lived in, yes, I was there! All around everyone walking dead sanctifying God's name, supreme righteous ones, who even if they sin with the worst sins, will still remain holy holy holy. Everything there was larger than life. Living in a hallucination, every sentence you spoke was holy Torah, supreme speech - blood spurting straight from the heart of the world. Without funerals, tears, eulogies, and all this kindness of truth. Only truth of kindness! And the cohesion was - there's nothing like it. My friends from there - there will never be friends like that again, no one will ever have such friends, forever. Yes, there was eternity there, there was meaning to this hollow word, so empty! Every day was eternity, eternity, eternity. The survivors didn't understand anything, they chose not to be part of it, the loss is all theirs. For anyone who had a drop of soul - to join the great fire, the pillar of fire in which Judaism ascends to heaven, who wants to be a brand plucked from such a fire? Here, a "simple" thing like food. Can you imagine a world without food? We discovered you can live without food, and how great food is, how sublime, we discovered how air is not to be taken for granted, we could touch Satan, and touch God, we were, ah, you won't understand.
And Satan grabs the page from me, looks at it, and laughs: In the Holocaust, even someone who died from slipping on a banana, died in the Holocaust. And all the way to the crematorium he sings: Who loves the Holocaust? Mom and Dad. Who loves the Holocaust? Grandpa and Grandma. Who loves the Holocaust? Me, you and you. Almost the whole world. So why not Holocaust every day? Why not Holocaust every day? Holocaust every day! He whispers and throws me into the fire. And I finally understand.
The Leap of Heresy I dreamed that here finally, after all is said and done, we return to the Garden of Eden. But to our misfortune it turns out that some changes occurred up there while we were away. Where are all the trees? What are all these thorns? The river was supposed to be here! And in the end we find one dying insect from the Garden of Eden, some poor grasshopper who tells us what happened. It turns out that one morning God woke up and decided he wants to be an enlightened ruler. Why don't they love him, they call him king, but treat him like a dictator. And he decides to hold elections. And no matter how much they talk to him, he's sure he'll be elected, and suddenly everyone will treat him differently. And he's such a political novice that he doesn't know which party to join, and in the end he finds: Hezbollah, that's mine, right? The party of God. And of course later they'll spread that God supports Hezbollah. But meanwhile everyone is cynical, he'll be elected with 99.99% of the vote, and the one who doesn't vote for him will wake up the next day in hell. But God is truly good, and he's serious. And he does a survey and discovers that people think that the creation of the world, really all respect, but since then he hasn't done anything. And he decides that from now on every week will be like the creation of the world. And he distributes trees from the Garden of Eden, and people are excited at first but don't know what to do with it, a tree from the Garden of Eden in the middle of the house, so what? But what else can he distribute? And the advisors say: Maybe make some changes to the platform?
- The platform is the Torah.
- You have to offer some new hope.
- What's wrong with the prophets?
- Reforms, transparency, separation of powers, freedom, something?
- What do you want, a more open approach to heaven? Journalists roaming around between our wings? Human rights in hell?
And the advisors are despairing of him.
- An apology?
- I believe in everything I did.
And he surrounds himself with a group of yes-men. Especially rising in status is some parrot from the tropical part of the Garden of Eden, who perched on God's shoulder, very close to his ear. God says: Let there be light. And the parrot says: And there was light. And so on. Until the terrible defeat. They were given democracy, but they chose the opposition.
And the angels cry: Why don't they love him? And the Holy Lion, who fought like a lion for every vote until the last moment, simply didn't want to believe the result, struggles to digest. And the Holy Mouse hides in a hole and doesn't even squeak psalms. The Jewish lobby in heaven did everything, they dirtied the whole garden with their campaign, covered the trees with signs saying "God is good for the Jews", and only now do they understand the depth of the mistake. And all the angels who just yesterday were walking around with stickers saying "You have chosen us" on their wings, suddenly overnight are covered with slogans saying "Love God. Vote for Satan".
But God surprises everyone. He's willing to serve under the other side. He respects the voters' decision. And no one understood why he needed this. Why is he willing to sell his soul to Satan, in order to continue warming the seat of honor? He gives his stamp of approval to terrible deeds, embarrassments from hell, done under the auspices of the clouds of glory. They take a small and beautiful girl there - out comes a righteous and wrinkled saint. A fat and gluttonous rich man enters, looking as if he's pregnant - and out comes a thin poor man with a diaper in his hands, inside which a pink piglet smiles. A young woman enters with a snake - and an old man with a stick comes out. A Yemenite Kabbalist enters - and a grasshopper jumps out.
And the grasshopper advises us that in order to defeat the evil inclination now, one needs to be the inclination of the inclination, because the evil inclination of the evil inclination attracts and tempts it to do good. That is, if your wife is your evil inclination, you need to be her evil inclination - and unto you shall be his desire and you shall rule over him. And if say you have a lust for honor, for example if you have an evil inclination to be Prime Minister, you need to be the evil inclination of the Prime Minister, and thus you will win, etc. And therefore what's needed is a journey into the depths of the evil inclination, an organization that will be more Satan than Satan, that will be the Satan of Satan, the serpent of the serpent. That this time Eve will tempt the serpent.
And it turns out that such a charitable organization already exists. A Satan charity. A charitable organization of righteous women, and only the most righteous in the world are allowed to join, because it's dangerous. Therefore one can only dream of discovering what they do. And they say that their wigs were stolen from Auschwitz, and that they wear beards of righteous men cut off at night by a woman (I wonder which one?), and hats of deceased yeshiva heads, and that one needs to be especially wary of rabbis' daughters. And they start arriving in droves to the synagogue, women I didn't even know existed in the neighborhood, as if they never left the house, or just emerged from the ground. And according to the upside-down books they read and hold, the last thing they do behind the partitions is pray, or perhaps they pray in the opposite direction - away from the men. And so they need a new Torah ark in the west, to confuse Satan - or perhaps to confuse matters. And they are all modestly choked of the type where modesty only hides that there is something to hide. Could these be the evil inclination of Satan?
And the grasshopper hops from right to left and explains that the whole difference is that once the righteous said not to sleep with the woman, and the wicked slept with the woman, and today the righteous say to sleep with the woman, and the wicked sleep with the woman. Understand? You need to descend to hell, and make the reversal and revolution from there. And you know how to get to hell today? The elevator broke down long ago. You must jump, the grasshopper is excited. And I look at him - and look at the height and get cold feet, fear of God. And he takes me to the suicide bridge of paradise. And there's a constant dripping from it of righteous people jumping to hell. And I see someone committing suicide and shouting: My wife! And I ask: Why is he shouting my wife? Is the woman in hell? The righteous man is willing to go there just to be with her out of love? And the grasshopper snickers: Not exactly, she's cheating on him with an angel. Familiar with the problem? And he laughs and trips me with a leg, or hand, or antenna, or wing, you can't tell with them, and I fall, but I tell myself that I jumped -
And hell looks like a hell we didn't know. Everything is black marble, black velvet, black screens. Someone poured billions here. Even the bathrooms look like a space station, and we go to pee just to see. And everywhere you look there are cameras, and all these cameras have beards and sidelocks, and I see that one of the cameras is my rabbi from the small yeshiva. And I pull his ears: Wicked cursed one what did you do that you're here? I always knew there was something dirty about you. And he scolds: And what are you doing here? I'll tell mom! And I say: Ha ha, eat it, my mom is dead. And he says with a choked laugh: Exactly! And my mom says: Why did you come here? Son, you should have stayed in paradise.
- I came to look for Satan. Have you seen him by any chance?
- If I've seen him!
- Did you happen to catch him in your lens?
And mom says: My fool, who convinced you to come here? Satan when he arrived up there quickly discovered that they're not really afraid of God. All the laws, judgments and harshest punishments don't move people. Not even death. What really scares is randomness - terror! And so Satan established a secret organization, planted righteous ones, sleeper cells, dreaming organizations, impersonating visions, double kabbalists. Do you know where Satan is? In paradise.
When God cries - it's a flood I dreamed I was in a Sodom of holiness. And I come to kiss the mezuzah at the entrance, and I see someone kissing the mezuzah in a disgustingly sensual manner, sticking out his tongue, practically swallowing it. Yuck, who would want to kiss it after him? And so it is inside: by all the doors people are writhing in an endless kiss with the mezuzah, with only their mouths pressed against it, as if they are sucking it. And others are hugging a Torah scroll in some dark corner, groping, fondling, touching the legs of the scroll, feeling the holy objects, the curves, the crown, the pomegranates, lucky the scroll is dressed, and I imagine with horror that they probably push fingers under the cover too. And in front someone is hugging the ark and kissing the curtain, really sucking it into himself, the tongue passing over the protruding golden letters: In memory of the holy martyrs of the Holocaust, may God avenge their blood, wetting it all, dripping from his saliva. And a giant grabs me, ties and presses me with the leather straps of my tefillin to the wall, and whips me with the straps of his tefillin. And I try to cry out and he puts the tefillin box in my mouth and ties it tight, eat he shouts at me, you know when we were in the ghetto and there was nothing to eat, the rabbi had such faith in the Holy One Blessed be He, the rebbetzin had no meat for Shabbat, but he wasn't willing - we don't put on tefillin on Shabbat and until Sunday God have mercy - and we ate tefillin soup, after all it's kosher! Black skin of a kosher cow, soft soft when cooked, paradise.
- And what happened on Sunday?
- There was no Sunday!
And he whispers into my mouth: You need to understand, in the ghetto we understood that even if we survived the destruction, spiritually we had already been annihilated. And what we were looking for in such a situation was not physical survival, what interested us was spiritual survival, what terrified us, what kept us up at night, was that the secret Torah - the great one - would be buried with us! And we established, the rabbi called it - Noah's ark. Some yeshiva of all the different animals in Judaism, of every type and kind, the rabbi gathered everyone, it was easy to assemble all sorts of animals from us, everyone at this stage was just skin and bones. And we knew we would all die, but the goal was - a book. A book can survive, even deep in the ground, even for another two thousand years, a truly great book - can survive. And it was, today it's hard for me to describe it, creation, illumination, a new Torah, exciting, supernal lights, facing death, Satan in the eyes, a summary of all the achievements in the old generations, and new breakthroughs achieved on the nights before the Aktions, people who went, who knew they were going without returning, secrets classified at levels you've never heard of, in colors you've never seen, that were kept for two thousand years by word of mouth, that they never dreamed of telling in their lives, everything poured out, everything was written down, everything connected to a new picture, an unbelievable picture, of the Godhead and the worlds - and of the Divine Presence and Satan. And it wasn't just with us. The revelations that fell upon us from above in those weeks - everything was very fast, we knew there was no time, that no time was left at all - there were things, there was simply a feeling that someone up there was destroying documents in panic and throwing them out the window, before someone else would already be at the door. I have no other way to describe this intelligence flood - an amazing abundance, simply a rain of fire and brimstone from heaven. Once they spoke of the breaking of the vessels - but this was the breaking of the lights! Top secret information like never before, that once would have merited generations of meticulous study, was considered reading material that one barely glances at. Materials that high priests would have been burned if they just looked at them, that in the past would have been felt in total darkness in caves kilometers deep with a thousand coverings over the eyes - everything flew at us without account. Quick decoding showed that up above, at these very moments, a similar yeshiva to ours sits in paradise with a similar goal, only there it's a yeshiva of trees, of the plant world. And beneath us, beneath the animal world, in hell there is also a parallel yeshiva, and this time a yeshiva of angels. And even below that, all sorts of levels you haven't heard of, didn't know about. And also above, above paradise inside the clouds of glory there is a yeshiva, a kind of self-sustaining binding, of inanimate objects. Inanimate objects speaking! And here is the surprising thing, a huge development that occurred precisely in the inanimate world.
Who are you chasing after, after a dead dog I dreamed they were trying to recruit me to an ultra-Orthodox intelligence organization. And there is some Admor whose Hasidic sect, a large part of them themselves don't know, don't understand their missions, but it is this organization. And they test me in a captivity week, a week in which I need to blend in as a captive infant, without the secular noticing, and of course while being meticulous about minor and major commandments alike. And I shave my wife's wig and put it as a head covering and she looks bald. The sidelocks I hide inside headphones and antennas that come out of my head, to receive transmissions from headquarters without arousing suspicion. But with the shtreimel I'm at a loss. And the technology department provides me with a solution, a precise bald-guided UAV, which carries the shtreimel at atmospheric height exactly above the head. And even on Shabbat there sits in the control room a trained monkey addicted to kugel, who provides me with air cover. And I identify on the street a dog with triangular ears, suspected as an Amalekite, and request permission to say the Ineffable Name over it and eliminate it. The request goes up to the highest levels, and the Shabbat monkey signals: Permission granted. And I recoil in disgust, say the Name over it, and nothing happens. It wags its tail and continues happy and content. And they immediately return me for debriefing on the severe operational failure: Listen, the Name didn't work. I failed with secular people, what will be with gentiles? And the department head rages: You always need to pray to close the matter, to confirm the kill. God has a tendency to do half-things, like giving a person a disease, and letting him die on his own. As if the second part will happen by itself. The most important part of the evil eye is what you do with the other eye. And I cut him off: But who told you? Maybe the dog got rabies. Any death, even death from cancer, can be a death sanctifying God's name! The seniors exchange glances, and the branch head asks to stay alone with me in the room: Let me tell you something. Everything needs to know how to read. There are places in Maimonides with closely guarded secrets for dogs and horses. And if you're a dog you can understand. You know that you shouldn't read "days of the Messiah" - but "the Messiah will die"? The Talmud itself is full of Persian spirits and demons that people don't pick up on. Bar Kokhba reigned for two years and said I am the Messiah. They said to him the Messiah smells and judges. After two years they saw he doesn't smell and judge, and they killed him. Now - who smells and judges? A dog smells and judges! That's what's written, that the Amalekites were sorcerers even in Saul's time, who turned themselves into animals and sheep, and thus were saved from slaughter and final extermination, and Samuel asks: And what - is this bleating of the sheep in my ears. So now do you understand? Without mysticism there would have been no Holocaust! And that's where they also give the answer. In the end it was a huge intelligence failure. If we had known, if everyone had known. And not just in advance, but even in real time, and even more so - even afterwards. Fine you failed in warning, you didn't know in advance - but not to know from the tail? That's why we're there and that's why we do what we do. These clowns, they have no idea what a long-standing attraction the Persians have to the hidden Torah, for them Purim is a joke. Amalek is a deep Kabbalistic force in the world, that's why he is never erased, and Iran means land of the Aryans. Whoever thinks the Book of Esther is funny and ridiculous doesn't understand Persians at all, that's what's scary - that this is what they really are. And it seemed contemptible in his eyes to lay hands on Mordecai alone, this is disappointment of love, it's not that you're a whore, all women are whores. This is not a crime of hate - it's a crime of desire. Everyone who is busy with all sorts of schemes against imaginary enemies and imaginary friends knows this. There are people who have dedicated their lives to fighting the other side, and they have no idea it's the Other Side.
And I feel that the branch head is a real person, and in my foolishness I now dare to say what everyone below thinks, but doesn't dare bring up: Listen, you're talking about ultra-Orthodox here. It's like assembling an armored corps from mollusks. You're a commander declaring war, and discovering there's not a single soldier behind you. Look even at the shtreimel: every head needs a tail, if God Himself didn't need a tail you wouldn't be here. Who is your tail?
- Leave the tail alone. No violence. You don't understand what we're doing here. You don't need force if you know exactly. The product of how much you know and the force you need is constant. Therefore when your knowledge approaches infinity you need force approaching zero. That's how God works. If you know everything about a country one man is enough to change history. If you know everything about a person a pin is enough to kill him. You know everything about his genes and one virus is enough. Everything about his brain and sub-atomic level intervention is enough. The more you know the more you can be an idle yeshiva student. And when you know nothing - then you need to exert infinite force. Then you really need to pray for miracles. One who knows enough Torah doesn't need to pray, he simply presses the right letters on the keyboard.