Restore my Soul

Life has this funny way of amazing me. For instance its always amazing to me how much my thoughts can shift in such a short time. Last week at this time if you had asked me my plans for a year from now I'd have told you I'd likely be a reform Jew, as in I spent sometime in yeshiva learned a little something and now I've regained my sanity. My oh my how a week can change things. Now today at this moment sitting here typing this, my soul feels restored. I feel good about my decision to be in Israel, learning Torah, and growing. It can be confusing and hard, as I've tried to document on this blog, but when you get a bit of clarity nothing else seems right. I've always known that I'm old fashioned. In a world where family values seem like a thing of the past, where people don't understand what it is to commit to something greater then themselves individually, I feel a bit like an old man. And yet in a Torah community, the moral and ethical values I've cultured my whole life are not just accepted but embraced. Before I left for Israel I spent a Shabbat at one of my Rabbis houses in Westchester and I starting talking with a friend of his. A younger guy with a young family, and he said something to me that I'll never forget, something that resonates with me until this day/ He said you'll never find a community like this in the goyish world. Obviously the religious world isn't a perfect place, far from it. But that doesn't change the fact that the people I meet and am comfortable with are good people, committed to working on themselves and to Tikkun Olam i.e. the repairing or bettering of this world. And thats a community I want to be a part of. It's hard to me to think about and even harder for me to say in such a public forum. I've always had difficulty committing myself to anything much less something that in its core exposes a world view with an absolute reality. But slowly more and more I find myself okay with that and that my friends is a beautiful thing. Shalom Alechem from Eretz Israel.