fbpx
[additional-authors]
July 14, 2011

We can never leave our own story. No matter how painful. No matter how agonizing. But maybe we can rewrite it.

Sometimes it feels as though we are walking inside an insulated tunnel filled with pictures, images, words, and messages that overwhelms our senses. Some of these messages relay fear and haunting circumstances that become the 4d movie we wish we could close our eyes off from ever confronting.

How do we move on from deep rooted pain? How can a family face their future when their child has been torn away from them and brutally murdered? The frustrating part of living this 4D movie is that there are never any answers to the why’s.  The inability to understand tragedy is a constant and man’s search will never learn this answer. The sad fact is, we only have our reaction. We only have our behavior to live with after tragedy has dealt us pain. We only have our own action, our own reflexes, our responses we become in control of.

We can never leave our own story, even though it feels unimaginably swollen with festering burning anguish.

World-renowned speaker, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Jacobson suggests that the word G-d can be swapped with the word “reality”, which can completely alter our image of the Divine; the scriptwriter of our lives.  Reality is the world or state of things as they actually exist in this corporeal sphere.  It is the truth that connects us with what is here and now in this physical realm. But if we have walked into a 4d movie, we also know, eventually that movie must come to an end and we can walk out. Eventually, the credits come up and a new reality does take over; a comforting idea.

These few years we experience on earth are just a blink of the eye in comparison to the vast universe that house our souls and carries our deeds and our everlasting reality to the next world, and the next one and the next one. Our realities constantly shift and change .  Sometimes our reality challenges our inner psyche and sometimes it enlightens us. Sometimes it forces us to grow and sometimes it breaks us. But it always keeps us shifting. Nothing ever stays the same.

Maybe we don’t have to leave our story.

We are born into this world kicking and screaming as we take our first breath of life, as we leave the warm and safe womb that was our existence for nine short months. We are thrown into this mysterious world without any game plan, without any script, without knowing the destiny we face or the experiences we will confront without warning. And yet we are born stronger than we give ourselves credit for, because we do manage to inhale despite the fact that our fragile lungs have never experienced air. We do manage to take a breath and scream and let the unfamiliar world into our fragile six pound frames. We do manage to make sense of pain and laugh again and dance again and sing again. We do manage to confront our existence with raw energy that propels us into the next reality that then becomes the new script of our lives.

Maybe trading in G-d for the word reality helps us in realizing that our reality gives us power. We are not helpless. We are not weak. We are kindled forces born to help thrust the Holiest Reality into this world. We have power to choose how we are going to relate to our ever evolving story.  Our reality is the constant break of waves that heaves through our lives like a tormented ocean always finding ways to push us to the shore. Always finding ways to make us move, to make us evolve, to make us become our better selves. Only after our current relationship with this reality has ceased and we will walk into the next reality, the next world, will we truly learn all the answers for what has become the script of our own lives.

We are Divine beings made in the image of the Divine. The Divine has no image. How can we physically duplicate an image of a blank portrait? What does it mean, what are we supposed to learn from this?

Maybe we are to learn that we are finite beings with infinite possibilities. We are finite beings trapped in a finite world yet built with limitless strength, immense faith, and the boundless ability to overcome the natural. Maybe we have the ability and the power to reshape our own destiny and how we react to pain is part of how we determine our destiny. Maybe we have the ability to change our reality. Maybe we have more power than we think.

We can believe in our 4d movie as the only story. We can reel in pain. We can see our existence as finite. Or we can mobilize our sacred and eternal purpose by holding hands with our Reality and realize eventually this movie ends, the credits come up and we will look at it all from a distance with clarity and understanding.

One day.

Maybe that is the purpose of it all. We can’t choose our story. We can’t walk away from it. But we can inspire others and morph into something new that we never thought we could become because of it.

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

Print Issue: Got College? | Mar 29, 2024

With the alarming rise in antisemitism across many college campuses, choosing where to apply has become more complicated for Jewish high school seniors. Some are even looking at Israel.

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.