“All who stop their studying and speaks works of idleness, shall be fed everlasting coals,” the Talmud had warned.
“One who is walking down the road, studying, and stops to comment ‘how beautiful this tree is, how beautiful this field is’, behold, he has forsaken his life,” admonished the Mishna.
His school’s legal name was “A candle for Rachel and her sons”. Rachel and her three sons had died the year he was born when their bus had been firebombed while traveling near Jericho.
(They had moved to the back of the bus so as not to disturb their father’s Torah study)
***
His parent’s cult was called “The Fire of Torah”.
(When has a movement ever had the words ‘fire of’ in it and not been a cult?)
They probably meant that the impact of the Torah was burning bright like the fire.
What he actually saw was the pages of the bible, burning.
Mirroring the physical experience of the world around him was a spiritual world, it was explained. Every word of Torah was another golden brick in the heavenly temple, destined to lower itself down to earth.
Every sin, brought darkness, fire, and destruction to the spiritual world around him. He was far more connected to this side of things.
The floor was lava, basically. And not in a fun way.
There was always the parallel gaslighting: all of this was the handiwork of a benevolent and ever-loving God. One who looked out for every detail of his life and personally calibrated every moment of his day with the utmost care.
He could not reconcile the two. The world could not be this scary and this good all at once. It was either or.
And so, every time he sinned, such as when he skipped classes to explore the mysterious Galizia rooftops with their rambling cinder blocks and glorious sunlight, he dissociated.
Infractions like practicing guitar instead of studying or riding a bike instead of reviewing ad nauseam meant that some part of him needed to leave his body, upon pain of death.
And so it was, almost 10 years after leaving religion, that he still struggled to bike to the library. To take a walk in the sun. To identify, and act upon, the most innocuous of desires.
Because he was still afraid of hell, and right beneath the surface everything was still burning.
Inside his mind, the walls of the Jericho were as sturdy as ever.
***
Therapy. Hypnotherapy, specifically.
“Maybe,” he wondered, “pain and pleasure were not that different?”
He’d had enough of perpetual fear of suffering being used to control his every breath.
He’d also had enough of grappling with the guilt that sunlight and freedom brought.
“When you go to heaven and are found to be a sinner,” the rabbis taught, “the angels all laugh at you.”
“Who programmed these angels to laugh?” he wondered. “After all, they have no free will of their own. Therefore, it is God who built them to mock me, and this kind of asshole is not someone I want to associate with.”
And with thoughts like this the shell within which he was rigidly stuck began to crack, and all the other parts that had already healed and were able to enjoy life, flooded to this part of his brain and body.
It felt like an exorcism. It was painful and pleasurable and a huge relief, all at once. He almost passed out, as was his custom.
The biking and the sunlight and the libraries and the dancing and the music that he had previously enjoyed were able to reach the the 17 year-old who feared to walk the earth.
Going to hell had never felt this good.
