The Secret of the Good Point: Disconnection - The Disease of Our Generation

One of the things that prevents us from feeling our truth and living it is emotional disconnection. We live in a generation so flooded with external stimuli, overwhelmed with so much personal and collective pain that we unconsciously repress without reflection. This disconnection allows us to function externally more or less successfully. "No pain - no problems." But perhaps the answer should be: "I feel - therefore I exist." If I don't feel my pain, I haven't gotten rid of it, I've just pushed it one layer deeper.

If I don't want to hear the voices crying out within me, I won't be able to reach the depth, the place where it's clear to me that I am good. If I try to silence something, it's still active within me. Therefore, from an emotional and internal perspective, although disconnection might help us function, it prevents us from reaching deeper into our true and good points (which, as mentioned, are covered by layers of confusion and negativity).

In my personal journey, it was difficult for me to recognize my disconnection and emotional numbness. It was natural to me. That's how I grew up, how I was raised. Nobody "did" this to harm me, but this was the message I received repeatedly and internalized - everything is fine. Everything is basically fine. Don't stir up trouble, don't create problems. Be a "good boy." That's what matters. I even succeeded externally, everything looked good and successful from the outside, but at some point, my walls began to crack. I remember being at Rabbi Nachman's gravesite in Uman and starting to feel a lack - in a place very distant from myself, I felt that I didn't have enough connection to other people. As if a wall separated me from the pain and sorrow of others. I decided to label it: "I don't have enough love for fellow Jews," I decided, and flew home.

When I returned to Israel, I told a good friend who works in mental health and couples therapy about it. Love for fellow Jews? he asked me, well, and how is the situation at home, between you and your wife? Can you feel the pain and sorrow of your children and wife? Everything's fine, I said. Everything's fine. And then it started to gnaw at me: Everything's fine? Is everything really fine? Like Titus's mosquito, my friend's question drilled into my mind. Maybe it's not true, maybe not everything is fine?!

It was hard for me. Why open up things that seem "fine" as they are? Why dig into a place that seems all good? But I gathered courage and asked my wife: Tell me, what's really going on? Is everything fine with us? She looked at me with concern. Do you really want to know? she asked. The truth is, not really. I feel alone. I feel like you don't care, that you don't see me and the children. That you're not interested in us and are only busy with your own affairs. It was strange and difficult for me to understand, how could this be? Not that we didn't have the difficulties typical of any couple, but I naively thought everything was fine.

With all the pain and concern, I understood that we needed to go to couples therapy. When we arrived at therapy, I realized how serious the situation was and how unaware I had been of it. The couples therapy framework allowed us to expose what we truly feel, what we're going through. My wife admitted that it's difficult for her, that she feels she can't share her feelings with me, that I'm not attentive enough to her.

How could it be that I functioned in the world with the feeling that the situation was basically fine? Disconnection. Repression. Disregard for feelings - mine or hers. This is a mechanism that probably helped me survive childhood, but now it prevents me from feeling what's really happening.

I felt that I didn't know what to do with it, like a disabled person being accused of not running fast enough. As therapy progressed and we opened up, I came to understand that my wife saw a lot of good in me and wanted genuine closeness. She wasn't willing to settle for crumbs.

And this is the secret of Azamra: in the deepest truth, you are absolutely good. On the surface, there are many clouds covering the sunlight. Instead of ignoring the problem and remaining in a gray day with dim lighting, you need to fight for the good and reach a clear day with clean skies. When you agree to go through the fog - the light is revealed. It was always there - just hidden.

From that place, where I saw how distant I actually was, began a wonderful journey of closeness where we started talking about what we carry inside and all the places where it was comfortable for us to be disconnected and not get close. It was a journey of deepening, of progress, that led to sobriety and seeing the places that hadn't moved, that hadn't changed.

I can say that from my personal place, from the agreement to see the difficulty, to recognize the deficiency and not push it away, I reach each time a deeper connection and encounter with the good and with love and acceptance for myself, my wife, and my children.

Let's try to touch on some of the roots of our disconnection, the reasons for the feelings of coldness and distance we experience, the self-pity that doesn't allow us to fix what truly bothers us and can be fixed.

I once heard a scholar say that to know what to fix, you need to know the state of the generation, what specific difficulties we are facing, difficulties that may have existed throughout all generations, but in our generation, and especially in this generation, they pile up and intensify more than in any other generation. This makes sense: to know what to fix, you need to know what's broken, and this must be discovered even before using the specific remedy that Rabbi Nachman prepared for us.

There are different opinions regarding the origin of our disconnection and its causes. Some believe it's related to collective traumas: the Holocaust, Israel's wars, antisemitism, persecutions. Others attribute it to psychological factors from childhood, and others excuse the problem with the shocking superficiality in which we live in contemporary society and culture. We can also blame it all on the deterioration from generation to generation - but from our perspective, it doesn't really matter. It's only important for us to know that we live in a difficult generation. A generation that on one hand has an abundance of material comfort, but on the other hand has an increasing measure of disconnection and emotional disability.

Of course, the situation was also difficult in previous generations. Rabbi Nachman wrote his advice about two hundred years ago, but it seems that day by day the situation worsens. My mother once told me that when my grandmother's sister passed away, my grandmother wore black mourning clothes for several years. I found it hard to grasp: my grandmother observed mourning practices for several years? Was the mourning in her heart so strong and significant? It seems that today people leave a funeral and immediately forget about the deceased!

I met someone who went to consult with one of the elders of our generation. He told the rabbi about emotional pain he was suffering from, and the rabbi said that the problem is that in our generation people don't cry. Nobody feels. The rabbi told him that he once knew a plumber who burst into tears every time he started reading Psalms. People aren't happy today, the rabbi said, because they also don't cry. The heart is closed.

In our generation, external functioning has become the supreme value, and emotion has been pushed to the bottom of the priority list. A person is measured by their functioning in society - economic status, type of job, car, external appearance, an aura of success. Such a person can be a source of envy to all who see them, and no one will stop and ask themselves: what is their true internal state? Their relationship with their children? With their parents? With their wife? With themselves?

During one of my business trips to the US years ago, I met a young man in Manhattan who was the son of an American media tycoon. He invited me to join him in a luxurious limousine for a business outing where we could exchange ideas and see if we could collaborate. He told me about his media business, talked non-stop and passionately about his successes. I looked at him - a handsome, rich, successful guy, seemingly carefree, ostensibly the pinnacle of aspirations for anyone his age. "Tell me, are you happy?" I asked him. He didn't answer for a moment, but the smile suddenly left his lips. He looked at me with a cold stare and said sharply: "We don't ask questions like that here."

We live in a generation focused on the external and superficial. A generation where the mind is king - and the heart is silent. In the mad race for material success, we've forgotten ourselves.

Rabbi Nachman wants to save our hearts. To restore our pulse so that we can continue to fight the forces trying to put us to sleep, the forces trying to separate us from each other and drive a wedge between a person and their fellow, and even between a person and themselves.

We live in a generation focused on the external and superficial. A generation where the mind is king - and the heart is silent. In the mad race for material success, we've forgotten ourselves.

From the book "The Secret of the Good Point", by Ran Weber, writer, therapist, and workshop facilitator in the spirit of Hasidism. Contact: ranweber@gmail.com