English Blog

I Was Trapped in Bed by Terrible Vertigo

Thursday, May 28, 2026 - 2:37 PM

Two weeks ago, I woke up, opened my eyes, and felt like the entire room was spinning. The ceiling was moving, the floor was shifting, and the walls felt like they were collapsing around me.

I closed my eyes and opened them again, but the spinning continued. Nausea flooded through me.

I woke my wife. “Shevy,” I whispered. “The room is spinning.”

I assumed it would pass quickly. Maybe I was dehydrated or perhaps I’d gotten up too quickly. I lay back down and waited for it to stop.

It only got worse.

For the next two weeks, I was plagued by dizziness. I could hardly walk or get out of bed. Even standing felt impossible. I davened lying down and put on tefillin in bed.

I never thought about how much of my day-to-day life depends on balance until that balance completely evaporated, leaving me unable to function in any way, shape, or form.

Eventually, an ENT doctor diagnosed me with vertigo—a tiny disturbance in the inner ear that can wreak havoc on one’s world.

I had plenty of time to think as I lay in bed all those long days, and I kept coming back to what the Baal Shem Tov teaches: everything we experience and observe in life provides a spiritual lesson for us to ponder and absorb.

So I began to wonder … what if the real vertigo isn't in the ear?

We live in a generation where people worship fame, wealth, status, power, and influence. We admire people simply because they are rich and famous. Meanwhile, the truly admirable people go unnoticed.

The mother who makes sure she raises her children with love and patience even though she’s overworked and exhausted gets zero applause. The simple Jew who gets up early every morning to go to shul before work does so without fanfare. Those who manage to remain kind despite immense struggles go without acknowledgement.

These people are all around us and we barely see them.

But Heaven does.

The Talmud tells a story of a rabbi’s son who experienced clinical death but was revived. When he awoke, his father asked, “What did you see?”

“I saw an upside-down world,” the son answered. “Those who were honored here were insignificant there, and those who were ignored here—they were exalted.”

“My son, you did not see an upside-down world,” the father explained. “You saw the world clearly, as it really is.”

I pondered this as I lay in my bed, the world spinning around me: What we consider reality is actually the distortion. We are the dizzy ones. Our generation has lost its spiritual equilibrium. We’ve become so intoxicated by money, image, ego, and public approval that we no longer know what truly matters.

But Torah stays steady and reminds us what is real. Shabbat. Kosher. Tefillin. Davening. Studying Torah. Honesty. Integrity. Kindness. Faith.

Lying there in bed, day after day, I felt as if G-d was whispering something to me:

“The world around you is dizzy. Don’t let yourself become dizzy with it.”

My Gmail Was Breached at 4AM

Thursday, May 14, 2026 - 2:55 PM

I recently became the victim of identity fraud. It started with my personal credit card. Then the Chabad credit card. Then PayPal.

Thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges on every platform. Things I would never buy in a million years.

Then my stockbroker called me asking if I had approved a $2,000 transaction. I hadn’t.

And then, at 4:00 in the morning, my Gmail account was compromised and it became clear that someone was trying to hack into my life piece by piece.

It became all-consuming. I spent days changing my passwords and then changing them again. I spent hours on the phone with multiple banks. I froze accounts. I reset all my authentication systems.

Ironically, some of the passwords I set up were so long and complicated that I struggled to remember them myself!

When I began to emerge from the chaos, I realized that there’s an important lesson here: If banks and emails and stock accounts need protection, how much more does the soul require safeguards?

Fraud isn’t limited to the financial realm. There’s spiritual fraud too. The yetzer hara worms its way in quietly, one step at a time, breaking through one railguard before moving on to the next. One bad influence. One compromise. One distraction.

It happens sneakily, subtly, until eventually we wake up one day and realize that we’ve been compromised. Our peace, our innocence, our clarity, our connection to G-d, have all been chiseled away at.

But just like my bank accounts and email addresses, Judaism gives us spiritual authentication.

When we set aside time each morning to pray and acknowledge G-d’s presence in our lives, we fortify ourselves.

When we attend a Torah class, we build another layer of protection.

When we light candles and observe Shabbat, we reinforce our safeguards.

With every mitzvah we do, every safeguard we set up, we are making priceless deposits into our spiritual bank account, which, unlike a physical one, can never be hacked.

This is how we set up the soul’s two-factor authentication and protect ourselves from becoming spiritually hacked by a world full of temptation.

I Caught Claude Lying to My Face

Thursday, May 7, 2026 - 6:29 PM

Last week, I was preparing a Torah class about soulmates. I had my sources—Gemaras, Midrashim, Chassidic teachings—strewn open across the table:

And then I turned to AI for some help. Someone in my office had recently told me that Claude is more powerful than ChatGPT so I decided to give it a try.

“Can you give me Chassidic stories about soulmates?” I asked.

Within seconds, it produced three breathtaking stories. One about Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, another about Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, and a third about Reb Zusha of Anipoli.

The stories had every element you look for in a Chassidic story. They were mystical, emotional, and profound.

But as I read them more carefully, a thought niggled at me. I grew up on Chassidic stories. I live with them. I tell them to my children before bed. I share them at my Shabbat table. I incorporate them in my sermons, classes, hospital rooms, and fundraising dinners. And yet somehow, all three of these stories were completely new to me.

So I typed back: “Are those real stories? Please don’t invent stories. I need them to be authentic.”

Claude responded immediately: ">“You’re absolutely right to push back on that. Those stories were not real. I fabricated them and falsely attributed them to great Chassidic masters.”

I stared at the screen, my mouth hanging open.

Then I tried again, asking for more stories, and again they were fabricated.

Losing patience, I snapped back: “Please stop lying and making up stories.”

“You are right to push back…”

That’s when I realized that yes, AI can produce words, even beautiful, touching words, but it cannot produce the one thing that actually matters: truth.

A Chassidic story isn’t “content.” The goal isn’t to make it as inspiring and emotional as possible. The whole point is that it’s real, it happened, and it has been passed down for generations.

A machine can imitate the components of a good story, but never the soul. And the whole reason those stories endure is because of the soul—the struggle, faith, tears, and holiness of those who lived it.

Sure, a machine can generate a sermon in five seconds, write poetry, compose prayers, tell stories. But no matter how far AI progresses, it will never know the human experience: a trembling soul, tears, a broken heart, struggle, faith, suffering.

People do not need more polished words. If ever there was a generation drowning in synthetic experiences, it is ours: Fake news, fake images, fake followers, fake branding, fake perfection, and now, fake inspiration.

We’re starving for honesty and authenticity, not perfection. We need a rabbi who has struggled, a spouse who messes up and learns to apologize, a friend who listens in a way that Claude can never emulate and tells it to us straight when we need it. We need parents who parent from the heart, and Jews who practice real, authentic Judaism.

That’s the challenge of our generation.

In a world where almost anything can be fabricated, do we have the courage to be real? To let our words come from the heart, even if they’re not perfect and polished? Only words that come from the heart, from the soul, from us, can leave a lasting impact on the world.