Trust and Betrayal

I had the strongest feeling of deja vu last night. Lying in bed, warm from the heat, but with a slight breeze from the ceiling fan. I'm in summer camp, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, collapsed in bed after a late night basketball session. The room is inhabited by the odor of overripe boyhood. The light is on. There is a conversation going on among somewhere, and I drift between wakefulness and sleep.

I'm bone tired, but a good kind of tired. I had known what I wanted from the day, and I'd worked hard at getting it. I'd sleep and be ready to do it again; supervise and entertain, mediate fights and perform antics, be a role model for children, who live their lives with eyes raised upward like baby birds, looking for elders to emulate.

I was sure of lots of things in this manner, and they all went hand-in-glove. Torah is the most important thing I can aquire. Learn and be saved. Sure, I failed most of the time, but I lived with the belief always that around the corner I'd find Shas at the end of the rainbow.

I had expectations. Unlike most people, who are acknowledged to be ordinary by friends and family, I was the guy about whom people said, If he'd just get his act together, string a few sedorim, a few weeks, a few months, together, he could be a tzaddik, a talmid chacham. Each day or two, sometimes even as long as two weeks that I managed to sincerely fake, reinforced my resolve and proved the truthfulness of my mission. I was as sure as the sun in the sky that this was my destiny, and I tried, desperately, as I realized later, to achieve it.

But I never tried hard enough. I never wanted it enough, the way I was supposed to.

After failing at something long enough, one invariably realizes that it's not so important after all.

In the last three days, completely coincidentally, three people asked me if I have a seder every day. I don't, and I don't know how to explain why. What I mean is, I do know how to explain why, but I don't want to be faced with the consequences.

Now I have a new set of priorities. This is about me, I don't judge other people. I have what I know, I have what I need.

Do I believe in God? That question is so 90's. I believe in myself, in people. I believe in what I have always had, and in what I have only recently gotten, and I want desperately to protect it. And I try not to remember what I believed with such sincerity - could it possibly have been equal sincerity? - nine years ago.

Because once you've betrayed yourself once, you can never trust yourself again.