So I'd like to begin tonight's talk with a story about what is sometimes called the

dark night of the soul. And this was an elderly friend of mine who was respected

rabbi told me that as a younger man he had had a debilitating depression. This

was a conversation some years back. But it was hard for me to imagine because this

is a social activist with amazing passion and jwadaveev. But as a younger man

he said he was a prisoner of his mind and that he felt in some way cut off from

real life. That he was here but not so here. He just tragedies would happen and

he'd feel a sense of oh that's awful but his body wouldn't feel it, his heart

wouldn't feel it. And he got a sense that beauty and love and he was a little

cauterized one step removed. And most painful was that he felt self-doubt as a

religious leader and self-doubt as you know a father and a husband and and doubt

in terms of his relationship with God. That was what was most crushing. So he told

me about that and he told me that one evening he was driving home in rush hour

and a car hit him from behind and he had some pretty bad injuries and landed

up in the hospital for a few days. And one night in the middle of the night he

was lying away because it's sometimes hard to sleep in hospitals and he

heard an inner voice and the inner voice said I'm not at home. And he had this

realization that he was never at home no matter what he was doing he never

really felt at home. Whether he was engaged with his children or at social

gatherings or leading a service you know speaking to people or writing it's

like he never really felt at home. There was always some sense that he should be

somewhere else. He should be different. He should be something more. And in the

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