🔥 “THE POTION OF DEATH IN MY COFFEE CUP” — a poem on Baal HaSulam’s warning 🔥
I wake each morning thinking I’m fine,
But poison drips from this heart of mine.
I open a sefer, pretend I’m clean—
Yet every thought screams, “What’s in it for me?” unseen.
Baal HaSulam shouts through the page with fire,
“Your exile drags on because of your own desire!”
Not Rome, not Babylon, not some king’s decree—
It’s my damn craving for honor that chains all of me.
I study, I pray, I smile at the friends,
But inside I’m calculating dividends.
The Torah in my hands is supposed to give life—
Yet mis-aimed, it cuts me open like a knife.
He says there’s an oath written in heaven’s air,
That mercy won’t rise till my heart learns to care.
Not for reward, not for comfort or gain,
But just to give Him pleasure—through joy or pain.
I sip my morning coffee like it’s holy ground,
But it burns like death when ego is crowned.
For the Torah becomes poison, the sages all say,
When I twist it to shine on me in some hidden way.
I slam the cabinet when the filter is stuck,
Cursing the world for my lack of luck.
Yet in that moment the Zohar screams, “See?
Even now you’re demanding the world serve thee!”
I scroll through my phone while pretending to yearn,
Waiting for someone to praise my concern—
But Baal HaSulam whispers, “Son, don’t you know?
This is exactly how souls stay stuck below.”
Lo Lishma is the exile lingering in my bones,
The reason the world cries in unheard tones.
Every cheap desire I refuse to release
Delays the coming of love, delays universal peace.
And when I treat Torah like a vending machine,
Hoping for comfort, for calm, to stay clean,
It bitterly flips into potion of death—
Robbing my heart of spirit, my lungs of breath.
But Lishma—oh God—when a man rarely ascends,
When his chest breaks open for the sake of his friends,
Then suddenly mercy wakes like a lion from sleep,
And the exile cracks open from our cries so deep.
So here I am naked, Creator—no lies.
No angel in me, no holy disguise.
Just a man with an ego sharp as a blade,
Begging You to love the heart You made.
Teach me to study for Your delight,
To pray for the ten in the dead of night,
To breathe for the world and not for my skin,
And to die to myself so the Light can begin.
Until then I walk with trembling breath,
For Torah mis-aimed is a potion of death.
But aimed at You—Lishma, pure and bright—
It resurrects my corpse and floods me with Light.
