Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  I was also lucky to have as my psychiatrist, Dr. Colin Ross. He helped me to remove layers and barriers that kept my mind in parts, at the same time that I was learning deep kabbalistic meditations. This took fourteen years of intense therapy, but I am happy to say that after all this therapy I am still crazy, but at least now I remember the stuff I do! My meditations made me realize that material wealth and fame were not what my spirit really wanted. What I really wanted was material wealth and fame and peace of mind. I wanted a game changer.

  Chapter 24

  True Tales of Ten Turning Spheres

  I had become braver and braver in my spiritual journey of making amends, exorcising my personal demons, nullifying all unholy deals, and integrating all of my divided parts. I had moved out of the common frame of mind that people call “forgiveness,” and instead moved into a frame of mind more about “repentance.” I called my teacher, Rav Berg, and said, “I want to make a confession to you.”

  “I know you do,” he said, since he is one smart rabbi. “Come to my house for lunch tomorrow.”

  “I will,” I said, hoping those young Iranian Jews who cooked for him would make that fantastic lamb dish. When I got there, I saw that we were going to have steak, which smelled delicious. “Did you know that Rebbe Shimon says in the Zohar that dogs are the reincarnations of bad rabbis?” Rav Berg asked.

  “No,” I said, thinking, How innocent and quaint, and all those things I think when a rabbi talks.

  “Yes, that is what it says in The Book. You know my wife’s dog, Murray, right?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” I said. During a synagogue service once, I told my son Buck that per the Zohar Murray was exactly like a human being, as is anything that possesses a spinal column. So Buck got down on the floor (he was only five then) and told Murray that he better start listening to people who were bigger than he was. Buck said to him, “Now, I am bigger than you are, so you should come over here and sit by me right now.”

  Murray stayed put, so I asked Buck, “Do you think maybe that Murray only speaks Hebrew?”

  “I never thought that animals could speak another language at all!” said my son.

  “It just goes to show you the things we don’t think sometimes, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Buck.

  The Rav offered me a seat at his kitchen table. The steaks looked like they cost twenty dollars each—really, really good ones. “So,” he said, “the Zohar says that all dogs are the reincarnation of bad rabbis. My wife’s dog, Murray, here, was a bad rabbi, and I think I know who he was, too. He was a rabbi who turned me in to the authorities during one of my other lifetimes. I was excommunicated for writing books about the Zohar, which was forbidden at one time. So now he has to come back here to be my wife’s dog, and you know what I do that really gets his goat?” he asked me.

  “No, what do you do?” I asked.

  “Watch this,” he said, and then he cut out the middle part of the steak, the very best part, called the dog over, and fed it to him off his fork. “That is what I do. It kills him that I am nothing but kind to him. He wants me to get mad and treat him badly, but that would be a terrible mistake. Treat even your worst enemies with dignity and kindness; that’s what you need to do, too, my dear,” he told me.

  In addition to the steak, the Iranian girls served up a tomato salad, olives, and other tasty treats, and they poured delicious red wine for us to drink. It was heaven on earth, sitting there with the Rav, who was watching the Reverend John Hagee on TV. “That guy is good,” the Rav said. “He knows a lot about Torah, but … unfortunately, he is incorrect in many, many ways.”

  “Like what?” I wanted him to explain. He told the Torah stories like I had never heard before in my life, and they were fascinating to me.

  “Well, Hagee misses the boat because he gets caught up in who is telling the story and which interpretation of the story is more righteous, and all that BS, and he misses the forest for the trees.”

  “Like … ?” I coaxed.

  Being a rabbi, he could not be brief. “Well, the message is lost, and the message is what matters, not who delivers it!”

  “Rav, what’s the message, dude?” He loved it when I called him “dude.”

  “The message is that you must treat others, especially your enemies, with simple human dignity, no matter what they do to you. If only a critical mass of Jewish people could do this, we could summon the Messiah! In the Age of Aquarius, these kinds of Jewish people are to be as numerous as mustard seeds. Are you in the groove or not?”

  “Yes, Rav, like most Jews, I think that I am Jesus,” I said. We laughed.

  “Well, we who want the Messianic Age are all Jesus!” he touché’d, being a master, and not a victim, of dogma, like common clerics.

  “I must confess, Rav,” I said. “I feel bad about a deal I signed with Satan when I was twelve years old. I’ve laughed it off for a long time, chalking it up to being young and unhappy. And yes, I know the whole concept is archaic and Stone Age, but the more negativity I get rid of since I’ve started to meditate, and since Buck was born, the more I want to keep ridding myself of all of it.”

  “Let me ask you, Shana Rifke, were you smart enough to make the deal with Satan on Shabbat?” he said.

  “Smart?! Rav, I am so ashamed that I desecrated my own deeply held belief system by defiling the Sabbath!” I confessed.

  He absolved, “We have all made that same deal in one way or another, Roxanna.” The Rav didn’t always remember my English name; he mostly called me by my Hebrew name—Rifke—like my family did when I was a kid. “So, Rifke, to answer your question about making a deal with Satan, here is what the book says—the Zohar tells us that on Shabbat, no evil inclination of any kind can exist. It’s the day of peace because there is no duality on that day, only unity in the soul. So, there is no deal! Shabbat is Satan’s day off—you picked the perfect day with the perfect loophole, and all of the torment you’ve felt about it is just unnecessary.”

  I said, like all the newly saved do, “So, I should start a foundation? Build a school, write children’s books, do a new tour? What should I do?”

  He said, “You should just concentrate on being nice, and actually be nice and nothing else for a while.”

  Then we had my favorite dessert—chocolate cake with a molten chocolate middle, French press coffee, and a shot of schnapps—as we discussed particle physics, my favorite part of our visits.

  So being nice would heal me—how hard could it be? Little did I know that on the one hand, I would better fit into “polite society” for a while and be able to engage in interesting discussions at luncheons with interesting people who talked about interesting things instead of trying to get into arguments with them that ended with me telling them how full of shit they were. Yet, on the other hand, trying to be nice was the hardest thing I have ever done—a descent into hell itself, where I suffered the tortures of the damned, and ceased being able to be funny at all.

  The truth was that being nice changed me deeply. I tested myself in thousands of ways, including standing in line to meet George W. Bush. I thought, If I can be nice to him, I will know that I have control of myself. When I met him, my mind was racing. I had to think of something to say to the person who I considered to be the worst person on earth. I shook his hand as we posed for a picture, and I said, “Mr. President, I pray for you every day.” He answered, “Well, that’s the important thing, aren’t you a nice girl!” In my mind I said, I’m fifty years old, and hardly a girl, asshead. But I just smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. President!” However, I was still not able to control the Evil Eye, though I had practiced and meditated for a couple of years to be able to do so by then. When Bush looked into my eyes, I felt it launching. I blinked and blinked and complained of allergies.

  Soon after, I realized that there was just no way for me to be nice and to be truthful. A comic needs truth to be funny. Without the sting that truth brings with it, you are, as my dad said, “funny
as a chapped ass.” I began to understand that the very definition of nice that most people accept is “not upsetting the way things are.” I realized that people hate people who tell them the truth. They think it’s mean! They only like truth tellers centuries after they are dead, and only if they have died a tortured and humiliating death. Then, and only then, do people like and revere them, but never while they are alive and telling the truth. When they are alive and telling the truth, they are hated and savaged by the same kind of people who later worship them. That is what I realized after being “nice” and “polite” for a number of years, which required holding my tongue and tolerating intolerable people.

  Although it was fun to experiment with new things, I came to the realization that I could no longer be polite to impolite people, and I could not be nice to assholes. The truth, I figured, is never really nice, and it always hurts when you don’t want to hear it—even though eventually it does set you free. I brought this all up to the Rav years later, and he thought for a few minutes, then said, “Rifke, you have missed my point totally! You can still be the biggest B-word on earth; that is how you were made, but just not toward people! None of them are your real enemy—you, me, all of us, we have only one enemy. Use what’s good in you against what’s evil in you—give it all you’ve got, kill the hell out of it, dead, Dead, DEAD! Believe me, you are the one woman who can do it, so do it for all of us!”

  Stunned, I knew at last what to do.

  Chapter 25

  Exorcism: Becoming One

  I booked my ticket to Jerusalem. I went undercover, with no hoopla, as I wanted no publicity at all in my quest. At the King David Hotel, I changed into the dress I had inherited from my bubbe Mary—of her own design, it was beige with brown embroidered flowers, a darted bodice, and a lovely bowed kick pleat in the back. It fit perfectly and looked great in the picture that made it into the Jerusalem Post; and the wig made of human hair for stylish Orthodox women that I wore made me look like I fit right in! In that way, I took Bubbe with me to the Wailing Wall, where the women of my tribe have prayed for centuries. I called the Rav from my cell phone on the way over, and he said, “Create a new kabbalist for these times,” and I assured him that I would.

  I walked up to the Wall, and knowing that I would never be the same after I touched it, I raised my hand and held it away from the ancient stones as I began to meditate. Before I touched my hand to the Wall, I said these words: “In departure of all I have learned about religion, I ask for nothing, I beg not, I plead not, I bless and curse not. Instead, I offer everything, my entire life, in the service of Truth, wherever it is.” When I moved my hand away, I was no longer alone. I would never again need to “practice” any religion at all. I was now free of it all. With no more imposed limitations on my thinking, and no more fear of punishment for my thoughts, I felt freed from slavery, and therefore filled with Love and Light.

  When Jerusalem’s then-mayor Ehud Olmert’s people contacted me, I agreed to meet him in his office for a photo op and a handshake. As we stood shoulder to shoulder looking out at the city and the Temple Mount, I dared to say to him, “When will we rebuild the Temple?”

  He said, “When the Messiah comes.”

  I said, “Why do we have to wait?”

  He said, “Because the Arabs want the same place for their Dome of the Rock! The Messiah will liberate it from them for us.”

  Turning to look into his eyes, I said, “Why don’t we just share it with them?”

  He said nothing and looked away.

  Chapter 26

  Gethsemane

  After I went to the Temple Wall and rid myself of all expectations, all superstition, and all excuses for bad behavior and disappointment, I knew it was up to me and me alone to make all my dreams come true.

  I was one year into doing a two-year talk show with spiritual themes for King World, the company that distributes The Oprah Winfrey Show. When I first started working on the show, I invested everything into coming to New York City to interview my friend Rosie O’Donnell. After we moved our entire staff and the whole production to the Apollo in Harlem, Rosie canceled. I wanted to kill her; I held a huge grudge against her, thinking she was trying to sink my show on purpose. I stopped talking to her for a year, and later, feeling all self-righteous, I confronted her about it at Elaine Stritch’s one-woman show. We were standing in the audience yelling back and forth at each other when Rosie said the reason she canceled was that her appearance was scheduled during the same week that she had to give her adopted daughter back to foster care, because of Evil Jeb Bush. I had to ask for her forgiveness, and I must say that when you have to take the Evil Eye back after you cast it wrongly, it really, really hurts your whole body and soul for a long time! Later I would learn from my teacher, Rav Berg, how to focus it. (I have always used my powers wisely since I learned self-control.)

  But the day Rosie canceled, I was furious, as we scrambled to find a guest at the last minute, which is impossible in show business. Showbiz tradition dictates that no really big names will ever come on as guests at the last minute, and Rosie was the biggest name in town at that time. But someone knew someone and we moved some mountains and got Gladys Knight to come on in place of Rosie.

  On the show, I asked Ms. Knight why “he” (the guy she sings about in “Midnight Train to Georgia”) didn’t “make it,” and had to go back home on the red-eye train, and she looked heavenward and said, truthfully without a touch of show business bullshit, “Sometimes real talented people just don’t make it, Roseanne, no matter how hard they try.” I couldn’t believe that she didn’t sit there and bullshit like every single other show business personality I had ever met did, and say the usual lie, “If you just work hard and believe in yourself and trust in God, it will happen for you, eventually.” I have an incredible amount of respect for her for saying what she said, as it’s pretty much frowned on to ever truthfully suggest that show business is all bullshit. She had told the truth in such a gracious way, and I learned a lot from watching her do that.

  Even more memorable, I got to sing with her! It was like dying and going to heaven. I decided that since there was no longer any hope of success, and yet I still had to show up every day to work, I would enjoy every second of the show to the fullest, without fighting, or conflict, or the desperation to turn things around and succeed.

  At the Temple Wall, I had merged my small self with the Greater Self; I offered to give something, instead of asking for something, and it started to make a big difference in my life. I began to enjoy things so much more than before. Once I started to really feel more joy, I wanted to be nicer to people, and the nicer I would be, the more I wanted to sing again, though the fear of doing so was staggering and overwhelming.

  I decided to start singing one song a week no matter how nervous I got, and no matter how bad and how embarrassing my nerves made me sound! I was going to do it no matter what, and I was going to get better and better at it no matter what, right there in front of the TV audience. The producers I had hired were really supportive of my becoming a rock star on the show. We probably pioneered the entire concept of reality shows when we just took a camera and followed me from rehearsing and putting a band together in L.A., to New York’s CBGB club, where me and my band, The DXXX, gave a rock-and-roll show that had slam-dancing and all the punk rock that New York could handle. I sang “Satisfaction” by The Stones at three times the speed they did, and changed the words to be about menstruation and Chernobyl. It was a blast!

  I got a lot of letters from people who told me how bad I was. One of them, my favorite, said, “You sound like a drunk singing in a bar at closing time. Stop!” But I didn’t let that deter me at all.

  I began to book the people with whom I had sung in my room as a kid. I booked and then sang with Lulu, Janis Ian, Etta James, the Monkees, Phoebe Snow, Chaka Khan, Eric Burdon, KC and the Sunshine Band, War, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson, Julio Iglesias, Keely Smith, Patti LaBelle, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Toby Keit
h, Jewel, and a lot of others.

  My real goal was not really about singing at all. It was about seeing for myself how it felt when everyone around me encouraged me to do what I thought was funny, and also about learning to speak truthfully, in a nice way, without anger—my quest according to the Rav. The classic problem that codependents like myself have, is that it’s hard to find a way to be assertive without being aggressive. I could never find that in my life before. I would dissociate from the anger I felt until it overwhelmed me and caused an explosion; I would strike out, instead of merely saying, “I would like you to stop talking to me like that,” and simply start over again.

  After we sang on the show, I asked all of these great singers on camera what they honestly thought about my singing, and oh, I loved to see that shit fly! Every one of these talented and most gracious people told me the absolute truth about my singing, and they made it all sound so sweet. They told me I sucked in a real nice and gentle way. I modeled that behavior. I took it all in, and I learned how to say true things nicely. As a comic, you need a “sting” to get a laugh, and that had always been my way, until I studied with the Rav.

  Wayne Newton is one of the nicest of the nice people. He said, “Your singing is so full of joy, it’s positively infectious!” Hilarious! Cyndi Lauper said, “I know a guy who can really teach you a lot about harmony and tone that will make you even better!” I graciously accepted all comments. I found that the most talented people are actually the nicest people of all, not just in public, but to everyone, always.