“If OCD has decided that two and two makes five, Archimedes himself would be powerless to convince you otherwise”
I say Shemoneh Esreh three times a day. Unless it’s Shabbos, in which case I say it four times. But when it’s Pesach time and we switch over to “v’sein brachah,” the number of Shemoneh Esrehs I force upon myself can easily hit double digits.
Hi, my name is Isaac, and I have OCD.
I grinned when I read the author of this past week’s Know This column describing herself hunting down people she had possibly insulted to collect the requisite mechilah. I’d been there. I’d also been awake at two a.m. on Friday nights, poring over a sefer on hilchos Shabbos, trying to reassure myself that I was not, in fact, chayav kareis. It was easy enough to find the spot in the sefer I was looking for. I’d looked up the same thing the week before.
Tefillin! Tefillin were a wonderful little spot of daily misery. Tefillin, as you may or may not know, require a certain level of precision — the box should be resting on the downward curve of the muscle, and the wraps must encircle the arm a specific number of times. I was awake a good 20 minutes earlier than the other guys in my dorm room to ensure I had enough time to put on my tefillin, take them off, put them on again, decide they were just right, begin praying, realize that they weren’t even close to just right, take them off again, put them back on etc.
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