When I was in my early teens, I dreamed of becoming a polyglot, but I never imagined I would become a professional linguist. After I completed my doctorate in Hebrew linguistics, I dreamed of becoming a tenured lecturer in Hebrew linguistics (and never a language teacher) at an Israeli university, but I never imagined I would leave my tenure in Hebrew linguistics at an Israeli university.
It was three years ago that I made a final decision to make this career change and become a self-employed Jewish life coach. I never imagined I would take an interest, and a strong and growing interest in Hasidism in general and Chabad Hasidism in particular, on which my new practice of Jewish life coaching is based.
It was three months before this final decision that I started to undergo what seemed the second tshuva to me in retrospect now. I started to experience "the dark night of the soul". Descent was the necessity for ascent.
Since then I also started to lose an interest in what had occupied me not only professionally but also personally for about 30 years - languages and linguistics. When I stumbled upon the websites of a few linguistic associations in Israel rather recently, I myself was surprised to realize that none of the lectures in their respective conference programs interested me, nor did I even ask myself what is the use of such studies though I don't delegitimize them.
Three years since I was exposed to Chabad Hasidism I think I understand now why languages and linguistics don't interest me any more. For another somewhat different but essentially the same reason I also lost my interest in the academic study of Judaism.
I don't know where this second tshuva of mine will lead me eventually. I'm quite sure that most of those who only know Tsvi 1.0 don't understand what fascinates Tsvi 2.0 so much in Hasidism in general and Chabad Hasidism in particular. I still have a burning desire to share what I see now with those friends of mine who only know Tsvi 1.0. But paradoxically, such a burning desire shows that Tsvi 2.0 still has a long way to go in his second tshuva until he fully internalizes - and behaves accordingly - that everyone is exactly where they are supposed to be now.