As you can see in the attached picture, I recently had the honor of being knighted by King Charles. It was extraordinary to represent Chabad of Hackensack, and I want to congratulate my fellow knights, who were recognized for their outstanding contributions as well.

Alright, alright—I admit it: this is fake. I have not been across the pond recently (and I don’t trim my beard. I generated this picture using ChatGPT's new image generator, which is surprisingly realistic-looking.)

I guess you have also come across some ChatGPT images in the past few days. Their new image generator is so powerful that millions have rushed to create fake pictures of everything imaginable (and not imaginable...).

My friends, if you have not realized this until now, let me break it to you and officially welcome you to The Fake Era.

Today, our lives are so full of fake content, and it's getting better and better that we can't tell anymore what is real and what is not. My social media feed is full of fantastical stories and incredible pictures of either underground or underwater locations. I read the riveting descriptions and go to Google to discover that such places do not exist.

It's so easy to fake everything: fake people's voices, fake their images or videos and stories. So, IMHO, our times truly deserve to be called The Fake Era.

Now, let's not blame ChatGPT for it all. We have been lied to for a very long time. All the people on the billboards have been meticulously airbrushed to look beautiful; cars have been carefully designed to make us desire them; and don't get me started about movies, which are so often filmed with a dull green screen to be made to look incredible using CGI effects.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon declares: Vanity of vanities, said Kohelet; vanity of vanities, all is vanity! And to paraphrase him, we might say: Fake of fakness, it is all fake!

Living in a Fake Era might feel like a reason to feel down and depressed, but please allow me to introduce you to a Chassidic song based on King Solomon's words.

The song's lyrics are both in Hebrew and Yiddish, and it begins with the words, S'iz doch altz hevel havolim, isn’t it all vanity of vanities.”

Now, you might think that such a song will have a slower, reflective, and perhaps sad tune to go along with it. But the opposite is true. This song has a lively tune, full of energy and joy. How is that possible? Because it ends with the powerful statement: Ein od milvado, “there is nothing but Him.”

The Chassid is singing and dancing because while he realizes the fake world, he also celebrates his connection to G‑d, the eternal truth.

The Chassid is happy because realizing how everything is nothing makes him discover the Actual Something.

And when we realize how “Something” everything is and how ein od milvado, there is nothing but G‑d, something incredible happens. We approach the world with a whole new perspective. We no longer would look at our materialistic world as a conflict with spirituality. Instead, we will see the true and holy purpose of everything.

So there you have it. Living in the Fake Era can bring us tremendous benefits: the constant stream of fakeness will remind us to connect with the actual reality, to learn more Torah, to do more mitzvot, and to remember that everything—that big, fake everything—is really something, all created to serve the holy purpose for which we were created.