Av

"Woe unto the heart that is not broken,” wrote Aryeh Cohen. 

No one wants pain but no one can avoid it.   

People let us down.  

Our bodies are instruments where the parts wear out and sometimes are defective.  

The things that we expect to make our lives simpler often do the opposite.  

When life does not cooperate with our expectations it is frustrating, to say the least.

 

As we pass through time we amass a wide array of these broken experiences.  Learning how to manage life’s disappointments is wisdom.   Wisdom does not come from books or what others teach us, it what we learn as the wheel of life turns.

 

This month on August 13 is Tisha B’Av, on the Jewish calendar.  Tisha B’Av is a day of historic tragedy.  It marks when our ancestors the Children of Israel, were sentenced o forty years of aimless wandering in the desert. It is the day that marks the destruction of the both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem.  It is also the anniversary of when Betar, the last breath of Jewish independence for 2,000 years fell.  Jews all over the worlds read Jeremiah’s Lamentations and fast.

 

Why?  Why bother to remember an historic event that has no bearing on our life?

 

A story:

 

One Tisha B’Av Napoleon rode by a synagogue in small town and noticed Jews sitting on the ground and wailing bitterly.

“Why are the Jews crying?” he asked a bystander.

“They are mourning their land which was destroyed about two thousand years ago,” he was informed.

These words deeply impressed Napoleon.  “A nation that can mourn over the destruction and loss of their land which occurred two thousand years ago,” he exclaimed, “Such a people will never perish.  They may be certain they will survive and that their land will eventually be restored to them.”

 

Our memory - both individual and collective – takes our pain and uses it to become wiser in our years.  Just as a scab started out as a bleed, it becomes much more resilient when new skin forms over it.  But, and this is crucial, a scar remains to remind us and teach us how to enrich our lives through the panoply of our experiences, good and bad.