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.

Mazel Tov!

Mazel tov!

Everyone, Jew and gentile, has heard this phrase.  We take it to mean, ‘Well done!”   Or “congratulations!”  Actually, mazel tov means “good luck.”   

The words are meant to ward of the “evil eye.”  Ok, say something good happens to you.  If someone comes up and says, “What a wonderful thing to happened to you” (i.e. I am envious and it should have happened to a nicer person) they would be putting the “evil eye” on you, this is wishing something bad.

Another generation may remember saying “kayna hara” after hearing good news, which are words to chase away and bad wishes or spirits.  Going back another generation, some will even remember spitting over their shoulder when something good was spoken to chase away a possible curse.

“Mazel tov” – good luck -- was originally a way to disrupt the pathway of the evil eye.

Going back even further in time, “mazel” was how the star lined up.  “Mazalot” means constellations.  In Israel there are star charts of the floors of some synagogues.  Astronomy was an important way to chart of the passage of time.   One scholar, Rabbi Shmuel was said to be more familiar with the pathways of the stars than the streets of the city where he lived.

Going back millennia, mazel tov indicates a wish for the stars to align in a favorable pattern to bring about a good outcome.

A Time Anomaly

Moses dispatched twelve spies to determine the viability of the Land.

Tisha B’Av (forty days later) the Jews deny their heritage in fright and refuse to enter the Land.  They are sentenced to forty years of wandering.

The first Temple was destroyed on the same date.

The Second Temple was destroyed on the same date.

The Judean revolt was quashed leading to 2,000 years of exile.

Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews from Spain.

So, is Tisha B’Av fated to be a day of darkness and excruciating pain?   We will fast and read Lamentations on this date.  Is the ninth of Av cursed?

Is there such a thing as good or bad luck?  Are things fated by the universe and therefore we are trapped? 

I remember my father telling me when I was saddened to hear about all the tragedies on Tisha B’Av.  He soothed my anxiety by telling me that the Mashiah would be born on this day.

Maybe we can change our ill fortune; God has not written our lives before they have been lived. 

We are not as stuck as we feel.

We are not fated or slated for anything but are ever free to choose our own destiny.

In the seventeenth century Italian violinists kept toads in their violin cases.  Before a concert they would pull out their toad and stroke it for good luck. Centuries later it was discovered by herpetologists that toads secrete alkaloids that dry out skin.  Toads actually helped them play better because they fingers did not stick to the strings!

Maybe there is no mazel tov: there are only the results of our efforts.