Tisha B'Av

For me, maybe just this year, I am finding the holidays to be personally meaningful. Like Shavuot. It was the perfect first Holiday for me as a quasi-almost-maybe-studying-for-wannabe Jew. First I count the Omer, then come to find out that the central reading for the Holiday is the Book of Ruth, which turns out to be about a woman who chooses Judaism because, like me, the rest of her life that she had known before had pretty much tanked. And, as it would happen, my first Christian Godmother (in her good memory) was named Ruth.

Now we have Tisha B'Av. And, like Shavuot, I can draw a parallel from the destruction of the Jewish Temple to my own life. If what I knew before - a starry-eyed, ambitious, young woman, engaged to a Jewish man and all seemed hunky dory - was no longer there, what was I who was I? Who am I now, and who am I going to be after all of this. And is it the case, too, that somehow, through all of this, I am preserved, even though I may feel that all my honor, dignity, and sense of self have been stripped away? What if, all the while, I am myself nonetheless?

But now I have no barriers. Now I have no illusions. Now I have no house of cards. So what I have is real. And I feel it.

I think it is the same with the destruction of the Temple, and all the other things. Of course we mourn that our old ways of life are gone. They were nice. We liked it. It was comforting. Now we have to go out and do our own thing. We have to reinvent ourselves. Find a new way of identifying. Find a new way to feel at home, when in fact we feel that we have no home. We are wanderers. We go everywhere, but nowhere do we really belong, except in communion, except in cohesion, except in knowing that all of Life is One, and all of us share in the pain. The pain that makes us real. The pain that makes us honest. The pain that makes us try harder, to be ourselves, to move forward.