Dear Friends,

Baruch Hashem, there is so much good news to share, but I sometimes feel a bit awkward  because some of you don’t know the people , It won’t stop me this time. Two girls from Bnos Avigail got engaged in such a short time span, that I can’t help but wish them both a real mazal tov! They are Goldie Stein and Sarit Poliaff. If you don’t know them, wish them well any way. Why not! Let yourself feel the goodness role… 

I can’t resist telling you a true story, but in honesty it works much better when you can understand the cultural/ethnic background. There was a bakery in Meah Shearim called Brizel’s. The proprietor was an eternally older Karlin chossid named Zalman. I shopped there for decades, but he always seemed to be in his mid-sixties, grey payos flying, and full of a rare blend of optimism and humor blended with Meah Shearim in every cell of his blood. His friend recounted that one day he entered the bakery and asked “What’s new?” Brizel replied “terrible” which was the last thing his friend expected to hear. “What happened?” “Nothing big. I got up really early to put in a good few hours of study before I get to the ovens (that means it was about 2 a.m.). I couldn’t find my shoes. My grandchildren were over, and they must have been playing around in my room. I finally found them, but they took the laces out. Finding the first one was easy, but then I wasted almost a half hour until I finally discovered where the kid stashed the second one. Then I headed out to the mikveh. It was too late to study, but I got there in time to immerse before going to the synagogue. I went in, and when I went out, you won’t believe what happened! Someone stole my clothes. He left me with nothing. I had to wait until someone came to tovel, and plead with him to go to my house and get me something to wear. The fellow agreed, but I knew that when I come home, my wife will have what to say about being woken up so early because her schlimazel (no one can translate that one) of a husband had his clothes stolen.” His friend commiserated, and then said, “How do you feel now? Want me to make you a coffee?” “No replied the chossid. “ I feel great. Full of simchah. You want to know why?” 

“None of this happened. “

“I had no trouble finding my shoes, no one stole my clothes, and my wife thinks that I’m the best thing that happened since they began slicing bread. Isn’t that a reason to be happy? “His grin was real, and his friend left him to finish arranging the cookies while looking like he won the lottery.

Do you think about what’s right in your life? 

It’s hard to not just write off all of the good and put them in the soul-destroying file called “regular”. All of Hashem’s constant compassion, providence, and love get lost once you put them in the complacency file.
I went to a funeral last night. Rebbetzin Zehava Kass lost her father. Her brother spoke, as did Rabbi Kass and a grandchild. None of them spoke about the kind of deeds that make the front page of a newspaper, or a Feldheim biography. They spoke of a man of few words, but kind deeds, who had left his native Syria as a young man, and succeeded in building a family in a different culture, facing challenge after challenge with the rarest of all virtues, modesty.  I didn’t know him, and only came to the funeral in respect to the Kass’s, but I am not sorry to have been there to be part of a group of people giving honor to someone who may have easily been overlooked in other circumstances.

Like everything...
That matters
That we see and don’t see.

This reminds me of the beginning of this past week’s Haftorah. “Be comforted, be comforted my People, says your G-d”. In classical Hebrew the word for comfort is also sometimes used to mean regret. In context, it means that once you see the end of the story, you may come to regret the way you responded when the story was still happening.

You have all heard the kind of story where someone is headed to the airport, but is delayed because they had to help out someone who was lost, or spend longer than he had planned on the phone with a lonely person, or any one of the endless repertoire of “things that happen at the wrong time”. Our hero gets to the airport late, misses the plane. If you were in his shoes, what would you be thinking? “I can’t believe this is happening. I’m going to miss half of the meeting’, or, “the ticket isn’t even exchangeable. There goes $250” or “This will finally teach me a lesson. I have to learn to think more about my real needs and priorities”. Obviously I can’t know your thoughts, but I can easily imagine any of the above occupying space in my brain…Then you hear your phone and your friend (or spouse, or parent) is in tears telling you incoherently that the plane you were booked for crashed. At that moment, all of the regrets you had for coming late disintegrate. 

But what if the plane didn’t crash. And you still had to face the mental debris that fills your mind?
The second invocation of the words “be comforted” is mean to tell you that in the ultimate sense, you will one day see the underlying chessed of the interactions that are not presently  clear. It says that the world will be covered by knowledge of Hashem the way the sea-floor is covered with water. 
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That means that you too will one day reach the level where it doesn’t matter if you found your shoes or not. The message of every moment being a gift, full of possibilities, will be part of your knowledge base.
In the meantime, 

ENJOY!
Love,
Tziporah

P.S. Please continue davening for Ester Yocheved bat Braizel Brachah Pollard . May we hear good news from the Pollards who have both suffered so much for being caring Jews…

Dear friends,

What a wonderful day today was! Tisha B’Av at the kotel was deeply moving. Thousands of people were standing in the plaza. Not doing anything specific; just about everyone did maariv as soon as possible in order to make Havdalah and drink something. After maariv, there were about 15 minutes of just being.
Am Yisrael, just being

Men and women, children, old people

Traditional Sefardim, American yeshiva boys, old Yeushalmis. Jewish tourists who had little idea of why so many people were there (Last year, the entire area was so empty, Ethel). They all felt very much part of something bigger than they are. 

And then it was over.

Getting on the bus was the same surreal experience of Last Chopper Out of Hanoi again and again. Even the driver was surprised by the instantaneous descent into real life. The general feeling was still one of being part of one basically big, happy, dysfunctional family. 

Today we began learning again. The Ten Commandments seemed so much more part of our reality, they have been with us since we became a people who have no basic identity outside of the Torah. The fourth commandment, Shabbos, is one in which the unique nature of our identity is most physically observable. It’s only Tuesday night, but Shabbos is on my mind. The Neve girls who are leaving want to get in their last Shabbos. My son and his family who live in Bnei Brak want to escape its brilliantly sunny days and torrid airless summer days. The center of Shabbos, as you all know, are the meals. It doesn’t matter who is coming (or where you are going). There is always the unseen guest, Hashem, who provides us with everything we see, taste, and experience. Before you can relate to your weekly Guest, you have gotten to know Him. The first commandment opens your heart. “I am Hashem, your G-d who took you out of Egypt. That means that He is aware of you (the way He was able to differentiate between the Jews and the Egyptians during the plagues). He is not “distracted” by the limitless expanse of the cosmos, or the innumerable microbes on the head of a pin.  You are central, and in ways that your mind will never fully grasp, so is everyone else. He creates nature minute by minute, and at the same time hides behind its mask. He made the rules that govern reality, and can break them if that’s what He finds best for us, His dear children. When you keep Shabbos, you are entering a space where you too aren’t distracted by life itself, and as you sit down to eat, hear the words, Vaishali, And He completed the heavens and the earth.

For you
For all of us
For the people pushing their way onto the bus
And the ones who aren’t
For their ancestors
And their unborn generations
The heroes
And the ones who wish they were
The sweet humble amcha
Who know Him even when they don’t know
That they know Him 
​
Love,
Tziporah 

​Dear friends,

Every so often when you write (and yes, like your elderly mother in law, the next step is for me to complain about the infrequency of your letters), you share your negative, painful, sometimes tragic moments and/or days. Not that I have anything against negativity. It’s the stuff that makes the world go round, keeps us real, and challenges your moral fiber and trust in Hashem. 

No. 

It’s the tone of impatience that often accompanies the narrative that worries me. It seems that on one hand you acknowledge that it’s no fun to live a life that’s like paint by number art that you outgrew. The problem is that the joy of achieving a meaningful life is only experienced when you get to the end of, what is often, a long trek on a dry hill. Yes, when you get to the top, you have no doubt that the climb was worth it, but it’s a really hard perspective to hold on to when you are barely half way up and feel like you can’t take another step. What you really need to know is why things take so long.

Welcome to the world of Tisha B’Av.  Maharal talks about the nature of time (all the way from Yerushalaim I can hear those of you who dread Heavy Stuff repressing a sigh). Time is the measured sequence of change. Hashem created the world in a way in which light and dark alternate regularly enough to get us to sit up and take notice. You use an entire vocabulary, seconds, minutes, hours, days etc. to make life more definable. The first narrative in the Torah uses that vocabulary by telling you that the world was created in 6 days, and Hashem sanctified and blessed Shabbos by making it a day of rest. Obviously, the world doesn’t regress on Shabbos (see! I trust you! You noticed!). The world continues but the flow of energy that led to More and More ceased, which allows the day to reveal not only what Hashem does, but something of who He is. 
​
There’s another narrative hidden within the same story. You may have noticed it, or you may have not focused on the wording enough to see it. There are 10 statements of creation, meaning 10 times where the Torah narrates that Hashem brought something about. “Let there be light” is the first directive, and “Let us make man in our image and our form” is the last. Nothing new was added after this statement. No new creatures or things. Humans are to reality what Shabbos is to time. You can relate to the Creator, not just the creation. We too can stop the flow of doing more and more things, and entwine doing with being.
The number 10 is an important number in Judaism. Besides the 10 statements of creation, we have 10 ways in which Avraham was challenged. He was the first person to be what I would call and experiential seeker of G-d. He brought Hashem into the real world. He didn’t just refrain from ruining the world, or retreat into meditation. He took Hashem with him when he invited guests, taught, and lived the way a human in Hashem’s image can live. Each test got him closer to the mountain top, but it was a hard hike. There are 10 commandments, each one of which tells you how to reach the top. 

And now the obvious.

Nine comes before ten. It is the number that symbolizes how hard your struggle is. How many times you felt you couldn’t go on? It’s what a woman feels in the last moments of labor before the child emerges showing her that all of the struggle led to something.

Tisha B’Av is literally the 9thof Av. While the names of the months that we use are of Babylonian origin, their Hebrew meanings are relevant. Av means father. The month of Av is the month in which a in a certain sense we give birth to ourselves through struggle. It was on the 9th day, that in the desert the spies that Moshe sent said that they just don’t want to go on. The Land can’t be conquered. We’ll all die in the desert. Years later the first Bais HaMikdash was destroyed because we were distracted, weary of the search, self-indulgent, and very stuck in the world of 9. The Jews of the time were distracted by the world enough to worship idols, distracted by their egos enough to shed blood, and distracted enough by their bodies to live promiscuously.

There were 10 constant miracles in the Bais HaMikdash (look in 5thperek of Pirkei Avos if you either don’t believe me, or want to see what they were). Having the Bais HaMikdash to continue its existence in their midst would have been the wrong message. It would tell them that All Is Well, which was the most destructive message that they could have heard. The second Bais HaMikdash was built even though we didn’t really heal. What we did have going for us was that when you look at the entire people, you could see wholeness. One person may have ego issues, but others didn’t. They didn’t live in tiny little worlds with a population of one. They lived with and for each other. The Bais HaMikdash was destroyed only when that too had faded, and we descended into the bottomless pit of in-fighting, senseless hatred, fragmentation that we still suffer from now.

Bad news, no?

Here’s the good news.

We are close to the top. We have the merits of all of the generations that preceded us. We are living in the worst time (just think of the assimilation rates) and the best of times, times in which even one step forward can get you to the top. You know yourselves well enough to figure out what step you have to take next. For some of you its finally letting go of the need to be the Winner and All Time Champion in your relationships. For others it’s letting go of gossip, and for others its re-establishing a meaningful relationship with Hashem, the source of all wholeness.

Have a meaningful and maybe even transformational Tisha B’Av. Keep going and remember Hashem gives you all the strength you need to get to the top.

Love,
Tziporah