After the Storm

After the firestorm of bullets a nine-year-old girl is dead.  Much ink will be spilled about the blood that was spilled.  Pundits and politicians will lay blame at the feet of their opponents.  The NRA will defend the right of mentally unbalanced individuals to bear arms.  Nothing much will change.  

This may very well be the most depressing thought of my day. From time immemorial, human beings have made an awful mess of the world that God gave us to inhabit.  We have repeatedly failed to achieve our potential to be our best selves. Instead of selflessly tilling and tending the paradise in which we live, we destroy the garden until it becomes hell on earth. 

In one biblical story, it is the words of a woman that precipitates the fall from grace. To see the modern parallel, one must turn to cached pages on the internet, for the woman has learned after several thousand years to eradicate the evidence of her misdeed. Will there be ramifications of her having put such a negative energy into the world?  Or will nothing much change after the detritus of the storm is cleared away and we attempt a return to normalcy?

For solace, I turn not to the biblical story itself but to its interpretation by an artist, Jheronimus Bosch, who depicted the aftermath of the storm using oil paints and his fertile imagination. In his painting of the world after the flood, we see the human beings who have survived the storm attempting to inhabit the earth once more.  They are stranded in a boat which teeters on the precipice. They have not yet recovered their balance, but soon they will stand firmly again on the land.  They are poised to do better this time, to fulfill God's promise to return to Eden.  It is in this moment-- after the storm-- that anything is possible.

This Date in Jewish History: Tisha B'Av

"On the 9th of Av it was decreed that our ancestors would not enter the land."

Mishnah Ta'anit 4:6

In the Mishnah, edited approximately 2,000 years ago, the early rabbis list five specific events which occurred on the 9th of the month of Av. According to their calendar, on today's date in history the twelve spies sent by Moses to survey the land of Israel returned from their mission. Ten of them brought back a negative report, saying that giants inhabited the land and that the people of Israel would never succeed in overtaking them. Their words created panic and despair in the camp.

Rabbis throughout the generations have chronicled the calamities that befell the Jewish people on the 9th of Av, including many expulsions from host countries and several events of the Shoah, the Holocaust. But the fact that the rabbis of the first century reach back in time to this particular event--God's punishment of our biblical ancestors-- to represent the first Tisha B'Av, is significant. On this date in Jewish history, a minyan (quorum) of Jews caused a fracture in our unity and prevented us from reaching the Promised Land. On this date in Jewish history, we were exiled from the Promised Land, our Temple and our holy city Jerusalem left in ruins.

We can deduce from the rabbinic chronology of tragedy that it is human nature to try to make sense of the random occurrences in our lives. We strive to create order from chaos, to connect the dots of the circumstances that befall us into a linear biography. We assign dates to events in our ancestors' lives, which are to be commemorated by our progeny, because we need to find purpose in our own lives.