I didn’t mean to freak out. Especially just a day after I’d sent out a message encouraging us all to keep calm.

Nonetheless, when an unmarked white van pulled up in front of my home a few days ago, I noticed my heart beat a little faster. From an upstairs window I watched the driver place a package at our doorstep, and then run back to the van. It’s possible I tried to catch the license plate number. It’s possible my mind raced to the worst: why would he be running back to the van, unless…? Good thing I meditate enough to be able to notice the thoughts as they come (sometimes, anyway) and then give my imagination a solid round of applause for another terrific performance.

I guess we’re all pretty jacked up. I mean, it’s hard not to be. Two thousand years of intergenerational trauma and that’s not counting the slavery in Egypt part. It’s in the DNA, biologically and figuratively speaking.

Two thousand years ago (1,956 to be precise), the locus of our religion and people was destroyed, Jerusalem burned, and the Jews evicted. Thus began the Diaspora, bringing us as a people to the four corners of the earth and beyond, since it turned out the world was round; perhaps that’s part of why we ended up back in that same Promised Land just a generation later, even if we wouldn’t be able to govern there again until 1948. Unclear how that part of the story will go, and what its next chapter will be.

What is clear is this: that this Wednesday night, Jews all around the world will gather to read the one Biblical book devoted entirely to mourning the destruction of the Temple. It is the start of a fast day, Tisha b’Av, the 9th of the month of Av, the national day of grief and mourning for the Jewish people. The only other full, 25-hour fast day in the entire calendar is Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, we atone – together as a people – for our individual shortcomings. On Tisha b’Av, we sit together and let the fear, the sadness, the pain of the Jewish people from generation to generation be with us in the room.

What a genius move. With the Temple gone, Judaism could have and logically should have been extinguished along with the flames of the fires set that day in 70 CE. The Torah contains an invincible weapon, though: the calendar. The rabbis added this day of commemoration to the holiday cycle given to us in the Torah, and they placed it so that it would help us in every generation turn back to our people and our roots.

Tisha b’Av always falls seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah: seven weeks of consolation, these weeks are called, and on Day 50 – we gather again, in our finest clothing, tables laden (please God) with food, and we blow the shofar to celebrate the New Year for the Jewish people.

Because no matter how afraid we may feel, no matter how anxious we get in our kishkes about the package arriving on the doorstep or the stranger walking into shul; no matter how angry we grow over the normalization of anti-semitism or how bewildered we feel by friends and neighbors we once considered trustworthy allies… the Torah’s got us.

Not because Torah promises that nothing bad will happen. Lots of bad things happen to the Jewish people (and by them, too) in the Torah and throughout Tanakh, the Bible.  What Torah gives us is the promise that we will never have to face whatever comes without a way to make meaning of it, without practices to steady us, and most importantly, without each other.

So these days leading up to Tisha b’Av, we are allowed to freak out a bit. And then, after a gathering and a fast, let’s let the calendar do what it has done for nearly two thousand years. Let it carry us toward consolation, toward hope, toward the sound of the shofar calling us back from the ancient source of our people. 

An unmarked white van, a flag torn from our shul in the middle of the night, and so much else sets off in us fear, anger, and a host of other emotions. All of it is part of being human; all of it is part of the Jewish story. Torah carried our people through the destruction of the Temple, through exile, and through every generation since. It will carry us through this moment too, and through all the other freak-out moments large and small along the way.

If you’re wondering, it was the opposite of scary: an item I’d purchased from Nordstrom’s, delivered to my home when they were out of stock in my size in the store. A blessing on every level. No reason to freak out, only to give thanks.

Rabbi Abigail Treu

P.S. Oheb Shalom comes together with our neighboring synagogues for Tisha b’Av services this Wednesday night, July 22 at 8 pm.

P.P.S. On Thursday, July 23 at 6 pm, join me at Oheb Shalom as we remount the yellow star required by the Nazis to be worn by all Jews; it was removed for the renovations to Founders’ Hall last year and will be put up as part of the history display next to the Holocaust Torah from the Czech Republic.