Dancing on the Ruins !

Tonight is Tisha B bav, the ninth day of the month of Av, the saddest day of the year for the jewish people,recalling the destruction of our holy Temple,The Bait Hamikdash in the holy city of Jerusalem. An interesting episode in the Talmud. Rabbi Akivah and the sages are walking over the ruins of the temple, the scene of the foxes scurrying over the smoldering rubble overwhelms the sages with sadness and they tear their clothes in mourning, their luminescent faces awash with tears .Rabbi Akivah rends his garment,but then begins to laugh and dance among the destruction ! What a scene, the grieving sages,on one side and the jubilant ecstatic Rabbi Akivah,dancing atop the ruins on the other! Another surprising and delightful tradition,the Messiah is born on Tisha Bav ! How do we process these mixed messages ? The truth is that Tisha Bav encompasses both. This day, we must reflect on our communal history, bitter defeats ,and our frequent oppression, at the same time we must acknowledge our miraculous ability to rebuild, redeem,and rise again outwitting history(Thanks Aaron Lansky!)and standing poised to write the most glorious chapters of our beloved narrative. As modern devotees of Chassidus and practitioners of jewish mysticism,we must also turn inwards with that paradox, and see those same patterns as they play out in our personal lives. On this day,even as we are aware of being surrounded by love and goodness, we also acknowledge the holes in our lives,and we become aware of all the pain in the world. Those place s where we feel destruction in some way,wether its the loss of a loved one, conflict within families, lost opportunities, a sense of vertigo,lack of drive, loss of interest in life, living without passion or faith, struggling with addiction,living with anger and sadness, all potent and destructive in their own way, all blocking our awareness of the latent dormant divine dimension ,lying just beneath the sometimes scorched earth of our inner landscape. In This sense we cry with the sages.However ......in order to unlock the real mystery of this day WE MUST ALSO LAUGH with Rabbi Akivah! We do so in the knowledge that the messiah is born today as well, we must acknowledge the gaping holes,but we don't have to keep falling into them! On this day our inner messiah presides over the groundbreaking ceremony of a new soulfulness, as we remember the forgotten steps of the dances of our lives!!