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When we visit Jerusalem today, we see a thriving city, one of the most beautiful in the world: bustling and busy, filled with people, old and young, living their lives. So what does it mean for us today to sit on the floor on the ninth day of Av and mourn the destruction of the Temple and the devastation of Jerusalem??
Rabbi Yehudah Lev Ashlag, the great Kabbalist, looks at the cause of the destruction from the perspective of the devastation of the sanctuary within ourselves. The sanctuary within is our inner Jerusalem, our inner temple. It is here that the revelation of the light of God needs to be shining, but it is dimmed. We live our lives without the conscious connection with the Creator and we think it’s normal. But the truth of the matter is that it is not normal. The destruction and the dispersion over the generations have left us empty of that living connection with God.
In particular, in the last hundred years with increasing materialism, we’ve lost that live connection through our mind and heart. And our soul, the Shechinah, is in the dust.
It is for this that we mourn on Tisha B’Av.
The lack of God in our lives leaves us with a terrible void which we try to cover up with substitutes: culture, economics politics… but nothing ultimately can comfort us for our aloneness. Truly Jeremiah spoke, when he mourns, “How does the city sit alone? She that was filled with people is like a lonely widow.” For we, inside of ourselves, are like the widow left by her Husband.
It is this lack of conscious connection with the Creator that constitutes the true reason to mourn on Tisha B’Av. First of all for ourselves as individuals, and then for our people, and finally for all humanity. We are all in the same boat together, and our mourning ultimately encompasses us all.
This talk is taken from a transcription of a talk given by Rabbi Avraham Mordecai Gottleib Shlitah, Head of the Beit Midrash, Bircat Shalom, Telzstone and translated by Yedidah Cohen
This podcast is dedicated in loving memory and for the ilui Nishmat of Feigi Bat Rivka z”l and Aharon and Sara Kotler, May their memories be a blessing for us.
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