Emotions in Surfside
In the days and weeks after the Surfside building collapse, we are more tuned in to emotions, sadness and pain. It’s also the Three Weeks now, so it’s sort of a natural feeling anyway.
This past erev Shabbos we put our Roomba, our robot vacuum cleaner, under one of the beds. Somehow it decided to turn itself on on Shabbos and started making its way around the house. Then it decided to go “home” to its charger. But we had removed the charger and put it under the bed before Shabbos along with the Roomba so it wouldn’t be an eyesore and so my toddler wouldn’t play with it. The Roomba rounded its way over to the place its charger was supposed to be. All of us just watched it as it turned, like it was thinking, what to do now? Where is my Home? Where is my mother? (Remember that book?) It wandered around a bit before kind of just stopping somewhere looking stranded. It was so weird how we all felt compassion for this machine.
Then on Sunday we went to a farm, and our van got stuck in the mud. The workers spent hours trying to get it out of the mud till we realized we could just call the tow truck who took it out in several minutes. Although we knew we had a home and we understood we would be going back to it eventually, the lack of security was nevertheless unsettling. My six-year-old kept worrying, “But will we stay here forever? Where will we sleep…?”
So of course I relate all this to the building collapse. If we feel sorry for a Roomba machine, if we feel sorry for ourselves in our temporary discomfort (in the hot sun), not knowing what time we would get home, can you imagine how we react when being privy to a human being’s emotion, who has lost his home and every item in it, and for the others who lost their loved ones, their anchors, without a hug, a goodbye, or a warning?
When we are distant from Hashem, deep in exile, Hashem, our Home, our source, also cries in pain.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe said, mishenichnas av mimaatin besimcha, while literally it means we reduce our Simcha in this month of Av by not listening to music etc., we should interpret it as follows: we should reduce the month of Av whose essence is sadness, with simcha, with joy. The type of joy we increase is not with weddings, music bands or new fruit. It’s the inner joy that we get when we are doing the right thing, Simcha shel mitzva, the joy that we can only experience when we fill our lives and days with mitzvos, with helping our fellow-Jews, with strengthening our connection to our Creator with the commandments He beseeches us to follow.
So let’s pray that even as we cry with our fellow-Jews in pain, we reach a place of inner joy and peace until Hashem reunites with us and redeems us from our dark exile. May it be speedily in our days.
Commentaires