Parashat Devarim

July 31, 1998

Beth Israel Synagogue

Rabbi Manes Kogan

As you know, tomorrow in the evening, will start Tisha BeAv, the ninth day in the Hebrew month of Av, that is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. This is a fast day and on this day we commemorate the destruction of the first and second Temple in Jerusalem, the first destroyed by the Babylonians and the second by the Romans.

Tomorrow in the weekly parasha -parashat Devarim- Moses will tell the people of Israel:

How can I alone carry your contentiousness, your burdens, and your quarrels? (Deuteronomy 1:12)

Then, the prophet Isaiah, in the weekly Haftara, will say to the people of Israel:

How has she become a harlot! - faithful city that was full of justice, in which righteousness was wont to lodge, but now murders. (Isaiah 1:21)

And then, at the evening, the prophet Jeremiah will lament the destruction of Jerusalem with these words:

How she sits in solitude! The city that was great with people has become like a widow (Lamentations 1:1)

Three incidences of "how can this be" in less than 12 hours is more than a simple coincidence. Our sages stress this causality teaching us that one must sing these three verses with a sad trop, the same one that we use for reading Meguilat Eicha (Lamentations).

Sometimes people ask: How have I come to this situation? Why are things not so good as they are supposed to be? What happened that I can’t have a good relationship with my son, with my parents, with my friends? How have I come so far from my Judaism? Why can I not find a rest for my soul?

Sometimes people blame their families, their bad luck, the stars, their friends and also God for what happened to them. They think that fate in life did not help them.

Nevertheless, the Torah, the Jewish tradition and our history teach us that things do not happen by coincidence, but rather by causality. There is a reason for things to happen in a determinate way, even though we don’t know the reason.

Moses doesn’t know how it will be possible for him to "carry the contentiousness, the burdens and the quarrels of the people of Israel", but we know that it is because God gave him strength so that he could do that.

For prophet Isaiah it is difficult to understand how Jerusalem, the city of justice became a city of corruption. For prophet Jeremaih it is difficult to understand how a city of beauty became a city of desolation. Finally, Isaiah and Jeremiah themselves found the answer in the behavior of the people of Israel. As we pray in the Musaf of the Iamim Tovim: "Because of our sins were we exiled from our land, far from our soil" (See Sidur Sim Shalom, pp. 463). Again: not coincidence but causality.

Things do not just happen.

We can think about life in two ways: the first one is to go through life thinking of it as a big coincidence. The second one, is to try to find a meaning in the way life itself develops.

To conclude, let me invite you to join this second way (that I believe is also a religious way). There is an engine that moves things and makes things happen. Not like the determinism that we can find in some cultures. Men have always free choice. Actually, some times we can not change things but we can use our free choice to give meaning to our life.

I believe that this meaning is possible to be found if we come back to the sources, to our tradition, to our identity, to our soul.

As we conclude in the book of Lamentations: