Thread by @GREENESJ333

Roger Froikin @rlefraim wrote:
"THE 9 DAYS AND THE 9th OF THE MONTH OF AV
1)

Have for a long time been set aside by the Jewish People as a time of mourning, a time of reflection, a time of contemplation about all the horrible things that have happened to us as a people, all the things that have etched themselves onto our national consciousness.
2)

Europeans talk of wars that altered their history. Americans talk of epic events that created their national identity.
3)

Every people has its ethnic and national histories turned into national myths that become part of who they are, and the Jewish people have been part of, and shared, many of those times and events,
4)

But the Jewish trauma goes back to the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem & the loss of sovereignty & control that plunged the Jewish people into being subject to the whims, manipulation, & persecution by hostile others for the longest time.
5)

The destruction of 2000 years ago, was the greatest tragedy of our history, not just because a building was demolished, but because we lost our land, a majority of us in Israel died, & maybe worse,
6)

the demoralizing effect on the Jews who were in the Diaspora scattered throughout the Roman Empire, led to the loss of a majority of us to conversion, leaving us a tiny minority to adapt so as to survive.
7)

But we did survive. The greatest story of ethnic survival in the history of the world. And not only did we survive, but we protected the most valuable document in world history, a blueprint for a moral & humane culture, the Torah, though some say we survived because of Torah.
8)

So, the 9th of Av is not just about mourning and sadness. It is about the most important story in world history of survival. The real national Phoenix, always rising from the ashes.
9)

Yet, we have a problem. The problem is we have not really communicated that cultural victory & its value to our next generations effectively.
10)

And the story is incomplete when we talk of the Destruction and then the Holocaust - the bad part, and we do not emphasize the story of the recovery and the victory and the rising from the ashes, the Heroism of the good part."
11)

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