As we reach the end of Tammuz 17, a multi-purpose fast day in the Jewish calendar, this year with Israel still engaged in an existential war that began with the barbaric attack of October 7, when approximately 120 are still held prisoner in unimaginably horrible terror in the tunnels or equally horrible middle-class apartments of inhumanly cruel slavers in Gaza, as we begin the millennia-old Three Weeks commemorations leading to the annual mourning of the Churban, destruction of our Holy Temple, A House Of Prayer For All Nations, more than two thousand years ago, we’re once again faced with the reality that we need to do something very differently than what we are doing……. Or perhaps not…..

In such a period of crisis, it’s hard to feel anything but urgency. But consider that life takes place in time, and many more factors than we can begin to track develop in time, as well. Changes we have made five years ago, ten years ago, even more, haven’t necessarily run their course, maybe some have yet to kick in–perhaps we need more patience to see the results of our previous hard work and excruciating decisions. Perhaps new factors, the results of other people’s life-decisions, people we don’t know and whose lives we had no idea are intimately bound with ours, have yet to begin to effect the arcs of our lives. We just don’t know.

The first of the Bakashot, the prayers of request we recite three times daily in the Amidah, the Standing Prayer that is the cornerstone of the devotional part of our daily responsibilities, beseeches God to grace us with wisdom, knowledge and the ability to intellectually analyze. These are skills we aren’t born with and can’t take developing for granted, but, rather must pray for Divine Favor to acquire, both individually for our solo journeys in life, but also collectively, as the Jewish People navigate history. We need wisdom to evaluate where we are in this journey–is it just around the next curve, even as it appears infinitely distant, or is it really as far as it seems at times like these? And once we find ourselves on the right map, understand where along we are in our route, what do we do next?

Much intellect, not to mention emotion, is wasted on the question “why did this happen to me/us?” when the useful next question is “what do I/we do now?”. For that, we can prepare, we can take steps forward, we can pray. But what if our map is defective? If, to use a modern metaphor, our “Waze” database is corrupted and unable to lead us safely to our destination?

My short thought along this line this year is to look back at the first of our communal disasters on this day, exactly 40 days after the Sinai experience of receiving Torah on that very first Shavuot, that day that Moses, our Teacher, descended to what he thought were the sounds of war and battle, but which turned out to be the orgiastic worship of the calf, our very own, very first hand-made idol, violating the very first instructions God gave us…. We learn that, either in anger Moshe cast the Luchot, Holy Tablets, to the ground, shattering them, or that these Tablets, themselves, burning with pure outrage, flew out of his hands on their own volition to shatter on the rocks of the mountain.

In either case, from the very first moment they were possessed by Am Yisrael, the code became scrambled. Our first act with the Torah was to screw it up.

Of course we can’t do the right thing until we restore that code, fix the Torah, at the very least the Torah shel Ba’al Peh, the Oral Law, the book of reality as precisely decoded using very specific and precise techniques and rules. Necessarily, we must be doing something radically wrong, to be so far off course…… Or, perhaps we’re eternally engaged in the processes of revising that code as it does bring us closer and closer, even if we’re preventing ourselves from seeing that we’re actually on the right track and oh so close to our goal…… if only we’ll let ourselves see that!

So, perhaps just like every day, we should give ourselves, along with all Am Yisrael, our fellow workers, fellow explorers, more credit, that we’re actually so much closer than we, in our insecurity (which is, after all, only doubt in God) fear. Or, with our current urgency and resolve to finally do it right, starting now, perhaps we’re a mere three weeks away from the rebuilding of our Holy Temple, may it be this year.

Brachot to all