Devarim 5771

As things happen to us we never see understand why they happen the way they do, in fact many times even looking back at a situation it is hard to fully comprehend it. But, even if we can't understand why it happened to us, we must strive to learn from every situation that we were in to see what how we must work on ourselves.

In this week's parsha Moshe reminds the Jews of their travelling in the midbar, all the places they went right and all the places they went wrong. The purpose of going through each event was to teach the people to learn from their mistakes and to fix what they have done wrong.

This coming week, just like every year the week after parshat Devarim, is tisha b'av. The mishna in taanit tells us many of the things that went wrong on that day over the years, but tisha b'av has become the date on the Jewish calendar to remember all of the bad things that have happened to the Jewish people over the years, from the sin of the meraglim to the Holocaust and everything in between.

The gemara in gitten tells us the famous story of kamtza and bar kamtza, and the gemara says that this story is the reason for the destruction of the beit hamikdash, meaning that we must learn from this story what they did wrong so that we can know what we need to fix. Chazal tell us straight out that the reason for the destruction was baseless hatred for our fellow Jews, and that story is the epitome of baseless hatred. The reason why chazal tell us this story is to show us how bad it really was. In the last few weeks Hashem has reminded us of how bad things are. Notice how many of these tragic stories were Jews hurting other Jews!

We have quoted the Ramban in Bo many times before, where he says that everything that happens to the Jews happens because of something we have done wrong, and Hashem always punishes us middah k'neged middah.

Looking at the stories of the past few weeks we see that the main cause of these disasters was our lack of achdut. Hashem is clearly showing us that we are no better than the generation of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza! Chazal tell us "Any generation in which the Beit Hamikdash is not rebuilt, it is as if that generation destroyed it."

Until we fix our achdut we are not moving in the right direction. We have two ways for our achdut to get better. One, to work on it ourselves, or for Hashem to cause sometime horrible enough that it will cause us to join together, and that is exactly what He has done.

May we all be zoche to celebrate this tisha b'av as a moed, joined together hand in hand by the beit hamikdash!

Have a good shabbat!