Seidemann: Mourning for my GPS

From the other side of the bench

by David Seidemann

As I do every year, I read most of the Kinot. I read them in Hebrew and in English and to be honest, I don't understand either. The Hebrew is not what we use in daily conversational Hebrew and the English translation is so flowery and allegorical that it soars above me. Maybe it is supposed to be that way. Maybe we are not supposed to understand the words because if we would understand the words, we might be tempted to claim we understand the events they describe.

Oh sure, the prophet speaks of sin and retribution but the magnitude of the punishment, the sheer scope of the human suffering, seems greater than any sin could have merited. The destruction of two temples,  pogroms, crusades and expulsions spanning thousands of years and continents; and the suffering continues.

By no means do I mean to equate the following to any individual or national tragedy. I cite only as an example of something that stirred a feeling in me.

The other day I entered my car in the morning only to realize that it had been vandalized sometime the night before. My GPS, which gives me a sense of direction in a world that loses me sometimes, was gone. At least five others neighbors had their cars tampered with as well.

While there was the actual loss of the GPS, there was this feeling of being violated and the thought of someone else using something that was mine and something that he had no right to possess. There was and is that sickening sense that the thieves could parade around with what was mine and claim to the world that always belonged to them, or far worse, bragging, "Look what I captured from the Jew."

The only thing worse would be for the thieves to pull their car into my driveway, steal my GPS, mount it on their windshields and claim ownership of the GPS and the driveway in which their car was parked.

No, this was not the destruction of our temples or pogroms or crusades. But I could not stop thinking of Jerusalem, the remnants of the Holy Temple, and other edifices in our land that is being taken from us. Taken from us with the proclamation of, ”Look what has always belonged to us, look what never belonged to the Jews, look what we have  taken back from the Jews.”

In 1096 when the first of the Crusades began the stated purpose was for the Christians to reclaim Jerusalem from the Moslems. Along the way, in France and Germany, many of our brothers and sisters met their untimely at the hands of these Crusaders. And so, began the precedent for state-sponsored mayhem against Jews on a wide scale throughout numerous countryside, occurring at the same time as opposed to destroying Jews in their homeland in a single attack.

Hitler thus had his template for his tornadoes of destruction in the 30's. State-sponsored murder turned into terrorism, what was once unconventional became commonplace. Suicide bombers went from being unheard of to run-of-the-mill.

For thousands of years it seems that the same story is replayed as we enjoy momentary respite from the sword of our enemies. In those brief interludes when perhaps no blood is being shed, we still shed tears as we witness someone else's vehicle parked in our driveway claiming ownership of the driveway and all of the belongings that were once ours.

With such a history how does one not despair? How does one allow himself to believe that one day it will be different?

The answer is that a lot of little things are happening every day that will culminate in a different big picture. All too often we wait for that one great event that will reshape history and destiny. Those moments rarely occur. Instead, it is the little moments that we tend to ignore that, taken together, create change; a new direction and light where there was only darkness but a moment before. How do I know this?

Because as I sit on the floor every Tisha B'Av,  mourning the destruction of world Jewry throughout the ages, I remind myself that my father, his brother and my grandparents escaped from Nazi Germany on Tisha B'Av night in 1940.

I am tempted to say that the rest is history, but in actuality the rest is destiny.