Page 20 - Issue 15

It made its way into our mysticism as we were told ן ֶק ֶתְל
םָלוֹע ָה letaken ha’olam – as what world needs healing or
fixing if it isn’t currently hurt or broken?

This discomfort propelled us to do things that we could
never even have dreamed of, and to honour Yom Kippur
as our most holy of days as we seek forgiveness for the
endless number of sins that we commit on a yearly basis.

But, then again, perhaps we fell in love with this
discomfort because our surroundings required this in
order to reconcile our reality with our outside brutality.

After all, how could we feel like we belonged as we wept
by the rivers of Babylon?

How could we feel like we belonged as we were
expelled, forcibly converted, tortured and murdered
throughout the world as we were told that we were what
was wrong with it, that we were the harbingers of an
insatiable plague as much as we were the plague itself?

How could we feel like we belonged as we were
ghettoised, pogromed, dhimmied, scapegoated, starved
and gaslit?

It was this discomfort which would partially compel us to
restart our nationhood programs at a greater level in the
1800s, as we sought to remedy this discomfort through
an assortment of remedies to our problems. Some
Orthodox traditionalists sought to self-isolate from the