Imagine that you have been told that you have a terminal illness and that you will die in exactly one year.  How does this make you feel?  Now, imagine one year has gone by.  It is the night before the day of your death.  All your affairs are in order.  You’ve made a will and made amends, and had time to tell the people that you love how you feel.  You lie down in your bed and as you drift off, you wonder what comes next.

Next morning you wake up… in your bed.  You did not die after all!  The sun is bright and shining and you feel completely healthy and healed.  How do you feel now?  Ready to jump out of bed and embrace the preciousness of life?  Full of gratitude that you can enjoy your friends and the feel of the sun on your skin and the taste of your favorite food?

Today (friday Aug 3), is precisely such a day!  It is the 15th day of the Jewish month of Av (tu b’Av in Hebrew), and it is the day that the Jewish people, after 40 years in the desert, stopped dying.  Almost 40 years earlier, it had been decreed that a generation would die in the desert, 15000 people, every year, on the 9th of Av.

Now, each Jewish month begins on the new moon.  So when the 9th of Av came and went and nobody had died, the people thought that maybe they had miscounted the days.  However, by the 15th, on the full moon, they knew that the 9th had passed and they rejoiced and celebrated and called the day a holiday.

On a practical level, we have been going through a process of being disconnected from Spirit.  I have certainly felt a strain on my faith, as I haven’t felt as close to the divine.  This past week, I have felt a shift happening, however, I also still feel a disconnect.

Now, with the arrival of tu b’Av, I am starting to trust and believe that the connection I am feeling is not imagined, but really coming back, and will continue to come back stronger and stronger.

And in this I rejoice, and I also will spend the next 6 weeks looking at what I learned about myself during the last month, and also at what I can do to strengthen the bond I have with god.

Are you ready to work on your relationship with your divine source, or are you going to forget what it felt like to be disconnected – to feel that all the good comes from your effort and all the bad is just bad luck?  Do you wish to repeat the cycle, or grow above it?

Something to think about of the next few weeks, yes?

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.