Twelfth of Tammuz: No Prison Strong Enough

Beginning tonight, communities around the world will mark the 12th day of Tammuz and relive the saga of the imprisonment and release of the sixth Chabad Rebbe in the former USSR.

Thinking about these historical episodes challenges us to stretch our understanding of the inner life of the holy person in Jewish thinking. In immortalizing them we are suddenly wondering why it is that our Chasidic Superheroes didn’t flex more of their TZADDIK muscles in these kinds of situations. One approach: A radical theological notion: Nothing that happens to a Tzaddik in their life; good or bad, happens without their input. So if they are in a precarious spot it’s part of their plan or, in Hebrew, it’s “Behaskamasam” - they are in on it. While that’s a helpful way to address the theological conundrum of a person who has the ability to bless others when they are in dire straits and yet find themselves accused of spurious “crimes” and sentenced and locked up in a dark and dirty Soviet prison themselves; it leaves us hanging.

Even if we were to argue that we are all more in control of our destiny than we are aware, we are still not angelic beings and unlike the Rebbes who conversed fluently in the language of heaven AND earth, our primary fluency is in our human language, even while managing a broken “heaven-speak” here and there.

Truthfully, we too have the ability to declare that everything that happens to us happens with our consent, with our “Haskama.” How so? How can we talk about controlling our destinies when most of the time we have our hands full simply controlling our tempers or our inflated egos?

Here is an approach that was helpful to me; in fact, afterwards, I felt as if I had renewed my appreciation and understanding of the importance of commemorating this auspicious day. While our once-in-a-lifetime spiritual leaders may be in cahoots with the Supernal powers that be, (like the Biblical example of the Jews winning the war against the Amalekites only when Moses was holding up both arms) the rest of us are not. So if we want to identify more closely with this story we need to personalize it by identifying that which IS in our control. So when we talk about something happening with our consent, we don’t mean that we can control what happens to us. We CAN however, control our reactions. The way we MANAGE the cards that we have been dealt IS our Kryptonite. As the saying goes “pain is mandatory but suffering is optional.”

So on a practical note, let’s bless one another this Erev Shabbat with the power of radical acceptance of that which is beyond our control. At the same time we do have the power to summon the mindfulness to hold those things up to a higher light. We do that by living with the faith that wherever we are and whatever is happening to us, is exactly where we need to be, or where the universe needs us to be. In doing so we are reminded that there is no prison strong enough to lock away our core humanity.