As dangers loom, our ancestors give me strength

On the first of Av, 586 BCE, some Jewish mother inside Jerusalem must have breastfed her baby, even as Babylonian soldiers were fighting against the last Judean defenders three streets… two streets… one street away.

A different Jewish mom was changing diapers (or their ancient equivalent) as the Romans stormed through Jerusalem centuries later.

And yet a different Jewish mom sang her kids to sleep in the ghetto.

Someone might look at this truth and deem it tragic. How fragile life is, this theoretical someone might exclaim. How sad, that so many little acts of love were doomed to be swept aside and into death by the catastrophes that loomed above them.

I choose to look at this same truth and marvel at the tenacity of our ancestors, at their courage. And on this first of Av, 2024 CE, as I pack my son’s lunch for camp, I feel that ancient courage flowing through my veins.

I am not afraid today.

Nor shall I allow the possible future to stop me from living, loving, now.

And, what’s more, I can’t help but feel that my great-great-great-grandmothers, all those brave women who went on living, are looking at me – at us – with awe and pride and satisfaction.

Because we continue their legacy of living on even in the shade of possible catastrophe, but we have so much more power than they did to shape our national reality. We go on raising children as they did, but we also have a state, an army. Even an Olympic team.

I think of the ancient Jewish woman who saw the Roman coin that depicted Judea Capta, captured Judea, in the shape of a captive woman. I think of how she saw her own fate imprinted in that coin, in the product of her captors. I think of the courage she embraced when she chose to keep on living, even thus.

Her courage, and the courage of countless Jewish women and men like her in the millennia behind us, brought us to this day.

A day when our enemies no longer have the power to coin our future for us.

A day in which we will go on purchasing the future we want to give our children with our little daily choices to keep on going, keep on living.

But also with a state’s, with our state’s, strength.