Appearance, Acceptance and Tisha B’Av

I’ve been thinking about appearance, I belong to a community that is all on the same wavelength, they all practice very similarly, they all dress similarly, it is a community that has an amount of conformity to it. That’s one of the things I like about it, even if I don’t match that same wavelength, it’s refreshing to be in a place with so many different permutations of the same idea. For all its ‘conformity’ it’s still remarkably diverse

Even given that diversity I still stick out and you’d think in that context that it would be weird for someone like me, to find a place in it, especially when I seem quite the outlier. In Jerusalem much of the way I dressed, many of the things I did were symbols of my freedom from and lack of attachment to the system that surrounded of me. I don’t mean to suggest that those were the only things that drove my decisions about appearance and actions but to it definitely played a role sometimes more sometimes less.

They were my assertions that while I was there, I wasn’t all there, that I was different. Here in this place while many of my actions are in their essence the same, they are symbols of the exact opposite idea… funny how that can happen…

While there I felt the need to rebel, to show my lack of conformity to some, not all of the ideas I was being exposed to, here in this community I’ve made for myself I feel none of that, and thus actions that look the same on the outside hold a profoundly different message. Here I do the things I do because they are me, because they are a genuine expression of who I am and what I believe, they aren’t a rebellion, they’re an acceptance.

They’re not an advertisement for my uniqueness in any way, except in the simple act of being me, being a part of my personality, one that neither I nor the community I’m a part of believes makes a person any more or less of a person to do. I love that. I love that something that I once used to differentiate myself is now an act of accepting myself. This is me, I’ve made a lot of changes, I’ve grown a lot, seen a lot and this is still me.

That’s one of the reasons why all of us need to be careful about judging people for their actions and appearances to quickly, we’d all like to think that we can just separate looks and actions and you name it. That we can distill actions and label those actions as one thing or the other, that things that look the same are the same. But we can’t because actions that look exactly the same on the outside can mean completely different things depending on the time or place in which they are done and it’s too easy to forget.

Yesterday was Tisha B’Av. On Tisha B’Av we mourn the loss of the Bais Hamikdash (the temples: there were two) the first one was destroyed for the crimes of sexual immorality, murder and idolatry.

The Second temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred; baseless hatred is not plain hatred. Plain hatred has a reason. For example, you hate a person who causes you financial loss or physical discomfort. Baseless hatred occurs when another person's mere presence threatens to diminish the importance of their being in their own eyes and it is for this reason that we are still in exile.

It is only when we begin to allow ourselves to see past all of our assumptions, all of the nonsense that we can begin to see people for what they truly are, for what those actions truly mean, may we all merit the humility to do so.

She-yibaneh beis hamikdash bi-m'heirah v'yameinu v'sein chelkeinu b'sorah-secha