Tisha B'Av On Fire- What Side Of The Border Are You On?

I want to share with you a small idea about tishabove. In a few days, I'm going to the country of Korea. Not the north, but the south. South Korea is a country of lights and freedom and innovation. A player, a place where you can dream and move and build, where there's Wi-Fi in the subways and there's 5G in the mountains and there's robots running around doing things for people. But just above South Korea, just a couple miles in the distance, there's another Korea. North Korea. A place completely locked in time. A country completely frozen in darkness. There's no normal cell phones. There's no internet. There's no access to truth or to history or the outside world. There's just lies and silence. But the people that go that live there go about their lives like everything is normal. In fact, the North Korean government convinced them that they are living in utopia while the rest of the world is decaying and crumbling. They are convinced that they are a model society. The citizens of North Korea walk around completely, entirely unaware that the objective quality of their lives is about a quarter of the rest of the world. They have absolutely no idea that their reality is about a quarter of what it could be. Now imagine if someone one person sneaks across the North Korean border and whispers into the ear of a regular obedient family and he says to them, "You know that there's a whole another world out there. A world where people live freely. Where ideas are born. Where beauty thrives. Where you can say what you think. Where you can know what actually happened in history. where there's music and color and laughter and connection and technology and modern medicine and a glorious wondrous world. That family, they would sit there stunned, completely frozen, because for the first time they'd realize that they've been living inside of a lie, that they're living in a prison that they never knew they were in. And they would cry, not because their lives changed, but because for the first time they realized what they were missing out on. Tishabove is that whisper to us. Tishabove is a whisper from across the border that tells you there was once a world, a world infinitely greater than this one, and you've never known it. You were born in exile. You've never tasted it. You've never smelled it. You don't even realize what you've lost. We sit on the floor every year trying to cry. But how do you cry for something you've never seen? Something that doesn't exist in your memory? How do you cry when life is pretty good? So, let me whisper it to you. There was once a world where the sky felt closer, where the fruits were sweeter, where the air was purer, where the land gave you everything you needed, where there was no such thing as spiritual confusion. You didn't wonder if you were connecting to Hashem. You felt him in your bones. There was no hustle to survive. There was no drowning in bills. There were no plagues or pandemics or cancer or fear. There was no silence from heaven. There was dignity. There was clarity. There was beauty. The Jewish people walked tall. We were respected. We were admired. Nations all over the world poured into our cities, bringing us gifts out of honor. We lived in peace. We lived with meaning. And most of all, we lived with truth. You didn't need to guess if you were d if your dominating was enough or if your learning counted. If your heart was heard. You knew Hashem was close. He was real. He was palpable. You didn't believe in him. You knew him. And we lost that that whole world. Tishab is not about mourning a building. It's about mourning a reality, a life, a level of being we've never known, a quality of life that is 10,000 times better than what we have right now. So when people say, "How can I mourn the B mikdash when my life's pretty good?" I have one simple question to ask it. Is it really good? Or are you just living in North Korea? Are we living in a world so cut off, so broken, so spiritually limited that we don't even realize what we're missing? Do we really think this is it? This life of spiritual fog, of uncertainty, of exile, of inner struggle. This is the dream. Yeah, we get used to this world where the world we're handed. We adjust. We adapt. We convince ourselves it's normal, that this is good enough. But what if it's not? What if this life is only a fraction of what we're created for? What have we been living with the spiritual amnesia, mistaking exile for home and darkness for light? Are we walking through life unaware of the unfathomably wondrous world Hashem wants us to be living in? Not because we're blind, but because we've forgotten how to look. Is not about sadness, per se. It's about waking up. It's the day we dare to say, "This isn't the world we were meant for." The Jewish people were built for more, for clarity, for peace, for closeness to Hashem. So real you can feel it in your bones of our souls. Remember, even if our minds have forgotten, deep down there's a quiet cry, an ache, a longing for a world we've never seen, but we're always meant to live in. So let the whisper rise. Let it open your heart. Let it shake you. Not with despair, but with hope. Because when the yearning becomes real, the the redemption gets closer. This tishabove asks yourself, "Will I hope? Will I cry? Will I plead for a world better in every which way? Or will I foolishly walk right back into North Korea?