3 Minutes for the 3 Weeks - Don't Despair or Give Up

if you had to choose one word to characterize these three weeks the nine days and tish above itself it would be mourning grieving a sense of a veilus a sense of loss but the truth is the things for which we are mourning happened so long ago the destruction of the two bodies the crusades the inquisition the calamities of the past how do we relate to them how do we identify how do we feel that loss how can we be filled with grief and the answer i believe is that we're not mourning things from long ago we're mourning things from right now any generation which the best is not rebuilt means that we have to look in the mirror and say to ourselves if the bashar natash existed right now it would be cause for it to be lost because we are not living the best lives that we can we are grieving and we are mourning we are looking back on the year that was and we see the potential that we didn't fulfill the opportunities that were lost the time that was squandered the mistakes that we made the fact that we were hopeless and helpless that we didn't give it our best and we didn't give it our all and we didn't accomplish who we could be and the difference that we could have made in fact we let it all precipitated the ninth of our being designated as a inauspicious sad day in perpetuity was the sin of the spies they came back and they reported something negative to the people and the people panicked they feared they cried they cried for the entire night and god said you cry for no reason i'll give you a reason to cry and boy has he ever throughout the generations the centuries and the millennia what was the report they gave that night spies came back the men who had gone with and they said we cannot go up they are stronger than we we don't have what it takes we can't get it done they were hopeless and helpless they didn't believe in themselves they didn't believe they had yesh they had despair they gave up and we too too many times we didn't believe in ourselves and who we could be the type of mothers and fathers husbands and wives the type of de hashem the type of co-workers or colleagues what we could get done in our davening in our learning in our chassid we didn't believe in who we could be the best version of ourselves the parts of ourselves we wanted to conquer or purge to realize the best of who we could be and so i propose to you that we sit on the ground and we said but we mourn and we grieve not only for things long ago but for the peace of ourselves that died that we cannot recover the time that cannot be made up the muslim people says teaches a person should always keep in mind before whom they will give din din means judgment and means reckoning what's the difference between the two the villain explains the dinner refers to judgment for the mistakes we gave into temptation we did the wrong thing we made poor decisions but not about what we did wrong is being accountable for what we could have done right what we didn't when we wasted that time we missed opportunities we'll give din for mistakes but will also be held accountable for hedge bone the calculation of what we could have accomplished if we'd only taken advantage of the time that we have that we claim we don't voltaire once said every man is guilty of all the good deeds he did not do and on tish above these three weeks nine days we sit on the floor we mourn we grieve for all the things that we did not do we analyze and we reflect on what we didn't become the time that we lost and squandered and we promise and we pledge to make it up this year and that is how we will bring the redemption one brick at a time