Said to Myself

This week was a big week for us filled with some of our nation’s the highest of the highs and lowest of the lows. Off the heals of Yom HaShoah last week, this week was packed with Yom haZikaron followed by Yom Haztamaut. While we have spent most of history in diaspora we never lost our hope to return to Israel. Our national strength and fortitude was forged in our march from slavery in Egypt to receive the Torah at Sinai. During this time we are also counting the Omer as we count the time from Passover to Shavuot. In a short period of 49 days our ancestors were transformed from a disembodied slaves to a nation standing before the Creator ready to receive the Torah.

The Kabbalists projected on to this journey of 7 weeks a whole program of traveling through a 7 by 7 grid of the different valences of experiencing the sephirot, emanations of the Divine. It seems fitting that today the 25th day of the Omer at the culmination of this week commemorating the recent survival and flourishing of the Jewish people we take notice of the moment of being Netzach ShebeNetzach, perseverance in the valence of perseverance. Today is the day in which we celebrate our steadfastness in doing something despite the difficulty or delay in achieving success.

Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, writes a lot of grit. You should check out her Ted Talk:

Professor Duckworth wrote:

…grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.( Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success)

This reminds me of how we see ourselves in the Hatikvah :

Then our hope – the two-thousand-year-old hope – will not be lost: To be a free people in our land

We are truly a gritty and ancient people with a youthful soul. It is clear we have the capacity to endure much more than we can imagine, and to prevail under the most trying of circumstances. Today more than ever the world needs our grit to help in persistence in the resistance. We need to persevere, this will take some time.

-More on Netzach