Lamentations: Third Kinah – Stanza 4 Line 1 Part Three

“…and the luminaries turned dark.” Part of what we lost with the destruction was the sense of our importance to God. The destruction and ensuing exile made us feel rejected.

Our low place in the world deprived us of the awareness that the world was created for us. Rashi, Bereishis 1:1: “The world was created for Israel, as it says, (Yirmeyahu 2) ‘The first of His crop.’” We were deprived of our sense of importance to all of creation.

We must use Torah as the means to recapture this feeling, not simply as a slogan, but as a sense of reality. This can only come if we believe that even the Torah was created for us.

All these ideas become more powerful when we realize that even the angels, the sun and moon, were created to serve us. The angels are there for us. They want us to succeed and thrive. Even the highest spiritual worlds suffered from the destruction and exile. We mourn for the angels too.

3) God reacts to us as a human king would for his son.  We tend to forget that God loves us and how intense that love is. The above Midrash describes God wanting us to experience His love on the most fundamental human level; the love of a parent for a child. Most of our unhappiness would disappear if we realized that the Creator of the Universe loves us even more than a parent loves a child. Our suffering makes us forget. We may speak about God’s love for us; we may mention it in our prayers. We do not experience it.