Seven-year-old David is punished by his grandmother. “You may not play outside with your friends today,” she instructs. “You must stay in this house and go to bed an hour early.” Of course, David wants to know why. Her answer: “Forty-two years ago your mother and her siblings didn’t listen when I called them to come inside for supper. They kept playing basketball in the neighbor’s yard.” David scratches his head and wonders why he is being punished for something his mother, her brother and two sisters did forty-two years earlier.

This week we observe the 17th of Tammuz, a day of fasting to commemorate the day the walls of Jerusalem were breached following a long siege, ultimately leading to the destruction of the Temple three weeks later at the hands of the Babylonians, and then a second time, centuries later, by the Romans.

Why are we, today, fasting for the destruction that occurred over 2,000 years ago? It’s certainly not our fault that the Temple was destroyed. Those responsible are long gone. The Jewish people at that time refused to listen to the many prophets who warned them to repent and better their ways. Two thousand years later we are still suffering the consequences of their misbehavior.

Sounds like little David being forced to pay the price for his parent’s misbehavior, doesn’t it? But there’s a difference. David is powerless to fix his parent’s mistake. We are not.

According to the Talmud, “Every generation for which the Temple is not rebuilt, it is considered as though the Temple was destroyed for that generation.” Taking this into consideration, the fast day becomes a day of opportunity and growth, rather than a day of sadness and punishment. It becomes a day when we are empowered to rectify the cause of the Holy Temple’s destruction, by actively looking for opportunities to perform good deeds.

The mitzvot we do benefit not just ourselves, but the entire Jewish nation. In his works, Maimonides describes a global scale, where good deeds and not-good deeds are weighed against each other. Each mitzvah that we perform adds weight to the “good side,” joining thousands of years of good deeds, dedication and service by our ancestors. If we keep in mind that our next action may the very one that will tip the scale in our favor, perhaps we will be inspired to perform just one extra mitzvah. And maybe, just maybe, that good deed will be the one to catapult us out of this long exile and into messianic times—may that be very soon.

Miriam Szokovski,
on behalf of the Chabad.org Editorial Team