Chronicles, Cheshvan, Yerushalayim and Dress Rehearsals

"This life is not a dress rehearsal."   Charlie Truitt

Tanach ends with Divrei Hayamim, the Book of Chronicles, and Chronicles is a strange book.   I am no Biblical expert (and that's quite an understatement), but I'll tell you what strikes me:

1) "Been there, done that."
One's first thought when glancing through it, and from having seen it cited in other places, is that it is the book of Melachim, Kings, redux.    Again we meet King David, Shlomo Hamelech, and the line of the Kings of Judah.   It all seems eerily familiar.

2) "Begats"
Okay, I don't have the King James version, but English speaking people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have a passing familiarity with geneaologies in the Bible.    "So and so begat so and so".    In fact, the first 9 chapters of Divrei Hayamim 1 are just lists of people.


So, in a nutshell, what is going on here?    Divrei Hayamim does indeed cover a lot of the same stories as the book of Kings, and for good reason-- it is during this period of time that the first Beit HaMikdash was planned, built and ultimately destroyed.   And indeed, the Beit Hamikdash looms large in Divrei Hayamim.

And all those mind-numbing lists of people--- where else do we see them?    Well, if you're a good genealogy skipper, you skip over a whole bunch of them in shul this time of year, because Sefer Bereishit is chock full of genealogies.  (We won't touch on their importance and purpose, just on the parallel).

So let's add these together.   A book about the Beit Hamikdash, drawing on the style of the book about God's creation and choice of the descendants of Avraham.

What's the connection Divrei Hayamim is trying to make?   The story didn't just end with Bereishit.:   God didn't just create the world, and He didn't just create Avraham.  He created us, and we can create a spiritual place in the world, in the form of the Beit HaMikdash.

Today we have no Beit HaMikdash, but the truth of the matter still stands:  We can still make a spiritual place in this world, in our homes, in our friendships, in our businesses, in our shuls.

A friend of mine, Matt Eisenfeld, z"l, once told me upon returning from a trip from Israel:  "You know, we might not be able to be in Yerushalayim now, but we have an obligation to make this place, right here and now, into Yerushalyim."

His words echoed for me the other day in the words of Rabbi Bentzion Friedman, talking about this new month of Cheshvan:   "It's called 'MarCheshvan',  'bitter Cheshvan,' because there are no holy days.   But that just means we have to inject the holiness into it ourselves."

And the stakes are high.   Now is the time to build Yerushalayim, now is the time to add the holy days to Cheshvan.   Because, to quote again the (discomfiting) words of my friend Charlie Truitt, "This life is not a dress rehearsal."  It's the real thing.