Sefer Devarim begins with Moshe Rabbeinu’s recounting of the Jewish People’s history since the exodus from Egypt, through the years of desert-wandering.

And our communal reading of the beginning of the sefer coincides yearly with our own annual survey of millennia since, our lookback at the myriad travails our forebears endured; parshas Devarim always precedes Tisha B’Av.

Abba Shaul (Shabbos, 133b) tells us to emulate certain name-descriptions of Hashem: “Just as He is compassionate and merciful, so too should you be compassionate and merciful.”

I’ve wondered about the fact that Hashem’s most “descriptive” name, the Tetragrammaton, implies “timelessness,” its letters signaling “Was, Is and Will Be.” In what way might we even think of emulating His temporal omnipresence?

Perhaps, though, in a way, we can.

Jews have history on their hearts. We are exquisitely sensitive to the past, not only the recent, but the long-ago.

On Tisha B’Av, we will fast and mourn the tolls taken by our people’s travails over time. We will sit low for much of the day, and read about the destruction of the Batei Mikdash, reciting poetic dirges about those Jewish catastrophes and many others, down through the Middle Ages to more proximate collective Jewish tragedies.

The fact, though, that most of the events we will mourn took place hundreds, even thousands, of years ago does not make them less timely. We live in the past no less than the present.

And so, perhaps, combined with our determination to live meaningfully in the here-and-now and our relentless pining for the ultimate future – Tisha B’Av is pointedly followed by the “Seven of Consolation,” when the haftaros read in shul consist of Divine reassurances that there is an end-point to history — we imperfectly parallel Hashem’s existence outside of time.

© 2021 Rabbi Avi Shafran