We are now in the nine days, and this is the time to talk about the Emunah that we need to have during times of Churban/ destruction. One of the great Rabbis that guided the Jewish people during the Holocaust was Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, also known as the Ponevezher Rav. He was the Rabbi of the town of Ponevezh, which was wiped out. After the destruction, he went on to rebuild the Ponovezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, which is one of the largest Yeshivot in the world. He constantly instilled hope in people. He explains the following: Twice in the Torah, there is something called a tochacha/ rebuke. We read one before Shavuot in Behar/Behukotay, and one before Rosh Hashana in Parashat Ki Tavo. There is one glaring difference between the rebukes, which is brought down by the Or Hachaim HaKadosh. Parashat Ki Tavo ends without any words of comfort. It comes to an abrupt stop, saying, “You will go back to Egypt, and you will be sold to your enemies as slaves and maid servants, and no one will buy you.“ Whereas in Vayikra, it ends on the positive, “Even though all these things happened, you were not disgusting, I did not spit you out to destroy you… “ It goes on to say, “I will remember the covenant of Avraham, Yitzhak and Yaakov.” So why is that one ends with some level of positivity, whereas the other one does not? At the end of Ki Tavo (28,47), the Or Hachaim points out that the rebuke in Behar and Behukotay is said in the lashon rabim/plural form. When something is said in plural form, it refers to the Jewish people at large. The Jewish people at large have a promise that regardless of what is going on, regardless of the worst possible decrees against the Jewish people, those may apply to individuals, or large amounts of people, maybe even tens of thousands of people, but the Jewish people, as a whole, will never be wiped out. As it says, “The eternity of the Jewish people will never be falsified.” We are going to last forever, and therefore, the public rebuke ends off with the positive. On the other hand, individuals along the way might fall off, so the individual rebuke doesn’t necessarily end with a positive. There have been many individual decrees that ended negatively, such as with the tochacha of Ki Tavo. The Or Hachaim shows us how most of the pesukim are either singular or plural, based on which rebuke it is, but he gets stuck with a few pesukim that actually show up as plural, within the singular rebuke. One of them is actually the end of this rebuke where it says, “And you will be sold ( in plural) and no one will buy you.” The Or Hachaim has an answer, but the Ponovezher Rav says, quoting the Zohar Hadash in Ki Tavo, “Even these words that You will be sold and no one will buy you is also a positive endings, the the Jewish people will last forever.” How so? No one will want to buy you. That means that you’ll remain Avadim/ slaves to Hashem. You will remain servants of God forever. No one will want to take you in. He says that this is why the loshon is switched to plural. Yes, there will be individuals who will have been sold, or who have, so to say, sold their souls to the devil, and are no longer on the Jewish program. But otherwise, this is a positive ending for the Jewish people at large, at the end of Ki Tavo. The Jewish people at large will never be bought out. Our company will never be bought out. God will keep us, and never sell us. This was the Ponovezher Rav’s approach, throughout all of the difficult times, in order to infuse a level of hope in the people. Yes, there might be individuals who won’t make it, as they did not in the Holocaust. But the Jewish people will survive. This is what we have to think about, even during these nine days, when we discuss the tragedies of the Bet Hamikdash. We always have to remember that we, the Jewish people, will survive forever. Have a wonderful day.