The story of Tisha B'Av is famous: it is about a man named Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. They were thrown out of a party.
Last night, our organization, Kesher, had an unbelievable night. We had 60 classes across the community, girls' classes and boys' classes, and I went to maybe 10 of them. In one of the classes, one of the rabbis asked this question. He said, “What kind of name is Kamtza? What kind of name is Bar Kamtza? What does it mean? Kamtza is cheap and it's narrow. What does it mean? It means fight. Why does someone have a name, Kamtza?”
So he said that somewhere it says that in Aramaic, Kamtza is the same word as Chagav, which means a grasshopper. What does that mean, a grasshopper? A Chagav, a grasshopper. What that means is that the parents of these people were insecure people. And so they named their child a name that reflects a grasshopper, like an insecure name. What's unique about this? What's special about this? It is that there is a time in the Torah when we see the word Chagav. When is that time? When the Jewish people sent spies into Israel. And they sent in 12 spies, and 10 came back. 10 Meraglim (spies) came back with a bad report. And one of the things they said was, “We felt like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and that's how we looked in their eyes.” The people were so giant that we felt like grasshoppers, and that's how they looked at us. And all commentaries ask the same question: Grasshopper, how do you know they looked at you like grasshoppers? The answer is, they felt like grasshoppers, and they felt small. And once you feel small, you project that smallness, thinking that everybody is talking about you with the same smallness that you feel. They describe themselves as Chagavim.
You know what the night was when the Meraglim came back with the negative report about Israel? The night was Tisha B'Av. And so the eventual story of the destruction of the second Beit HaMikdash happens by two people with the same name, with the same insecurity.
You can't live this scared of your shadow. You can't live that preoccupied by the conversations. You have to live with an internal confidence. Yes, you have to be mindful of social cues. Don't be a dummy. But at the same time, you have to live with a certain happiness and confidence, because if you don't, you'll be focused on everything you shouldn't be focusing on, and you'll never be focusing on the things that will rebuild our Beit HaMikdash. You'll never be focusing on the things that give you confidence, that give you strength. The things that you need to work on. Hashem allowed you to fool the world so that you can maintain your kavod, so you can maintain your dignity. But don't spend your whole life fooling the world. Once you have the world fooled, now work on it yourself. Think about yourself. Think about your own internal confidence.