A fear of Cossacks

I was walking up to my Tai Chi class tonight when I realized I had walked down a familiar line of thought. I imagine some disaster that suddenly, God forbid, takes my family away. I imagine my reactions and how it would destroy my life. Usually, when I catch myself thinking these thoughts, I thank God for what I have, and try to feel the fear of loss more intensely so that I can put it back in its appropriate place and not let it control my actions.

Tonight, however, I suddenly felt the fear as part of something much, much larger. It almost felt as if the whole city was a part of the intensity of this fear. I had to stop walking several times and just let the fear run on past me. It almost felt like the ancestral flow. That's when I realized I was probably feeling the Jewish fear that no matter how good it gets, someone will come and destroy it all and take it away from us. I call this the Cossack fear, though it should probably be called the Tisha B'Av fear (that's the date of the destruction of the second temple).

It's the fear that we are going to be sitting in our village, and then, for no reason we can see, a bunch of cossacks come running through town destroying everything. How many times has this been repeated in our history: the expulsion from Spain, the holocaust, and now, the fear that Israel will fall. Does it happen because we don't know how to deal with this fear, and we remember all the times we were almost destroyed (or were destroyed) without knowing how to respond to the fear that comes with it? Or is it just a part of who we are?

Another possibility is that this is my personal ancestral fear, as my forebearers certainly had life hard. I'll have to interact with it a little more to get a clear read on it.

What I am really interested in is how to change this fear, or if that is even possible. It was so powerful, so strong, that I'm not even sure it can be done. In that case, I'll have to learn how to live with it without giving it any power over me.