In the Narrow Places

The Day of Atonement’s repentance is personally cathartic. Tisha B’Av’s mourning is nationally cathartic. It allows us to grieve as a unit and then move on, strengthening our national identity by rebuilding from the ashes of memory.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik observed that American Jews do not always have sufficient sensitivity to Torah values to achieve spiritual depth. Human happiness does not depend on comfort. The American Jew follows a philosophy which equates religion with making Jewish life more comfortable and convenient. It enables the Jew to have more pleasure in life. This de-emphasizes Judaism’s spiritual values.

“Mi shenikhnas Av, mematim – besimĥa, As Av approaches, we minimize – with happiness.”

With the loss of the Beit HaMikdash we became less of who we were and who we wanted to be. Tragedy has that impact.

Rabbi Soloveitchik once questioned the implications of a midrash on Genesis 1 that states that God created worlds and obliterated them before arriving at our story of creation. He answered that “A Jew has to know how to emulate God, and, like God, to continue to create even after his former world has been eradicated.”

It is not easy to predict where God is to be found, so sometimes we can fulfill Isaiah’s demand by identifying where God is not in our lives.

Who truly provides consolation – those at a shiva who ignore the pain and speak of unrelated issues, or those who are not afraid to ask “When did your mother get sick?” “What did she have?” “How did you handle it?”? These questions do not minimize the pain; they invite the mourner into a dialogue about what really happened, into a human encounter more profound for its harsh honesty. God consoles us in this prayer not by avoiding the pain but by mourning the loss with us.

Since memory is so unreliable and yet so necessary for Jewish life, the sages of the Talmud codified practical memory triggers around Holidays and historical events.

Hope is never rational.

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The sigh is a non-word that signifies disgust or resignation or despair. Tisha B’Av is a day of sighs.

As a youth, Rabbi Soloveitchik once asked his father why so many questions in the Talmud remain unanswered. His father explained to him that God wishes to teach us a lesson that “not every event and happening can be comprehended by the limited mortal mind.”

Tisha B’Av is precisely this reminder to us as Jews to take the time to mark difficulties, not escape from them.

Tisha B’Av also reminds us that there is a language of pain, a way to articulate suffering.

Meaningful distractions are still distractions.

Seek God in places not only where God is likely to be found but also where you are most receptive to God’s presence. Receptivity can happen in the least likely of places.

Sometimes, we find purpose in our suffering. Finding purpose is not the same as explaining the cause of a problem, although the two are often confused.

Allow silence to hover without feeling the need to punctuate it with talk. Silence is often the most noble, honest and understandable response to suffering.

God’s world, not only ours, contracted in the ashes of destruction. The God who has dominion over all, lost a touch-point to humanity. This shrinking of the sacred is what we mourn. The collapse of beauty,

One scholar in the Talmudic sea remarked that “Since the Temple was destroyed, all God has in this universe is four cubits of Jewish law” (Berakhot 8a). This measurement is a standard rabbinic measurement demarcating personal space. It is virtually impossible to conceptualize the fact that once the majestic Temple was gone, God went from possessing a universe, to “owning” only the equivalent of six feet of a study hall. Again, the experience of exile and destruction changed us. It narrowed us. It even narrowed our perception of God’s space in our world

We often find ourselves immersed in the particularities of Jewish law, reviewing the minutiae of observance, not always as a preparation for this period but often as a distraction.

Consolation is about looking exceedingly closely at a past from which it is all too easy to turn away and deriving meaning and comfort from it. It is the confrontation of grief in company. Think about a visit to a mourner, a house of shiva. Many mourners during the shiva period try to focus all conversation on the person lost. We are there to be together with the mourner as he looks back. The consolation is in the details, in the reflection and contemplation of a life and the often sad and heart-wrenching last months and days. One can only really get to the other side of tragedy by immersing oneself in it and then emerging.

Our hearts may be like heavy stones, which we cannot possibly lift. What we then must do is take a hammer of words and break our hearts of stone. Then we can lift them up to God.