When the tears don’t come naturally
I want to start with a confession that I suspect many of us share, whether or not we would readily admit it. I have a hard time crying for the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash.
This phenomenon is not unique to our generation. The Midrash (Eicha Rabbah, Petichta 24; see also Sanhedrin 104b) relates that Rabban Gamliel once heard the anguished cries of a mother in his neighborhood whose son had died. He could not help but weep with her. Who wouldn’t? He was deeply moved by her pain. Then, says the Midrash, he also began to cry over the Churban Beis Hamikdash.
Perhaps Rabban Gamliel also struggled to connect to the Churban Beis Hamikdash, and he was wise enough to channel his way in through pain that seemed more relatable. This is not a “Tisha B’av hack” and not disingenuous because perhaps every pain we experience can be traced back to the Churban Beis Hamikdash. Here we are in the Nine Days, approaching Shabbos Chazon, and if I am honest, I am thinking more about missing meat and my itchy beard from not shaving than I am about the Churban. I am not there yet.
• • •
Even on Tisha B’Av itself, we find that genuine mourning for the Churban does not always come naturally. In Yirmiyahu 9:16, the Navi calls for the professional mourners, “Hisbonenu v’kir’u la-mekonenos v’savo’enah,” urging them to come and awaken the people to cry, to feel, and to mourn. Even Yirmiyahu understood that sometimes our hearts need help. He called upon professional mourners to awaken the nation’s tears.
Another tangible pathway is through the Kinos we recite on Tisha B’Av. One of the most elegant explanations comes from Rabbi Soloveitchik, who says that the Kinos comprise the diary of the Jewish people. I don’t know how many of you have had the zechus, though at times it can be awkward and even painful, to read a diary that has been entrusted to you or letters exchanged between grandparents through both good times and bad.
I think most of us would agree that there is something deeply powerful about that experience. In many cases, those pages are the closest we will ever come to truly knowing the people who wrote them.
Through the Kinos, we are reading the diary of our people, what they lived through, what they suffered through, and what they died through. Holding that diary in our hands, we remember that we belong to a people who refuses to forget.
• • •
I remember years ago hearing Rabbi Pesach Krohn tell a story about the Six-Day War. When the Kotel and Har HaBayis were returned to Jewish hands, one of the greatest moments not only in modern Jewish history but in all of Jewish history, soldiers from every level of religious observance stood together before those ancient stones.
The Kotel did not look as it does today. The broad plaza had not yet been built, and the area surrounding the Wall was neglected and strewn with debris after years under Jordanian rule. It was far from the inspiring sight we know today.
One of the secular soldiers suddenly began to cry, and his friend asked him why.
“You don’t get it,” he replied. “I’m crying because I don’t know what there is to cry about.”
Each of us has to find our own tunnel into the Churban.
Perhaps it is through the Kinos. Perhaps through another person’s pain. Perhaps through the realization that we no longer know what there is to cry about. Maybe we will not cry this year because we fully understand the Churban. Maybe we will cry because we have finally begun to understand how much we have forgotten. And maybe that first honest tear is where the rebuilding begins.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
