Festival of Sadness

by Rabbi Yehuda L. Oppenheimer
Longing for a better future.
Unless things change a whole lot in the next few weeks, we will one
again be going through the days leading up to and including Tisha B'Av,
the Ninth Day of the Month of Av, the saddest day on the Jewish
calendar. Year after year, we reflect on our condition in the Diaspora,
and what this long, seemingly endless exile is supposed to teach us,
while awaiting the long sought for Redemption.
There is an interesting anecdote recorded regarding a meeting between
the prophet Jeremiah and the famous Greek philosopher, Plato. Jeremiah
was mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, and Plato engaged him in
conversation. Impressed with Jeremiah's great wisdom, Plato asked him,
“I do not understand how a sage of your stature can weep so bitterly
over something that is over and done with. Surely, what is past is
finished with, and your concern now ought to be solely with the future,
and how you can influence it. What possible use can there be in all of
this weeping?”
Jeremiah answered, “I cannot give you a proper answer to your logical
question, for you will not understand it.”
Was Plato not right? And surely now, 2500 years later, is it not time
to focus on the present and the future, and to let bygones be bygones?
Can we never forget? Can we never forgive? After all this time, how can
we spend three weeks of every year going into greater and greater
mourning, culminating in a day of fast and sadness?
In fact, one of the great blessings that God grants us is the ability
to forget painful memories. “God has decreed about a deceased person
that they should be forgotten from the heart” (Sofrim 21). If it was
not possible to forget, if the pain of losing a close relative or
friend remained always as immediate as when the loss first occurs, we
would be immobilized, unable to cope with life. It is a blessing that
while we always carry a memory of a departed loved one, we are able to
remove the pain of the loss from the forefront of our consciousness.
Nevertheless, this general rule does not hold here, as expressed by the
famous verse in Psalms, “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right
hand be forgotten!” We are bidden never to forget! The sages, by
instituting all of the laws surrounding these three weeks, made sure
that at least during one long period of the year, and several other
fast days year-round, not to mention the requests in our thrice-daily
prayers, that we would constantly remember and never forget to mourn
for Jerusalem.
The Slonimer Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom Noah Barzovsky, zt”l, wrote a
fascinating essay on this subject, in which he noted that central to
Tisha B'Av is the idea that we are not to make our peace, ever, with
the fact that the Holy Temple, the Beit Hamikdash, was destroyed. To
never allow ourselves the thought that we accept the post-Temple world
as the new, normal, permanent reality for us as Jews. The Temple is
Jerusalem was destroyed for many reasons, some more well known than
others. But that was never meant to be its final disposition. The day
that we stop hoping that the Beit Hamikdash will be rebuilt is the day
that its destruction will really be irreversible.
This is such a basic thought that it ought to permeate all of our
concerns in life. We struggle with our problems, with our kid's
education, with our personal growth, with financial problems,
existential problems; we look at the communal scene and the national
scene both here in Israel. We listen to the pundits and “wise men” who
have this solution to intractable problems or who point to this
occurrence to explain the crux of our quandaries, and we forget that
the main problem is Exile — our distance from God and his Holy Temple
in Jerusalem. That no matter how many problems we solve here in America
and Israel, and regardless of how much we grow in our spiritual lives
as Jews, we will have a huge gaping hole in our spiritual lives as long
as “we have been exiled from our land, and we cannot fulfill our
obligations in your great and holy House…”
Why are so many Jews distant from their spiritual roots? Why are there
so many terrible, endless problems between groups of Jews? How are we
ever going to be able to resolve the great issues that divide us, when
those matters are based on such fundamentally different outlooks on
what the Torah is, what it means to be Jewish, the nature of our Jewish
obligations, and how flexible can we be about adapting them for modern
times? What will it take to allow myriads of Jews who have no idea of
the beauty of Shabbat, keeping kosher, learning Torah, and Jewish
living to even have a real glimmer of what they are missing? How will
the great problems surrounding the Land of Israel ever be resolved?
When we will be able to always feel the indescribable joy of being
close to God without the inner contradictions and pain and difficulty,
and existential loneliness that we so often feel in our spiritual
quest?
Our aching longings to reunite with God and rebuild the Temple are the
building blocks of the eventual edifice. Although in many ways Judaism
teaches that what one does is more important than what one thinks or
believes, it is nevertheless true that “The longing to perform a
mitzvah, or to engage in a spiritual pleasure, is even greater than the
pleasure itself.” The active awaiting of its rebuilding, the tears shed
over its absence — the effort to not assimilate into the surrounding
culture and its alien values, but rather to strive to retain our
uniquely Jewish selves — these are what will eventually bring it back.
Every tear shed and every sigh over its absence is another element in
the building.
Thus, says the Slonimer Rebbe, the period of the three weeks between
the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B'Av are a period of crying, but a
positive period: a crying that is part of the rebuilding process. A cry
of hope, of longing for a better future — an expression from the
depths of the soul that we will never be satisfied and complacent in
our spiritual quest until we have achieved total Teshuva (repentance),
back to the closeness with God that once was and is still potentially
possible.
We must certainly face life with a happy, confident attitude. We must
take time to enjoy our growth, to celebrate our Jewishness, and to sing
with the joy of being fortunate to be engaged in building our spiritual
lives inwardly, as well as in our families and communities. But we must
also take the time to mourn a little inwardly; about all the potential
that is there, that is not yet being fulfilled. Only thus will we
continue to grow, and look forward to the day that our inner sanctuary
will be fully built, heralding the time of Mashiach, speedily in our
days.
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