Years ago, the mourning of Tisha B’Av felt distant. We sat on the floor and read about how the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed, of a city in flames and a people exiled. But we didn’t really know what we were missing. It was hard to cry for something abstract, so far removed from our modern lives.
But in recent years, the grief has become palpable. The losses are no longer just about what was, they’re here, now. Tisha B’Av doesn’t feel like a reenactment anymore.
In recent times we've had so much more to mourn. And then there are years like this one, when the world feels like it’s splitting at the seams, and despair hangs in the air like smoke. Sadness is not something we have to summon. It’s already here, pressing against our chests, burning in our throats.
It’s in the headlines we try to avoid and the images we can’t unsee. In propaganda videos that show hostages with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, emaciated bodies that look like they’ve been pulled from the rubble of another century. We thought we’d moved on from that kind of horror. But history has a way of folding in on itself, and the echoes of the Holocaust no longer feel so far away. They feel like a warning flaring in real time.
And then, beneath the weight of national sorrow, there’s the grief no one sees. The kind that doesn’t make the news but quietly unravels your world. We each carry something: some losses loud and life-shattering, others quieter but no less harsh.
For me, this year brought a loss of foundation-shaking grief. The kind you don’t bounce back from, you crawl through it. And then, when the dust hadn’t even settled, came another blow. Smaller, maybe. But grief doesn’t work that way. Pain doesn’t keep a scoreboard. And in the shadow of the first, the second was like salt in a wound that hadn’t even begun to close. Kind of like an aftershock that still steals your breath and leaves you gasping.
Grief on top of grief. National and personal. Collective and solitary. The sorrow of what was taken, and the hollow ache of what never had the chance to exist.
Tisha B’Av invites us to sit in that darkness. Not to tidy it up. Not to explain it away. Just to sit. To cry if we can, to feel if we dare. To stop pretending everything is okay.
Because some years, mourning doesn’t need rituals. It’s already stitched into our days, in the quiet moments, the empty spaces, the ache that doesn’t go away.
But maybe there’s something sacred in that. In not having to hold it together. In being given permission, no, the obligation, to fall apart a little. To remember that the world is broken, and that we are too.
And that the brokenness matters.
Because at its core, every loss, every wound, every shattering—personal or national—is a ripple from the same fracture. The pain of being in galus, of living in a world where Hashem feels hidden, where the Shechina has withdrawn and we’re left searching.
When we cry, we’re not just crying over what happened, we’re crying over the distance. Over how far we are from wholeness, from healing, from redemption. From G-d.
We cry because we remember that we weren’t meant to live like this.
And we cry because deep down, we still hope we won’t have to...very soon.
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