And because we are all related, I often see someone I feel I know. Sometimes there is a passing resemblance to a relative, a friend, or colleague. Or maybe I connect because I know that their dreams and goals and aspirations were the same as mine. And it becomes personal and real.
And for a few minutes, I see and feel the churban. I understand its horror and I finally experience Tisha B’Av on an emotional level.
Until I click off the website or toss the newspaper. And let my sugar-coated reality rescue me from getting mired in angry despair.
Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism gifted to human beings, allowing ourselves only a pinch of heartbreak on designated days as opposed to swallowing a huge mouthful that can choke us on a daily basis. What a bracha it is that for most of us, the Nine Days of Av end on the 10th and we can go about our daily business freely, unencumbered by the heavy chains of loss.
Tragically, that is not everyone’s reality, because for too many individuals and families, every day is Tisha B’Av.
I remember years ago walking in my neighborhood one morning and noticing a man whom I knew to be Jewish eating on his porch. I was about 8 years old, and a day-school student and aware that it was Tisha B’Av.
Though at that age every adult seemed rather old to me, I knew he really wasn’t and should have been healthy enough to fast, at least for a few hours as it wasn’t even noon yet. I called out to him and reminded him that it was Tisha B’Av. This man, a Holocaust survivor who must have been in his late 40’s, looked at me with what I can only describe as weighted dull eyes and said in Yiddish, “My child, for me every day is Tisha B’Av. ”
How could that be, I wondered in my youthful cluelessness. Tisha B’Av came only once a year. It was only later that I learned that he had been married with many children and his entire family had been wiped out. He mourned his loss every moment of his life.
I have come to realize that tragically, there are many shattered souls like him – men, women and children who have endured or currently endure horrific loss or deprivation – waking up in physical or emotional pain, and going to sleep that way. The reasons vary, but the reality is the same. Some have lost a parent, spouse or child whose love and unconditional support nourished and enhanced their lives. Others are enslaved by disease or severe handicap, while others are the hapless prisoners of emotional and/or physical abusers who terrorize them. Some are connected to these monsters by blood or marriage; some by circumstance.
Others mourn that they are alone, childless; or chronically physically or emotionally impaired, or that someone they love is in this bottomless pit of cruel dysfunction and that the status quo is unlikely to change.
Perhaps if we can relate to their pain; if like a bitter pill that must be taken daily, we could allow ourselves to experience a brief taste of their personal Tisha B’Av; if we could gain insight into what life is like for them, we will reach out to them and lend a hand to lift them out of the life-draining quicksand that engulfs them. So too, perhaps, will our Heavenly Father hasten our own collective Redemption.