The Pain That Grows

I once knew a family that owned a large, successful, multi-generational manufacturing business. When Chinese manufacturing arrived, the family made a principled choice. They would not move production overseas. They wanted to protect American jobs.

Competitors undercut them, the business was squeezed out, and it went bankrupt.

This was a wealthy family. The children believed they were set for life. An external force changed everything.

At the time, people felt the pain of the loss for the owner himself. He had gone from wealthy business owner to a man who had lost it all. That was the tragedy everyone could see.

But time revealed a deeper one. As the family grew, a pattern emerged. Many of the children, and then the grandchildren, struggled financially. What looked like one man's loss turned out to be a loss for generations. The tragedy did not shrink with distance. It grew.

That is a strange truth about loss. Sometimes we understand more with the passing of years. The further we stand from the event, the more of its shadow we can see.

A Moment or a Turning Point?

Consider September 11^th. Ask someone born in the last twenty years what happened that day, and they will tell you the facts: two hijacked airplanes flew into the Twin Towers. Accurate, but incomplete. Ask someone over the age of 45, and they will tell you something different. September 11^th was not a moment. It was a turning point.

Security lines grew longer. Water could no longer be carried onto a plane. And far more importantly, America lost its sense of security. It learned it could be attacked on its own ground. It went to war. The America of today is a different America because of that day. The event ended in hours. Its reverberations changed the course of a nation, and they have not stopped.

The people who lived through it did not understand it best on September 12^th. They understand it better now, because now they can see what it set in motion.

The Longest Shadow in Jewish History

This week, Jews around the world will mark Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av and the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. It is a fast day that mourns the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem, the first by Babylon over 2,500 years ago and the second by Rome in the year 70.

When we mourn on Tisha B'Av, we tend to travel backward in time. We place ourselves at the moment the Temple stood ablaze. We picture Jews sold as slaves and thrown to the lions in Roman amphitheaters. We focus on what was lost then.

But the family's bankruptcy teaches us something, and so does September 11th. The full weight of a catastrophe is not measured at the moment of impact. It is measured in everything that follows.

The Temple's fall was the climax of something larger: the collapse of the Jewish people as a functioning, independent nation in its own land. For nearly two thousand years, we lived without sovereignty, without security, without a home. We became a vulnerable people. The expulsions, the ghettos, the pogroms, the wandering from land to land, all of it flows from that break. Even today, the challenges to the legitimacy of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel draw their force from that long discontinuity. We were not a sovereign nation in our land for all those centuries, and the world has not let us forget it.

Every Generation Adds a Chapter

The rabbis understood this long ago. The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that every generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt is regarded as if it destroyed it. On first reading, that sounds unfair. What did we do? We were not there.

But the statement makes perfect sense once you grasp the principle. The destruction is not a sealed event in the past. It is an ongoing condition. Each generation lives inside its consequences, and each generation that does not repair the break becomes part of its story. Every generation adds another chapter to the cost. Every generation sees more of what was lost.

Which means the pain of the destruction has not gotten easier with time. It has gotten worse. Not because we feel the flames more vividly, but because we understand more fully what was set in motion when they burned.

Mourning with Maturity

This is what it means to mourn with maturity: to mourn the moment and the consequences.

So this Tisha B'Av, when you sit on the floor and hear the Book of Lamentations chanted in the dark, try two exercises rather than one. First, do what Jews have always done. Go back. Stand in Jerusalem as it burns. Feel the heat of the flames. Listen to the cries of the people. Experience the loss as they felt it.

Then do the harder thing. Come forward. Trace the line from that fire to everything it ignited: the wandering, the vulnerability, the two thousand years of homelessness, the Holocaust, the arguments still raging today about whether the Jewish people belong in their own land. Ask what it cost your great-grandparents. Ask what it costs you.

We are not remembering Tisha B'Av. We are still living inside it.

And yet Jewish tradition insists that this darkest of days carries a seed of light. An ancient teaching holds that the Messiah is born on Tisha B'Av. The day that marks the deepest break also holds the promise of repair. Mourning that grows with understanding is not despair. It is the measure of how much there is to rebuild.

May we merit to see the rebuilding, speedily and in our days.