What We’re Missing

I was eight years young. My mother’s father – my zaidie – had recently passed away, and I was still trying to come to terms with the concept of death. I was having a hard time grasping the idea that I would never again see my zaidie, whom I loved and adored. The fact that my mother was not home for the first week after so she could sit shiva with her mother, sister, and brother in my zaidie’s apartment in the Lower East Side only made it more difficult.

But shiva ended, my mother returned home, and life was starting to return to normalcy. Now, a few weeks later, for the first time since my zaidie died, we were going to visit my newly widowed bubby. We came to the door and rang the familiar bell. Bubby replied in her familiar way. It all seemed so usual, like it always was.

Then we entered the apartment. I will never forget how my mother began crying bitterly as we walked in. All the usual pictures were where they always were, the furniture was where it had always been, Zaidie’s myriad seforim were still lining the shelves of his study, and as usual Bubby was cooking something. But there was no big Gemara open in his study, no new seforim hidden under the dining room table, and, most profoundly, Zaidie did not come to greet us with his trademark gleaming smile.

That painful moment revitalized the anguish of the raw wound that Zaidie was gone.

My younger siblings, born after Zaidie’s passing, had a very different experience when they came to visit that apartment in later years. They could hardly understand the anguish we felt because they never knew Zaidie; they didn’t know what was missing.

We are very blessed in the current exile. We can visit Eretz Yisrael and the Kosel, there is no dearth of shuls or yeshivos throughout the country, and the proliferation of Torah and mitzvos is unparalleled. Yerushalayim has regained its status as the capital of our world, and the country is flourishing.

However, all is not well. As long as the Beis HaMikdash is not rebuilt and korbanos are not being offered, things are not as they should be. The greatest challenge for us is that we don’t even know what we are missing. We cannot fathom the excitement of offering a Korbon Pesach, and we have no inkling of the inspiration of seeing the kohanim performing the avodah while the levi’im sang with harmonious beauty. We do not know the excitement of the tri-annual pilgrimage for the holidays, and we never experienced the awesome trepidation of seeing the Kohen Gadol perform the Yom Kippur service. We were never privy to feeling devotion to G-d and acutely sensing that we had achieved atonement when offering a korbon.

Although we don’t know what we are missing, the very fact that we want to know what we are missing is indicative of the fact that we wish to connect with that forgotten world.

On Tisha B’Av, we demonstrate our connection, or at least longing for connection, with a more G-dly world. We remind ourselves that for all the blessings we have, G-d is not yet home. His presence may have never left, but we cannot experience it fully. We long for the day when the dome of the rock will be replaced with the third Beis HaMikdash, an eternal reunion, when all our tears will be dried forever.