What I Mourn This Tisha B'Av

For the past few years, my husband and I have been attending an outdoor reading of Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) on the night of Tisha B’Av. We sit on low, stone steps, in an open plaza, overlooking Jerusalem. And we hear about the ancient destruction of the city.

Tonight, I had the opportunity to speak briefly before the reading. This is what I said.

 

A few months after we moved to Israel, I was in synagogue on a Friday night. We were singing Mizmor l’David (Psalm 29), which comes in the middle of the Kabbalat Shabbat service, welcoming in Shabbat. The words are about the Voice of God and the impact of the power of God’s Voice on all of creation. The 8^th verse speaks about how the Presence of God, and the power of the Voice of God is so intense, it shakes up even the desert itself.

 

In that moment, sitting in synagogue in my new community (which is located in the Judaean desert), with the white curtain that serves as a divider between the men and the women gently swaying in the desert breeze, I was deeply aware of the connection between the verse I was singing and my new reality. In that moment, I experienced a profound connection to God, to the Land of Israel and to the story of the Jewish people. It was an electric moment that took my breath away.

 

I remember it with great fondness, because it was one of the transcendent moments of connection with which I have been blessed. There have been others. They occur at unexpected times, most commonly when I’m learning and sometimes when I’m in deep conversation with another human being. I sense of the Presence of God.

 

These transcendent moments are very precious. But they fade quickly, leaving a wispy memory of a connection to God and to something mightier than my ordinary consciousness.

 

On Tisha B’Av, we are taught that we are mourning the destruction of the two Holy Temples in Jerusalem. The second one was destroyed almost 2,000 years ago, nearly 100 generations before anyone who is alive today was born. The question is often asked, how do we mourn for something we never knew?

 

I believe that whenever we are privileged to experience one of these transcendent moments, one of these moments where our souls are momentarily elevated, it’s a gentle reminder from God about what we once had, and what the Third Temple will restore to us.

 

When the Temple was standing, it wasn’t just a magnificent building on the top of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was where humanity could come and bathe in God’s Presence. As Sara Yocheved Rigler explains, “The Holy Temple was the mystical vortex between the higher, spiritual worlds and this gross, physical world. The Temple service was an elaborate mystical procedure that kept the aperture between the worlds open and functioning. The Divine Presence manifested itself in the Temple and through the Temple. When the Temple was destroyed, that palpable Divine Presence removed itself from our world.”

 

That is what I mourn this Tisha B’Av. Not the buildings of wood and stone, but the fact that humanity once had, and is now deprived of, access to a palpable sense of the Divine Presence. When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, it was impossible to question the existence of God, because God was clearly discernible.

 

Like others, I have my moments of unmistakable connection to a sense of holiness, to a sense of divinity. But because we still have Tisha B’Av, because we have not yet been redeemed and we do not live in the presence of the Third Temple, these precious moments are as ephemeral as a snowflake on the tongue.

 

God has promised that the Jewish people will live in the splendor of the Divine Presence once again.

 

But for now, we are bereft.

 

This is what I’m thinking about, this is what I’m mourning, on this Tisha B’Av.