Tisha B’Av: Alas! The power and potential of tears

There are times in our lives when the pain is so severe, so immediate, that the potential exists that like a raging tidal wave crashing on the beach, we will be swept away into a sea of uncertainty, unable to find our bearings ever again. The brilliance of our Jewish tradition is that we are provided vessels in which we can hold this loss, contextualize it in a larger historic and even cosmic dimension. For example, in comforting the mourner, we wish the mourner that she be comforted “among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” While affirming the unique loss she has experienced, we also offer words of consolation in the context of all those mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the beginning of our national journey of displacement and suffering. In saying these words, we attest to the world in which we live, an unredeemed world of brokenness, of death, and a world where at times the Divine presence cannot be found. In essence, we link the personal mourner’s journey of tragedy to the national one, the central motif of the fast day of Tisha B’Av, the day which marks the destructions of both Temples.^[1]

For so many, the national mourning day, Tisha B’Av, has been difficult for many Jews to actually conceptualize. How does one mourn an ancient Temple destroyed, especially after the people have returned to the Land of Israel? While there are those people that have been spiritually attuned and see the impacts of a world in which God seems all too often eclipsed from our daily lives, the words of Jeremiah’s Lamentations (Eicha), and the liturgical dirges we read (the qinot) – most composed over a thousand years ago – seem removed from our lived experience.

Not this year. This year has been a year of suffering unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime. There is not a person in Israel who has not been fundamentally changed after the events of October 7, and the impacts are not only the physical losses and thousands upon thousands of funerals. The psychological effects of this destructive tidal wave will continue to traumatize the next generations of Israelis; I have heard the unutterable fear of some that the entire national project is now at risk. Soldiers returning from the battlefront will suffer scars of PTSD and moral injury. While Jews are not living in 1938, the vulnerability we have experienced in the past year feels very much like the emotions of generations past. In America, our place in the country suddenly feels uncertain, and antisemitism is indeed not something rooted in a distant past, but very much part of the fabric of our historical present. Frankly, growing up as a proud Jew in a liberal college in the 1990s, I did not take hatred of Jews seriously. Today, I would seriously think about where I would send my children. In sum, this year is just a flood of loss, and the way forward is uncertain. As you read this reflection, events may be happening in the State of Israel which only creates even greater fear, greater despair, greater crying. (Rachaman Litzlan! May God forbid it!)

The most salient word that encapsulates the meaning of our twenty-four hour fast is the opening exclamation of Jeremiah in the book of Lamentations, Eichah! The word as we will see has many implications, but at its root the meaning is “How is it?!” or “Alas.” It is an expression of both confusion and shock, of flooding emotions and despair.

Tisha B’Av, despite it being a physically and emotionally difficult day, can be seen as an opportunity.  For a clearly demarcated allotment of time, the day allows us to hold our sorrow collectively, contextualize it historically, and even pray for healing from the present moment.  Each of us need this now more than ever.  Jeremiah’s ancient Lamentations for the destroyed temple might speak to us in ways we did not imagine before.

The artistic and musical production following October 7, especially in the land of Israel, has been prodigious. One of the most powerful for me was expressed by Yagel Haroush, a modern day paytan (liturgical poet), who studied various traditions of Persian and Moroccan piyyut and maqam and opened a school of Oriental Music in the southern Israeli town of Yerucham. In February 2024,  he authored Qinat Be’eri, a Lament for Kibbutz Beeri, one of the kibbutzim overrun on Simchat Torah.^[2] He opens

אֵיכָה בְּאֵרִי הָפְכָה לְקִבְרִי
וְיוֹם מְאוֹרִי הָפַךְ שְׁחוֹרִי

Eikhah– Alas! My well (be’eri) has turned into my grave (kivri).
And the day of my light has become my darkness,

The choice of the opening word, Eichah, is deliberate, contextualizing this contemporary kinah (liturgical dirge) in the history of his predecessors, both the medieval poets and ultimately Jeremiah himself. His cries – our cries – are a continuation of the crying of our ancestors.  In this movement, we do not cry alone, but with a people; people who cry together lift one another’s pain. This collective crying provides the seeds to our resilience of our people, the key to our ultimate capacity to overcome adversity. (See B.T. Sanhedrin 104b on the verse from Lamentations, 2:19.)

The opening lines express this shock and dislocation, emotions I believe many of us our feeling at this time. The word Be’eri means a cistern or well, a place where the earth yields water and life. This was Kibbutz Beeri, a verdant place of beauty and life growing from the ground. The fertile soil suddenly has been transformed into death, a place of graves, saturated with blood. Similarly, the day of light is an allusion to Simchat Torah, as the Torah is often compared to light. The day of celebration was violently transformed into a day of unspeakable darkness. To all of this, Yagel Haroush can only say Eichah! Alas! How can this happen to us!

Upon further thought however, there is another nuance to the word eichah! Alas! It is not simply an expression of despair, but the beginning of deep introspection, or what would be called in traditional parlance hirhurei teshiva (the stirrings of repentance). “How can this be?!” can also be understood in some contexts as “How did we get here?” The response to tragedy and suffering in life, both on personal and national levels, is traditionally seen as an opportunity for introspection.^[3] While we cannot control all the factors in the world in which we live, we can control our personal or national lives, and the Jewish tradition teaches ‘that when one suffers, one must introspect their ways’ (BT Brachot 5a). In this sense, the word Eichah is not only an expression of despair, but also of sharp self-rebuke.^[4]

The double nature of this word is alluded to in a Rabbinic midrash, on the first time the word eicah (aleph-yud-kaf-heh) appears in the Torah. In the third chapter of Genesis, we are told that Adam and Eve are placed in an idyllic garden. Everything is provided, and the implications are that this place is insulated from any death or suffering. The one commandment – not to partake of the tree of knowledge in the garden – is violated first by Eve, and then by Adam. They do not seem to respect the gift they have been given. In shame, Adam hides. God calls to Adam, “Ayeka,” “Where are you?” using the same letters as the word Eichah. ^[5]  As the Biblical text has no vowels, both words and meanings are available, and the rabbinic midrash expounds upon this double meaning.

Clearly, God knows where Adam is physically, so the verse is read as a rebuke. “Where are You?” in the sense of “Alas, what has become of you!” By violating God’s command, it is as if God can no longer recognize Adam. He has debased himself. Through ignoring the spiritual, ignoring the Godliness of our lives and existence, in one way or another we destroy ourselves. If we all honestly believed we were created in the image of God and had the capacity to see that in the other, we simply would not have the capacity to kill or destroy, or to cause suffering to each other.^[6] Rather, we would heed the command of God to Adam in the garden to “nurture and protect it.” All tragedy in this world in a sense derives from the egoism and self-centeredness of the act of Adam, the inability to see we live in connection with both one another and the Divine.^[7] Exile and brokenness in a real sense are rooted in  our own failures, and it begins at the moment humanity is created. 

On one level, an exclamation of lamentation and an exclamation of rebuke might seem mutually exclusive. When someone is in the throws of despair we do not tell people, “I told you so!” Yet, if we consider our lives, it is at the points in which we experience the highest level of despair that we also find the potential for radical transformation and change, or post-traumatic growth.  Often suffering is the beginning of a process of introspection, and a moral agent does not simply point fingers at the other to justify the situation in which one finds oneself. When Jeremiah exclaims “how could this be,” he also means “how did we get to a point that we were forsaken by God?” It can be both an expression of despair and a statement of introspection. Before October 7^th, never before had the divisions between us been so contentious, threatening to rip us apart on ideological, political, or geographical fissures.  Clearly we face an implacable enemy who has forgotten any moral compass, but does that relieve us of ensuring our own moral compass? These are questions that “a kingdom of priests and holy nations” must ask itself.

Still, this second moment of eicah defined in self-critique and introspection needs time to emerge, and one must allow the space and time for people to grieve. Just as God’s statement towards Adam is a statement of rebuke, it is also simultaneously a statement of despair – Gods despair. When Adam violates the Divine command, God is crying as well; God is crying for us. Just as we cry for one another, on Tisha B’Av, God cries for us as well. God is crying for the people of Israel in particular, but moreover for all of God’s children who suffer in an unredeemed world. Seeing the state of the world at this moment, God needs to cry as much as we do.

Tears are not simply tears of despair but can be redemptive in nature.  They can awaken us to new possibilities of being, washing away old paradigms that no longer serve us well. Our collective tears can also be a balm, providing us with the healing we hope for. Yagel Haroush ends his liturgical poem of sorrow:

וְעַתָּה קוּמָה לְהָאִיר נֵרִי
וּבְעֵין רַחֲמֶיךָ תְּרַפֵּא שִׁבְרִי
וְעֵינִי הַנּוֹבַעַת תַּשְׁקֶה בְּאֵרִי

And now, arise to kindle my lamp
And from the wellsprings of your mercy heal my brokenness
And my eye that pours forth will water Be’eri

His tears – and our tears – are not in vain. They will water the fields of Be’eri, and they will water the fields of our hearts.  Whatever challenges we face, and we will face many, on Tisha B’Av we will ask that God transform our tears of sorrow to tears of redemption and renewal.

Ken Yehi Ratzon. May this be God’s will.

[1] While beyond the purview of this reflection, the rituals of Tisha B’Av and the three weeks preceding it overall, are all mourning rituals of increasing intensity, mirroring in certain ways the rituals of a mourner.

[2] The full text can be found here:  https://opensiddur.org/prayers/life-cycle/death/mourning/qinat-beeri-a-lamentation-for-beeri-by-yagel-haroush/  In addition, the kinah was musically adapted and can be seen here https://youtu.be/qdZN0NYW0VY?si=MTjNiZtO-Clj945v

[3] To be clear, it does not necessarily mean punishment.

[4] See for example the haftarah read for Parashat Devarim, “Hazon Yeshayahu”, always read the week before Tisha B’Av.  “Eicha! Alas, she has become a whore- the faithful city that was filled with justice,  Where righteousness dwelt—[is] but now murderers. (Is. 1:21) See also Pesikta d’rav Kahana, piska 15, in which there is a dispute between R. Yehuda and R. Nechemia if the main valence of the word is one of despair (qinah)  or rebuke (tochecha).

[5] See Pesikta derav Kahana piska 15.

[6] To be clear, this recognition must be reciprocal.

[7] In an address in 1938 to Quakers “The Meaning of this Hour,” Heschel admonished the lack of a response to the rise of evil in Europe, failing to take the moral voice of God’s presence and command seriously. “We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken the ideals in vain. We have called for the Lord. He came. And was ignored. We have preached but eluded Him. We have praised but defied Him. Now we reap the fruits of our failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in the temples! How often it was drowned or distorted! Now we behold how it gradually withdraws, abandoning one people after another, departing from their souls, despising their wisdom. The taste for the good has all but gone from the earth. Men heap spite upon cruelty, malice upon atrocity.”