Our own pain and the pain of the Churban are one — and the cry of a Yid is a cry of hope
by R’ Dovid Steiman
The hardest avodah of Tisha B'Av is this: how do we take the pain we already carry and redirect it towards the Shechina's pain? Every person has his own pain, each one in a different way — a person, a family, so many people carrying so much, each situation its own. And the whole work of this day is to take your pain and redirect it and feel it with the pain of Hashem — the pain that there is no Beis HaMikdash, that the closeness we once had is gone, that we sit in hester panim. How do you redirect a pain like that? We are sitting here crying over a Churban from the time of the Beis HaMikdash — and honestly, we have no idea what we lost. We don't even understand what it means to be close to Hashem on the level of the Beis HaMikdash: to bring korbanos, to see real nevi'im, people who were truly connected to Him. We have no idea what we are crying about.
If we will look for a source of Tisha B'Av in the Torah, we can find the very ingredient of the day. The pasuk in Parshas Shelach says: במספר הימים אשר תרתם את הארץ ארבעים יום יום לשנה יום לשנה תשאו את עונותיכם וידעתם את תנואתי[Bamidbar 14:34] — according to the number of days you toured the land, forty days, a day for a year and a day for a year, you shall bear your avonos forty years, v'yidatem es tnuasi — and you shall know My estrangement. The Seforno there points to the Gemara in Taanis: that yom lashanah — the one day a year — is Tisha B'Av. For that was the day, all through the years in the midbar, when the generation would dig their graves and lie down in them to wait for death; and the cheit that brought it all was on Tisha B'Av.
So what is the whole point? V'yidatem es tnuasi. Rashi tells us what tnuasi means: שהניאותם את לבבכם מאחרי — that you removed your heart from Me; tnuah is a lashon of hasarah, of taking away. And the Sifsei Chachomim finishes the thought: because you removed your heart from Hashem, therefore Hashem was removed from you. There it is. The main ingredient of the Churban, if we can say it in one pasuk, is a heart taken away from Hashem. And our avodah, then, is the reverse: not to remove our heart from Him.
I read an unbelievable story about the Klausenberger Rov — perhaps you've heard it. Right after the war — this great tzadik who had lost eleven children. He lost his wife in the war. He was in a labor camp, he was on a death march, and he survived. And after all of that, he put himself back into the shoes of a Rebbe and began gathering the Yidden who had come out of the camps, to be mechazek them however he could. He made his first tish, a chassidishe tish. Some of the people there had known him from before, from Klausenberg, and some were new.
And the people looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Completely. We are in hell here. No one survived. Everyone died. Where is Hashem? Where is He? What are you singing? Zemiros about inviting Hashem to the seudah — what is wrong with you? And they all knew he had lost every one of his children and his wife. How is he standing there and doing this? He sang as if nothing had happened.
And then he began to speak. Yidden — I lost my children, my own children. I lost a wife. I saw so many korbanos, I saw the Churban of Yiddishkeit. Yidden — and we are still here. Do you understand? We are still here. They are not here anymore, but we are still here. We survived. And who helped us survive it? They stood there, lost — on one side he looked completely off, and on the other he was speaking the plain truth. The emunah had not gone anywhere. He said it again and again, until the people began to cry, and they tore strips from the paper tablecloths just to cover their heads — because they had nothing else to cover them with.
That is exactly the redirection we cannot find. We sit and cry over a Churban from the time of the Beis HaMikdash, and we don't know how to connect to it. But here is the point. This is one of the greatest avodos of our generation: davening, tefillah — to concentrate completely on Hashem, to pull our thoughts off everything else and put them on Him alone. And where do we feel that we cannot handle our pain? Where is the source of this great pain? Not being able to hold our heart with Hashem in the tefillah!
That pain is the Churban. It is not a separate pain. We think we have our pain over here and Hashem has His pain over there — no. The reason we cannot bring our heart back to the place of tefillah is because this itself is part of the same Churban. Our pain and His pain are one pain. The moment you feel how hard it is to keep your heart with Hashem, you are already touching the main Churban itself.
There is an explanation in the Nesivos Shalom. When Bas Paroh opened the little ark on the water, the pasuk says והנה נער בכה[Shemos 2:6] — and behold, a na'ar was crying. But na'ar is a grown boy, and Moshe was an infant, a few months old. She looked at a baby in a little ark and heard the cry of a grown boy — strange. And from that she understood: this child is surely a Yid. Why? Because of the cry. His was not the cry of someone who has given up. It was the cry of someone who still has hope that what was lost will come back. That, Bas Paroh understood, is a Jewish cry — and that is the real cry of a Yid.
Our crying is the same. We are not crying out of yei'ush, out of despair — we are crying out of hope. And that is why our pain is part of the same pain as the Churban of the Beis HaMikdash. It is one cry. Cry out of hope to Hashem for complete salvation.
And this is our avodah. When we daven to Hashem, if the davening comes out of hope and not out of despair, then we do not have to work so hard to redirect our thoughts at all. Because when we are hoping that Hashem will surely help — we are bringing Hashem into our heart, and Hashem will surely reconnect Himself to us, and therefore the whole tefillah becomes a completely different tefillah. That is how we cry for the Churban: not as people who gave up, but as a na'ar who is still crying because he knows he is coming home.