Tonight is Tisha B’Av. Well actually tonight is the 10th of Av but we are fasting for the next 25 hours, primarily in mourning for the loss of our beloved Beis Hamikdash.
I hate fasting and I hate being sad so I’m always the girl looking for a way out - especially emotionally. I try to find someone who’s spun the Tisha B’Av fast into a positive. Made is lighter. Easier.
Alternatively most seek out material to trigger sadness because mourning a building, lost, so far from our reality, is almost impossible. We watch movies about the Holocaust and immerse ourselves in relevant history that is
current enough to strike a cord of mourning.
This year I need neither.
The second Beis Hamikdash was destroyed due to baseless hatred. Evil without a cause. Pain without sense. Senselessness. And I see this around me everyday.
My Beis Hamikdash, a life that makes sense, my paradaigm; is crumbling down around me everyday.
A devoted husband and father is stung by a bee and life will never be the same. A teenage boy cannot cope with the weight of his own mind and Life will never be the same.
And a boy. A fourteen year old boy. A Bar Mitzvah. A prince of HaShem, was playing soccer. In one incomprehensible moment life is never the same.
But I don’t know these men. These magnificent Jews. I’m warm in by bed.
And yet I do.
He is my husband. My devoted father. My classmate. My son.
He could have been son.
And the pain is all encompassing. It is this senselessness, this immediate and very real evil without a cause, that destroys my personal Beis Hamikdash every moment of the day.
So no, I will not be consoled with silver linings this year. And I will not be needing any Schindler’s List.
I am mourning. I am pleading and I am begging. We are ready HaShem. We are ready for Mashiach and we need him now.
The pain is real now.
It is all too real.
