Jews around the world are mourning today. We’re mourning tragedies that go back centuries—the destruction of two massive Temples, pogroms, Crusades, the Inquisition, the Shoah, Oct. 7, among other tragedies.
How can we mourn all this in one day?
We can’t. We can’t focus on only one target of grief—there are too many.
So I imagine many of us are commiserating over a kind of “package deal” of darkness. It’s all loosely flowing in our heads and hearts as one big, overwhelming idea—the suffering of the Jewish people through the ages.
This year, I found a hidden blessing in this package of grief. Because the package is so big and overwhelming, I was looking for a consolation that was equally big and overwhelming.
I found it the other night when I heard my friend Rabbi Shlomo Seidenfeld say a few words at a friend’s birthday party. I don’t remember his exact words, but the gist was that the enormous grief we feel at Tisha B’av offers a unique opportunity to reflect on something equally enormous—the pride we should feel that we have overcome so many disasters and are still as vibrant and alive as ever.
Yes, the Temples got destroyed, and Rabbinic Judaism came along to take our tradition on the road. Out of the Inquisition came the flourishing of the Sephardic tradition of which I’m a part. We were almost exterminated in the Shoah, and a few years later, we returned home to Zion after waiting and yearning for 1900 years.
Those disasters and tragedies were all too real, but so was the resilience and the faith that enabled us to prevail and keep the Jewish flame alive.
This doesn’t negate the crucial message of Tisha B’av: Let’s make sure those disasters don’t happen again, if we can help it.
But at a time when we’re reminded that so much of the animosity against Jews is not about what we do but who we are, it’s good to know that who we are has taken us this far.
