For what did you mourn today?

amother

Sun, Aug 11 2019, 11:38 pm

Tisha bav is a sad day. And we each mourn in our own way...
For what did u mourn today?
Ill start. We lost a close family member this year. Dont want to go into details cuz ppl on here will figure out who I am. But today as I saw his wife and children who have to deal with this on a daily basis, for this I cry.
I cried today (and everyday) for the big family I always wanted. Just started going through routines for infertility and am having a hard time with it. Bh I have 1 child, but am still waiting to be blessed with more.

amother

Coffee

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 5:42 am

I wasn't aware that we can mourn personal things on Tisha B'Av. Not being judgemental at all, really not, just astonished. Please don't throw tomatoes. It simply never occurred to me and I didn't think consciously of my personal peckele yesterday or the years before.
I always thought one has to focus as much as possible on the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash and all that followed it in terms of galut, persecution, pogroms, terror attacks, the Sho'ah. And on how to avoid sinat chinam. I usually spend the day reading books about these things, asides from supervising the children and trying to ignore the increasing headache. If I thought of my own troubles I would feel that it distracts me from the bigger issues of Am Yisrael. I mean, this day feels like it belongs to the klal and not the prat. And reading about the terrible suffering that our people have gone through shrinks my problems into next to nothing.

PinkFridge

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 7:22 am

amother [ Coffee ] wrote:

Do you have the book Why We Weep? Rabbi Zev Smith has an essay on the 10th of Av, and he brings the famous story of Rabban Gamliel, who would weep for the churban every night, to the degree that his eyelashes fell out, and hearing a neighbor who was weeping nightly for her personal loss triggered him. Why should that work? Because every tzaar since the churban is directly related to the churban and the fact that we are living in an imperfect world.

I try, at least before chatzos, to, for want of a better word, wallow in the sadness. I wouldn't read an upbeat book about someone going through tzaros, at least not the upbeat part. We have to think about the tzaros of klal Yisroel. But then again, how do we focus on this? We so often find we most connect through the stories of individuals and individual suffering.

Either way, focusing on individual tzaros, those of others or our own, should bring us back to realizing that we are enduring all this because we are in an imperfect world without the Beis Hamikdash. And it should spur us to contemplate what we can do to bring BY back to where we should be, physically and spiritually. We should hold on to these hirhurim and nurture them through the rest of Av and bring them into Elul.

PinkFridge

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 7:24 am

amother [ Vermilion ] wrote:

I mourned the churban and the pain Hashem is in. But I understood the mourning from the perspective of a huge personal loss and relate to Hashem's pain in a very personal way. May Moshiach redeem us very soon and relieve all our pain.

Something else Rabbi Smith said: We say HaMokom at shiva. Doesn't that seem tactless, as if to say that the churban overrides your petty tzara? (I'm paraphrasing. This si the sentiment, I'm sure more elegantly expressed.) But we are giving great nechama. We are saying, this is incredible pain. It's only happening because we don't have the Beis Hamikdash, this is not our ideal state and Hashem's highest aspirations for us and He is in pain too.

etky

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 7:54 am

amother [ Coffee ] wrote:

I feel the same. It was not the hashkafa I was brought up with. I think it detracts from the real significance of the day and discourages the opportunity for a national, collective cheshbon nefesh that can lead to positive change.
We have the yamim noraim for personal rumination.

naturalmom5

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 8:32 am

amother [ Coffee ] wrote:

I think it's interconnected.
All our problems public and private are because we need mashiach

thunderstorm

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 8:37 am

naturalmom5 wrote:

I think it's interconnected.
All our problems public and private are because we need mashiach

That is what I heard in a few shiurim yesterday. It’s only because of the churban that we all have our personal pekel of suffering. If the Bais Hamikdash were with us we wouldn’t have all the tzaros we have. So yes, every time we mourn about our personal losses we are mourning over not having the Bais Hamikdash.

amother

Puce

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 8:40 am

Isn’t the whole reason we have Tzoros nowadays because we don’t have the Beis hamikdash? That’s what I’ve always been taught. If that is the case, then yes, why can’t we mourn different things we’ve gone through that was in essence all a result of not having a Beis Hamikdash.
I mourn for my mother who passed away a few years ago at a very young age from a terrible machala. I mourn for some of her children who were very young at the time and did not know what hit them and are currently going through a lot of pain and difficulty from not getting the proper therapy they needed right away.

amother

Orchid

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 8:58 am

amother [ Brown ] wrote:

I mourn the childhood I never had.
I mourn the parents I never had (but people think I do).
I mourn the difficulties of struggling to be a good wife and mother when I don’t even know what normal parents or spouses are like.

I mourned for this exact thing too.
Adding for those that are wondering if this is relevant to Tishaa Baav-
I think we can use our own pain as a jumping board to understanding the pain of klal yisrael and the shechina.
In addition all of this pain is a result of being so far flung from the loving embrace of our almighty father. Its only because this world is so full of darkness, lies and confusion.
I think its as relevant as can be.

etky

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 9:21 am

My objections to a personalized Tisha B'Av still stand.
Saying that all suffering is connected to the loss of the mikdash makes the day extremely theoretical, unfocused and diffuse.
I see the observance of Tisha B'av and the three weeks preceding it as central mourning rituals that were highly instrumental in the preservation of the Jewish people throughout 2000 years of exile as a unified nation. The specific mourning for the Temple and the attendant loss of Jewish political sovereignty kept alive the memory of our nationhood and our ties to a particular geographical location in all Jewish communities and united them. Sure each community composed their own kinnot to lament their specific predicaments, but still these were communal sorrows and the persecution was real physical persecution that derived directly from being in exile - the result of the churban.
I am in no way belittling peoples' personal sorrows and hardships - just saying that Tisha B'av loses something when it becomes a hold-all for the world's sorrows, that afflict and have afflicted all people from the dawn of humanity.

amother

Cerulean

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 9:27 am

etky wrote:

I think the same can be said for personal sorrows, so long as their connection to the churban is acknowledged. Pain caused by machlokes, lack of shalom, sickness and death, etc. When we have our bhmk these sufferings will no longer be present.

amother

Cerulean

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 9:45 am

To answer the OP. I had a conversation last week with a man named Christian and a very Irish sounding last name. He told me he had a Jewish ancestor. He had spent his life trying to find information about her, but came up with very little. He knew she was born in 1901 in NY, to Jewish parents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had married someone of Irish background. He felt so drawn to her, in a way that he did not feel to his other ancestors, he just couldn't explain it. But he was so frustrated with how difficult it was to find information. He felt he had a deep connection with her.

As we got to talking, I realized that his Jewish ancestor was his maternal grandmother! He had absolutely no idea that he is halachikly a Jew. And suddenly this deep connection he described feeling his entire life, made perfect sense.

Is this not exactly what we cry for on tisha b'av? Jews who don't know they are Jews, who have an internal yearning for something they don't understand and can't explain.

But also. V'heishiv lev avos--is this not the exact fulfillment of this pasuk? May it be soon, bimheira b'yameinu.

etky

Mon, Aug 12 2019, 10:12 am

amother [ Cerulean ] wrote:

And there is a difference between the third bhmk and the first 2. The first 2 were never promised to be eternal.

So in essence you're saying that Tisha B'av is a day to bemoan the absence of a future, eternal Temple whose existance will signify a new utopian age for humanity marked by the end of all human suffering rather than a day of mourning for the destruction of the two historical temples?