Can I Cry Now? Ruminations and Resources for 9 Be'Av 5786

Articles and Video's to accompany you this 9 B'Av:

WATCH:

With thanks to Matan Hasharon for sharing the recording.

When God Is Silent: Confronting Evil. English

Hebrew

LISTEN:

A conversation with Rabbanit Racheli Sprecher Fraenkel exploring the literal and existential concept of comfort when relating to the Jewish people and to God Himself.

What does it look like to have hope after tragedy? What comforts the weary? Listen here: https://www.matan.org.il/en/online/episode-278-parshat-veetchanan-when-god-comforts-us-and-we-comfort-him-shabbat-nachamu/

READ:

Tisha B’ Av: How we respond to tragedy and build resilience

https://www.instagram.com/p/DbGlr-TCJK1/?igsh=c3RiZnJ0YnU5d29v

YOU CAN CRY NOW: RUMINATIONS EREV 9'BEAV 5786

There is something I wish so many people I love knew. So many young soldiers carrying the burden of survival over the last three years. So many ordinary citizens living through years of uncertainty. So many who have lost loved ones, innocence, limbs, sanity, dreams, and love.

You can cry, you know? You don't need to be strong all the time.

Three thousand years ago, in the midst of a real genocide, Pharaoh's daughter opened an ark floating on the Nile. She saw the child - והנה נער בוכהand behold, a na'ar crying. Not a yeled, an infant. A na'ar - older, a lad. The rabbis wondered why Scripture suddenly calls the infant Moses a na'ar, a boy. The infant could not yet cry. He had been silenced by the threat of the enemy. Only years later, safe, as a na'ar, could he finally weep.

Abba Kovner tells of partisans who returned to the Vilna ghetto and found a mother holding her child. When she saw them, she burst into tears. The child looked up and asked, "Mama, can I cry now?" For years survival meant muting the cries of a child.

Elie Wiesel wrote of the night his father died: "I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep." He had no tears left to shed.

Michael and Amelia, nine and six. Deria and Lavi, ten and eight. Two sets of siblings who hid in a closet for hours after watching their parents murdered on October 7th, unable to make a sound. They knew they could not cry for fear of being caught by the terrorists.

Eli Sharabi describes how in captivity he never let himself cry. Only once released, safe hands of the IDF did he finally break down. He too knew crying would mean vulnerability, something he could not afford.

The midrash tells us the Ninth of Av is the day of tears. In fact, it is the day God cries. In midrash after midrash, God weeps with His people as they are exiled from the land.

Tears are grief made visible. They are pain, the bitterness, finally given permission to leave the body. When we cannot cry, when survival demands that we hold ourselves together, we cannot fully process what has happened. We cannot release it. We cannot begin to heal.

The rabbis, in their infinite psychological wisdom, understood that a people forged in uncertainty, sharpened by survival instinct cannot properly grieve. Without a day carved out to weep, grief has nowhere to go. It remains buried and repressed. The day we mourn our destruction is the very mechanism that makes rebuilding possible.

So once a year, for twenty-five hours, we are given permission to stop. To refrain from food and water. From intimacy. From comfort. From the ordinary rhythms of life that keep grief at bay. We sit on the floor. We remember the tragedies of our people. We bring to the surface the painful memories we spend the rest of the year trying to hold together. And we cry.

We look destruction in the face as it is-without easy answers, without sugar-coated meaning, without neat theological explanations. Just the pain. Just the sorrow. Just what is broken in a world that longs to be whole again.

So today on the Ninth of Av, I want to embrace my ancestors across the centuries, including so many of me brothers and sisters today, and whsiper: it is safe to cry. You don't need to be strong.

It is not over. We are still in the midst of a war with no end. Our enemies are waiting for their next opportunity. There are still hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and their families, who cannot yet allow themselves to cry because survival still demands their strength.

And yet tonight, we will cry. We will wail. We will remember. And we will know that in the midst of our tears, Hashem is crying with us. It doesn't erase the pain. But it lets us feel, for one night, that we do not carry it alone.

הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ ה' אֵלֶיךָ וְנָשׁוּבָה, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם