The Jewish calendar has a time of year for every kind of emotional experience, a time when we can fully live the part of ourselves that is most in tune with that spiritual koach. This rhythmic cycle of the calendar keeps all of us in balance, allowing us to live the whole spectrum of human experience.
On a global level, the Nine Days and Tisha b’Av is when we can finally process and mourn for the tragedies that people we know or don’t know have experienced this year. My friend told me of a beautiful practice of a woman she knows. This person holds onto clippings of sad news stories, and on Tisha b’Av she finally goes through them and really cries for other people’s pain. During the year, we hardly have time to catch our breath before we have to put sad news aside and go on living. And the only way to really live is to process each feeling, at some point, lest we become detached and unwilling to engage, ever.
Every person has trauma to process and losses to grieve. We might not think of them in that way but they’re still there inside of us, and no person’s loss or trauma is judged relative to anyone else’s. The Nine Days and Tisha b’Av is the time to mourn and process all the grief inside of us, whatever it is. The things that can’t be. The things we thought would be different. The people who are not in our lives, physically or emotionally.
The Sfas Emes says that Hashem appeared to Moshe Rabbeinu in a flame in the burning bush as a symbol — the darker the galus, the more brilliant the geulah.
This year in Yerushalayim.
