Tisha B’Av

Recently I dealt with a difficult situation and tried to stay detached and unemotional about it to help me cope. That worked for a time, but then something else happened on top of everything else, and that’s when I started to cry.

 

I find that every year at Tisha B’Av I feel less and less inclined to watch the many programs that are available. I have no difficulty feeling the pain of galus, even literally – the pain of feeling like an outsider, like I don’t really belong anywhere, like I’m trapped and kept out of the place where I can reach my truest potential.

 

Most of the time I am focused on other things, busy and satisfied and happy, and I cope fine. But then something happens that is extra hard, and I feel pained and grief-stricken and totally bereft. Though those times do end, the pain is always there alongside everything else.

 

It is always hard for me to write about Tisha B’Av. It is hard to write about sadness without being depressing and hope without being cliché. Tisha B’Av feels very big, beyond me and my own struggles. I don’t want to minimize it by making the churban about shidduchim. Yet I don’t want to minimize shidduchim by not relating it without question to the churban. The events of Tisha B’Av, and the fallout from Tisha B’Av, are the reasons we suffer now as we do.

 

Tisha B’Av is a container for these feelings of sadness, loneliness, and loss, a place on the calendar where they belong. So I hope to spend some time tomorrow writing (for myself) about the losses I have experienced/am experiencing through these years. It is a day of sadness and mourning, and I want to face, acknowledge, and honor what has transpired, not transpired, and what is in the wide space between expectation and reality.

 

And I hope we all have a wonderful and HAPPY Tisha B’Av this year!

 

P.S. Two beautiful articles about Tisha B’Av: this and this.