When I look around at what’s going on in our world, I feel like I am living in Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities. At any given moment, it is the best of times and the worst of times. We see social media posts describing the glamorous and luxurious lifestyles of influencers and friends who carefully curate their online footprint. At the same time, the news reports seemingly constant reminders of the doom and destruction that is lurking around every corner. It feels like we are being pulled in two radical directions at a break-neck pace.
While I struggle with our propensity for catastrophe, it is actually the toxic positivity that is so prevalent in our interactions that concerns me most. We know what this feels like; how often do we respond to “How are you?” with a generic “good,” despite how we really feel? How often do we put on a positive face and show the world an impression of how we are, even when that is so rarely an expression of fact. It seems that the cultural expectation is that each of us is living our best lives, even when all evidence points to the presence of some real struggles for so many of us.
This week, the Jewish world is commemorating Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, which is the day on which we remember the destruction of both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as many other horrible dates throughout Jewish history. Not only was this the date on the calendar when our ancient calamities occurred, but it has also been the date of more modern tragedies, like the expulsion of the Jews from Spain on July 31st, 1492, and the approval of the Final Solution on August 2nd, 1941. Thus, the day has become the catch-all for Jewish expressions of grief and suffering.
In many progressive North American communities, Tisha B’Av is considered tangential, most notably because there is less of a focus put on our desperation for the Temple period. It doesn’t help that the day often falls during the summer when programming calendars are most often at the barest of bones. But in truth, Tisha B’av has a powerful opportunity to show us that, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time for every season under heaven.
We do ourselves a disservice when we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to experience hard and painful emotions. Grief, sadness, and hurt are normal feelings we owe ourselves to experience with honesty and openness. When we hide from these raw feelings, we often wind up compounding them, bottling them up until they demand a different (perhaps more volatile) outlet. Tisha B’av helps to remind us that our Judaism is here to support us in every aspect of life, not just the most pleasant aspects. Sure, we know how to celebrate and rejoice, but we also have the necessary space to feel the darker, more fraught emotions that are no less important to our overall well-being.
Tisha B’Av is an ever-important reminder that Judaism can be a gift to us in every season of our lives, helping us to grasp the true breadth of human experiences. In a culture that so often prioritizes the pursuit of happiness, it is a profound gift that we are also given permission to experience our sadness as well.
But lest we get stuck in our tragedies, we are also reminded that Tisha B’av is the day on which the Messiah is predicted to be born. Because even in our deepest grief, there is also the promise of hope, the belief that things can get better, things will get better. Our stories inevitably contain sadness and pain; that is unavoidable. But in those moments, we experience the raw authenticity of our feelings, even while we are given the hope that there is more beyond our narrow experience, that the world is constantly open to wholeness and peace if only we can look up and find it.
As we commemorate Tisha B’Av this year, there are many reasons to feel brought low. On Tuesday, we should give ourselves permission to allow for that. We are at our best when we understand ourselves most clearly and authentically, with all of our joy, all of our grief, and everything in between. Judaism has created a perfect system to allow us to experience all of it.
Austin Zoot is the Rabbi Educator at Valley Temple in Wyoming, Ohio.
