TEARS OF HOPE
Rabbi Avi Strausberg
Lamentations opens with the image of the grieving widow weeping bitterly into the night. She is alone and there is no one to comfort her. On Tisha b’ Av, we step into the role of that grieving widow and mourn the destruction of the Temples and the loss of closeness with God.
In his writings in the Netivot Shalom, R. Shalom Noah Berezovsky radically transforms the tears of despair of Lamentations into tears of hope.
R. Berezovsky teaches that the tears that we cry on Tisha b’ Av are tears not only in which we mourn the past but they are also tears of hope, born of a longing for the future we imagine. He writes,“ When a Jew is immersed in bitterness over the absence of Divine light that once radiated from the Temple, and is filled with longing for it— that very longing contributes to its rebuilding.” The bitterness of the weeping in Lamentations is no longer just the cry of despair of the grieving widow; it is a cry of hope and a cry of rebuilding.
R. Berezovsky takes it a step farther and teaches that contrary to how we usually approach Tisha b’ Av, as a day of mourning and destruction, in fact,“ Tisha B’ Av is the day of building,” from“ the world of rebuilding” because“ it is from these very tears that the Temple begins to be rebuilt.”
R. Berezovsky radically transforms our understanding of Tisha b’ Av from a day of mourning over destructions of the past to a day of rebuilding of an imagined future. He recasts the bitter tears of despair of Lamentations into productive tears of hope. In a period in which it can feel very difficult to access hope, it feels profoundly meaningful to approach Tisha b’ Av with this new intention: what would it look like to experience
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