This week we begin the nine days, an intensive time of mourning for the destruction of the Temple and the exile from Israel.   Rabbi Solovetchik pointed out that this process of national mourning proceeds in the opposite direction to personal mourning.   Personal mourning of the passing of a loved one begins with very strict mourning, shiva, then sheloshim, which is a bit less mournful, and finally, for a parent, a year which is even less mourningful.  We proceed through the same stages for national mourning but in the opposite direction, first the three weeks which is like the year, then the nine days which is halachically similar to the sheloshim and finally Tisha B’av which is akin to shiva.  The reason for this is obvious, personal morning begins with the shock of loss, whereas in national morning we must utilize a process to come to feel and appreciate the loss.  We don’t feel it directly because we did not actually experience the destruction ourselves.

One might look at the jewish people from the outside, see them sitting on the floor and crying over the loss of the Temple and think it was something that happened yesterday.   That we mourn over a destruction which happened 2000 years ago is unusual and begs explanation.

The great Chasidic Rabbi, Rabbi Shalom Brezovsky in his explains that there are two kinds of mourning.  There is mourning the loss of that which is gone, but there is also morning which is really about hoping that things can be different in the future.   My friend and congregant Rabbi Dan Epstein compares this to Memorial Day versus Earth Day.  Memorial Day commemorates those who are gone, who have given their lives for our country.  On the other hand Earth Day is a day that should be mournful, a recognition that something is amiss with our environment, that something has been lost and damaged which we all need, and yet it is a day of celebration and joy.   Why is this?   If we are commemorating that the earth has lost some vital aspect of its health why all the joy, why is this not more like Memorial Day?   The answer of course is that the goal is not just to mourn the loss of that which is gone but to resolve to bring it back.  These are the two aspects of Tisha B’av -we mourn that which is gone but it is with an eye to the future- to bring it back.   As the Talmud says, the first question one is asked after death is “mitzapeh l’geulah,” did you anticipate redemption.  This is the Earth Day aspect of tisha b’av and it is not mournful but hopeful and indeed joyus.

Why is this the question we are asked on the day of judgement?  Perhaps because it sums up who we are as a people.   We are the people who always look toward redemption.  We are the utopians, those who know there is always the possibility of something better.  Our history shows this.  The natural course of nations is assent, decent and dissolution.   The natural progress of the the Jewush people is decent and accent, decent and assent, but never disappearance.   In our history we have seen the most powerful; example of this, the Holocoust, our lowest point in all of history, and then the establishment of the State of Israel, our highest point since the exile began.

We are the people who bring the idea of hope, the idea that no matter how things are, the movement of the universe and of history is toward redemption.  As Rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) said: “…The redemption is the idea which guides and stimulates service of God through observance of the Torah and the commandments, an idea which makes the commandments an everlasting task and duty; the redemption is seen as a reality, but one which always transcends the existing and which one never reaches but must always strive to reach.”

We all are living now in an exile within exile.  May this be a decent that brings about an accent and ultimately a time of redemption.