Mourning
It’s the 9th day of the Jewish month of Av again.
A national day of mourning for all things broken.
Our once majestic Temple in which all people could experience meaning, connection, belonging, love, and acceptance by God — has been reduced to — and remains — a small fragment of its most exterior wall.
The Jewish nation, still scattered across the globe, boasts around 16 million, but statistics seem to indicate that the children of 5 or 6 million of us are at risk of not identifying as Jewish in the next generation (if we don’t turn the tides).
Israeli society is as divided as it’s ever been.
Alienation, loneliness, sadness in general is the pandemic that continues to plague us in the wake of COVID-19.
We certainly have what to mourn.
And yet, for many of us, the 9th of Av is a burden not because of the mourning — but because of the heaviness we feel slogging through a day in which we’re supposed to mourn, but profoundly struggle to do so.
Many people don’t feel much of anything today.
Is emotional numbness curable?
Yes. We can start by mourning our inability to mourn.
Mourning is a lost art.
It seems strange to call mourning an "art," but there’s undoubtedly a wisdom to accepting brokenness. Much of our modern society has lost this in its preoccupation with fixing everything ASAP.
Faced with a vacuum left by the loss of loved one, the modern mourner turns instinctively to fill the void through the many avenues of stimulation at his or her fingertips.
I watched one person, shortly after the tragic death of his spouse, make a series of large, luxury purchases in rapid fire without much awareness of what he was doing. The unavoidable pain of loss naturally caught up with him about a year a later.
Similarly, although of course not the same, after a break-up, a person may feel the almost visceral desire to scour social media for photos and updates of their former lover (or perhaps two loves ago) instead of sitting with the blunt ache of loss. Again — the same urge to fill the void.
The night has been banished by electric lighting for a century and a half. Thoughtful walks have been made into an endangered species by Spotify and earbuds. And solitude itself has been eclipsed by social media.
It is nearly impossible to find the quiet space in which to just stop, and feel the pain of loss.
Irish wakes are known for their games and live music in their effort to keep the mourner from falling into the pain of their loss — to fill that vacuum. Although etymologically, the name "wake" comes from the night vigil of those standing guard over the body through the night, we could visualize the effect like the wake of a motorboat.
The waters of celebration rush in to fill the holes in our hearts left by the person who has passed on.
I’m reminded of a man who employed the “wake strategy” when he nervously spoke to me about the telecommunications industry for an hour and half when I was mourning the loss of my mother. I was beyond desperate to escape his well-meaning attempt to distract me from my feelings of loss. Little did he know that his distraction was far worse.
A drop of introspection reveals that we all use smoke and mirrors to avoid confronting difficult experiences. It's human nature. Eastern medicine, and increasingly Western medicine recognize that chronic back pain and gastrointestinal problems can be symptoms of the mind avoiding psychological pain by diverting attention to physical pain elsewhere in the body.
We’ll take pain anywhere but in our consciousness where the pain hurts the worst.
The Jewish approach to mourning is quite the opposite, and quite striking if we think about it. For those who haven't experienced a house of mourning according to Jewish law, hearing about it could make them uncomfortable. This shouldn't surprise us since it is this very discomfort with the thought of feeling pain and loss that causes us to avoid it in the first place.
Good mourning requires full immersion in the feelings of loss.
The mourners sit together for a week (hence the name shiva "seven [days]"). Those that come pay their respects aren't allowed to start conversation. As a result, there's often a certain silence that fills the house. Trite small talk and diversions of all kinds are checked at the door.
But from within that silence, the mourner organically begins to speak about his family member that is no longer there, and a very different kind of conversation emerges. The conversation is not one that evades the reality of the loss, but one that draws from it. From within the loss of life, life emerges, and the house gets filled with stories, sobbing, even laughter at the person’s funny quirks — punctuated by quiet lulls in conversation as people reflect in their own minds.
Somehow, the person who has died becomes the person most alive in the whole house.
We have reached the culmination of a 3-week period of mourning. Jews around the world have abstained from listening to music, grooming themselves (shaving/haircuts), and throwing parties.
Today, we mourn the destruction of a Temple, about which, if we were to say, "we struggle to relate to it," most of us would be embellishing how often we actually think about it.
We sit on the floor, and read obscure, but evocative poetry of the many Jewish tragedies that happened on this day. For a day, we bite our tongues to hold back our usual cheerful greetings to one another.
But inside, we barely feel anything...
The turning point comes if we don't turn away from this discomfort.
In the chasm between our external signs of mourning and our internal lack of feelings, genuine sadness emerges. Our anesthetized heart begins to thaw, and we can feel pain again, if only, at first, for the difficulty with which we come to feel the pain of others. The depths of loss that we need to be told what to mourn for begins to sink in.
The beginning of mourning is mourning our inability to mourn.
On this it is written that all those that mourn the destruction of Jerusalem will merit and see its rebuilding.
Based on a talk by Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler delivered about a century ago.