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God will be our visitor

The Jewish family is in a constant state of mourning.
[additional-authors]
July 27, 2015

The Jewish family is in a constant state of mourning. Most of the time, we push our mourning to the back of our collective consciousness and carry on our daily lives as if we’ve suffered no loss. Once a year, though, we allow the misery and pain of our tortuous 2,000-year Diaspora to creep into view and dominate our emotions.

That would be Tisha b’Av, our day of mourning. We cry for all that we have lost, for all that could have been, and for a compromised national identity that was detached from our homeland for so long and without its glorious monument to our God. Once a year, we sit on the floor in agony and feel the dormant pain in our souls.

Mourning is a metaphor that helps us cope with Tisha b’Av, which this year begins on the evening of July 25. Metaphors can help us relate to challenging concepts and they can also shine new light to our traditions and rituals.

Jewish mourning is unique, and the concept of sitting shivah has even been popularized in media and popular culture. If we are mourning on Tisha b’Av, we are sitting shivah on Tisha b’Av.

I see the entire Jewish family sitting on the floor together, sitting shivah together, crying together and mourning together. On Tisha b’Av, our synagogues and prayer gatherings become our shivah homes.

But something is incomplete. One player is missing from the metaphor.

Who will do the mitzvah of nichum aveilim — comforting the bereaved? If we are all mourners, we cannot comfort each other. A shivah with no visitors to comfort the mourners compounds the pain of loss. Have we been so abandoned that no one will come to pay a shivah call to us? Who will comfort us this Tisha b’Av?

It has to be God. Our comfort will come from God.

God is our Menachem (“comforter”). God “visits” us on Tisha b’Av. That’s why we go to synagogue to mourn. Generally, it’s easier to feel God’s presence in synagogue, so we mourn in God’s House. But the Jewish laws of comforting mourners require that the visitor wait for the mourner to speak first. When the mourner is ready to talk, the visitor listens and responds as appropriate. Listening is the most powerful tool in our comfort toolbox.

The character Sadness from the new Pixar movie “Inside Out” taught the world this important lesson when she just listened to Bing Bong and gave him a shoulder to lean on. Somehow, that helped him feel a lot better. A mourner just needs someone to listen.

God is our Visitor. God is sitting in the shivah house. God is just waiting to comfort us. But we need to speak first. We have to give God the opportunity to listen. God is ready to listen; we just need to speak.

Eikhah (Lamentations) and kinnot (expressive religious poems) are our chance to speak. We cry, we lament, we wail, we contemplate, and through the experience, we acknowledge our pain. God listens while we speak. But first we talk. We talk to God about our pain; the new pain and the old. Eikhah and kinnot give us a chance to speak first and it is our way of granting God permission to comfort us.

This Tisha b’Av, let us be conscious of our mourning. Let us imagine ourselves experiencing shivah together in God’s House. Let us remember that we have not been abandoned. God is coming to comfort us. Let us allow God to comfort us by speaking to him first and acknowledging our suffering with our words. Let us experience God’s “shivah call” and may we merit to feel God’s comfort. Let us hope and pray that this year we will get up from shivah after Tisha b’Av and never feel the spiritual agony of Tisha b’Av ever again.

Rabbi Eliyahu Fink is a rabbi in Beverly Hills. He blogs at finkorswim.com.

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