Tonight is Tisha B’Av, the saddest night of the Jewish year.
I have one night to mourn.
I listen to Eicha (Lamentations) over Zoom. I read Dr. Yael Ziegler’s extraordinary book Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World. I read and reflect on A Mitzvah to Eat’s anthology, most struck by Shana Aaronson’s powerful piece ‘How They Sit in Solitary Loneliness,’ a meditation on how our communities treat survivors of sexual abuse.
Tonight is my one night to mourn. Tomorrow, I will prepare breakfast for my kids. We will do arts and crafts projects. I will tell them that we are sad that the Beit Hamikdash [Temple] was destroyed, and we will talk about that a little bit. But mostly, while my husband is at shul [synagogue] saying Kinnos [laments/ mournful poems], they will read books and play, and I will watch them. I will shelter them from real grief, real pain, real trauma. Because they are still young enough that they do not need to know.
My daughter learned about Nazis because of the memorial outside of the Skokie Public Library. She still does not understand the enormity of what they did, of what people survived, and that is because I have chosen not to explain it yet. I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and I only found out about the Holocaust in fourth grade, when Mrs. Vaccaro read us ‘Daniel’s Story.’ I remember how alarming, troubling and haunting I found the book. My mother bought me my own copy so that I could finish reading it on my own. Having to hear only one excerpt read aloud each day left me worried about how things would end.
I remember looking in the mirror and wondering whether my eyes were blue enough, and my hair light enough, that I could pass for Aryan. Whether I would escape if the world turned feral again. I became obsessed with the Holocaust, especially in eighth grade, when I devoured many, many books about every single aspect of it. I wanted to know about Dr. Mengele. Concentration camps. Experiments on twins. What it was like to have a parent who was a Nazi. If it existed in my local public library, I read it. Most of all, I wanted to know how God could let this happen.
My name is Chana, and I am named after a woman who was murdered in the Holocaust. My grandfather’s mother. So I carry her legacy with me wherever I go. And I have spent a lot of time wondering about why and how God inflicts trauma, cruelty and pain upon people.
My conclusion is that most of the time it is people who inflict trauma, cruelty and pain upon others. And God, who gave us free will, watches and weeps. His hands are tied. He can’t take free will away from human beings. It undoes the way our world operates.
I came to this conclusion in eighth grade and it is still my belief now. It is not a very comforting belief. It also does not explain situations where the pain clearly stemmed directly from God. God gave the child incurable cancer, or an incurable mental illness that caused them to take their own life. God brought the tsunami, or the plague or the natural disaster. In the face of these kinds of situations, I have no answers.
As I was listening to Eicha over Zoom, and reading through it simultaneously, I came across a verse that jarred me out of my mourning.
מה יתאונן אדם חי גבר על חטאו [חטאיו]
Of what shall a living man complain?
Each one of his own sins!-Lamentations 3:39
I became angry because I had a teacher in Bais Yaakov who liked to use this pasuk [verse] all the time. Anytime anyone complained, or was upset about something she considered minor, she would go back to this statement “Of what shall a living man complain? Each one of his own sins.” The idea being that if you’re alive, you have nothing worth complaining about. Being alive is enough.
There’s an aspect of that which is true, and an aspect of that which is false. There are people whose only goal was survival- such as many who endured the Holocaust. And we are unfathomably lucky to be alive when they are not. But. The blithe cheerfulness with which she used to utter the phrase wrought untold damage, because it told us our inner experiences, our pain, our loneliness, were not real. They did not count.
I have learned over the years that believing that one’s feelings are not real does not make them go away. If anything, it causes them to fester, darker and blacker than they were, angry at being denied. This causes pain, and pain will erupt. Sometimes it makes you hurt yourself. Sometimes it makes you hurt others.
But then there is grief. And grief is cleansing. Grief means embracing the maelstrom of feelings, the intense pain, the anguish, the horror, and acknowledging it as true. Grief can mean screaming at God or begging God or bargaining with God or coming to a sick sense of acceptance of the reality you wish was anything but. And when it is healthy, grief also allows you to - although it takes a long time- go through the tunnel of pain in an effort to get somewhere else.
There’s an excerpt of Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World by Dr. Yael Ziegler that spoke to me:
Philosophers of religion and rabbinic sources have developed a number of approaches to the problem of why a just God permits human suffering. However, one thing is clear: piety does not inhibit biblical figures from questioning God’s ways, often in a less than measured manner.
Consider Abraham’s heated challenge of God’s decision to destroy the cities of the plain: “Will the Judge of the world not do justice?” (Gen 18:25). Or Moses, who confronts God in a similar tone, asking: “Why have You done evil to this nation, why have You sent me?” (Ex 5:22). Isaiah boldly thrusts a measure of responsibility upon God for Israel’s errant ways: “Why, God, do You make us stray from Your ways; why do You harden our hearts from revering you?” (Is 63:17). Habakkuk digs in his heels, asserting his intention to “stand on my watch” until God “will reply to my complaint” (Hab 2:1). Job expresses his inability to understand God’s words: “Why did You place me as a target for You?…Why do You not bear my sins?” (Job 7:20-21). Several notable chapters of Psalms fling a litany of complaints against God, cataloguing and questioning the myriad ways in which God has grieved humans: “Until when, Lord, will You forget me for eternity? Until when will You hide Your face from me? Until when will I have cares in my soul, daily anguish in my heart? Until when will my enemies rise against me?” (Ps 13:2-3).
The great religious personalities ask these questions because they believe in God’s justice, because they wish to probe and understand the great mystery that underlies the relationship between God and humans. They hold firm to a faith in God who allows questions, and in a religious quest that is genuine and fraught, an apt reflection of life.
Nevertheless, some readers still find these biblical complains uncomfortable, and even theologically inappropriate. Who are we to question God’s ways? Perhaps we must simply accept them and remain silent while God implements His impenetrable, but undoubtedly righteous, plans. In his commentary to Psalms 89:1, Ibn Ezra recounts a story of his encounter with a wise and pious man from Spain who refused to read Psalms 89 because of its harsh treatment of God. In a response to Ibn Ezra, Radak (Ps. 89:39) disagrees with the anonymous detractor, maintaining that it is illegitimate to reject passages from the Tanakh. Tradition regards all of Tanakh as divinely inspired. It appears that God approves of human questioning when it emerges from an honest and mature attempt to grapple with one’s relationship with God and His world.
-pages 31-33
I don’t think this is limited to great religious personalities. Tevye talked to God, and so did the common folk. And I do too.
I have been very angry with God. And I have also been bewildered, and confused, and just felt my heart ache. I have seen things happen that I do not understand, and I am looking forward to talking to God when I die, because I hope then I will get the answers that I cannot have on earth.
At the same time, I also know that God is my true North, my lodestone, my anchor, and if it is incomprehensible that at one and the same time I turn to God and I am angry with God, well, why should it be? We are made in His image, and we contain multitudes. So He is big enough to contain all of us- and to hold all of me.