The summer after I graduated high school, my best friend and I decided to become counselors in a sleepaway camp neither one of us had attended before. The camp was too expensive for us to have gone there as campers, but counselors were paid really well so we decided to give it a try.
There were four things about those eight weeks that I will never forget: the hundred-dollar bill that a parent gave me on the first day of camp “to take care of his little girl”; the three days I spent in the infirmary with a temperature of 103; the color war where they pitted my best friend and I against each other by making us captains of the opposing teams; and my very last Tisha B’Av in camp.
When I was a camper, my parents only sent me for half a summer, or as they called it back then, one “trip.” The less desirable half of the summer was the one that contained the Three Weeks – because who wanted to go to camp if you couldn’t swim or listen to music? Perversely, I loved camp during the Three Weeks. I liked not being forced to swim a thousand consecutive laps and I loved singing “Al Naharos Bavel” three times a day at bentching. The Three Weeks at home were hot and and boring and uninspiring, but in camp, due to the shiurim and the obvious change in schedule, by the time Tisha B’Av arrived my sorrow over the loss of the Beis HaMikdash was a palpable entity.
As Leil Tisha B’Av approached, my junior counselor and I got the kids ready for Eicha, helping them change into their sneakers and making sure they were wearing skirts that were appropriate for sitting on the floor. The chairs in the shul were folded away and we huddled together on the floor, a sea of swirling denim, and watched as candles were lit and the lights extinguished. The baal koreh, who was a singer with Dveykus and married to one of the staff members, began to layn Eicha. I had never heard it layned before by someone who could carry a tune, had never realized that the melody was so achingly beautiful, and at some point all the molecules in my body began to harmonize at the same frequency as the tune. At that moment I experienced a connection to the universe, to G-d, to the loss of the Shechina, in a way that I intuited would never be duplicated again. It is a memory that will linger until the end of my days, a memory I can conjure up at will, even forty years later.
My ability as a child to connect to Tisha B’Av was reinforced by my camp experience, but certainly did not begin there. My parents were very makpid about the Three Weeks, particularly my father. He did not allow us to go on any unnecessary outings starting from Shiva Asar B’Tammuz, and even once we were grown and out of the house, he would keep tabs on all of us, reminding us that the period of Bein HaMitzorim was a dangerous time. But it wasn’t just fear that he instilled in us, it was also a respect for the gravitas of the time period as well as a deep sensitivity to the “spirit of the law” and not just the “letter of the law.”
The first summer after my husband and I got married, I took a job working as a secretary for frum Jews in downtown Brooklyn. It was my first adult job ever and when they told me to come to work on Tisha B’Av I did, despite my own misgivings and my father’s voice in my ear. On the way home, standing on the subway platform in the steamy heat unique to those underground tunnels, karma (or whatever word defining hashgacha pratis we want to insert here) came for me in the form of a mugger, a small but wiry assailant who tried desperately to yank my purse out from under my arm where I had tucked it crossbody style in the manner specific to every native New Yorker. I screamed, but no one came to my assistance, and I clung tenaciously to my purse until finally the mugger gave up, leaving me shaking and vowing to never again work on Tisha B’Av. I never told my father what had happened.
When my daughters were young, Tisha B’Av was hard. There was no room for contemplation, nothing deep anyway. I concentrated on fasting and keeping the kids busy in a way that would be appropriate for all of us, because now observing Tisha B’Av was not just about me – it was about guiding the next generation as well. Once the kids were in grade school, my husband would play for them the taped history shiurim of Rabbi Berel Wein on the Three Weeks, and when they were older we chose age-appropriate Holocaust films for them to watch. Equally important was to teach them that there was more to the day than just getting through it, but that it was okay to be bored and okay to be uncomfortable, and also okay to not necessarily grasp the enormity of the day.
Later, after the kids were grown, I read a teshuva given by Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, about children and Tisha B’Av which explained that although it is impossible for a child to mourn for something they never lost, there is a chinuch aspect to the endeavor in that each Tisha B’Av experience builds on the one before until the point where the child is old enough to understand.
I would add to this that the process of experience-building never ends. Every life event changes us forever, and makes us look at the world in a different way, which makes every Tisha B’Av unique in its own way. At eighteen, I was basically a blank slate. Nothing too bad had ever happened to me, and through that clear, untainted, unsullied, unjaded lens, I felt G-d’s presence, and then understood the lack of his presence in one brilliant moment. Child that I was, I thought I would hold on to that feeling forever, and when it faded into memory, I called upon that memory year after year after year, so many years, that I wondered if the well of memory would dry up if I drank from it too many times.
I learned the true meaning of grief when I lost my father in 2015, when I sat shiva for him in the same room where he had sat shiva for his own father. I remembered the brown cardboard box he sat on for seven long days, the same box he used on Tisha B’Av, the same box he used when he sat shiva for his brothers in that same room. It was no surprise to any of us that he died during the Three Weeks, ensuring that this time period would forever be synonymous with loss.
The summer of 2024 I was asked to speak at a community-wide women’s kinnos-reading on Tisha B’Av morning. It wasn’t the first time I had been asked, but it was the first time I said yes. The format of the program was that we would read the kinnos together, each one prefaced by various women giving a five-minute mini-shiur on the kinnah beforehand. Before last summer, I had never felt I was knowledgeable enough to dissect a kinnah to the point of being able to discuss it with authority, but in the wake of the October 7 massacre, our communal grief demanded more of us, demanded more of me, than just a passive recitation of the liturgy.
We sat there together on the floor for hours – the old, the young, the in-between, bound by our shared past, our shared future, and our shared new understanding of the grim consequences of not having the Shechinah in our midst. Sitting on the floor, once again, in a sea of swirling denim, I thought I would experience dejà vu, but too much time had passed, to the point that what I remembered from thirty-nine years before almost seemed like the memory of a memory, perfectly crystallized, but somehow changed.
Nobody adhered to the time limit of just five minutes; there was too much to say. We were so hungry, so thirsty for these words that finally articulated our feelings; we gobbled them up like candy, these words that only one year before had been just words but were now history and destiny intertwined in the most unimaginable way possible. One of the youngest speakers was an older teenager from shul who had just graduated high school. What she lacked in style and finesse she made up for with passion. As much as one can enjoy kinnos, I enjoyed listening to her speak and now I experienced that dejà vu that had been missing before, her youthful enthusiasm and her untainted, unsullied, unjaded ideas reminding me of my younger self.
We end Megillas Eicha with three powerful words: “Chadesh yameinu kekedem” – renew our days as of old. A simple translation would have us think that this is merely a nostalgic desire for the good old days, a logical assumption after the horrors outlined in Eicha – who wouldn’t want to return to the time before the Temple was destroyed? A closer look at the words forces us to question the use of the word “Chadesh” – new. Wow are we asking Hashem to return us to the old days while simultaneously asking Him to renew, to change our days and forge a new and better reality? Of course we want to return to a better time, to the days before the churban and the Holocaust, to October 6, the day before our children truly realized what it means to be in galus. We do want to go back, but not as the people that we were then. We want to go back as the people we are now, people who have suffered and experienced loss, people who have grown and changed and transformed into better versions than before.
I rarely catch a glimpse of that eighteen-year-old girl anymore; she is safely tucked away with other memories and older iterations of myself. Every past Tisha B’Av, for the briefest moment, she has reappeared, glowing with the lustrous halo of youth, so brightly, that I could only look at her out the corners of my eyes. Last year when she shimmered back to life, she waited for me, patiently, to extract that perfect memory, the one I would use, have used, always use, to feel the Temple’s loss. At the end of the day when she disappeared, I wondered if she was confused by my apparent neglect. Will she come back this year, and wait for me again? Or does she know – does she even have the capacity to know – that in her future an event so heinous would occur that I would never need her memories again to feel the loss of the Shechina in our midst?
