Between the Horn and the Hush
Several weeks ago, Shabbos was beckoning, but there was still plenty of time. The air was warm and full. I was weaving my way back to my home community where Friday afternoon hums with familiar warmth, when I passed a kosher market in a different neighborhood. I knew this area, but it wasn’t mine. I thought I’d shop here to avoid the last-minute rush later. As I placed the last of my bags into the trunk, a sleek luxury car pulled in beside me, angled a little too close, crossing into my space. I opened my car door carefully, trying to avoid contact. I don’t believe I touched his car, but maybe I brushed it, so faint it registered only emotionally, not physically. Nothing visible. Nothing real.
Then came the horn. It was loud, long, furious. His door slammed. He stormed toward me, tzitzit flying, face twisted in rage, kippah atop his head. I tentatively rolled down my window to speak with him.
“There better be no damage.”
“There’s no damage,” I said gently.
“THERE BETTER NOT BE.”
A storm of possible replies rose in me. Some biting, some clever, all defensive. But I swallowed them. And offered only two words:
“Shabbat shalom.”
With that, I rolled up my window and drove away.
It wasn’t the drama that lingered. It was the symbolism that stayed sharp and unshaken. Weeks later, at the apex of the Three Weeks, it still echoes. Because this isn’t who we are. Or at least… it isn’t who we’re meant to be.
Later, when the weight of it settled, I thought of Yeshayahu’s lament: Eicha hayta le-zonah kiryah ne’emana, molei mishpat, tzedek yalin bah, ve’atah meratzchim – “How has the faithful city become like a harlot! Justice once lived there, but now, murderers.”
Ritual without righteousness is not neutral, it wounds. Even now, working on this reflection during the Three Weeks, the ache remains. Because I was taught to make a Kiddush Hashem no matter where I stand; in a parking lot among our own, or as the only Jew in town. Space doesn’t define sanctity. Behavior does. Especially when no one’s watching. Especially when they are.
The Hardest Season to Feel
Growing up, summer was carefree. It held camp, family trips, and long hours at the beach. Warmth and light shaped our calendars and our hearts. But now, as an adult, amid that same brightness, we pause. The calendar shifts. And for Three Weeks, we begin a slow unraveling toward Tisha B’Av.
And it’s hard. Because I know how to rejoice on Purim, how to prepare for Pesach, how to stand in covenant on Shavuos, how to gather awe and accountability on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and how to cultivate gratitude on Sukkot. But this? This grief feels abstract. The destruction is distant. The loss, unlocalized. We’re asked to mourn a Temple we’ve never seen, for a land I’ve never walked, and weep for a fracture centuries old. One that echoes through rubble and poetry, but not through personal memory.
And yet, even so, we are challenged to feel it. We sit low, dim joy, pause music, quiet celebration. We inhabit a grief not born of personal experience, but of spiritual inheritance. And maybe that’s what made the moment in the parking lot echo so loudly. Not because it was dramatic, but because it happened in a season meant for noticing fracture and for attuning ourselves to discord masquerading as dignity.
Recreation, Not Commemoration
This teaching wasn’t passed down through texts alone. It came to me through voices I know and love; my husband and his father, Dr. David Luchins. He first heard it from Rav Ahron Soloveitchik, zt”l, in 1975, when Rav Ahron stood before a group of teenagers at summer camp and asked a question still echoing today: How do we mourn what we’ve never lived? How do we evoke emotional gravity in a season of lightness?
Rav Ahron’s answer was stunning. He reframed the Three Weeks as emotional choreography: as a mirror of the Jewish mourning process. Shloshim is reenacted through the Three Weeks: muted joy, avoidance of risk, spiritual distance in public life. Shiva emerges in the Nine Days: no meat, no wine, no adornment. A soft quieting of the senses. And Aninut, the rawness before burial, finds its mirror in Tisha B’Av: we sit on the ground, refrain from greeting, and abstain from joyful Torah study. The silence is intentional.
This teaching makes sense from a grandson of Rav Chaim Brisker, zt”l, who once distilled the difference between secular and Jewish time with a deceptively simple line: “Secular holidays commemorate. Jewish holidays recreate.”
National memory looks back. Jewish memory returns. On the Fourth of July, we don’t say “We were colonial Americans.” On Juneteenth, pain is honored, but rarely reenacted. But on Pesach, we declare Avadim hayinu – we were slaves. On Shavuot, we receive Torah anew. On Sukkot, we dwell. And on Tisha B’Av? We don’t commemorate destruction. We recreate it.
We sit low. We do not greet one another. We chant Eicha in lament’s minor key. We don’t just remember the Beis HaMikdash. We enter its absence.
Rashi teaches that Eicha isn’t just a cry of despair. It’s disbelief. Ibn Ezra calls it a mirror, when ideals are violated, the soul asks, How? That question is emotional and theological and lives at the center of Rav Ahron’s teaching, carried forward each year through my father-in-law’s Kinnot reflections. It’s not only where we turn next. It’s what steadies the soul when it feels unmoored.
Mussar Meets Psychology
Just as Rav Ahron choreographed communal mourning into halachic time, I’ve come to understand that emotional choreography also lives inside us. The rituals of grief don’t just shape behavior rather they invite reckoning. And that reckoning lives not only in memory, but in muscle, in silence, and in the choices we make when no one’s watching.
I found that same steadying force in Chovot HaLevavot, one of the first classical Jewish ethical works I studied after my conversion. Its teachings are organized into “gates”: each one opening into a distinct facet of soul-work: trust, introspection, intention, and beyond. When my soul feels scattered, I return to its pages like one might return to familiar tehillim (psalms); not for answers, but for orientation. It reminds me that emotional refinement isn’t decorative. It’s spiritual infrastructure.
In the Gate of Trust (Sha’ar HaBitachon), the text teaches: “Ha’botei’ach b’Hashem yasi’r mi’libo masa ha’inyanim.” (“The one who trusts in Hashem removes the weight of circumstance from his heart.”) That weight, the sting, the indignation, the impulse to retaliate isn’t resolved by passivity. It’s soothed by practiced faith. That’s restraint. That’s mourning. That’s leadership.
In the Gate of Spiritual Accounting (Sha’ar HaCheshbon HaNefesh), we’re taught: “Ha’chacham yivchon lo rak b’ma’asav, ela gam b’mach’shavotav.” (“A wise person examines not just his deeds, but the thoughts behind them.”) It’s a discipline that echoes grief expert David Kessler’s sixth stage of mourning: finding meaning. Not as a detour around pain, but as a way to cultivate something within it. It’s not about closure. It’s about cultivation.
A Parsha Framed by Eicha
Every year, Parshat Devarim opens the final book of Torah not with comfort, but with confrontation. Moshe’s farewell is not gentle, rather it’s a reckoning. He revisits the collective fractures of Bnei Yisrael, especially the sin of the spies, whose fearful tears on Tisha B’Av established a legacy of mourning. According to the Gemara (Ta’anit 29a), Hashem responded to their baseless cry with a declaration: “Atem b’chitem b’chi shel chinam; va’ani kovei’a lachem b’chi l’dorot.” (You cried without cause; I will establish this day as a time for crying throughout the generations.)
Moshe’s lament “Eicha esa levadi: How can I bear your troubles, burdens, and disputes all by myself? (Devarim 1:12) is not administrative. It’s existential. And it’s one of three prophetic cries of Eicha we read this week: Moshe’s exhaustion, Yeshayahu’s indictment, and Yirmiyahu’s devastation. Three voices. Three generations. Three cries of How?
According to Eicha Rabbah, even the angels asked Eicha. It’s not only a human lament – it’s a cosmic ache. Maybe that’s why Eicha echoes so loudly. Because it isn’t just a question from Moshe or Yirmiyahu – it’s a thread running through generations. A quiet ache tucked into the corners of memory, leadership, and restraint. It’s the whisper in a parking lot. The hesitation before a reply. The pause in the middle of mourning.
It’s not just the angels who asked How. It’s us.
Shabbat Chazon: A Vision That Indicts
The Shabbat before Tisha B’Av arrives, we read Yeshayau’s vision. It’s not a gentle prophesy. It’s a cry sharpened into a moral indictment; Sarayaich sorerim v’chavrei ganavim; kulam ohev shochad u’rodef shalmonim. Yatom lo yishpotu, v’riv almanah lo yavo aleihem – “Your leaders are rebels, companions of thieves; all love bribes and chase after rewards. They do not judge the orphan, and the widow’s case does not come before them” (Yeshayahu 1:23).
It’s tempting to keep those words at arm’s length as an ancient rebuke aimed at the long fallen Yerushalayim. But Yeshayahu’s cry refuses confinement. It stings because we are still walking inside the indictment.
Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, zt”l, speaking during the Three Weeks in 1941, said plainly: “Although even the second of those events happened almost two thousand years ago, they are not only remembered. They are remembered because they are still felt by us.”
We feel it in institutionalized erosions, moral compromises, and spiritual fatigue. Not just in the headlines, but in the moments like the parking lot. Because Moshe’s exhaustion, Yeshayahu’s fury, and Yirmiyahu’s weeping aren’t sealed in history. We don’t simply carry them with us but rather we relive them. We re-inhabit their ache, their indictment and their call to conscience, year after year, verse after verse.
They force us to confront questions that remain unanswered.
What have you tolerated?
What have you built?
What have you betrayed?
These aren’t historical inquiries. They are spiritual diagnostics. They live in committee meetings, in silence after injustice, in choices that privilege comfort over conscience. Shabbat Chazon isn’t a relic. It’s a warning we read aloud because we’re still living inside it.
The Parking Lot as Moral Text
That summer erev Shabbat wasn’t just a fleeting moment. It became a living text. A scene where theology, philosophy, and identity collided. Between the horn and the hush, I was no longer a passerby. I was like Moshe, whispering Eicha. I was like Yeshayahu, confronting hypocrisy. I was like Yerushalayim low to the ground, asking How?
The faithful city wasn’t just ancient. It was me. It was him. It was what we stood for and what we failed to represent. Both of us dressed as frum Jews, but only one chose restraint. Pirkei Avot teaches: “B’makom she’ein anashim, hishtadel lih’yot ish.” (“In a place where there are no leaders, strive to be one.”). But leadership isn’t grandstanding. It’s restraint. It’s swallowing the clever reply. It’s choosing dignity over domination. It’s being willing to walk away not as a retreat, but as a reclaiming.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls this the knight of faith or the one who walks quietly through absurdity, unshaken in conviction, invisible to acclaim. And Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, zt”l reminds us: “Greatness is not measured by visibility, but by moral weight.” That’s what Eicha asks of us; not eloquence, but integrity. Not ritual, but righteousness. The Brisker Rav, meticulous in halacha, taught that precision is compassion. Even in mourning, there is derech eretz. Even in rupture, there must be mercy.
The Faithful City, Reimagined
We were both dressed as frum Jews. We didn’t exchange blessings. But somewhere between the horn and the hush, holiness hovered. Perhaps the faithful city isn’t only Yerushalayim. Perhaps it’s each of us trying not to betray what we represent.
The parking lot didn’t feel sacred… But it was.
Even broken places carry sacred echoes.
Even fury can be met with dignity.
Even laments can become leadership.
Mourning teaches this, most of all: that restoration doesn’t require perfection. It asks only for pause. It invites presence. It calls for a heart bold enough to say:
Ani esbol ve’amalet. I will bear, and I will rescue.
