It’s that heavy, drained feeling when sadness lingers and hope feels distant. In therapy, we don’t treat dejection as something to fix right away, but as something to approach with curiosity and care. The Three Weeks and Tisha B’Av invite us to sit with that feeling. We mourn, we remember what was lost, and we resist the urge to move on too quickly. But Tisha B’Av also marks the beginning of comfort. Sometimes the way forward begins not with answers, but with presence and with simply staying close to what’s real.
Dejection slows us down and sometimes that’s exactly what we need. It can soften the parts of us that have been moving too fast or staying too distracted to notice what’s really going on beneath the surface. It asks us to listen more closely: to ourselves, to others, to the brokenness in the world. Judaism doesn’t treat emotional pain as a detour from growth; it treats it as part of the path. (I highly recommend Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning for more on this). Tisha B’Av reminds us that even from the deepest places of sorrow, something new can begin.
