Lessons from Tisha B'Av

Most parents will agree that their main wish is for their children to be happy.  Successful, good people, but mostly happy.  And most parents will agree that the last thing they would do is actively teach their children how to mourn.  Which normal parent, who wants their children to be happy, would teach them how to sit on the floor and reflect on tragedies until tears spill from their eyes.  Yet this is exactly what religious Jewish parents, including myself, do once a year on Tisha B'Av, the day when the Temple was destroyed and many other tragedies befell the Jewish people throughout the years.

Yesterday, over two thousand years since the first Temple was destroyed, I sat with my children on the floor as mourners do and read them the story of the events leading up to and following the destruction.  As we do every year on this day, we cried together.  And I couldn't help but wonder, why am I teaching my children how to cry?  We are living in good times, why not focus only on our good fortune?

In addition to a painful history, the Jewish people also have a history of celebrating life, even in the darkest moments.  Woven into the mourning is a feeling of hope.  The wedding scene in the movie Defiance illustrates this idea very well.  A group of Jewish partisans during WWII were barely surviving in the forest, skeletons of their former selves, and most of their relatives killed by the Nazis.  Nevertheless, when young love finds itself, the Jewish partisan group makes a wedding for the new couple, singing and dancing in the cold Russian forest while snow falls on them.  This scene cuts back and forth between the celebrating and scenes of another member of their group fighting alongside Russian partisans at the same time the wedding is taking place.  The contrast between the wedding and the war was very poignant.  My son watched the movie with me, and he asked, breathlessly, "Why are they making a wedding during such a terrible time?"  But that is exactly the secret to Jewish hope: never giving up.  Dancing with strangers instead of relatives at a wedding deep in the Russian forest during the Holocaust. There is always reason to celebrate life, no matter how dark the times are.  It is not a tragic story, it is an inspiring story.

This is message of Tisha B'Av: hope.  More than 2000 years have passed since the destruction of the Temple, and yet we have not given up on it.  We still mourn this great loss.  Just as we still have hope that it will be rebuilt.  We never give up our hope.

By teaching our children to mourn the destruction of the Temple, we are teaching them to have hope.  Hope that we will survive, hope that it will be rebuilt, hope that we will one day rejoice with as much emotion as we now mourn.  I want my children to be happy people.  But I want the happiness to come from within, not to be dependent on circumstance.  This way, they will be able to find joy and hope even in the darkest moments of their lives.  In times of war and poverty, Jewish parents taught their children to find joy in their lives.  In these times of peace, however shaky that peace is, I am grateful to have my children naturally understand joy and instead to teach them how to mourn.  And I am grateful to be able to pass onto them our Jewish legacy of hope and survival.