Some years, like this one, we do not have to be reminded to
mourn. With our outside enemies openly trying to wreak
another churban upon us, we find it natural to seize
the tools of our forefathers and cry out to Hashem for
help.
It is important to use our physical situation to create and
emphasize the mood of the day. The general rule on Tisha B'Av
is that one should minimize his personal dignity and comfort
as much as possible — in the clothes he wears, in how
he sleeps, in how he sits, in what he thinks about — in
order to feel more deeply and thoroughly the loss of the
Beis Hamikdosh.
Nonetheless, neither our personal situation nor our immediate
threats, which loom so large, should prevent us from mourning
the general loss that we recall of the Beis Hamikdosh
and all that its presence implied.
A mourner, such as we are on Tisha B'Av, must not take his
mind off of the subject of his mourning. The limitations on
him — not to learn Torah, not to do work — are
such as to ensure that the mourning fills his purview.
To be hunted and threatened by enemies is our natural state
in our golus, as long as we lack the full structure of
life as it should be lived: the living Beis Hamikdosh
which enables us as a people to perform the full range of
avodas Hashem as prescribed in the Torah. We are to
live centered on spirituality, dedicated to service to
Hashem, and organized as a people around its highest
expression in the cycle of korbonos in the Beis
Hashem in Yerushalayim.
We cannot imagine what it was like to attend the Beis
Hamikdosh. All of our experience provides not even a hint
of the experience of bringing a korbon. Ignorant
people project the blood and filth of a slaughterhouse, but
"you slaughter a lamb, for example, and get all dirty with
its blood in skinning it and washing out the entrails, in
rinsing it and butchering it, sprinkling the blood, arranging
the wood and burning it with the fire on the pile. And if it
were not done as a result of a Divine commandment, you would
sneer at such deeds and think that they take you further from
G-d and not bring you closer . . . Until, when everything is
completed properly, you see a Heavenly Fire, or you find
within yourself a different spirit that you were not used to,
or true dreams — then you will know that these
achievements are the results of what you did earlier and you
will realize the great thing that you have cleaved to and
gained. After that, it would not bother you at all to die,
after coming to such a state, because your death is only the
end of your body. But the soul that has reached this level
will not come down from it nor become distant from that
achievement" (Kuzari 3:53).
All of the discomfort and fear and oppression that we
experience should enhance our mood and help us mourn what we
truly miss: the functioning Beis Hamikdosh that was a
spiritual beacon to the entire world.
We must yearn for the right things, and strengthen our
performance in learning and doing. Our fundamental obligation
to Hashem should be enough to draw and inspire us throughout
the year, even when bombs are not falling.
If the Beis Hamikdosh is not yet built, it shows that
we have not yet rebuilt ourselves.
