Three Weeks - The Mourning We Don’t Feel: How to Belong to a Beis HaMikdash We Never Saw

1:57 Most people just understand. Now it's a funny thing. I have a daughter who is an aunt to three grandchildren that are older than her. So even though I grew up in Lawrence, New York, I think I'm officially Yerushalmi now. I'm like from that world. It's a tremendous bracha. She's healthy. Everything is amazing. But I want to share with you. I try to say real things that are at least real for me. There's a question. That my entire family has been like, not asking so much, just as kind of verbalizing. Like it just keeps coming up. They keep saying it over and over again. I also, just so you know, I had this daughter before who was born. I have six children, and five of them are girls. So there's a lot of emotional language in the family. This might be shocking to you. I didn't grow up that way. I grew up in a family of all boys.

2:54 I thought for sure that I would have boys. The girl that I married was a tremendous basketball player. I thought we'd have a boy family. Didn't happen. So there's a lot of emoting that happens in the family, but they're all kind of saying the same thing. They're verbalizing the same thing, and it goes something like this. They're holding my daughter, the 19 year old, the 18 year old, or the marrieds. They come over to the marrieds and hold her, and then they go like this. She wasn't at my wedding. I'm like, yeah, 'cause she was just born. And then they go, she missed COVID. I'm like, yeah, 'cause she was just born. And then they go, she never had to run to a mamad in the middle of a war. I'm like, right, like she, and that's like the theme. All the things that Sarah Malka never got to experience. And then when you push them and you say, 'So what are you really asking?' What they're asking is this: How is she going to know how to be part of our family? She never experienced it with us. She's not in our family pictures. She didn't experience the memories. And it's not like when you have a break between children. So there's a gap. The gap between my wife and my oldest daughter is 21 years.

4:24 The gap between my oldest daughter and my newest daughter is 23 years. So we always talk about how in the family there's three families. There's the two married ones, and then there's the two older teenagers, and then there's the two younger ones. And now there's this island of Sarah Malka, who's born after everything, and she's gonna have an old dad. A lot of people have asked me in a very disrespectful way, but I love them anyway. Are you still up for parenting? Good choice. What was my option here? Care is not great enough. Thank you. I appreciate that. Despite the fact that I have six daughters, if I'm being very real, there's a sense of like, I have a nine-year-old son. He's my youngest. So I was kind of thinking, I don't have so much. He was my youngest. Yes. Thank you. I appreciate that.

5:22 There's a sense of, I have a couple years left. How much do you actually parent these kids at 18, 19, 20 years old? I was on the tail end. I figured I had 10 years left. This is like re-upping your contract. Now I'm on for 20 years. And for those of us that have married children in the room, I think you'll agree that there's still parenting that happens even after they're married. It's just much more subtle. It's a much more dangerous type of parenting because anything you say is now they go home with it, they share it with somebody else. But it's a beautiful thing. The truth is, I'm experiencing, if I'm being honest, I'm experiencing the same thing my daughters are experiencing. What family is she going to be a part of? If she's in school with one of her nieces, that's weird. How are you related?

6:16 That's my niece. She's in a grade older than you. That's a weird experience. I think that in many ways, the challenge of the three weeks is a very similar challenge. I'm going to be going here because it seems like a group that appreciates honesty. Just from your feedback, I don't really feel this. I wish that I could tell you that I was one of those sadikim who was getting up tikkun chatsots and crying over the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. It's something that I aspire to. I've read the same art scroll books. I know that's what I should be doing, but if I'm being honest, I don't. It's been a little easier living in Eretz Yisrael over the last couple of years to tap into the concept of tragedy. It's been a bit easier because.

7:11 Lo alenu, we've lost so many in the last couple of years. We lost a lot. It doesn't need to be rehashed. If you live in Eretz Israel, I don't know how it feels living in America through this. I don't know if it feels distant or disjointed. In Eretz Israel, there's no escaping it. Everybody you know knows somebody who lost a child or lost a husband. We've been living with death in the most insane way. It's normal. It's normal for my children to be like, I have to update them like, kids, we're at war with Iran again. Like that's a thing that you as a parent don't prepare for. They don't go like when Trump decides to attack on a Friday night and I didn't see it coming, so I was in America.

8:09 While the attacks were happening, and my wife was seven months pregnant, I was speaking to her on Shabbos and I said I'm not getting back anytime soon. My kids were like, 'Abba, it's really hard without you here.' What's the parental response? In which parenting handbook did they write how you're supposed to deal with that one? And I dealt with it super poorly, just for the record, because I was having my own anxieties around it. So in the last couple of years, to be able to tap into the loss of not having Mashiach, the loss of not living in a world of peace. Those things are more readily available to you. But to sit here and tell you that we really mourn the three weeks, not so much. Maybe some do. If you're at a higher level than me, then kol hakavod. I personally, I'm not holding on that level. I think, if we're being honest, probably a lot of us aren't holding on that level, because if we're being honest, life is pretty good. I like coming to Muncie.

9:07 In Eretz Yisrael, everything is very tzafuf. Everything is very like on top of each other. I never grew up in Lawrence, New York. I was not the type of family that went to bungalow colonies. There's bungalow colony families, and then there's I am never bungalow. My father was from the community of people that would have. It would have been bad if we went to a bungalow colony. Bad things would have happened to the family, to our neighbors, to my mother. It would have been a terrible thing. And now I live in a bungalow colony. Everybody's on top of each other. I know what everybody has for dinner. I know what everybody. If somebody orders pizza, just because it's right outside, I go up. Lazy parenting. Like the I'm in judgment. They're in judgment of me too. If somebody goes to the hospital, Hatsala comes down. Every kid, because it's very Israeli, every kid does some combination of either the very brazen kids come outside, like while people are being wheeled into the ambulance, going, "What's wrong?"

10:04 It's not your business. Somebody should parent you, not me. But you know. Or alternatively, there's like the kids who sit out the window because we have sorerim. So in Eretz Yisrael, the window is like a perch for children to look into other people's homes. Not what it was in the desert. Matovu al Achayakov is far from what we're living with in Ramat Beit Shemesh. I come to Muncie. I like it here. It's very nice. I drove by Wesley Kosher. I made a note to myself. I have a lot of things to pick up for my family to bring back. Our supermarkets are different. We have pigeons. I can't imagine you have pigeons flying around in your supermarkets. I'm pretty confident that I'm going to find everything that I need in one supermarket. In Eretz Yisrael, that's just not a thing. In Eretz Yisrael, my wife comes back. How'd you do? About 60%. I'm going out later to somewhere else. How'd you do? I got the next 20%.

11:03 It's a tahalich. It's pretty comfortable here. It's pretty comfortable. It's nice. It's nice. Are we going to really sit here and say life is so bad? When we were living through pogroms and inquisitions, and then there's the fearmongering. But Mamdani was elected. But we're still doing okay. Do we really feel it? If we really felt it, we would be yearning. We would be crying, and we're not. I think it's understandable, because we were born into a world that never had a Beis Hamikdash, and you're asking us to mourn something that I know nothing about. And just because you tell me the stories, Sarah Malka is going to hear all these stories. Just because you tell me the stories, doesn't mean that she's going to know what it really means to be a part of this family. She'll hear the stories; they'll be academic. She's named after my two grandmothers.

12:02 I had a good relationship with one of them. I'll probably tell her more about that one. But at the end of the day, she never met Grandma Sarah, and she never met Grandma Carrie. It'll be stories. But to be like for it to be real, I don't know. It's a good question. So we could sit and we could learn, and there's value. I'm not chas v'shalam being mezazel in this. If we would really sit and learn everything that happened in the Beis Hamikdash, and we would know all the halachos of the Beis Hamikdash. Like the Chafetz Chaim did in Radin, where they had a Kachim Kailo, and today in Yerushalayim also there's Kachim Kailos, and Bnei Brak also there's Kachim Kailos. For sure, they have a better understanding of the Beis Hamikdash than I do, no question. But I wonder if knowledge about something creates avelus, and if I'm being very honest, I doubt that it does. Just because you know something intellectually does not create an emotional reality.

12:56 So you might have a better understanding of the Beis Hamikdash. I'm not convinced you have a better understanding of what we lost. And I think this is really, if we're being honest, what every Rebbe tries to do when they get up to speak, which is to somehow make it relevant in this moment. It's not about the loss of what was; it's about the loss of right now. And if we would have a Beis Hamikdash, but again, as clever a move as that is, it's still not mourning the loss of the Beis Hamikdash. It's still not mourning the loss that there's not a central place in the world where Hakadosh Baruch Hu's transparency is obvious. Shaila is. What do we do? So I want to share with you an idea that I think is going to be, at least for me, a game changer. I don't know if it's going to be a game changer in the long term, but for sure, I hope in the short term.

13:50 There's a psychologist whose name is Dr. J. William Warden, and when it comes to grief, when it comes to avelus, when it comes to mourning, there's a lot of different approaches, and there's basically two camps. It divides itself up into two camps. The first camp is like there's no right way to do this, and the second camp is like there's kind of a right way to do this, but we don't want to say that there's a right way to do this. But these are the things you have to go through if you're in avelus. So Warden is from the second camp, and he says like this: There's four things we're going to focus on. The fourth one: There's four things that everybody has to do if they're going through avelus. Number one: You have to accept the reality of the loss. Number two: You have to process the pain. Number three: You have to adjust to life without this person. And then number four, and this is the key one, and it's brilliant, but it's really, for sure, the hardest one.

14:47 He says you have to find an enduring connection to the person that you lost. It's brilliant. It's impossibly hard. A chaver of mine lost his dad, and that's a complicated story. He said, I was talking to him. I said, How are you doing? Which is, by the way, the most trite. What do you want them to say, great, or terrible? Close enough. So I said, 'How are you doing?' He said, 'I'm learning to love my father in a brand new way.' I'll be honest. At first, I didn't really understand what he was saying, and then when he shared with me a little bit more, I was like, 'Right,' because the big avoda of avelos is not letting go.

15:46 And I think that's where so many people get stuck. The avodah of avelus is to let go of one iteration of the relationship, and then to build a new iteration of that relationship, which is impossibly hard. How am I supposed to build a relationship with someone that's not here? I can build a relationship, young and married. You can have conversations. You could have fights. You could take trips. You could build a relationship in a very obvious way. How do I create an enduring connection with someone that's not here? How do I stop it from just falling into the realm of memory, which is, I think, mostly what happens? But I think what it means is something along these lines. And tell me if this makes sense to you. I have a picture of my grandmother on my desk.

16:43 My grandmother and I were very close. I was the oldest grandson. I made her into a grandmother, and she was like the kindest person in the world. I have a picture of her on my desk in my office, and I know this is going to sound strange. Judge me if you want, just don't do it out loud. Do it with your faces so that I could see the judgment. But just don't say anything not nice. She speaks to me. I know it sounds crazy. She doesn't actually speak to me. But like I see her face, and I'm in the middle of doing whatever work I'm doing, and I'm talking to whoever I'm talking to, maybe I'm talking to a client, whatever it is, and then my grandmother, I just look at her, and I hear her voice inside of me, and that voice, that's my grandmother's voice, it always tells me exactly what I need to do. You know what I'm saying? Like I have this reaction that I'm about to have, I'm about to say the wrong thing, and then I hear my grandmother go like this.

17:38 She was very old school. She go, simmer down now. I go, okay, Grandma. I take a breath. I go, and I like literally, this happens all inside of me. I go, Grandma, what am I supposed to say here? And she says, be kind. I'm like, yeah, this person needs some kindness. This person needs some compassion. And I can find it in me because my relationship with my grandmother, it's alive. It's really alive. I know that sounds crazy. I'm not talking about mystical. You have the same thing. For you, who's the voice? Your grandmother also. I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you for letting me know that I'm not the only crazy person in the world. At least we're crazy together. I'm sure there's a couple of people here that have had a similar experience.

18:34 It's crazy because the definition of alive for me has changed, and I'm not talking about pretending that she's there when she's not, because she's not there. She's not there, not in that way, and she'll never be that way again. I'll tell you the worst thing I ever did to my grandmother. I'll never be able to do tshuva for this. It's the worst thing I ever did. When my grandfather died, I was five years old, and his passing was a very big deal in the family. Both of my parents are bale tshuva. My grandfather, Elul Shalom, was not super supportive of my mother becoming frum. They did not have the best relationship until I was born, and then it was like okay.

19:28 And there was a lot of stuff around it because my mother was partially becoming from through Chabad because a lot of my family became Chabad and it was complicated. When I was born, everything was okay. Five years later, my grandfather passed away. I was not brought to the funeral because I was five. Somebody I don't know watched me at home. My is terrible. My grandmother came home after the funeral to sit shiva, and there I was, little five-year-old. I didn't grow up as Mordechai Berg. My plan in life was not to be overweight with a beard. I grew up as Matt Berg from the Five Towns. As my English name is Matthew Scott. All of my brothers are named after apostles. This is not a joke. I grew up watching television, and I don't know if this. Some of you might be old enough to remember this. Do you remember Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street? Yes. This is the first time I've ever given a speech where people know who Mr. Hooper was.

20:24 Fine. But Mr. Hooper was a staple on Sesame Street, and Mr. Hooper, Hashgacha Katt, has worked it out that Mr. Hooper died shortly before my grandfather died. So I, the big five-year-old cousin, was very knowledgeable in the area of death, because Mr. Hooper had died, and Sesame Street used it as an opportunity to teach us all about death. My cousin Yoni. Grandma Sarah sat down, and my cousin Yoni goes, "Don't worry, Grandma. Papa Harry will be back tomorrow." And I, being the five-year-old, very knowledgeable cousin, looked at him, and he said, "No, he won't. He's dead. Dead means you're never coming back. He's never ever coming back." And my grandmother started bawling, and my father ran through the room and grabbed me and took me out of the room. And like this is like family legend, the time that I crushed my grandmother right after she buried her husband. I'm not going to pretend that someone who's there is not there because part of the process of grief is accepting that there was a loss. But the next part of the process, which I didn't know until I was much older, was just because they're not here doesn't mean that the relationship is over. I'm just trying to be patient and see if they get.

21:49 What's the reason for step four? How does it help you? First of all, I so appreciate the question, and it's such a real question. I'm honored that you felt comfortable to ask it, and it says a lot about this community that you feel comfortable to ask. I'm hesitating because not because I don't have an answer, but because I want to really pay attention to what's coming up for me. And if I'm honest, I'm listening to my grandmother. I don't know. I don't know precisely how it helps. I don't know if I could define for you how it helps me. I just know I'm not as alone as I thought I was.

22:47 Does that make sense? It's not so much that it helps in my day to day. I miss her terribly. It's more like the relationship that gave me life. It's still giving me life. I'm still attached. That's, I think, the beauty of it. So I don't know if I could tell you how it would help you, but I know what it means for me. To find an enduring connection means that this person that meant so much to me, they're gone, but the relationship is not. And we are born. I just want to be clear about this. We are. There is some myth that exists in the world today, like you come from nowhere, like you spontaneously spawned into reality. It's not true. We are born in the gaze of another. That's like. That's the deepest psychological truth. As parents, when we hold our children when they're young.

23:46 That's what gives our children a sense of self. Everybody's always talking today about being enough for yourself. I don't really know that that's possible. If I'm being, I don't really know that it could be true that somebody could be enough for themselves by themselves. Where would they ever know that they're enough for themselves unless somebody deeply loved them into being? And I think it's a very big mistake that we're making. There's a difference between saying I'm going to take the love that you gave me and take it with me so that I don't need to be holding on for dear life. But that's not the same thing as being able to be enough for yourself out of nowhere. We all draw from the voices that gave us life. I just want to say sometimes there's a situation where you were not nurtured or you were not loved for who you are, unconditional love or whatever it was. You need to learn how to reparent yourself and love yourself for who you are so that you can.

24:45 Parents, the next generation. So you do need something about self-love and self-empowerment. It does help for those that need it. I'm with you. I'll tell you where I'm with you. I'm with you that, and I love that language of re-parenting yourself because that's huge. Because parenting Winnicott, if you're holding enough in re-parenting, then I'm going to assume that you're holding enough in Winnicott. Winnicott basically said all parents are imperfect, and that's good. I agree that not all of us got exactly what we needed, and some of us got very far from what we needed. But I'll tell you what I've learned. For sure, my parents loved me into being. For sure, my grandmother loved me into being. But I have to say, as I think about it, as I get older, a lot of people loved me into being. Camp counselors, and madrichim, and principals of my schools.

25:41 Some yes and some no. I was expelled from school in fifth grade, so that principal a little bit less. But Rabbi Bender from Darche took me in. He was the only person that would take me in fifth grade. And so Rabbi Bender's, that voice that I was worthy of being taken in. If I have to re-parent myself, I'm still drawing from somewhere. If I literally had nothing, I don't know where I would be able to re-parent from. So I agree with you. Not all of us got what we needed, and yet. I think some of us got enough from the outside that we could do the rest of the work. Does that resonate? It resonates. Thanks. I'll take it. Just to go back to that number four, the question that we asked, why it might be so significant because the enduring connection that we're trying to hold on to—that's what you said, right? Connection for the grandmother, I think. I think speaks to me. It feels like it speaks to our mesama, which is yearning for that mitzvahs connection of Hashem, which brings us to the tzniyta.

26:37 So I think you're going down the mystical road, and it's exactly where I want to go. The neshama is eternal, and the neshama has no idea, really, what to do with death because death is so far in to the infinite, and it's we're not supposed to live in a world like this. It's a cosmic accident, so to speak. But there is something that's unnatural to the human condition, unnatural to the soul. The infinite has a very hard time comprehending that something could end, and so it perhaps keeps it alive on that level for sure. I want to just see if I could say one more thing, and maybe this will resonate. In the absence of the people that we love, we really have two choices. One is to allow ourselves to be hit repeatedly by the truck of their loss.

27:35 And then somewhere in that pain, to find that enduring connection, or the opposite of that, which is to numb ourselves to the point where we can just survive. And I've done both. I think probably all of us, on some level, have done both. When tragedy strikes, and it does. And it does, and there is no Pollyanna version of this world. We protect our children growing up, and we tell them that life is good, and life is good. Life is amazing, and life comes with the craziest twists and turns. And if you've been around long enough, then you've had yours. But everyone, kimaat, has something. Everyone has something. Three months ago, one of my closest friends in the world.

28:28 On a Matzei Shabbos, I got a phone call from the Rosh Yeshiva of our Yeshiva that on Friday his wife fell into a coma, and for three months, Baruch Hashem, she's taking small steps. Arielle Chava Baschan Malka, if anybody could have her in mind. So she's taking small steps, and Beis Hashem, things are going to be good, but it has been a very complicated three months. And the pain—the pain that my friend is in, the pain that we're all in for him—who wants to sit? Who wants to allow themselves just to confront that reality? The answer is nobody. You have to. So it's like—I don't know if this makes sense—but you know, you do it until you can't, and then you numb out, and then you do it until you can't, and then you numb out. I think, if I'm being honest.

29:26 I think the Jewish community, for a very long time, has not really ever been able to process the pain of what we've gone through. That's the thesis statement. I think I've spoken about this with a lot of my friends who are therapists. For the Ashkenazi community, I don't think we ever processed the pain of the Holocaust. For those that had relatives that were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, Russian Jewry. I don't think that got processed. For Sfardim, whose families, I don't know. Anyone in here Sfardi? Where's your family from? Morocco. We just had a recent family reunion. Relatives there. Talk about being positioned the way that other families have been held. They still holding on to that. I have Talmidim.

30:18 We had a Talmud once in yeshiva. It was the craziest story. This kid came to me and he goes, 'Rebbe, you're not going to believe what just happened. There's a guy on our campus. He's like a maintenance man. I don't know his real last name. We call him Avram Chashmal, Avram Electricity, because he's just constantly fixing the electric. He started talking with this random Svardi kid in the yeshiva. He said, "What's your last name?" The kid says, "Yoshi." He goes, "Is your father Ploni?" He goes, "Yeah." He goes, "Send your dad my regards." So the kid calls his father. He goes, "Do you know this guy Avram, whatever?" And he goes, "You met Avram. He's the one that snuck me out of Iran. He was the smuggler smuggling all the Jews out of Iran. He got caught and was sentenced to death. He escaped jail. His entire back is filled with lashes. They beat him. They beat him.'

31:13 Sfardi Jews, like all these Sfardim in L. A. That they're just like the Persians who washed up on the shores of L. A. There's so much unprocessed trauma, and because we are a people for whatever reason, I'm not even getting into the whole Deir Betachtainim and why we have to go through this. I'm not trying to make any sense of it, but just as a reality, what were we supposed to do if we were the generation that was right after the Holocaust, and six million just disappeared? Who amongst us, even if we had psychological language at that point, which we didn't, but who amongst us would have been able to say, "Yeah, let's process this pain"? They didn't have time to process pain. They were coming to Muncy, and they were going to Lakewood, and they were going to the Five Towns, and they were going everywhere they could go, and they were rebuilding shuls and mikvaos and beis yakhovs and yeshivas and all the things that needed to happen for Klal Yisrael to survive. But somewhere along the way, we just forgot.

32:12 Somewhere along the way, we just didn't have enough in the tank to be able to say, 'Let's actually take a minute to just understand what happened to us.' I don't think we ever did it, and I think as a community, you can see it. You can see the fear. It still plays itself out in people's families in everyday life. Whenever anything happens, it's like I knew grandparents that were hoarders because they never knew. When they were going to need stuff and they weren't going to be able to leave their homes, and if you were the child of those people and you grew up with that in your family, it made an impact. It for sure made an impact. I wonder if the following happened. I wonder if because of the korban, in all of its different iterations, if we just said we're moving on, we're just going to have to leave it in the past and we're going to have to move on because that's the only way we know how to survive.

33:12 And moving on is very different than moving forward. Moving on means there's an attempt to leave that traumatic event in the past, and it does not work. No matter how hard you try, it doesn't work because it keeps following you because it lives inside of us. So it's like when you're younger and you're like, if I just switch seminaries or if I just switch yeshivas or if I just be in a different friend group, then all of my problems will be solved. And then you go to the next place and it's like. I can't believe it followed me. It didn't follow you. It's living inside of you. So of course it came out in the next iteration of who you are because it's so core to your being, and you can't just move on from it. And that's the crazy part of this whole thing. When we go through Gehenna, and everyone at some point in their life goes through Gehenna, you can attempt to numb yourself and be indifferent and leave it behind, but there's no way to excise this.

34:09 And that's the reality that we have to wrap our heads around. We can either choose to deal with it, or it will deal with us. But there is no in between. And the reason that we don't feel the churban bias is not because we're indifferent to it, and it's not because we didn't learn the halachos of the Beit Hamikdash, and it's not because we never got to see the Kohanim and the Levim singing Shira and the Kohanim and Azarah. The reason is because we are absolutely petrified. That if we, as a nation, would stop for a second to really conceive of the idea that we have not had a home in thousands of years, and despite our best attempts to build places like the space and the shuls today are palaces, what happened? I grew up in a shul that was a dump. Didn't you? What was a kiddush when we were growing up?

35:03 Raise your hand if you've ever, and you're a hero if you have. Have you ever eaten sponge cake and kichel? This generation is a dar yasom. They don't know what kichel is. It didn't get leveled up with the rest of the stuff. Potato kugel became yapchik. Cholent gets spare ribs now. Somehow sponge cake never became like, and now you know what I'm saying. And it came in a box. You know what I'm talking? Like it was like. What now is what is it? Strawberry shortcake. Is that what they're having here in America? Hashem yirachem. Not only did Kkush survive, Kkush is thriving. Kkush is like having its moment. There's this guy. He's like this influencer on Instagram. African American guy.

36:02 And he's going around like tasting Jewish food because we've been gatekeeping it. He calls it rugalash. He loves cockesh cake. My wife has deep Sternberg memories of underbaked cockesh cake on a Shabbos morning. I see where we're at as a people. That was amazing. I have a friend. His name is Ari Dicker. Ari Dicker is a cockesh cake aficionado. Places send in their cockroach cake to post about it on his WhatsApp status. I just want to add one thing. Today, what we suffer and we don't realize, because we're here in America. I am live. Bullets passed them, the wind of the bullets passed them, and hit their friend. Their friend was pulled out, and they had to just continue moving on, so that the next bullet wouldn't hit. I want to say something.

36:58 On that, just because it's such an important point, the divorce rate right now in Israel is not being spoken about, but it's so high. From all of these chayalim that have been living for two and a half to three years, whatever it is, under the craziest conditions, they don't know how to come back to real life. Their wives don't know how to deal with them. Their wives themselves have been in this survival mode for years. I have talmidim that are chayalim. And watching them try to recover, you can't imagine what it's like. My Talmud told me he dug his own grave because he was up north. He was in Lebanon, and he dug like a hole because they said when the bombs explode, the shrapnel goes up, so you got to sleep at night in these holes. So they gave them shovels and they said dig. Mamish, dig.

37:54 And he woke up in the morning. He rolled over and he said to his best friend, who's in his same unit, 'Did we just dig our own graves?' And his friend said, 'I think we just did.' We have no idea the impact that has on a person because he had to numb out in order to survive. But the problem is, if you stay that way, it doesn't work because you're not going to be a functional father and you're not going to be a functional husband. He told me he's a tzaddik. This guy. He told me when he's driving by an Arab village now in Israel, he naturally, without even thinking about it, is looking up and saying, 'There could be a sniper there. There could be a sniper there. They could just come down through there.' I'm not having that thought. I'm just driving, but he's living in a different reality, and it's impacting him. And he's a tzaddik for dealing with it. My akharas atov to him is boundless. I'm able to teach taira and learn taira in Eretz Yisrael because of the sacrifice that he made. But you're right. This numbing that we do in order to survive, we could do it for a minute, but we can't hold on to it forever.

38:56 That's amazing. Thank you very much to your son. I don't know how these kids do it. They're just kids, but they did it. I want to say that my grandfather made aliyah when he was 80, and I was about six years old or seven. We were walking through the streets, and he was coming, and he would run from one side of the street to the other, and bench every chayyot, and say, "You've eret to Hashem, you've eret." And I was embarrassed, and he'd say, "Saba zed mitayeshetu ki," and he would say, "You don't understand. I lived through the Holocaust. There was no one there to protect me. These people are kedoshim, mamish. I'm a chayyot. I'm a korat to bench them."

39:53 And he would do that till he lived till ninety. Literally, one chayal, another chayal. So beautiful. I think we could use a lot more of that today. I want to say one last thing because I think this is going to wrap it up. If we face the pain, and if we create an enduring connection to the people that we lost, that comes with a sense of responsibility. Many years ago, one of my rebbeim, who was actually a chavrush of mine, but he was also one of my rebbeim, he said to me, "Why do we say kaddish?" "It's a good kasha. Why do we say kaddish?" He said, "Because here was a person, and his job was to be marbuk v'otshamayim. His job was to make Hashem's name great in the world, and when he is done."

40:50 With his time making Hashem's name great in the world, now it's our time. We pick up where he left off. I think sometimes we think about the things that we do li'ilui nishmas, to give tzedakah and we're going to make a siyum and we're going to dedicate something. And I think we think it's sort of trite. It's kind of what you do. When you have an enduring relationship with someone, it means, what would you want from me now? Where am I picking up where you left off? And this is the final stage, and you can't rush to it. The final stage is how do I make meaning out of this korban? Chanan Algez, even if you don't know that name, I'm pretty confident you know the story. Chanan Algez and I were in yeshiva many years ago. Out of nowhere, this year in yeshiva on Rosh Hashanah, Chanan, who doesn't live anywhere near our yeshiva, just showed up.

41:49 So what are you doing here? Here in the neighborhood, I said you have to come speak to the boys. Why did I want Chananel to speak before Tkiyah Shofar? Why did I want him to speak? Chananel was on his way to the hospital. His wife was nine months pregnant. They were on their way to the hospital to give birth, and unfortunately, lo alenu, his wife was driving the car. She was killed. Two weeks later, the baby died. Chananel said to me in the courtyard of the yeshiva. It was like on our break in Rosh Hashanah. We were having kiddush. I said, Chananel. What's going on? He goes, Mordechai. I discovered a final stage of grieving that the secular world doesn't talk about. He said, 'It's making this meaningful, doing something with this tragedy.' I said, 'Chananel, you have to speak to the yeshiva.' And he got up in front of the entire yeshiva, and he spoke about not just the pain that he's living with, but what he's doing with the pain. I think that because we had to survive.

42:47 And build these amazing communities that we've built, halavaykei nirbu. But I think somewhere along the line we stopped taking responsibility for rebuilding the Beis Hamikdash. I know that's a harsh thing to say, because it's like, what do you mean? Everything we do is like, as Hashem, Mashiach. I know we say it. I know we say it. And yet, I don't want to say but. And yet, are we rebuilding the Beis Hamikdash, or are we rebuilding our communities? It's not exactly the same thing. Rebuilding our communities is we have to survive. Rebuilding the Beit Hamikdash is in the absence of the Korban. I have to ask myself: So where does Hashem live now? Because He had a home, and He doesn't now. So where does He live? Is my home a Beit Hamikdash? Is my shul a Beit Hamikdash? Are our yeshivas a Beit Hamikdash? If they're a Beit Hamikdash, then we're rebuilding the Beit Hamikdash. But if they're just.

43:44 This is where we are now in Gullus. It means we missed something, and I think we missed something. I think we became so numb—not because we didn't care, because we cared so much about the loss of the Beis Hamikdash—that somewhere along the line we said, 'so we're going to figure out how to survive in Gullus,' and we've done a masterful job at it. Masterful, probably better in America today than ever before in the history of Gullus, and I don't just mean because of the wealth in the Jewish community. Palaces, we built palaces. Everything, the infrastructure of our community, is more incredible now than it's ever been before in the history of Klal Yisrael. It's unbelievable the amount of limudat Torah, the amount of chesed. It's incredible. Period. And yet, I wonder. Do we have it based on Mikdash consciousness? Do we have a consciousness of like Hashem doesn't have a home, so now our homes become His home?

44:41 That's a rebuilding the Beis Hamikdash mentality. Grief comes with a deep sense of responsibility. I think the title of this year, Mrs. Levine, you'll tell me if I got this right, was something along the lines of I don't feel the korban of the three weeks, but it should still matter to me. I'll tell you why it should still matter. It should still matter because if we don't actually take some time over the course of the next three weeks, not chas v'shalom, to create anything artificial, nothing artificial. An artificial tear is not worth much, but a little bit to go back in time and to really imagine to ourselves. I'm never going to be able to tell Sarah Malka this. I can tell her what happened, but I can't make her feel it. I can't do that for her, but she can. It's within her to be able to say, this is what my yachas is to that thing.

45:37 It's her responsibility now. I'll do my best to bring her into it, but it's her responsibility to create a relationship with this family, and it's our responsibility to actually spend time thinking over the course of the next couple of weeks, what am I in Availus for? And if I actually pay attention to that, then the tears that might come—if they don't, that's okay, also—but the tears that might come might actually be genuine. And if they're genuine, then I can guarantee you that there's always some forward movement that comes with that genuineness. There's always something like, 'So now, what will I build? And now, what will I do?' And I think that that's really the avoda of the three weeks. The avoda of the three weeks is not to be still. The avoda of the three weeks is to create a genuine movement towards rebuilding the Beis Hamikdash. Blessed Hashem, we should see it soon.