Tisha B'Av: The Day Has Broken

2:53 Until tonight I never heard anyone say the word Yerushalayim like I heard Reb Weingraber say the word Yerushalayim. I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to hear him. Most people when they say Yerushalayim. When R. Weinberger said Yerushalayim, he had such longing, such gadguim for Yerushalayim. Say Yerushalayim. You ever hear him say Yerushalayim? And I feel like now Sitting on the porch Overlooking Yerushalayim, I feel like I'm in Yerushalayim. I feel like the bridge has been gapped between Nach Tishbev and right now. I imagine that if it was nearly two thousand years ago Tomorrow afternoon we would have been sitting on this porch. Looking at the flames coming up from Harabais And we wouldn't have known what to do with ourselves. Kaviyachal, like when I was in America for 9/11, and everyone was running up to the roof of my yeshiva to go see the skyline, to go see the smoke in the skyline. That's what would have been for us.

4:05 And now we're here, two thousand years later, and we don't see the smoke. But there's this deep connection that we still have to Shalayim, to Beis Hamikdash, to Harabayis. I couldn't have said it any better than Avi said it before. We're holding now. It used to be that it was difficult. It used to be that it was difficult to try to access. Some of the pain of what chur ben abayis means today, we have very little difficulty. Av five seven The state of Israel is trying to convince a bunch of Muslims to go daven and harabayis. Is that not the most painful thing in the world? It's not a difficult. It's not a difficult thing to access. That we go Baruch Hashem, that we go to the Kotel. But we have We have a wall. That's what we have. We have a wall. And we look up.

5:09 We look up to the left a little bit. We look up to the left, and we see We see our cousins parading around over there. That a Jew can't go to Daven on Harabayis today. We say ki Beis Tefillah cholam. It's going to be my house, a house of prayer for everybody in the world. They say you can't be here. So we're here. But we're not here. We're sitting on the roof. We're overlooking Yerushalayim. It's Nach Tishavah. We're not here yet. There's a fascinating halacha that tomorrow afternoon we begin to get up from the aveilus of Tishavah. We begin. We sit on normal chairs. We put the paroches back on the Aron Kodesh. We start to be making the food for the breaking of the fast. There's even a minute. There's even a minute to start washing your floors. To herald the coming of Mashiach.

6:10 And yet the Gemara tells us, the Yeshamim tells us That really the burning of the Beis Hamikdash started tomorrow. Really, it started tomorrow, and it went all the way to the tent. Which is why we don't eat meat tomorrow night. Which is why we wait, because it's not really a hundred percent over. The obvious question is: How could it be? That in the time of the ultimate destruction is the time that the fast begins to diminish. Imagine if it was two thousand years ago. And it's tomorrow afternoon, and somebody comes and they say to you "Come to the roof! Run to the roof!" You're not going to believe it. It's actually happening. And you saw the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. You were watching it with your own eyes. Is it possible that we could start in that moment to sponge the floors The herald the coming of Mashiach? To put the paroiches back onto the aron kodesh to start to prepare a suddah who could eat Who could even think of eating And for us, this is the time that we begin to diminish the time.

7:14 It's a very strange thing. All the mamarechazal keep talking about Mashiach was born on Tishah B'av. Eicha ends hashiveinu hashamilech of Tishah B'av chadish yameinu kekeden. So we always look at Tishah B'av. In a certain sense As a fast day, a day of tzara, a day of brokenness, and when you actually look at the mamarechazal It doesn't seem to have that quality. It seems to have some sort of redemptive quality to it. In fact, we don't say tachnum tomorrow because it's called a moed. We don't say tachnum like a choson or a kala on the day of their chasnut. We don't say tachnum like a father on the day of his bris mila. That's tomorrow. This is an incredible paradox, one that requires us to understand something on a very deep level. I think we made a terrible mistake. We look at Tishah B'av in a vacuum as a twenty-five hour period But the truth is that perhaps we need to look at Tishah B'av.

8:30 As the fulcrum between Shabbos Chazon and Shabbos Nachem A journey beginning with the three weeks Getting more intense with the nine days. Shabbos Chazon, and now on Tishah B'av we start to move into a new segment of this month called Shabbos Nachem. Shabbos Chazon Chazon means vision. But vision is a word that leaves us a little empty. Perhaps a better word would be imagination. In davening, we have a chazan. A chazan is somebody who leads us in a collective imagination. That's why the word pallel comes from the lashon of imagination. Yaakov said to Yosef when he saw him so many years later in Mitzrayim, 'Lo pallelti. I was never palal that I would see your face again.' What does palal mean? Palal means to imagine. I never imagined. I never thought that this could be a possibility. This is not what came up for me when I was thinking in the world of what's going on in my life. I never imagined that there would be a reunion of Yisef HaTzadik and Yaakov Avin.

9:47 So chazon means so much more than just to see. Chazon means to dream. And chevra. Our dreams are so pathetic. We dream in such small terms. We don't dream for redemption in the global sense of the entire world coming to recognize. We dream that a parking lot won't be open on Shabbos. That there be a little less Vil Shabbos. We don't see Jews for what they truly are, for what they could be. Instead, we focus on the negatives. He's from this ism. He's from that ism. He's Dati Lumi. She's Charedi. He's Mizrahi. She's Hasidish. Sometimes I feel like I've never met a Jew in my entire life. Our vision, our imagination Our eyes are so skewed. We daven that the Rebbeinu Sholom should return our eyes to be able to see once again real redemption. To be able to look and see beauty in another person.

11:15 I once heard from Weinberger that he said we're like a child who recently lost a parent. Like a seven-year-old kid who lost a parent. There's nothing more heart-wrenching in the entire world. Than seeing a child say kaddish for his parents You know why? Because he has no idea what he lost. He's seven years old. He's eight years old. He has no chazon. He has no vision. He has no dream. He can't imagine how his life was just altered. My shvare passed away when my wife was thirteen years old. I think her younger brother was six. People still tell me what it was like to watch him say kaddish. And today, by family get-togethers When everyone's reminiscing about their father He says, "At least you have a father to reminisce about." I don't even know what I miss. So Shabbos Chazon is the Shabbos of trying to figure out what in the world is going on over here to recalibrate our eyesight.

12:25 And Shabbos Nachamu. Is not only a Shabbos of consolation But actually the word Nachamu also means reconsideration. By the Chayta Ega, where the Rebbeinu Shlom was vayinachem, you reconsidered. He reconsidered. By the time we arrive at Shabbos Nachamu, the destination is just a couple of days from now. We have to already be at a place where we see the world so differently. Where, when we look at another Jew We don't see what they wear. We don't see how they behave. All we see is a sister or a brother. We already have to be there in just a couple of days from now, and the question is how do we get to that place? And perhaps the answer to that question is Tishbev. Perhaps the answer to that question is the paradox of coming up from Avelos in the middle of destruction. I want to read to you.

13:28 A Gentile poet. He's one of my favorite poets in the entire world. He talks about a concept called longing. And when I was reading this poetry I thought to myself Maybe 'aveilus' doesn't mean mourning. Maybe we've been taught. The chitzonius of Tisha B'av. We haven't accessed the essence, the peninius of Tisha B'av. Maybe on the outside, Tisha B'av is about mourning, but on the inside, it's about longing. And listen to this sentence: In longing, we move and are moving from a known but abstracted elsewhere to a beautiful, about to be reached someone. Something, or somewhere we want to call our own. Maybe Tisha B'av. We have feelings of availus because we long so deeply to move from where we are to where we want to be, to once again call the Rebbeinu Shalom our own. Like a wife who feels so distant from her husband because getting caught up in the vicissitudes of everyday life They stopped paying attention to each other.

14:53 But on the inside When she's sitting and crying. In her room, and the husband doesn't even know that she's crying Because he's out wherever he is. And she's crying because she misses her husband. So she's mourning in a sense. But in a deeper sense, she's longing for the return of someone and something and somewhere. That her house should once again be a house that's filled with love. That her marriage should be filled with love. That she can look at her husband and her husband can look at her and say we've returned to each other. That there's been redemption in our marriage. Maybe that's what Tishabah is really about. Maybe that's why Rizikiva was able to laugh when everybody else is crying. Because when everybody sees destruction And they see a fox coming out of the mikdash So Rizikiva sees in that destruction the longing, the yearning to return.

15:46 Maybe that's why Mashiach is born on Tishabah Because in the most destructive moment we reconfigure We have a nechama, so to speak. And we realize that in ourselves, as we're watching everything that's going on, how much we dearly want the Rebbeinu to return to us. Hashiveinu Hashem elachov enashuba. Chadei shameinu kikeden. Return. We don't want this anymore. It's broken. It's empty. It's beautiful. But it's not enough. We're not satisfied. The Baal Shem Rebbe says that the word gola and the word geula. Is only missing the aleph, which is the alufoshal olam, the rebanisholam. That's the only thing that's missing. A return to Eretz Yisrael, we have in the process of an unbelievable kibutz galios Unprecedented in history. But it's not enough because Ayako, where's the rebanishim? We have not yet returned. We don't yet feel his love. I read for the first time that there was a minig in Kali Yisrael to bury the kinos after Tishbev.

17:12 That's why we have flimsy paper kinos. We don't want to invest too much money in our kinos because we used to bury them. We knew this was the last year. We knew there is no Nach Tishbev. That's the hope. That's the hope that a Jew lives with. That's why the Navi calls us. We are prisoners of hope. With your permission, I want to read to you an article. I don't know this person But I did reach out to him and ask him Roshush to read this article to you tonight. I read it a couple of days ago, and I couldn't stop crying as I was reading it. The day before Tisha B'av three years ago, I ate the egg and ashes prescribed as the meal before the fast begins. Taking my last bite of sliced white bread on the eve of the darkest day in Jewish history, as I sat on a milk crate and gazed into a field and its tree-lined background, I began to cry.

18:17 I wasn't only crying because of Tisha B'av. But also for myself. I knew something was wrong. For weeks, while I'd been teaching at an Orthodox Jewish summer camp in upstate New York, I'd been waking up in bed sheets dampened by sweat. Despite sleeping in air condition My exhaustion and the lumps in my chest and throat had grown so rapidly that even in my bed I could find no rest. Before settling upstate for the summer, I had gone to see a dermatologist to deal with insatiable itch throughout my body, like a fire spreading. It gave no warning, no sign of rash. A prescription for an ointment to soothe my skin was filled but never used, and now weeks later, I was getting worse. The next morning on Tisha B'av, I read Eicha, Lamentations, at camp. It was the first time I'd read it publicly. Assigned the fifth chapter, I came across verses that left me trembling, just as I did when I tried to sleep, shuddering from a cold that wasn't there.

19:10 The fifth and final chapter of Lamentations is different from the previous four. It is the only one not arranged alphabetically, symbolizing the chaotic order and misalignment I felt going on within me. Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers; our houses to foreigners. It reads, much like my own body. Upon our necks, we are pursued. We toil and find no rest. Much like the protrusion in my throat. After reading my chapter for the other members of camp, I couldn't tolerate my symptoms any longer. As the campers began reciting kinos, I had no choice but to retire from the synagogue. In an attempt to find comfort in my bunk, after changing into sweatpants and turning on the air conditioning, I pulled out an empty notepad and began to write. I began to lament both Temple's destructions that Tishbev commemorates and my own pain. It came from a solemn place within me, a place at once familiar and deeply foreign.

20:02 Instead of reading the kinos from past millennia, I was writing my own. As I filled each page with poetry of my symptoms, of their erosion of me, my weariness grew greater. My time for a diagnosis drew nearer. With my head pounding, I closed the notebook and stood up. And walked to the camp doctor. After hearing my symptoms, the camp doctor said it was likely a respiratory ailment, probably nothing to worry about. He told me to see my general physician after camp. A month later, I got my diagnosis: cancer. And I found myself with the rest of my family on the ninth floor of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, waiting to see the pediatric oncologist who would treat my non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I was 21. My treatment lasted a year. Taking me through the entire cycle of Jewish holidays. It consisted of nine aggressive rounds of chemotherapy plus a month of radiation to my chest and neck.

20:59 In three cycles. Entering my first round of treatment, I weighed 165 pounds. After the second month of chemotherapy, receiving treatment Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. till 4 p.m. Followed by two weeks off to be monitored, hydrated, and transfused with blood or platelets. I was down to 115. Incapable of keeping meals down due to nausea, I went a month and a half eating only yogurt and frozen grapes. Which forced my nutritionist to supply me with liquid food intravenously from a bag hooked up to my ports. Mucositis, a side effect of chemotherapy, filled my mouth with sores so painful I couldn't speak. I wrote anything I needed to relay in a notebook, and my sister would act as a messenger. Even what should have provided comfort, laying my head on a soft pillow, became torture because of the pain. There is tired, and there is tired to the bone.

21:50 Chemotherapy saps all of your energy. While I underwent treatment, it depleted my will. I spent those first two months as an inpatient. When sukkahs arrived after celebrating in the Sloane Kathering sukkah, I was sent home in a wheelchair. I had been in bed for two months; my legs were weak. The highlight of Simchas Torah, the joyous culmination of sukkahs, is hakafas Dancing around the shul, hugging the Torah scroll, and singing songs of fortune. This seemed to be an insurmountable task. Physically weak, mentally exhausted, and having lost my hair to chemotherapy, I didn't even consider going to shul at first. Then one of my best friends asked me if I'd like to go to hakafas. My family was spending the holiday with friends, and there was only one place I wanted to go to hug the Torah, Eish Kodesh. Rav Moshe Weinberger shul. I met with the rab in his office a few days before Simchas Torah and discussed my situation.

22:42 I left his office feeling elated and, for a moment, forgot all about my illness. His shoe was my destination on Simchas Torah. My friend rolled me there in my wheelchair, nearly two miles. As they passed me the Torah, I hugged it with all the strength I had and began to dance with the community. My fortune was vast, and I was so happy. I thought that maybe my bald head shone like the face of Moses when he came down from Sinai. The worst side effect of all, being a 21-year-old forced to move back into his parents' place, was the recurring loneliness. The first night of Chanukah, Friday night, I had the house to myself. I lit candles before sundown in the windowpane of my room. As I stared into the first candle, I thought about the Jewish custom of lighting the shamash, along with the number of candles for each night of Hanukkah. Because we cannot take benefits from the Hanukkah light themselves, we light an extra service candle, just in case we utilize any of the light emanating from the menorah.

23:37 I thought then of a different reason for this tradition. We light the shamash so that on that first night, the single Hanukkah candle flickering will not feel alone. That is where I get a. That's where this. That is where I was emotionally by Chanukah 2009 With friends graduating from school, some finding jobs, others getting married, my life was not only completely on hold, but it flickered weakly. It could be extinguished at any moment. Purim came early in 2010. Or at least that's how it felt to me. For weeks before the holiday, I kept petitioning nurses from Sloan Kettering to allow me to drink wine. Of course, I wasn't serious. My immune system was compromised. My liver was beaten from the chemical poisons. Drinking even a glass of wine was never an option. I went to a meal with my friends who were all drinking. And sat them on my first sober Purim.

24:27 I thought of the lyric from Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower": "Businessmen, they drink my wine." For an entire year, I was basically idle. Like a Seinfeld character, a show about nothing, living each day in sweatpants like George Costanza. I was completely worn out from the treatment. My will was depleted. I began having follow-up scans to measure the effects of the treatment. First, once a month, then every three months. I had a PET scan and a CT scan of my chest, neck, abdomen, and pelvis. The tests came back clear of any trace of tumor. I was in remission. After a year of treatments, I could begin planning the next step in my life, but I faced a new hurdle: motion. I had the opportunity to start rebuilding, but no energy to actualize. To not have to go into a full day of chemotherapy was all I wanted at this point.

25:17 I couldn't muster the energy to be productive beyond that. Free from the hospital, I would need another entire year of recuperation before I was strong enough to re-enroll in classes. Move out of my parents' apartment and re-emerge in an attempt to regain myself. I learned in that time that coping, in and of itself, is forward motion. Even if it's just thoughtful, mindful introspection. By Tishav 2011 Two full years after my initial diagnosis I felt nearly back to full strength. I went on a trip to Scotland, spending Tishav in Edinburgh, which stood in stark contrast to my Tishav two summers earlier. Having forgotten to pack non-leather shoes I walked back from Shul in my socks after hearing Eicha. It was a little more than an hour walk, but I was more comfortable on Tishav. Hiking old cobblestone streets without shoes Than I had been that Tishav I spent in camp.

26:11 Today, at age 24, I have been in remission for two years. I'm entering the last semester of undergraduate studies and preparing for another Tisha B'av. Marking the destruction of the temples. We often consider the holiday to commemorate the end of our culture's peak. According to Jewish tradition, however Tisha B'av is also the day when Mashiach is born. Within our suffering and beneath the ruins, there is a flask of pure oil waiting for us to retrieve it. Cancer made me feel completely misunderstood and out of place. But it also made me more self-aware. It gave me a new perspective on the world. Helping me appreciate simple dialogues with loved ones and strangers. Above all, it was transformative and empowering. Giving the knowledge that only an experience like this could impact. To know what it means to be empathetic. This is the story of my tishabah. The first word for cancer to appear in medical literature Back in the time of Hippocrates around 400 BCE, was karkinos From the Greek word for crab. It's a linguistic coincidence, but it seems to be connected to the similar-sounding word kinos, the elegies of Tishbe.

27:24 Since that hour on my bed at camp three summers ago I have searched for the notebook where I wrote my own kinos and filled pages with my own pain, but I haven't found it. Maybe like the old Jewish custom to bury the books of kinos deep in the ground in the hopes of not needing to use them in the following year with the rebuilding of the temple. I buried them somewhere deep in my room. What I feared then as my life's end, like the temple's destruction, turned out to require me to have the courage to begin again. One of my kinos did show up. The one that I tore out of that notebook. I found it last year on one of my best friend's fridges. And chevra. This is the most meaningful kinos that I've ever read in my entire life. As the heart of the nation beats The mind of the people settles to focus.

28:19 Time has brought us to the place of redemption. The tears have dripped into a pool of blood, leaving behind a darkened moon. So the nation lifts its legs and rises above Perfecting what is theirs And begins to walk alongside the rising sun. Day has broken. I think that's the most powerful thing I've ever read in my entire life. Day has broken. That's what it is for us. We're all cancer patients. We're all broken. We're all mourning, but within that mourning, we're looking for each other. We're looking for the Rebbeinu Shalom. We're looking to return the Alufa Shalolim into our lives. To go from Gula to Gula. May this year be the last year of Tishav. That next year Be v'asgail tzedek. When the Rebbe is standing here in Yerushalayim Maybe on this porch And he says Nach Tishav He won't mean it the way he meant it all those years ago. It'll be Nach Tishav, the Tishav before destruction. At this point, we're going to finish up Maariv.