Bein haMitzarim - 003 The Perspective of the Nine Days

Tisha B’Av: Mourning On The Collective Level

There is a fundamental difference between the Nine Days and Tisha B’Av.

One of the differences is that the Nine Days are not days of open mourning upon the tzibur (congregation). Although all people are obligated according to halachah to refrain from certain activities due to the period of mourning of this time, each person individually is following the halachos, and it does not look like open mourning. But on Tisha B’Av, every person openly mourns. The congregation gathers together to hear Eichah and recite Kinnos; everyone is coming together to mourn, and in an open manner. Tisha B’Av reveals the deep concept that mourning can connect everyone together.

There is our individual role, and there is our collective aspect. Each soul must be built on the individual level, and all souls of the Jewish people must form one structure. There is a personal Beis HaMikdash in each person’s soul[1], and there is a collective Beis HaMikdash of the entire Jewish people. The Beis HaMikdash of the Jewish people was a structure that unified every Jew together. The mourning over the loss of the Beis HaMikdash is therefore in the communal sense. It is not mourning over what I am personally missing in my own life, but because I am mourning over the loss that affects us as a whole.

The second Beis HaMikdash was destroyed because of sinas chinam (baseless hatred).[2] The depth of this is that the concept of unity was missing from the Jewish people; we stopped being a ‘Kneses Yisrael’ (gathering of the Jewish people). The Sages say, “And it [sinas chinam] still dances amongst us” – because the reason that brought the destruction is still existent: we are lacking unity.

The Beis HaMikdash was built by collective efforts, for it symbolized that there was a unity binding together the entire Jewish people. Its destruction meant that we had lost that sense of collectiveness with each other.

Collectiveness

Mourning over the Beis HaMikdash is essentially about how we view Creation. When a person only sees Creation as random details and he doesn’t see the collective whole of things, he is only mourning over what he is personally missing in his life, but not over the Beis HaMikdash.

The Beis HaMikdash was not built for any one person, and it was not destroyed because of any one person. It was built for everyone, and it was destroyed as a result of everyone. Collectiveness is what builds it, and its destruction meant that its collectiveness was destroyed.

There is a very deep place in our soul which sees collectiveness, the greater picture of things that is beyond our private existence. This part of our soul isn’t concerned with our private aspects of our personal life. There is klal (the general whole), and there is perat (details). The perat is part of the klal; we all come from the klal.

The depth of the destruction was that we stopped being a klal, and we each became our own individual “perat”, divorced from the klal. Even the desire in a person of “I want to serve Hashem” is a form of perat, for it is still coming from the “I”, and although it is a spiritual desire, it still doesn’t save a person from self-absorption. When a person views life from the perspective of his private “I”, he has a very difficult time trying to mourn the Beis HaMikdash, because he is stuck in his own private existence and he can’t go beyond himself.

This is actually the reason why we should mourn. The fact that a person only feels himself and his own problems, and he doesn’t connect to the collective whole of the Jewish people, is reason to mourn.

The three cardinal sins which destroyed the first Beis HaMikdash were all forms of negative desires. The problem there was they didn’t have the true desire in life; they didn’t have the desire to do Hashem’s will, thus they were filled with negative desires. The era of the second Beis HaMikdash was destroyed due to baseless hatred, and this was a deeper issue. They were not filled with evil desires like in the era of the first Beis HaMikdash, but they were stuck in their own personal desires. They wanted to do Hashem’s will, but it was from the perspective of “I want to do Hashem’s will”, with focus on the “I”, and not being able to go past their private existence. This self-absorption was what paved the way for baseless hatred that destroyed the Beis HaMikdash.

Self-Absorption

If one has never nullified his improper desires yet, he surely can’t get to the stage of getting beyond his private self. First one needs to get used to nullifying his desires and to want to do only Hashem’s will, and after that stage, he can work on the stage of leaving his private existence and entering into the collective whole of the Jewish people.

We need to properly define what it means to want to do Hashem’s will. It can either be coming from a selfless place in ourselves, or, it can be coming from a self-absorbed place in ourselves. If “I” want to do Hashem’s will, does it mean simply that “I” should want this, or rather that I want what Hashem wants? If I want it because Hashem wants it, that is called desiring Hashem’s will. But when the focus is on the “I”, this is a subtle form of self-absorption.

The Destruction: Deepening Our Perspective

Before we continue, let’s give the following brief introduction.

Sometimes we hear about concepts that are very lofty and we think that it is way above our level. Imagine if we tell a short person to take a book off the shelf that’s much higher than where he stands. He will respond sheepishly, “What do you want from me? I’m too short. I can’t reach it.” So too, we might feel that way too when we hear about concepts that appear to be way above our normal level that we are capable of.

But the truth is that there’s a point in our soul which is capable of reaching very high places that go above our normal level. If we don’t access it, we remain with same immature and childish perspectives towards life. It will soon be Tisha B’Av. Do we feel towards it the same way we felt towards it when we were in first grade? We must graduate from the child’s perspective towards Tisha B’Av and deepen our perspective.

Surely we can’t skip to the higher perceptions before we’ve gotten the more elementary stages right. But we should know that there is always more depth to be uncovered.

The Soul of Creation

The first step is for a person to nullify his desires and have the desire to do Hashem’s will, as we explained previously. After that, one needs to come out of his own private life.

The things that make us happy or feel pain should not be limited to what happens in our personal life. There is a huge and vast world that is beyond your own private existence. There are 600,000 souls in the Jewish people.

Creation also consists of the animals, the plants, and rocks. Hashem didn’t create it all for nothing. One must come to feel the soul of Creation. The soul of Creation is a unified soul, and it is not felt through one’s private self. It is not felt by someone who lives his life in self-absorption.

Why is it hard for a person to mourn the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash? There are many reasons we mentioned previously, but there is another answer. It is because the Beis HaMikdash was the collective unit of the Jewish people. When one is stuck in his own private existence and he can’t connect to the collectiveness of the Jewish people, he does not feel the Beis HaMikdash. He doesn’t feel what it was and what we are missing now that we don’t have it.

The Beis HaMikdash was not simply destroyed due to sinas chinam. It was destroyed because each person considered himself to be his own individual perat and didn’t view himself as part of the klal.

Rav Shach zt”l didn’t eat between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. He said that it is because at this time of the day, there are thousands of Jewish boys going to irreligious schools, where they aren’t even taught Shema Yisrael. At a time where these children are being taught heretical ideas instead of Hashem’s Torah, he felt like he couldn’t eat.  

If one has the purpose of Creation in front of him all the time, he sees the world on a collective level, and if the world is reaching its purpose; as opposed to seeing the world through a private lens and how it relates to him on a personal level. When a person isn’t aware of the purpose of Creation, he lives superficially, he doesn’t see what is going on around him. He is self-absorbed. He doesn’t breathe the soul of Creation; he doesn’t breathe the purpose of Creation.

The perspective a person needs to be aware of is, as the Sages say, that the world will last for 6,000 years, and then it will be desolate[3]. That’s how we need to see the world: What did it look like in the beginning? What does it need to look like by the time its end comes? And what point are we in now? This is what it means to see through klal.

When a person sees only through perat, he doesn’t see past his own personal life, his current lifetime. All he sees is the years of his own life, his children, his situation of parnassah, his health, etc. That is all he sees, and that is how he ends life. If he’s a bit deeper, maybe he thinks about last week. He only lives in the moment and all he sees are details, and he never connects the dots.

Beginning To Come Out of Self-Absorption

Usually, people think that in order to have empathy for others and feel their pain and joy, we should learn how to love others. That is true, but how indeed do we come to love others?

One of the ways, which we have begun to explain previously, is to act against our will, whether it is a material desire or even a spiritual desire. Train yourself to do something for another person who you don’t know at all – not a family member and not a friend. This helps you expand beyond your own personal world. This is the first step: breaking the private desires.

There is a concept of giving “maaser” (a tenth) from our ruchniyus (spirituality) for others. However, this is tricky, because sometimes a person might want to do this because he is motivated for self-gain; he awaits the reward that will come from this, similar to how there are people who give maaser because Chazal say that giving maaser makes a person wealthy. If that is the motivation, then he hasn’t gotten anywhere.

Similarly, there are also people who are involved in zikuy harabim (benefitting the public), a matter which the sefer Chovos HaLevovos writes in high regard of, but the person is doing it entirely for self-gain because he knows that it entails reward. It’s like if a person is told that he should be nice to his family because then he will gain from this.

The key is our motivation. If we are doing it for the sake of giving, this helps us break the self-absorption. If we are doing it with some ulterior motivation that involves self-gain, even if it is only minimal, we haven’t even begun to go beyond the self.

The question is: Are you prepared to do something once a day that is purely for the sake of giving to another person, when there is absolutely nothing you will gain from it? That is the ultimate question. I know some people who will never do anything unless they will get some kind of reward from it. They won’t even give up 30 seconds of the day to do something for another person without intention for reward. They don’t see a point in something if there is no reward involved.

Obviously, any level we want to acquire needs to be accompanied with prayer, so we need to pray to Hashem for help in acquiring this level.

Seeing Creation Through A Mature Lens

I will ask a question and get into a discussion from there. Can an eight-year old child be on the level of Ahavas Yisrael? Is he even close to it? If you train him to get used to giving to others, and if we can get him to daven that he reaches this level, maybe he will indeed acquire it. But, practically speaking, a child is missing the maturity and emotional strength that is needed to reach Ahavas Yisrael. So it does not just depend on giving more often and on prayer. A person needs the inner tools, in order to break free from his own private existence.

Our avodah does not only involve making use of our heart. We also need intellect. If all we needed is the heart, then we could get a child to have Ahavas Yisrael, through getting him to purify his heart, via the acts of giving to others. But ourinner avodah is always a fusion of intellect and heart. If a person has only learned a little bit of Gemara and a little bit of Halachah and a little mussar, he will never become someone who can leave his private existence and connect himself to the klal. In order to become part of the klal, which is the avodah of the Nine Days, one needs a sharply developed seichel (intellect): to have the proper and mature perspective towards Creation.

There are two reasons why a person doesn’t connect to the klal. One reason is when there are still extraneous desires in each person’s heart, which make a person remain in self-absorption. Another reason is due to immaturity of the mind: when a person has a childish perspective towards life and he has never gained a more mature perspective on things. This is called katnus hada’as (small-mindedness), which also negatively affects the heart.

Of course, a person can still have love for others even if he doesn’t have much da’as. But by remaining in his state of katnus, he won’t ever come to deeply feel the purpose of Creation. If a person isn’t cognizant of the purpose of Creation on a regular basis, he will never feel pained at the fact that the purpose of Creation hasn’t been reached yet.

We need to be able to see Creation through a lens that gets down to the root of things, as opposed to just seeing things at face value. This makes us leave the narrowed perspective of perat and enter us into the vast perspective of klal. We can give a few examples of this, but the point is to keep thinking of the earliest roots of a matter.

Examples of Seeing The Root

When a person learns halachah, if he just learns the Mishnah Berurah on it, he has learned the information, but he hasn’t seen the root of the information. If he learns the Shulchan Aruch and commentaries on it, he is getting deeper into the root of the halachah. If he looks deeper, he looks into the Gemara where the halachah was first discussed. Finally, if he looks into the Torah itself, he may find it there at its very root.

Here is another example. How do we view the Israeli-Arab conflict? If a person is unlearned in Torah, he views it purely as a political war. He is unaware that there is such a thing as the “exile of Yishmael” which has been written about by our Sages long ago. He wonders who is responsible, how negotiations can be made, and if there will ever be a way to solve it. But someone who has the Torah’s view on this sees a much bigger picture than this. He is aware that there are four exiles, and that the fourth exile is the exile of Edom, and that within the exile of Edom is the exile of Yishmael, which we are currently in.

The earliest roots of each thing are in the six days of Creation. The six days of Creation contained the entire Creation in its potential form, and everything stemmed from it. Whatever we have now is the very same material that was created during the first six days. It is just that the form of each thing took on different combinations, shapes, and sizes. When we view the world like this, we are getting to the early roots of each thing.

First we need to see where everything is in the Torah, and then we can see where it is in the six days of Creation. And in fact, there is an even earlier root to everything: the first day of Creation. Rashi says that the entire Creation was already created on the first day, in potential form. So there is a way for a person to see how each thing is really contained in the first day of Creation. When you see what the beginning of each thing is, you can know what its end will be. This is the way to see life through the perspective of klal.

This concept might sound very lofty, but it is a true view towards life. The Sages state that Hashem showed Adam HaRishon the entire history; he was shown the Beis HaMikdash being built, as well as its destruction. Adam HaRishon saw both destructions. Thus, the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash was already contained in the first six days of creation (and from a deeper perspective, it was already contained in the first day of creation). If so, the Beis HaMikdash wasn’t simply built in Shlomo HaMelech’s times, and it wasn’t simply destroyed 410 years later and rebuilt in Ezra’s times and then destroyed 420 years later. That would only be starting from the middle of the picture.

Here is another example. On the night of Tisha B’Av, when the people heard the Spies’ report of the land of Israel, they cried, and Hashem declared that night ever since then as a night of crying for the generations, for it would become the night where we would become exiled. So the root of all crying is the episode of the Spies. But if we look deeper, we can uncover an even earlier root of exile: Adam was exiled from Gan Eden.

If a person wants to connect himself to an inner perspective towards life, and if he wants to make the most of the Nine Days, it will not be through reading sefarim about the Beis HaMikdash and its destruction and the future redemption. That is all very nice, and all the words are truth, but what one really needs, in order to properly mourn the destruction, is to gain the perspective of klal.

This is why Klal Yisrael is called “Klal” Yisrael – because we must see the klal of things, and that enables us to join with the klal that is Klal Yisrael. “Hashem, the Torah, and Yisrael are one.” If one wants to have a connection to Yisrael who are called “one”, a person needs the “one” view that comes from the Torah – the collective view that comes from seeing the klal, as opposed to seeing just peratim.

In order for a person to reach the view of klal and to come to have true Ahavas Yisrael, besides for what we said earlier that a person should getting used to breaking one’s desires and self-absorption - and praying for this - the most important tool that one needs is to view life in terms of how everything relates to the broader picture of things. This is not just knowledge, and it is more than a feeling. It is to see all of Creation as one piece.

This is what it means to connect to the concept of “Kneses Yisrael”. If one has no connection to Kneses Yisrael, he cannot mourn over the Beis HaMikdash, because the Beis HaMikdash was not just another detail in Creation; it was the “gateway to Heaven”, which connected earth to Heaven, the plane of the physical with the Divine. It is not enough to “know” what Kneses Yisrael is, and to “know” what Ahavas Yisrael is. The avodah upon us is not merely to get ourselves to love others and remove hatred. This is not the depth of it. The depth of our avodah is to leave our narrowed perspective (perat) and instead see the world in terms of the collective (klal).

Gaining A Collective View

In order for a person to gain this perspective, he should study the words of Chazal about the Beis HaMikdash and the destruction, and amass a picture of it all. Then he will realize what the Beis HaMikdash was and feel connected to it, and mourn over its loss.

The Basic Level of Mourning

If someone feels like he can’t do this, he should reflect on what we are missing now in our world. Anybody today can feel how the situation in the world today is painful, and how much truth it is missing.

There are some people who have a very positive nature, and they don’t like to see things this way. When it comes Tisha B’Av, they don’t see what there is to be sad about, because they have a carefree attitude of seeing everything as good. This is not called the worthy trait of “ayin tovah” (good eye). An ayin tovah means that a person is aware that there are bad things he sees, but he sees the larger picture of things, and he is aware that everything is somehow good. But if someone thinks that everything is good, this is the imagination at work, not ayin tovah.

Anyone who reflects a little can see what kind of dismal situation the world is in. Maybe one doesn’t feel pain at this, but if one has managed to calm his desires a bit and he is sensitive to the spiritual, he is able to feel pain at the situation of Creation today. If he has purified himself even more, he can feel a broken heart from all of this, and if he is even more purified, he is able to cry.

The situation in the world right now is very painful; the destruction is in front of our eyes. Even a person who doesn’t think deeply and he sees things superficially is aware that the world today is simply living a life that is far from Hashem’s Torah and mitzvos. Although the Torah is called our “Torah of life”, this is not necessarily the case in many peoples’ lives, who are absorbed in the various aspects of their life. One can just think of his own situation: how far he knows he is from the truth. This is the minimal level of mourning one must feel, if he can’t relate to the idea of the collective view.

So you don’t have to be such a deep thinker in order to see the situation of Creation today and feel pain at it. As long as you have already begun to purify your heart a bit, you can feel it. There is so much suffering today, both physical and spiritual. There are so many tragedies. There are financial issues, health issues, etc. All of this resulted from the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash. Anyone on any level can think about this and come to feel some level of mourning, because you don’t have to think deeply about this. Almost everyone is aware of it - unless a person is totally oblivious to the situation of the world today.

After The Pain: Regaining Inner Peace

When a person begins to feel the pain of the situation of the world today, he might find that it’s too difficult to bear, and he will feel overwhelmed. A person might feel like he can’t handle the pain and he will want to instead throw himself back into the Gemara, to take his mind off all of the pain. This is a normal feeling. What can a person do to take his mind off the pain?

There is a quiet place in the soul where one can retreat to at times, where he can shut out the world and feel nothing but tranquility. A person is capable of detaching, on a healthy level, from all the pain and suffering he hears about, so that he can regain his inner peace.

To illustrate, the Chazon Ish was once asked how he is able to stay sane after all of the suffering that people would tell him about. He answered that as soon as he is finished listening and empathizing with the person, he would have a quiet place in his soul where he would retreat to and detach from the world. (This was also said of the Sfas Emes).

“A dead person does not feel.” In the final generations we live in, where we live amongst the 50^th gate of impurity, people don’t even feel what’s wrong. Once a person does feel a little bit of what’s going on, he will feel pained at how far the world is from the truth. Then he will able to reach a deep place in himself, where he can reveal G-dliness.

In Conclusion

One has to gain the mature perspective towards the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash, and he must not remain with the perspective he had towards it as a child. One has to feel connected to it in his soul, and not remain with a detached perspective towards it as if it’s something totally far removed from him. This is how we ‘build’ the Beis HaMikdash – when we acquire the perspective of klal towards it. Without the perspective of klal towards it, this is a form of destruction to the Beis HaMikdash.

Getting used to this perspective (klal) can transform a person into an entirely new being. Life contains depth within depth. When one sees the big picture of Creation, he realizes what he is missing from it. Just as we cannot demand that a child should understand what the destruction is, so is it illogical to demand from a 30-year old to relate to it, if he has never deepened his perception towards it and he lives in oblivion of what the purpose of the world is. He doesn’t know what is missing from Creation, because he never thinks about it.

Those who have purified their hearts and they see the big picture of things are the ones who live what the Beis HaMikdash is and they have real pain over its destruction, because they know what is missing. We all have the bechirah to nullify our desires and come to the point where all we want to do is Hashem’s will, and to see the klal of Creation, its bigger picture. Then we can realize how much Creation lays in disgrace.  May we merit from Hashem to realize how much we are missing and to thus feel true mourning.[4]