Parshat Devarim: Shabbat and Tisha B'av

This Shabbat is the ninth day of Av, and yet we do no mourning or fasting on it until the following day. There is a powerful message here.

Tisha B’av speaks a certain kind of truth. It speaks the truth of judgment and sadness and suffering and destruction and disconnection and dislocation. And also the truth of human imperfection – we were and are still not worthy to sustain the Presence of God in this world as it once was. We fall short; we are limited; we fail. Life is difficult and overwhelming.

These feelings are encapsulated in the three cries of Eikhah, how, that we find on this Shabbat and Tisha B’av. The Book of Lamentations cries out Eikhah yashvah badad, How has a once robust city now turned desolate and alone? Isaiah 1 (the haftarah on Shabbat) says Eikhah haytah lezonah, How has a faithful city turned into a harlot? And Moshe, in Devarim (this week’s parsha), exclaims: Eikhah esa levadi . . . How can I carry the full burden of this large people all by myself?

The first two are cries of sadness over the sudden change in status of a beloved city; we feel how quickly life can turn from good to bad, how destruction recurs in our history; how ongoing is suffering; how impermanent and unstable are our lives and fortunes. There is change and suffering and we mourn the truth of these in the world. And most especially, we mourn our role -- through our neverending capacity for faithlessness -- in contributing to this suffering. There is sadness and it is partly our fault. The third is a cry of overwhelm. Really, God put me on this earth to accomplish something, but it all seems like too much sometimes. How can I possibly carry this full weight?

These are gnawing existential burdens that we carry, our knowledge of our limitations and our failures and the truth of our impermanence and continued suffering in the world.

When Tisha B’av falls on Shabbat, we have a special opportunity to see these truths, these burdens, through the prism of Shabbat.

What is the message of Shabbat? First, the eternity of our relationship with the Holy One. Beyni ubeyn beney Yisrael ot hi le’olam. Between Me and the children of Israel it, Shabbat, is an eternal sign.

An eternal sign. Temples can come and go. Destruction and suffering and mass killing can come and go. But Shabbat wraps us in the knowledge that through it all God stands with us. Shabbat is the touchstone, the eternal Rock that reminds us we are forever. On one level, there will always be sadness and suffering coming and going. But in some other realm, beyond this world, there is eternity and we are part of that eternity.

Even as we mourn the loss of our temple of space, we hold on to our temple of time, Shabbat, our expansive sense of the whole span of human history, past, present and future, and our little taste of divine time, eternity.

We are comforted by these Shabbos concepts because they remind us that we are not alone, badad, striving in our limited way to fix a broken world. Our work is indeed imperfect and impermanent. But we are embraced by the Eternal One, embraced by the knowledge that come what may, no matter how we fail and mess up this world, we are held by the Rock. Ot his le’olam. An eternal sign.