We tend to think of Tisha B’Av as a day for our own grief. After all, it was our loss; we’re in exile, and things are hard at times (a lot of the time, if we’re being honest). The Beis HaMikdash that was ours is gone, and every negative thing the Jewish people have been through since is a result of that void.
This is all true, but it’s not the whole truth. In the Mishnah in Sanhedrin, Chazal tell us that whenever a Jew is in pain, Hashem Himself, as it were, screams out in pain. His pain is worse than ours, and if you play the odds, He’s feeling some form of pain at any given moment, because a Jew is likely feeling pain at any given moment. The way the Gemara in Brachos puts it: Hashem says, “Woe to the King that destroyed His own home . . .”
Hopefully, this should all raise a simple question. If the One we love is in pain, what can we do for Him? What would an exiled king need at this time?
In his sefer Yichud HaHisbodedus, Rav Avraham Tzvi Kluger shlit’a brings a mashal from the Koznitzer Maggid, the baal Avodas Yisroel, on Parshas Masei. I’ll give it over as I understand it, and I invite everyone to take a look inside.
A human king, the Maggid says, is surrounded by every kind of joy. His servants attend him, music plays, drums and flutes, and there’s dancing to go with it. But sometimes the king is troubled by something in particular. At those moments, ordinary music won’t do. They have to call for the violinists, the truly gifted ones, to make a special effort and gladden him.
So too, the Maggid teaches, in the way Hashem arranged the world. The malachim praise Him and sing to Him without pause. But since the Beis HaMikdash was destroyed, a kind of sorrow settled over the “outer chambers” of the King, and only specially gifted beings have what it takes to gladden the King.
Those beings are us, the Jewish people. We’re the ones called to enter further, into the “inner chambers,” and gladden the King in the deepest way. And we can only do this if we move the focus away from ourselves and focus on the King’s sadness. We are to say to Him: “You will always be our King, even now. You will always reign. Everything else in the world is like nothing beside You. One day, all mankind will come to serve You, and they will return Your crown to You.”
I don’t imagine the term “punch line” existed in the times of the Maggid, but if it did, here it is:
“This service is more precious to Hashem than the times when everything was openly good . . .”
The song the violinist plays for a king in good times is beautiful. But the song he’s called to play when the king is troubled, the one that reaches past the sorrow and tells him he is still the king, from someone who can put their own sadness about the situation aside — that is the one the king will never forget.
We don’t have a Beis HaMikdash to bring our avodah to. We have something the malachim don’t have and that the avodah of those open times couldn’t accomplish. We can sit on the floor, in the dark, with every reason to despair, and still say it and mean it: “You are the King. You will always be the King. And one day soon, the crown comes back to where it belongs.”
That’s the avodah of Tisha B’Av. Not only to mourn what we lost, but to comfort the One who lost more. To be the ones who, in the King’s hardest hour, walk into the inner room and play the best music ever played.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 90.
