Redeeming Sadness

Thursday of this week is Tisha b’Av, which marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Those cataclysmic events also took away our land, leading to 2,000 years of exile until the establishment of the modern state of Israel.

Other catastrophes are also said to have happened onTisha b’Av, including the defeat of Bar Kokhba‘s rebellion against the Romans, which led to the razing of Jerusalem, the declaration of the First Crusade in 1095, the edict expelling the Jews from England in 1290, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Even World War I broke out on Tisha b’Av!

The ninth of Av is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar and is marked by a fast that is as stringent as Yom Kippur.

Most people do not like being sad and tend to make their escape back to the land of Happy as quickly as they can. And here we find a Jewish tradition directing us to turn to face sadness and walk right into its dark cloud, to immerse ourselves in feelings of grief and loss. The message I take away is that sadness – atzvut in Hebrew – has its place, both on the calendar and in our spiritual lives.

What a contrast to a world that is infatuated with happiness. Disneyland markets itself as “The Happiest Place on Earth” and happiness has come to be so cherished that there is a movement to replace Gross Domestic Product as a measure of a country’s success with an evaluation of Gross National Happiness. GDP has been criticized because it only looks at what generates economic activity, and by that measure, if someone gets cancer or has a car accident, that might actually boost GDP. A scale based on happiness does not focus strictly on quantitative economic measures but takes into account a mix of quality-of-life factors.

Mussar perspective has nothing against being happy, but is guided by what Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the founder of the Mussar movement in 19^th century Lithuania, wrote, that a Mussar student’s goal should be to master both “a trait and its opposite.” The goal is not to try to eliminate anger, envy, sadness or any other inner trait from our experience, if for no other reason than because that is actually unrealistic and unattainable. Who gets through life without some measure of anger, envy, and sadness? Rather, the goal in the Mussar approach is to become an expert in a trait and as well as its opposite: sadness plus joy, anger and also equanimity, envy as well as contentedness.

Tisha b’Av focuses particularly on the pain of loss and invites us to explore and process the feelings of longing and grief we have all experienced when a parent passed, a business collapsed, a proposal was rejected by every publisher or foundation, an exam was failed or whatever form of loss you might sustain in life, as we all do.

Experience sadness, but with a caution not to go so far as to descend into depression or despair. Those dark depths can be very destructive and must be avoided. The word in Hebrew for depression is dika’on, stemming from the word ledake which means “to suppress” and that is surely not what we are after.

The message I hear is that we are meant to engage with sadness but not wallow in it. That’s because any middah taken to the extreme becomes a spiritual obstacle, while at a more moderate measure is a feature of inner wholeness.

The starting point for understanding the place of sadness in our pursuit of wholeness is actually to understand and appreciate the middah of love – ahava – because where there is no love, there is no sadness. What kind of loss do we mourn? The loss of something or someone we have loved.

Love is notoriously difficult to define because it is, in essence, a spiritual experience and our ordinary, everyday English language defines things in psychological and material – but not spiritual – terms.

But look at what we find in the Torah about the love between future King David and Jonathan, son of the present king (1 Samuel 18:1):

As soon as he had finished speaking to Shaul, the soul [nefesh] of Jonathan was knit [nikshara] to the soul [nefesh] of David.

The key words here are nefesh – soul – and the word that describes what happens to the soul in love, which is nikshara – knit or bound together.

And then the verse says: “And Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

We are learning something crucially important here. The Torah is not speaking in metaphors. It is telling us what happens when one person loves another. What might be unfamiliar to us is that the Torah includes the spiritual realm in its matter-of-fact discussion of our world. From a Torah perspective, the spiritual is as real as anything else, and it shows up in our real lives in real ways.

We only have trouble defining love when we try to do that in terms of the material world. When we include the soul in the picture, it becomes easy to define love: that’s what happens when the soul of one person knits together with the soul of another person.

The Torah’s definition of love makes loss more understandable. Upon hearing that Jonathan had died, David took hold of his clothing and tore it (2 Samuel 1:11). We see the same action being taken by Jacob when he received word that his son Joseph was dead (Genesis 37:34).

To this day, we model our own behavior on these precedents. Just before a funeral, the ritual of kriyah is performed. Kriyah means “tearing” or “ripping” and involves rending the clothing of a bereaved person.

When we understand that love means knitting together two souls, then we can see that death or loss is the severing of that bond. The ritual of kriyah gives physical expression to the spiritual reality. We tear the clothing because the soul of the bereaved person has had a piece torn away. Again, this is not a metaphor but an actual description of what happens on the spiritual plane when we experience loss.

Of course, this is not something uniquely Jewish. In popular music, love is a major theme. And where there is love, there is loss, which is often described as a ripping or tearing. And then there is country music, where nearly ALL the lyrics describe feelings of sadness and loss, and the perception of being torn apart that goes with it.

We are not solitary, independent, circumscribed beings but are spiritually united with other people, places, things, etc. This way of seeing ourselves – not as separate but as a composite of all the things and beings we love – is expressed by Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, the 16^th century kabbalist and Mussarist who wrote: “Yesh ba’zeh cheleq zeh” – there is in this one a part of that one. Our inner lives are an intermingling of all that we love.

And when we lose one of those things for whatever reason, the loss is experienced as a tearing away – not of it, but of a part of ourselves.

Our losses place us on the path of sadness, and soon we come to a three-way fork in the road.

One way leads to stoicism and rejection of feeling. That is the road to hardening and blocking the heart.

Another fork leads to melancholy and depression and every voice in the Jewish world cautions us not to take that turn.

The third one – the way of sadness – means accepting broken-heartedness and allowing tears to flow. This is the straight path according to both nature and spirit. When it is time for the heart to break, it is meant to be broken, and opening to that experience is both healing and a spur to personal growth, leading to renewal and wholeness.

Renewal is the gem that glistens in the shadows of sadness.

That idea is expressed so poetically in the psalm traditionally recited before grace after meals on Shabbat and YomTov. There we read in the image of the agricultural cycle:

Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. One that goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, shall come again with rejoicing, bringing one’s sheaves.

Have you had the experience of renewal sprouting from sadness?