I was doing my shopping as usual in one of the big supermarkets, scouring around and hoping to be in and out as quickly as possible with the few item on my checklist, when a young woman entered the store with her even younger daughter. The mother had made the terrible mistake of taking what she probably thought was a shortcut through the toy section (Note to young parents, there is no such thing as a shortcut through a toy section. It’s like saying hell is a shortcut to heaven, even if it is, you don’t want to go there!).
The mother, let’s call her Tracy, was trying to drag her daughter by the arm as quickly as possible through the aisle and even though it looked close to being dislocated, the daughter had dug her heels in and refused to budge. She wanted a toy. Lots of toys. Entire shelves of toys. Aisles upon aisles of toys, games and furry animals. All of them. Right here, right now. But Tracy wasn’t having any of it and with now both of her rather adult and muscly arms, was pulling her daughter by the hand to follow her to buy something far more sensible, like a suitcase to carry her daughter around in for future shopping trips.
But as if magnetised by the earth’s gravitational pull, Tracy’s daughter was still not shifting and had now taken to demanding other things outside of the toy department, the two in one ratchet set, the cut price mackerel that had been on display since the week before and even the woman behind the customer service counter. And this is when Tracy lost her composure and though she didn’t shout nor barely raised her voice, she did threaten the child with everything from starvation until her early twenties to lifetime imprisonment. Her daughter, realising that now was probably a good time to stop crying and take out a comprehensive life insurance policy, allowed her mother to finally haul her around and off they went together, reminding me of one of those games with the ball attached to the bat by some flimsy piece of rubberised string.
How very sad, I thought to myself with the carefree abandon of someone whose children were very far away. She cried and cried and didn’t get anything back in return for it. Was it all worth it? Does crying ever help?
We are in the middle of the three weeks, the build up to a night where crying is the theme and in some cases the goal. It is our expression of connection and root core for the reason why we have even heard of the name Tisha B’av. The night the spies returned from scouting out the land of Israel, they gave a report to the Jewish people, that we cannot conquer the land, that the current inhabitants there are too strong for us, too mighty.
The people were scared and they cried and cried and cried. But the sad fact is that what the spies had reported wasn’t true and all their crying was for nothing. And G-d explained that since you cried for no reason- I will give you something to cry about for all generations to come. It isn’t spite- G-d doesn’t work like that- but is in order to correct our behaviour
So why did they cry?
The verse says they cried because they felt that G-d hates them and He is abandoning them. They felt separated from Him. An absolute rule is that the Master of the World never abandons anyone and never hates anyone. He never neglects us and so this crying was a worthless crying. It had no merit.
But if now we can cry for the right reasons, to rectify that meaningless crying, if we can connect and plug in properly, then we have a good chance that this will be the last Tisha b’av. And Jews, in their essence, know how to cry.
When Basya, the daughter of Pharaoh opened up the basket to see Moses in it, she saw a child crying. And when she saw that she declared: This is one of the Jewish children- Jews know how to cry. They have a soft heart that they inherited from their forefathers. We really know how to cry and how to use tears correctly. But the question is, are we ready to make use of this special gift that we have?
How many tears do we shed for all the wrong reasons? How many times have we cried out for nothing? For some temporary situation that they won’t remember in a week? Some people cry when they watch movies about a bunch of people that don’t really exist and when the real things happen, they just don’t connect to that. How many meaningless tears do we waste? It is a gift that we really shouldn’t ruin. And so the next time you cry, even if the cause of the crying isn’t exactly the correct one, even if the tears that are about to fall aren’t from the purest of sources, at that moment when they are falling, make them special. Catch yourself before they fall and pray at that time for something that is meaningful. Pray for someone that needs it. Pray for your communities. Pray for the sick, the poor or pray for yourself. Don’t let these precious tears or precious moments go to waste and if we can do that, we will feel the presence of Moshiach coming ever closer
