Machshavot HaLev - Yeshivat Lev HaTorah

257
בלה תובשחמ
challenged not just Rabbi Eliezer’s public display of mourning but the very
experience of mourning: “Are you important enough to mourn for Yerushalayim”
implies that only people who are important due to their level of piety can
mourn for Yerushalayim. How can this be? Aren’t we all supposed to mourn for
Yerushalayim? Isn’t that, in fact, the whole essence of Tisha B’av, the “nine days”
and the “three weeks”?
Rav Chaim Friedlander (Siftei Chaim) notes that in order to understand this
story, we must understand what it means to mourn for Yerushalayim. What is
there to mourn about? What is it that we are missing in the absence of the Beit
Ha-mikdash? The Beit Ha-mikdash is meant to be the point where Hashem rests
His Presence in this world, among human beings: “ve-shachanti be-tocham, I
shall dwell among them” (Shemot 25:8). It is the meeting point between heaven
and earth. With this in mind, we can understand the story in Bava Kamma.
Not just anyone can truly mourn for Yerushalayim. Only someone whose life
is oriented toward making this world a place in which the Shechina can dwell, a
place of holiness, can truly mourn the absence of the Shechina. Someone who is
not concerned enough with bringing Hashem’s Presence into the world to make
it a focal point of his life cannot possibly mourn the absence of that presence;
doing so would be artificial and would constitute yuhara. The fact that we have
institutionalized mourning for Yerushalayim is in order to remind us of the
general orientation that our life should have.
Perhaps we can now come back to our original question, but it will take one more
story. Rav Yisrael Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, writes1 about
his experiences as a very young survivor of the horrors of Buchenwald. He and
hundreds of other young survivors were taken to a recovery camp in France, where
they could begin to put their lives back together in an aesthetically pleasing and
safe environment. One day the Jewish organizations that sponsored the facility
held a ceremony at the camp, which was attended by the survivors. The survivors,
however, harbored tremendous resentment toward the “establishment” Jewish
organizations of Western Europe for not having done enough to save Eastern
European Jewry, including the families of virtually every resident of this facility;
.pp. 88-89 ,רענה לא ךדי חלשת לא 1