Tisha B'Av: A Time to Weepഉദാഹരണം

Tears That Count

The Jewish sages teach that after the destruction of the First Temple, the prophet Jeremiah accompanied the Israelites to the Euphrates River, at which point he informed them that he was returning to Israel to stay with the few remaining Jews there. The people began to weep inconsolably. Jeremiah said to them, “I testify in the name of God that if this sincere cry would have transpired when we were still in our homeland, the exile would never have come about.”

Indeed, there is an appropriate time to weep. There is an opportune time to cry out to God. Tisha B’Av is one of those times. It’s a time to cry sincere tears of repentance and longing for God. It’s a time to regret past mistakes and to long for a better future with a restored relationship with God. These are the tears that God desires, and the tears that can open doors to salvation.

When the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, it wasn’t until they cried out to God that the wheels of salvation began to turn. Similarly, our personal redemption, and that of the world, will come about when we turn to our Father in heaven and cry out to Him with sincere heartfelt prayer.

According to Jewish tradition, after the destruction of the Holy Temple, all the gates to heaven were locked, except for the Gates of Tears. However, if the Gates of Tears are never locked, then why should there be any gates at all? The answer is to keep out all the insincere and inappropriate tears.

Interestingly, the Hebrew word for “crying” is numerically equivalent to the Hebrew word for “heart.” (All Hebrew letters have numerical values, and in Judaism, when two words have the same numerical value, it means that those two words are intrinsically connected to each other.) This teaches us that true tears come directly from the deepest parts of our hearts. When our tearful prayers come directly from our hearts, they go straight to heaven.

Tisha B’Av is a time to weep for what really matters in life. We weep for the shattered relationship between God and His children. We remember that all evil in this world is a direct result of the loss of God's dwelling in our midst. As we read in the Book of Lamentations on Tisha B’Av, “pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord.” As one rabbi once said, “The Gates of Tears were never locked. What a shame if no one bothers to walk through them!”