Cry for Your Teeth

On Grief and Tisha b'Av

Every year, as Tisha b’Av approaches, I find myself reflecting on the relationship between the grief we carry in our own lives and the grief we inherit as a people. This year, that reflection has taken me back more than twenty years, to the beginning of my contemplative practice.

In January 2005, I arrived at my first Institute for Jewish Spirituality retreat with an escape plan.

I had rented a car instead of taking the shuttle. I wasn’t sure I could make it through several days of silence, and I wanted to know that, if it became too much, I could leave.

The previous year had taken a great deal out of me. I had served as one of the two co-chairs of the campaign against Georgia’s proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. It was the first political campaign I had ever chaired, and I was learning, in real time, what community organizing required: knocking on doors, building relationships, trying to awaken people to what was at stake, and discovering how difficult it can be to move people from concern to action.

The campaign also felt deeply connected to my calling as a rabbi. Much of the public case for the amendment was being made in explicitly Christian language, which meant the most persuasive countervoice would have come from Christian leaders willing to challenge that interpretation from within their own tradition. Too few did. In their absence, I felt called to step forward, not because Judaism was the central religious language of the debate, but because some religious voice needed to insist that faith could also speak on behalf of the dignity and equality of gay and lesbian people. I sometimes thought of myself, only half-jokingly, as the next best thing.

We poured ourselves into the campaign. According to the polling we saw, we moved public opinion by only a few percentage points. The amendment passed overwhelmingly.

Afterward, some of the very people we had struggled to engage wondered aloud: How could this have happened? Why hadn’t more been done?

A tremendous amount had been done. It had simply not been enough.

George W. Bush was reelected over John Kerry that same night, and ours was one of eleven marriage bans on ballots across the country. Every one of them passed. In the days that followed, the country settled on a story about why: “moral values” had decided the election. It was a polite way of saying that people like me had become the thing America voted against.

At the same time, a significant relationship in my own life had ended.

By the time I arrived at the retreat, I was carrying political disappointment, exhaustion, heartbreak, and the peculiar loneliness of having tried to sound an alarm that too few people had been willing to hear.

The world was on fire.

When the first period of silent meditation began, I could not settle. One thought kept interrupting every breath.

What am I doing here?

How could I justify sitting in silence when people were suffering? When injustice demanded a response? When there was so much work left undone?

I had come partly because I believed contemplative practice might help me become a better rabbi for other people. It had not yet occurred to me that I might need it for myself.

What I could see clearly were the fires burning in the world. What I could not yet see were the embers I was carrying within.

What surprised me first was the physical relief of silence.

For half of each day during that five-day retreat, I did not have to attend to anyone else. I did not have to read a room, respond to a need, hold another person’s emotions, or anticipate what might be required of me next.

I had not realized how much of my life had been organized around that kind of attentiveness.

It felt as though I had been moving through the world wearing a weighted vest and, for a few hours each day, I was finally allowed to take it off.

The silence was not empty.

It was spacious.

When we were not silent, we were mostly receiving. I was learning meditation. Opening myself to prayer and chant. Doing yoga. Paying attention to sensations I had grown accustomed to ignoring. I was not producing, organizing, persuading, or caring for anyone else.

I was being taught how to notice.

Little by little, those practices began returning feeling to what had gone numb in me, the way sensation returns to a limb that has been asleep too long, prickling and unwelcome before it becomes relief.

Beneath the urgency and the organizing lay grief.

Beneath the grief lay exhaustion.

And beneath the exhaustion were parts of myself I had neglected for a very long time.

I had imagined contemplation would take me away from the world.

Instead, it brought me into more honest contact with the part of the world that was living inside me.

The world was still on fire.

But in the silence, I could finally begin to feel the heat of my own embers.

Many of us are already carrying grief into this Tisha b’Av.

Perhaps it is the erosion of human and civil rights. The relentless attacks on transgender people. Families living with the fear of detention and deportation. The killing of civilians in war and the growing sense that human life has become frighteningly expendable. The rise of antisemitism, white supremacy, and other forms of hatred. A culture of greed that prizes profit over human dignity. The widening gap between wealth and poverty. The vulnerability of the earth as the climate changes around us. Or perhaps it is another wound entirely.

These are real griefs. To ignore them would not be faithful.

But neither is it enough simply to name them.

Here is a story I met only recently, when my colleague Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld shared it. She had drawn it from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s book Jewish with Feeling, and it has been quietly rearranging me ever since.

It concerns Rabbi Israel of Rizhin, the holy Rizhiner, great-grandson of the Maggid of Mezritch. On Tisha b’Av he is walking through the house of study, moving among his Hasidim as they rock and weep for the destruction of the Temple. He stops in front of one of them and asks, plainly, “Why are you crying?”

The man looks up, a little offended. “Rebbe. It is Tisha b’Av. Why would I not cry?”

“Yes. But why are you crying?”

“Who, me?” the man says. “Why am I crying?”

“Yes. Why are you crying?”

The man is flustered now. “Well. I am a Cohen, a priest. If the Temple were standing, I would receive my share of the meat from the offerings. For free.”

“That is all?” says the Rizhiner. “Stop crying. I will buy you enough meat to last the year.”

“But Rebbe, the Talmud says the flavor that once lived in the meat has gone into the bone. It no longer tastes the way it did.”

“Bones you want? I will buy you a mountain of bones. Two years’ worth. Now stop crying.”

“But Rebbe,” the man says, quieter now, “I have no teeth left. I could not get at the bones if you gave them to me.”

And the Rizhiner says, “Then cry for your teeth. Do not cry for the Temple.”

Reb Zalman draws the plain lesson from this, and it is the right one. Do not bring God your theories, he says. Bring God your own loss. Start where you actually are, and offer that up. Prayer that does not rise from the heart is not really prayer.

I laughed the first time I read the story.

Then I stopped.

Because I recognized the staircase.

The Rizhiner does not argue the man out of his grief, nor does he shame him for its smallness. He simply follows it down.

Temple

 Meat

  Bones

   Teeth

Until the man is standing before the only loss he can actually feel: the one inside his own mouth.

I know that descent. I had made it myself on that retreat, though I did not yet have this story to name it. I had come, if I wept at all, to weep for the world. What the silence uncovered, rung by rung, were my own “teeth.”

There is something else in the Rizhiner’s method that I recognize after years of sitting across from grieving people.

He asks the same question three times:

“Why are you crying?”

He is not gathering information.

He is doing what a gifted spiritual director does: refusing the first answer, and then the second, not because they are false, but because they are not yet deep enough.

He keeps asking until the man stops performing his grief and begins inhabiting it.

Years later, though I did not yet have the Rizhiner’s words for it, I found myself living inside his question.

I had planned to spend a three-month sabbatical away from Atlanta. Then my father was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer, and those plans changed.

The man who had been my model for growing older began transforming before my eyes. Instead of traveling, I stayed close. I cooked for him. For a time, the meals I prepared were among the only substantial food he could eat. We talked. We sat in silence. He knew his life was drawing to a close, and there was much he wanted to communicate. As his world grew smaller, he chose to limit who could be with him. Being welcomed into that sacred space became one of the greatest privileges of my life.

My father died the day before Tisha b’Av.

I spent much of that day at his bedside chanting Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, as his breathing grew quieter and quieter. He was buried the day after the fast.

Since then, his death has always lived beside Tisha b’Av in my experience of Jewish time. The day does not ask me only to mourn the destruction of ancient Jerusalem. It gathers the losses carried by my people across generations: lives shattered, communities uprooted, hopes broken, and grief left unfinished.

And it has never stayed within the borders of my own people. The tradition that taught me to weep for one fallen city never allowed me to believe that sorrow ends at the edge of what is mine. So the day keeps widening. It gathers the wars that continue long after the headlines have looked away. It gathers the straining earth. It gathers all the ways human beings continue to wound one another, and all the ways we ourselves are wounded.

For a long time, I imagined these were different kinds of grief. One belonged to me. The others belonged to my people and to the world beyond them.

Now I experience them differently.

The Rizhiner helped me understand why.

Our deepest collective grief is not meant to replace our personal grief. Nor is our personal grief a distraction from the suffering of the world. They meet beneath the surface. They draw life from the same hidden taproot.

When I chanted Eicha beside my father’s bed, I was not choosing between mourning my father and mourning the losses of my people. I was discovering that one grief had become a doorway into the other.

Perhaps that is one of Tisha b’Av’s quiet gifts.

It does not ask us to perform grief. It invites us to tell the truth. To stop pretending that someone else’s sorrow is easier to feel than our own. To stop believing that our personal losses are too small in a world so full of suffering. To trust that the doorway into our shared humanity is not around our own broken hearts, but through them.

So this Tisha b’Av or any ordinary Wednesday these days, if you find yourself weeping for the brokenness of the world, ask yourself the Rizhiner’s question.

Why are you crying?

Stay with the answer long enough to hear the next one, and then the next, until you reach the place where your own heart tells the truth.

My hope is that when you arrive there, you will discover that your grief was never separate from the grief of the world, and that the grief you could least bear to look at, the one smallest and closest and most your own, was the doorway in.