Why We Cry on Tisha B'av?

רב שמשון דוד פינקוס – דף קפז

על אלה אני בוכיה

השפע הגשמי שיש בדורנו, נגנב מאתנו במקום השפע הרוחני

The avodah on Tisha B’av is to cry. Why are we crying? We know we cry for the generations of tzarot, which are all an extension of the churban bayit. But what is the avodah of crying?

Before the churban, there was a constant שפע that Hashem placed in the world, and it was a flow of גשמיות that flowed into the world for the Jews. As a result, the non-Jews benefited from the flow, but it was placed here for us. We used to come to the mikdash to eat korbanot and for aliya l’regel and from that emanated רוח הקודש ונבואה. But that was all lost with the churban. In our times, the שפע comes into the world and the non-Jews take it, leaving us the leftover. Moreover, during the times of the mikdash, the non-Jews fed off our extra שפע, but now they feed off of our tzarot.

How does this שפע come into the world? Only through our tefillot. When a father sees his child on the floor begging for help, he listens to him. When he sees him bleeding, even more so. Tisha B’av is for tefilla and crying – Hashem, look at all the tzarot, all the blood lost, etc. Please redeem us.

Our challenge is that we can feel the tzarot, but we don’t feel the missing שפע that the non-Jews are now enjoying. We don’t know what we are missing. We are supposed to be crying on Tisha B’av for the loss of this שפע. But  we don’t know what we are missing – that is why we cry; we cry for not knowing what we are really missing.

There is a story of a man who picked up a package at the post office and it contained 10 rubels; he was so happy, it was the talk of the town. But later it became known that this man’s uncle sent him 100 rubels, but the mailman stole the other 90. Our simcha for our spirituality today is like the man who was happy about getting 10 rubels. We do have good things, but we are missing the 90%. Yes, there we learn Torah, do Mitzvot and Pray, but is are we doing it with 100% or 90% focus on the , or are we thinking about the other good things in life?

We have to cry on Tisha B’av that we want to learn with better focus, pray with better intensity and take more time to do mitzvot properly. We have to maintain our lofty goals and not give in and compromise to the complacency of our society. Recognize what we are missing – that is why we cry on Tisha B’av.