On Erev Tisha B’av this Wednesday night, I entered a stranger’s apartment. “Good grief,” they said, ushering me through the door. At first, I was thrown off. I quickly remembered that some people have a custom of not greeting each other on Tisha B’av, the holiday that marks not only the Temples’ destruction, but a series of devastating tragedies throughout Jewish history.
My friend had invited me to this gathering, where we were to sing sad songs, and settle into the mood of the holiday — the mood being grief. Each year, as the holiday approaches, I find myself growing resistant: my heart hardens and my body braces for impact. I don’t want to feel grief. It’s painful. It’s scary. On one hand, after losing many loved ones at a young age, I’ve been intimately acquainted with grief, and am far from eager to dive back into its abyss. On the other hand, with the constant buzz of technology, I am able to move through the day without feeling too much. We are inundated with tragedy after tragedy, news of injustices and oppression abound — punctuated by advertisements and clickbait. If we’re given the option to dissociate, to keep scrolling, to become a bit numb, why wouldn’t we take it? Our hearts have grown calluses in order to survive, in order to get through the day.
But Judaism scheduled us a day to mourn. Our tradition insists that we don’t look away, that we feel the pain of loss and devastation that demands to be felt, that bubbles under the surface of our lives as we work and create content and try to be okay. This pain is wildly inconvenient.
At that stranger’s house, a group of Jews sat in a circle and each shared something that each of us are grieving. “The climate crisis,” someone said. “Another person killed at Rikers.” “The Knesset’s judicial overhaul.” “Chronic illness, and what my body used to be.” We named the people and places and ideas that we were grieving, and before long I found myself sobbing.
Eventually, it didn’t feel terrible. It felt vital. Sinking into the abyss of pain and loss was strangely cathartic. We passed around a tissue box that was quickly emptied. It was at that moment, sitting on the hard floor holding sweaty hands with people I hardly knew, that it hit me. Grief might just be the most appropriate thing to be feeling these days – the very emotion we avoid may just be the one we desperately need to listen to.
The next day when I opened my computer, it felt like both Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers were all philosophizing about grief.
Some spoke about grief as a way of bearing witness to pain, as the only appropriate reaction to the kind of devastation that Tisha B’av commemorates. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg examines the imagery of sexual assault present in the text of Lamentations. “Let the pain in,” she says. “It is there. We can’t heal as individuals or as a society when we pretend that it’s not there.” Tisha B’av gives us a chance to tap into the suffering of the world, not just in the past, but today: “We can regard the text of Lamentations as a chance to bear witness to the harm caused, to hear the voices of victim-survivors telling the truth about their experiences.”
Others spoke about the climate crisis, the enormity of which can make it feel impossible to fully take in. Aleah Black, who goes by the name Gendersauce, reminds us to stop pretending to be fine; our grief is proportionate to reality:
“Part of working to change things is learning to balance your grief and hope.
Things are terrifying. The oceans are losing krill and the poles are losing ice and and and and. And you have to learn to feel it.
This place is your home. It is good that you are grieving the pain the earth is in. She is your mother.
Of course you are so sad. The disappearance of the forests deserves your tears.
Oh child, oh small one, let yourself weep.
Stop pretending you aren’t heartbroken.
We can only take action from a place of love if we acknowledge we feel love.”
Similarly, Rabbi Tamara Cohen’s “Eicha/Lament for The Earth” details the pain that humans have inflicted on earth, as she cries out. How can we take action toward climate justice without first feeling the weight of the damage that has been done?
But it’s difficult to let these heavy emotions flow through us on a daily basis. Sometimes it seems that we must choose between hardening our hearts and allowing grief to paralyze us. Jericho Vincent writes that “When we’re grieving, when our world is on fire, when our families are falling apart, when our nations are crumbling, when we’re overwhelmed by our wounds, we have two choices: We can allow our wounds to crust over and we can harden our hearts, allowing the momentum of harm to continue on. Or we can allow our wounds to stay open, to transform into portals of empathy, opening our vision more deeply to the troubles of the world, our two responsibilities, and the way forward to a better tomorrow.” Grief, if we let it, can be a portal to healing, to change, to liberation. It begs to be felt, no matter how much we try to avoid it. The only way out is through.
As voices swirled around me singing Acheinu, I felt a yearning to be able to do this more often, to let out grief for the vast suffering in this world. It felt so good to not have to pretend everything is fine. To be able to mourn, to bawl in the presence of community without apologizing for the snot and the sound. “I almost want to do this once a month,” I whispered to my friend. “Or even once a week,” they replied with a wink.
Maybe there need not be a binary between all-consuming grief and dissociated productivity. Maybe, just maybe, we can create a home for grief to live within our souls. The poet Hanif Abdurraqib believes that grieving is a spiritual practice. “…I’m of the belief that one doesn’t move past loss,” he says. “Grief makes a home within us if we allow it to…. I believe that I should be a generous steward to my grief. If I tend generously to my grief then it treats me well in return.” Dr. Koach Baruch Frazier feels similarly, explaining that lament is actually its own practice that can help us cultivate resilience, with a formula passed down by our ancestors to hold us in times of uncertainty and crisis.
I think back to the months and years after my best friend’s tragic death. It seemed the world had made an executive decision to move on, so I decided to do the same. I buried my sadness, and immersed myself in college life: piling on the activities, spending long hours in the library, going out with friends. Wow, I’m doing this, I thought. I’m okay! It was around that time that I began curiously experiencing panic attacks. “Grief is an emotion that demands to be felt,” my new therapist said when I asserted that I was completely fine. “If you refuse to let it out consciously, it will find a way to the surface.” Grief was making a home within me, whether I liked it or not. It was up to me whether I wanted to attend to it.
What, really, is grief? You can’t grieve what doesn’t matter to you, I realize. Maybe grief, at its core, is a consequence of love. It is caring about something — someone — deeply, and then losing it. Grief is an affirmation that we love, that we care. In our world where distraction is always an option, allowing ourselves to grieve becomes a choice. In our world full of suffering, stopping to grieve is a necessary yet radical act.
Maybe instead of avoiding it, we can create a home for grief within our soul, listening closely for what it has to teach us. Instead of an enemy, grief can be our friend — our guide to creating a holier, more just world.
“Where did the idiom ‘good grief’ come from?” I googled the next morning. It “began with the origin of the phrase “good God,” which first appeared during the 1600s,” the internet spat back at me. God does feel wrapped up in our grief, in the eternal mystery of bad things happening to good people. In moments of feeling intense grief, sometimes all we can do is cry and scream out to God, even if we’re calling out in anger, unsure if anyone is listening.
After the singing, I walked home in thick darkness with a tank top soaked in tears, and a soul that felt somehow heavy and light. Strangely, I felt closer to God than I had in a long time.
Good grief, indeed.
