The Walls Come Down

"In order to understand, I destroyed myself."

-Fernando Pessoa

I recently came across this quote and was struck by how clearly it connects to the space of Jewish time we're currently occupying:  the Nine Days of mourning, which will culminate with Tisha B'Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.  There are many tragedies in Jewish history that have fallen on Tisha B'Av, but the two primary ones are the destructions of both the First and Second Temples.  We can imagine what once was the most sacred structure in our tradition, crumbling to the ground in a pile of debris.  And yet, as I look out at Jerusalem today, I am struck by the magnificence of what has been rebuilt and the ways in which Judaism is still vibrantly, unquestioningly alive.  

What happens when the walls come down?  That's the question that Alan Lew tackles in his book, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.  As he explains, at the moment of complete destruction, you can no longer deny the problems that have weakened the foundation.  And he's not speaking only of buildings--this is about us.  On an individual level, Tisha B'Av is when all the protective walls of denial that we've so carefully constructed in our lives come tumbling down, and we are left to face the hard truth of what remains.  He writes:

"On Tisha B'Av it is as if this emptiness has broken loose from its bounds and swallowed everything up.  The Temple burns...This image touches us deeply because we are always under siege, and we are held there by our attempts to hold off the emptiness we intuit at the center of our lives."

Once the walls we've built to ward off emptiness collapse, what are we to do?  One option would be to wallow in the rubble.  Another option, suggests Lew, is to examine honestly what remains when the walls come down, and figure out where to go from there.  There is something strangely liberating about complete collapse, because it allows us two valuable opportunities:  1) to acknowledge that we are in crisis; 2) to rebuild.

I remember very clearly what it felt like to be under siege.  It was being in college and spending all my time either studying or exercising, not socializing; it was slaving over rituals involving tiny amounts of food; it was studying abroad in Spain and calling my parents every day, crying and frightened.  On one such phone call, my mother remarked, "Maybe it's a good thing you're so miserable, because you'll finally do something about it."  She was right; the siege was unsustainable...but I wasn't yet ready to change. 

And then, in the fall of my senior year, the walls came down and I collapsed.  It was messy and ugly and scary, but it was also a gift, because it allowed me to admit that I needed help.  The edifice I'd so carefully constructed to conceal the anguish I felt lay in ruins at my feet.  There was no more room to hide and deny.  As Lew explains:

"We spend a great deal of time and energy propping up our identity, an identity we realize at bottom is really a construct.  So it is that we are always living at some distance from ourselves.  We live in a fearful state of siege, trying to prop up an identity that keeps crumbling, that we secretly intuit to be empty.  Then Tisha B'Av comes and the walls begin to crumble, and then the entire city collapses.  But something persists--something fundamentally nameless and empty, something that remains when all else has fallen away."

Recovery, for me, has been a process of examining that part of me that survived collapse, mining it for strength, and building a new life around its cultivation.  It's a process that started on the day I left college to enter residential treatment, and it continues to this day.  And the result of all that hard work of rebuilding is a life that is richer and more fulfilling than the one I had before.  The fundamentals of who I am haven't changed...but the way I interact with others, with myself, and with G-d definitely has.  I know myself better now than I ever would have if I had not had to endure the destruction of my walls.  

We will all find ourselves at times in our lives when the houses that we've constructed for ourselves crumble to the ground.  When this happens, the key is to view the destruction as an opportunity to clear out the debris and fully examine what remains at our core.

"Tisha B'Av has a hot tip for us:  Take the suffering.  Take the loss.  Turn toward it.  Embrace it.  Let the walls come down...And Tisha B'Av has a few questions for us as well.  Where are we?  What transition point are we standing at?  What is causing sharp feeling in us, disturbing us, knocking us a little off balance?  Where is our suffering?  What is making us feel bad?  What is making us feel at all?  How long will we keep the walls up?  How long will we furiously defend against what we know deep down to be the truth of our lives?"

As we make our way through this time of national mourning, I hope we can each look inward, as well, to see what Tisha B'Av means for us on an individual level.  Remember: you can survive the falling of the walls.  It won't break you--it will hurt, but in the end it will make you stronger.  My hope is that we can each allow for a little destruction, so that we get to experience the possibility and freedom that come along with rebuilding.