Tisha B’Av is not just about the churban Beis haMikdash. It’s about all the suffering Jews have had through the centuries, even until today. It’s about what we’re missing – the fact that we don’t realize exactly what the Beis haMikdash means is what it’s about as well! We mourn that we are in golus. Eichah yashvah badad – we sit alone.
My Rav told a story of a man whose wife died in childbirth. Every year, he would sit his son down and tell him the story of how his mother gave her life to bring him into the world, and what an amazing person his mother had been.
One year, on the yartzeit, the father sees the son in shul, mumbling kaddish. The father was furious! “This is how you repay your mother? By barely mumbling kaddish? Do you know what an amazing person she was? How can you do this to her?”
The son responded, “No, actually, I don’t. I’ve heard from you about my mother, but I never experienced it for myself. How can you expect me to appreciate her fully? I wish I had met her and gotten to know her, but unfortunately, that couldn’t happen.”
This is our situation. We don’t fully understand our loss, because we didn’t experience the Beis haMikdash. But we can mourn the fact that we didn’t see it, and that we still haven’t seen it.
Mourn for what you can understand. Those who lost relatives to the Nazis yemach sh’mam. Those who lost friends or family to the Muslim terrorists. We mourn all the tragedies on Tisha B’Av.
May Hashem soon wipe away all our tears, and may we never know tragedy again!