Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: It is related that the son and the daughter of R. Yishmael b. Elisha were carried off [and sold to] two masters. Some time after the two met together, and one said, I have a slave the most beautiful in the world. The other said, I have a female slave the most beautiful in the world. They said: Let us marry them to one another and share the children. They put them in the same room. The boy sat in one corner and the girl in another. He said: I am a priest descended from high priests, and shall I marry a bondwoman? She said: I am the daughter of a priest descended from high priests, and shall I be married to a slave? So they passed all the night in tears. When the day dawned they recognized one another and fell on one another's necks and bemoaned themselves with tears until their souls departed. For them Jeremiah utters lamentation, For these I am weeping, my eye, my eye pours forth water.
This tragic story is transformed into one of the most evocative of the kinnot, the liturgical poems, recited during Tisha b'Av. The kinnot written by a variety of authors throughout the history of Jewish exile relate the diverse ways the Jewish people have suffered in the last two millennia. They weave through the destruction of both Temples, the exile by Babylon, the exile by Rome, the havoc and destruction caused by the Crusades, the persecution of our religious leaders and guides and eventually the utter obliteration of European Jewry that was the Holocaust.
It is within this spectrum of death and destruction, of tears that know no end, that we relate the loss of two individuals. These individuals, the children of Rabbi Yishmael the Kohen Gadol, were not particularly remarkable or notable. They were two people amongst throngs of suffering, humiliated, ridiculed exiles. Yet, the Talmud and later the composer of the kinna, chose to highlight their particular form of humiliation and eventual death. In so doing the mourning transitions from events of national calamity, of places and great personalities, and moves to the individual and the personal. On Tisha b'Av we sit on the floor and cry. We cry for the loss of our spiritual and national centers of life. We cry for the loss of our teachers and role models. We also cry for the loss of every individual, every person who was made to suffer throughout the two thousand years of Jewish wandering and exile.
This Tisha b'Av afternoon, during Minha, I will recite the mourners kaddish as I do every year. I have spent some time over the years researching my family history and piecing together the history of my family through Europe. I think of my family in Austria, the Ukraine and Lithuania amongst other places that perished in the Holocaust. I think of my cousins who did not persevere through the torment of Stalin's Russia. I think of my family who suffered untold horrors during the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903. I also think of all the family members of whom I will never know their name who suffered degradation, torture and persecution and with all those memories I stand and recite kaddish in the merit of their neshamot.
Each individual is precious and priceless. Each individual is made in the image of God. On Tisha b'Av we reflect on both the loss of our communities; our autonomy, our religious centers and leadership and on the loss of every person - from the son and daughter of Rabbi Yishmael to the members of our own extended family.
May we who mourn for Jerusalem and all of her offspring merit to see her complete rebuilding with compassion.
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