From Nachem to Nachamu

It is the day after Tisha B’av, and I want to share a thought I had as we were leaving Majdanek.

Far into the camp, at the end of a long road, there is a dome, and under it sits seven and a half tons of human ash. Not all of it Jewish. Approximately sixty to eighty thousand Jews were murdered at Majdanek. That’s two full Fair Lawns of people.

I stood there thinking about the two moments in the Jewish calendar when we use ash.

We used it this week. We dip an egg and dry bread into ash as we enter Tisha B’av, carrying the weight of all of Jewish history at once. I prepare all year and still get through maybe half my material. Every year. It’s impossible. It’s impossible to get through everything. It’s impossible, even the kinos themselves. And that’s the essence of the day.

Six days after Tisha B’av comes Tu Be’av, the season of weddings. Not just because the three weeks have ended and the calendar has room again. Chazal put a wedding on the other side of this, on purpose, close enough to touch. The minhag is to place ash on the chassan’s forehead before he goes under the chuppah. He can wipe it off before pictures. That’s fine.

The source is a pasuk in Yeshayahu, and it’s a play on the navi’s own words. Yeshayahu promises peer (פאר) tachas efer, a crown in place of ashes, a future where Hashem replaces our mourning with glory. We’re not there yet. So at a wedding today we invert it: efer tachas peer, ash in place of the crown. In the days of the Beis Hamikdash, a chassan and kallah wore that peer under the chuppah. We have no peer today, because we have no Beis Hamikdash, so we give him ash instead. We don’t touch the kallah’s forehead, but we tell her the same thing. We tell them both that this is a placeholder, that their children should merit the real peer, that they should see the binyan of the third Beis Hamikdash with their own eyes.

I’ve carried this from Rabbi Yudin and used it myself under the chuppah more times than I can count. But I was thinking about it walking up those steps at Majdanek, toward that dome, and what these two moments on the Jewish calendar are actually doing next to each other.

One face of Tisha B’av is mesiras hanefesh. Jews murdered, communities erased, yeshivos burned. Generation after generation giving up their lives al kiddush Hashem. Vehi she’amda l’avoseinu. The day holds more than that too, but this is the face Majdanek put in front of me, and it is inspiring and unbearable at once, without resolving into just one of those things.

But there’s a second thing ash marks, a different kind of demand. Not mesiras hanefesh but mesiras hachayim. Mesiras hanefesh can be forced on a person in a single terrible moment. Mesiras hachayim is a choice made over and over, for decades, in rooms no one is watching. Not giving up your life. Giving it over. Living it, day after day, dedicated to Torah and mitzvos and the Ribono Shel Olam.

I leave Tisha B’av with the fire of the Beis Hamikdash still burning somewhere inside me. Shabbos Nachamu opens with the very words that follow the ash: nachamu nachamu ami. The same navi who told me to place ash before the crown is telling me the crown is coming. I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with that. I know what I did with it every other year. Mourned, and didn’t give up. Rebuilt, and didn’t forget. I’m not sure that’s a plan for this year. It’s just what’s true about the ones before it.