Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg zt”l: The Need for Tisha B’Av Part Two

A blind man, G-d forbid, reaches the point where his blindness is so accepted that he is not aware of a sense of loss. One who has lost his legs can adjust so that he is not aware of a sense of loss. He is not aware that he does not live a normal full life, that he is handicapped and that there are whole stages of experience and existence that are closed to him. He starts thinking that this is life. And he doesn’t know that the inability to see colors, the inability to see the magnificence of G-d’s creation, is a lack and a loss. He accepts it as being the norm and that is a great tragedy.

Because he is “metzamtzeim,” he makes small G-d’s creation.

If this is true in “chomer,” if this true in material virtues, think for a moment how much more true and how much deeper and how much greater the effect when we come to accept a spiritual crippledness as being the norm, as being the accepted, as being the ways things ought to be. If we come to feel that as a people without a Beis Hamikdash or without Korbanos we are living a full life, think of the effect this has on our understanding of what existence is all about, of what our relationship with our Creator is all about. If we accept this as a normal way of living, to live without

G-d’s face turned to us, to live without the ability to bring a Korbon and carry it out, then we even begin to think as Jews have “b’avonoseinu harabim” begun to think.

Will we really long to bring sacrifices in the Beis Hamikdash when Moshiach comes?

Somehow or other it seems as thought the way we live is so right. It doesn’t make sense that we’ll go and bring animals and slaughter them in a Beis Hamikdash and put them on a Mizbeiyach and burn up the meat.