Every Tisha B’Av, something quietly uncomfortable happens in shuls and homes across the community. The lights are dimmed and Eichah is chanted in its haunting trop. The next morning we sit through hours of Kinnos. And the day asks for more than attendance. Halachically, we are meant to stay preoccupied with the aveilus itself: no learning that gladdens the heart, no greetings, no taking our minds off the mourning. And for many of us, perhaps more than will ever admit it, the honest experience inside all of that is: nothing. A vague sense that we ought to feel something. A flicker of guilt that we don’t. Kinnah after kinnah, some people spend those hours trying to squeeze out a feeling that will not come, and end the fast having suffered a great deal — not over the Churban but over their own failure to feel it.
I want to speak directly to that person. Not to tell you to try harder, or to learn more halachos about the Beis HaMikdash. I want to suggest that the numbness you feel may be one of the most honest things you bring to Tisha B’Av, and that it has a name, a place, and a path forward.
The aveilus of the Churban is unlike any other. When we mourn a person, we grieve for someone dear who did not choose to leave us. The Churban is different: it was Hashem who took the Beis HaMikdash away, and what we mourn is the relationship with Him. This is less bereavement than heartbreak — the rupture of a relationship. Chazal teach that the withdrawal was a response, mipnei chata’einu, not an abandonment; but from within, it is still felt as a rupture. And each of us arrives at Tisha B’Av carrying our own relationship to that heartbreak, shaped by our history and emotional wiring.
Attachment researchers have observed that when a parent withdraws, one of the most common responses is not open grief but a dismissive stance: the child becomes seemingly indifferent to the rupture — not because the relationship means little but precisely because it means so much. Rather than feel the sharpness of that pain, the child goes numb. Numbness on Tisha B’Av is not proof that the Churban means nothing to us. It may be proof of the opposite: the rupture struck so deep that the only way to survive it was to stop feeling it. Grief, after all, does not arrive in one form. It moves through stages — from protest to longing to exhaustion to silence — and numbness is one of the most well-documented of them. Megillas Eichah itself may hint at this: five chapters, each speaking in a different emotional voice. Wherever you find yourself this year, you are on that map, not off it.
Here is another liberating perspective: feeling nothing does not disqualify your mourning, because halachic mourning was never defined by emotion. Aveilus is a set of practices that create the outer form of mourning: sitting low, refraining from comfort, reading Eichah. No halachah commands tears. The Sefer HaChinuch teaches that the external arouses the internal: the ritual is not evidence of grief already present, but the vehicle by which grief finds its way in, if and when that becomes possible. Sitting on the floor when you feel nothing is not hypocrisy, and it is not faking. It is aveilus, practiced in the only register currently available to you.
For many of us, though, the numbness is not only protective. It is trained. In large parts of the yeshiva world, and in many corners of the frum world generally, there runs a quiet current of suspicion toward emotional display: crying is for children, or for women, or for people making a show of their avodah. Each of these voices has its reasons. But over the years they add up to a standing policy: dismiss what you feel before you have even felt it. The way through is not to argue with them, and certainly not to force tears. It is honesty: noticing what you actually feel, including the nothing, and becoming curious about the reasons you dismiss it.
I know this from the inside. Some years ago, early in my training as a therapist, I underwent my own personal therapy in a modality called Internal Family Systems, or “parts work.” Its central move is simple: identify the inner parts involved, and get to know them. The part I met first was rational, composed, and deeply skeptical of emotional display. Its position was clear: crying is performative, and tears on Tisha B’Av probably say more about self-image than about genuine avodas Hashem. This part had served me well in many contexts. But it was also guarding a locked door. Behind that door I discovered another part of me, one that cared, achingly, about the Shechina, about the relationship we lost, about the distance of our generation from Hashem’s presence. With that map in hand, the work was not to try harder to cry. I was able to sit down, acknowledge the protection the blocking parts offered, and ask them, gently, to step aside. And when they did, I connected to a reservoir of real grief carried, unknowing, for years. Ever since, my experience of Tisha B’Av has been completely transformed.
So: sit on the floor. Read Eichah slowly. The external practice is already aveilus, and you are not failing at anything. But you do not have to stop at accepting the numbness as all there is. Before Eichah begins, take a few quiet minutes and turn inward. Notice the numbing part, and instead of fighting it, validate it; it has been protecting you, perhaps for a long time. Ask what it has been protecting you from. Then explore what else may be blocking, and ask it, very gently, to step back. You may find that behind it sits something that has cared all along. Tears are not guaranteed, and they are not the goal. But this quiet process of noticing, validating, and gently asking can lead to a real transformation in how you experience these days.