V'ata Amarta…V'lama? Lekha, Hashem Ha-tzedaka

These two dirges of couplets are complementary: The first asks the unanswerable question of why G-d forsook all His promises of benevolence to unleash forces of destruction on His people, and the second, foreshadowed in the concluding lines of the first, gives a traditional response—G-d is righteous and our actions have been our undoing. Looking back over the parallel kinot, it seems roundabout--even wasteful--to have asked the question so many times when the answer was just around the corner. But this perception dissipates when we realize that the kinot, like Tisha B'Av itself, are about the deep psychological work of processing tragedy, and not merely the application of pat answers to unready souls.

It is said that a when a scholar would ask Rav Chaim Brisker a question and receive an answer, both questioner and responder would emerge dissatisfied. The nature of the lomdus employed by Rav Chaim made it clear that there had never been a question in the first place. Thus the questioner felt he'd never really had a real challenge to the text, and Rav Chaim felt that he had not come up with a real terutz, but merely cleared away the underbrush of confusion. To appreciate an answer, there has to be a recognition that there truly was a question.

When future Ambassador of Israel, Naftali Lavie, was a teenager newly liberated from Auschwitz, he could not, at first, bring himself to pray with the other freed inmates who made a minyan. Having successfully sheltered his little brother, who would be the future Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau, but lost his parents and entire community, the young Lavie had too many unanswered questions to form the words of the prayers. One his first visits was to the Grand Rabbi of Ger, and his recollection of that visit was that the wise Rebbe, aware of his emunah issues, never once raised with him the topic of faith. He understood that there must be a time for questions, before there can be fertile ground for answers to take hold.

Perhaps the Gerrer Rebbe took his cue from G-d Himself. In the Midrashic debate between Moshe Rabbenu and G-d, during which Moshe pleads to live and to enter Israel, G-d informs Moshe that he must die because "he has partaken of the cup of the first man." This reference to universal mortality is misconstrued by Moshe as a direct comparison to Adam himself, and therefore he responds: "Adam sinned, but what sin have I committed?" Rather than correct Moshe's misapprehension, G-d continues the discussion on Moshe's terms, comparing his sins with those of Adam and the forefathers, until finally, when Moshe will not yield, G-d, as it were, bangs a fist on the table with the phrase "Rav Lakh!." This is beyond you, at the moment, Moshe, and this is where the discussion must stop, until you have had more time to process.

I remember how, in the aftermath of a miscarriage exacerbated by an insensitive Ob/Gyn, my wife and I went to interview a prospective new doctor. This gynecologist had a ready answer to all of our questions. He'd seen every situation, solved every problem before it occurred. He absolutely radiated competence. We disqualified him, because our recent painful experience made us yearn for a doctor who didn't have all the answers, but honored the questions. We wanted a human doctor who knew that, no matter how trained and prepared he was, there would situations and questions would always arise that are unexpected and unanswerable. Before we could accept his answers, he had to legitimate our questions.

That's why the Kina of V'ata amarta is not repetitious. The Kinot give us a chance to repeat and process the questions, before suggesting the breath of an answer. Tisha B'Av itself is not a time of wallowing in tragedy, but of processing it. It is a necessary stage, the spiritual crouch that presages a rise towards redemption. May we experience it as such.