This can-do attitude left me when I realized I would miss a seminal seminary experience: going to the Old City to hear Rebbetzin Heller’s shiur on Tishah B’Av.

“You understand Tishah B’Av viscerally,” everyone said about it.

I’d been looking forward to that. This would be my second, maybe third Tishah B’Av, and learning about this day so physically close to the actual location of the Beis Hamikdash was incredibly appealing. Maybe it would connect me to this history I was so newly attached to. Maybe it would make it less theoretical. With my crutches, though, I couldn’t navigate the narrow, uneven cobblestone pathways and stairs.

I was in denial at first. Obviously, I had to go. But there was no one who thought it was a good idea.

Tishah B’Av evening, I sat among the others on the stone stairs of the amphitheater and listened to the haunting tune of Eichah. The Jerusalem air was thick with sniffles and muffled sobs. It was different than my experiences in America, where the feeling was more reserved. This is how it’s supposed to be observed, I thought. We’re sad together.

But the following afternoon, as everyone made their way to the waiting bus, I stayed in my room, sad all by myself. This was my first, possibly only, Tishah B’Av in Israel, and I was sitting in a hot dorm with stale air, nothing and no one familiar or comforting around me.  Forlorn and abandoned, I tried to do something meaningful, but I didn’t understand what exactly we had lost. What was the Temple? That’s what the shiur would have been about, and I was missing it.

I spent the day feeling sorry for myself. My foot hurt. I was tired of crutches and of being dependent on others to carry my books, my lunch tray. I was shaky in this new world, full of insecurities and secrets and unsure if I could really be myself. I wasn’t entirely sure who I even was anymore. In my zeal to become frum, I’d hastily abandoned much of my previous life. My music, books, the way I’d spent my free time — it all seemed so treif, but it had been how I defined myself.  Now, on the other side of my conversion, I’d begun sifting through the wreckage to see what was salvageable. Still, I wasn’t sure what was safe to share.

My solitude wasn’t just physical — it was emotional.

At some point from within my melancholy, it occurred to me that if I could take a small pain like not being able to go to a shiur and connect it to a larger pain of not knowing who I was anymore, maybe I could connect that to a loss as unfathomable as not having the Beis Hamikdash.

Alone and abandoned. Me and Yerushalayim.  Of course, a broken foot is not the worst thing. But attaching my pain to Hashem’s pain is a lesson that stays with me every Tishah B’Av. Ff

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 954)