Someone — let’s call her Mrs. Pearl — calls me right after Tisha B’Av.

“I had the most amazing insight on Tisha B’Av” she says.

I know Mrs. Pearl and her revelations are usually good ones so I get my pen and paper ready. She begins.

“I was reading Eichah when you could already lie on the couch” she sets the scene “getting those hunger and thirst pangs and I started to read about how Hashem threw down Yisrael’s beauty from Heaven to Earth. Actually it was the first time I remember hearing that concept and it struck me what does that mean ‘He threw down our beauty from Heaven to Earth’?

“I read on and it explained that HaKadosh Baruch Hu had a brick He would look at every time Klal Yisrael would anger him and the sight of it would assuage His anger.” She then asks “What was this brick?”

Before I can answer she continues.

“In Mitzrayim the women used to help their husbands collect the straw to mix clay for the bricks because if their husbands didn’t meet their quota they’d be brutally beaten or worse.

“One day a wife who was expecting went out to the fields to help her husband. This was during the time when we were commanded to make bricks without straw. When this woman saw there wasn’t enough mixture to meet the quota she lost the child she was carrying (lo aleinu). This she added to the mixture to meet the quota so her husband wouldn’t suffer.

“And the brick formed from this action was the brick that HaKadosh Baruch Hu would look at to soften His anger at us. And this is the brick formed from the ultimate act of mesirus nefesh which reflected the beauty of Yisrael and which HaKadosh Baruch Hu threw down from Heaven to Earth.

“This really got me” Mrs. Pearl says. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” Mrs. Pearl goes into a new segment of her story. “A little later in the day I asked my husband to take some nice rolls out of the freezer for the break fast. I wanted my husband and more so for one of my children who was fasting for the first time to have something nice to break the fast with.

“So my husband looks into the freezer and sees there’s nothing there. Since he lost his job a few months ago I thought the sight of an empty freezer might make him feel pressured or bad like it was his fault that it was empty because he wasn’t making any money. So I say to myself though I’m feeling faint from hunger I’ll make bagels and real cream cheese. You know the kind you make by hanging up the white cheese in an old cotton cloth and letting it drip over a pot.

“So I check the flour” she continues her story “make a dough with the last of my strength and start to knead it on the floured counter. As I’m kneading I say to myself but really to G-d ‘This should be a piece of that brick.’ Here I am pushing myself beyond my limits to stand by my husband and take away his suffering.

“Really” she tells me “these times are not that far from those in Mitzrayim. Aren’t we making bricks without straw? Doing night work during the day and day work during the night? Men doing women’s work and women doing men’s?”

She pauses.

“So instead of mumbling under my breath and resenting my husband and our lot I threw myself into it with him. And this is the beauty and the brick.”