QUESTION
How important is it to cry in the kinos in Tisha B’Av? Is it very important or let’s say I’m more of an internal person and it’s very hard for me to cry?
ANSWER
It’s very easy to weep on Tisha B’Av בחרב נפלו עם ה' על ישראל. The Germans came to town after town and took the people. The people in the small towns, they were generally shomrei Shabbos in the small towns. They all ate kosher in the small towns. They weren’t tzaddikim already and their children didn’t go to yeshivos but in general they were moderately observant people.
The small town where I lived for a while, I knew the people personally. Quiet people. Kosher people. They didn’t have any great hislahavus but they kept everything. And then one day the Nazis came and marched all the men outside on a field outside the town and they shot them all down. My brother-in-law, a Telzer yeshivah bachur, a nice boy, they shot him down for nothing. In cold blood they killed him. Now can you do anything else than weep at that?
Then they took, a few weeks later, all the women; quiet women, decent women. Many didn’t have sheitlim at all; no, they wore their own hair most of them but still they were quiet women. They kept kosher. So they took these quiet people out in the field, the quiet women and the girls. My sister-in-law, a beautiful and fine frum girl, went with them. And they shot them all dead in cold blood.
My chaveirim; Rav Feivel Pilvishker, zichrono levrachah, from Pilvishkov, a tzaddik, a yungerman. He was learning all the time. He even thought in learning all the time. He was always thinking in divrei mussar in his spare time. They found his dead body on the field. He was murdered outside of the town. Other tzaddikim too. Aharon Birzher, my chavrusa. He was the son-in-law of the Kodoner Rav and he was murdered together with the Kodoner Jews. My rebbi, Rav Avraham Grodzinski, was burned up in a fire. The hospital was set on fire. They burned him up. Rav Elchonon Wasserman zichrono levrachah was in Slabodka. They marched him out with all the Slabodka boys and they shot him in the Ninth Fort. They shot him dead.
Is there anything to do except weep? Certainly we weep. We weep and weep. And Tisha B’Av is not enough. We have to weep more frequently for that. All of them deserve that we should remember them with tears. And Hakadosh Baruch Hu surely will remember them! כי דורש דמים אותם זכר – The One Who remembers the blood of the innocent, לא ישכח צעקת עניים – He won’t forget their outcry. He won’t forget it. He’ll take His revenge.
And we should know sof kol sof the end will be that we will be the ones who are going to conquer. And the tzaddikim in the Next World are going to rejoice that their nation is the nation that survives. Sof kol sof the happiness of the World to Come and the happiness even in this world will be ours. When Moshiach comes all the nations will admit that their religions were false, that they were wicked lies, and they’ll all bow down and כל לשון תודך כל ברך תכרע לפניך.
