Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.”
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is Walt Whitman’s testament to the personal and collective grief at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War. The poet watches Lincoln’s coffin making its way through the northern half of a nation held together by a thread, at odds with the beauty of the spring around him. The cities are draped in black, the bells are tolling, and America waits at a standstill, halted for this one train as its citizens mourn, take a collective breath, and wait to see what will come next.
It is strange, in modern and divided America, to imagine what a collective day of mourning might look like. The concept seems strangely unsuited to our times—“we,” that is to say, the collective American public, do not do things together anymore. The complaint that Memorial Day has been coopted for politics dates back to the 1880s, even before the holiday was formally established in many states. Other national days—the Fourth of July, Veterans Day (known elsewhere, and let us not forget the significance of its American renaming, as Armistice Day) even Thanksgiving—these may be days that we celebrate America, or some section of what we believe America could be, but we do not in this era take any of these days to mourn all together. On November 9th, 2016, half the country was perhaps engaged in collective grief—but it was not so with the other half, and that could not possibly serve the purpose of bringing us together, even temporarily. In 2001, we mourned the Twin Towers as a nation, but already the plaques outside fire stations across America commemorating the fallen do not draw the attention of most passing by, nor do the flowers laid out in front of them each September.
Collective mourning has not dropped out of the modern world entirely, however. In Israel, two days stand one week apart to provide space for the country to mourn—first, Yom HaShoa, to mourn the victims of the Holocaust, and second, Yom HaZikaron, to mourn the fallen soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces. I was struck, when I was there, to see how much the ceremony of the latter outdid the former—on both holidays, a siren sounds across the country, but on Yom HaZikaron, it sounds twice, and for a longer amount of time. As a Jew, I had waited my whole life to hear the former. As an American, I could only stand and wonder at the latter.
It is a strangely moving experience, to watch an entire country shut down in mourning. All places of entertainment are required by law to close on the evening of Yom HaZikaron. Televisions play a running list of the fallen. Civilians, often dressed in white, come out of their homes and cars to stand motionless when the siren sounds.
Of course, this too is not entirely unifying. Members of Israel’s ultra-orthodox sects often do not serve in the military, and the Palestinians who live in Israel and the occupied territories have little reason to enter into this national narrative (it should be noted, however, that some ceremonies have been held to engage in collective mourning with Palestinians on Yom HaZikaron, a gesture met with contempt and disgust by other members of Israeli society). But it is hard to imagine a comparable scene here, even with its outcasts. These days, even grief does not seem enough to bridge the divide between us.
I did not learn to mourn from modern-day America. I learned, primarily, from Judaism—after all, there are many spaces in the Jews’ long history for grief. The earliest I knew were memories surrounding the Holocaust, but the oldest—or, one of the oldest—is the fast day that passed this weekend. Named Tisha B’Av after its date on the calendar (the ninth day of the month of Av), this is the day on which both the First and the Second Temples are said to have been destroyed and the Jewish population sent into exile. If this were not enough, the Jews have proceeded to tack most other great tragedies in their history onto this date, ranging from the moment the Israelites who had left Egypt learned that they would not go into the Land of Israel in the book of Numbers to the Spanish Inquisition and beyond. It is a day of calamity, a day to let the broken pieces of the world fill you until you are brimming over with sorrow. The rituals of the day reflect this—you may not bathe, eat, drink, or anoint yourself; one sits on the floor rather than a chair and often goes without shoes; the morning prayer shawl is cast aside until the afternoon service. For a day, one ceases to be a part of the world of the living, and resides instead with the shadows of the dead.
It is a wholly collective holiday. Together we mourn the loss of our peoplehood, of our traditions, of our lives. This is a reasonable approach. To bear all this alone would be untenable—the losses of a nation are too much for one person to bear. And yet, individual grief has a way of creeping in as well. Forced exile, the deterioration of society, martyrdom—perhaps in spite of ourselves, faint parallels trace onto our everyday tragedies. People leave, people get sick, people die, and sometimes those moments in our own lives feel more immediate than the ones that happened thousands of years ago. The line has often been a blurry one for me in recent years: this year, as sometimes happens, Tisha B’Av coincided with the yartzheit (the anniversary of one’s death on the Jewish calendar) of my paternal grandmother. Each year, I wonder how to find a balance between so much communal mourning and the personal grief of my family. I do not think I have yet managed it. How does one successfully prioritize a thing like grief?
To an outsider, the whole thing may seem like a miserable affair, and indeed, in some years, I have found it to be such. This year, however, I found that I was looking forward to it. The summer—the year—has been full of suffering, from shootings in Pittsburgh to El Paso to Dayton, from the immigration crisis on our southern border to the immigration crisis happening in every American’s backyard. Faced with one terrible piece of news after another, one presses on or tunes it out or screams in the streets, but to take the time to mourn each piece of news with the depth that decency demands would drive any one person mad. We bemoan the normalization of tragedy in today’s world, but we cannot forget that this is also a biological coping mechanism. Empathy, we are discovering, is not a bottomless resource.
To be faced with a day to really think about the world, to really feel it hurting, then, seems to be oddly cathartic. As we hurtled from tragedy to tragedy, I looked forward to taking a moment to stop and breathe. This was perhaps wishful thinking. The organization I work for spent the weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av coordinating rallies for the Jewish community across the country, which meant that even as I was preparing for a holiday of reflection, I was also building to a day of action. The rallies focused on immigration as a Jewish issue—based in the collective memory of the moment when international borders were closed to us, Jews across America came together to mourn the closing of our borders to others in need.
Clearly, these events struck a chord—here in New York, more than a thousand people attended, and we had similar crowds at another five of the more than fifty events that took place across the country. Processing the photos of hundreds of drawn faces and defiant signs and upraised fists yesterday, I thought that perhaps this is what collective mourning could look like in America. A siren or a moment of silence, white clothes or a protest sign: perhaps they are not so different after all.
It is not terribly surprising that, when the day came, I only managed to feel this shattering grief for a few brief moments of the day. I had work to do and many things to worry about at once; the fast and the heat of the subway mixed as well as anyone would expect. I had seen many things on the news and in person that were worth mourning, but to submerge one’s self completely in a national grief for twenty five hours is an ask few people can pull off. As I flipped through the photos and quotes of rally after rally, I thought instead of the value of this collective, national grief. Together, a community can bear what an individual cannot. And I thought, too, of a moment of national American mourning and the words of one individual within it, who watched a country mourn and then offered his own small piece of grief:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbarred heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the somber faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.”
Tisha B’Av allows its participants the chance to offer their own lilac—to give a piece of their grief to the whole, while trusting that our own personal empathy will not run dry. It is the kind of mourning that our country desperately needs at this moment. I do not know what form that might take, but for now, I turn my thoughts to my grandmother, who took me out one spring afternoon when I was a child to the blooming lilac bush in our backyard to smell its flowers. And I will think that maybe grief is not a thing to be prioritized or balanced one way or another after all.
Here, Nana—
I give you my sprig of lilac.
Bare the Iron Hand 