tisha b'av

I got off the floor about an hour ago, a little bit after chatzos. While the fire is still burning in the bais hamikdash, we only have a small, symbolic amount of mourning to do. The beard that I have been growing for 3 weeks, the not going to public events, no live music, the refraining from water activities, the vegetarianism etc.. all say that I am symbolically part of the mourning. It would be impossible to truly mourn, for if we knew what we were missing, we would never get off the ground. As it is written, "those who mourn Jerusalem and the temple will take place in its rebuilding.

My shul says 14 kinos on Tisha B'av morning, ending with the traditional Eli Zion. We started davening at 7:30 and finished at around 9:30 I thought that it was a good amount of time. In our shul, a different person reads each kinah out loud and then the congregation says out loud the congregational point, so during one kinah everyone is saying Oyah together. I read one kinah, stating that God is great and we should be embarrassed as it went through some of history saying nice things that God did for us and how we screwed it up. I thought that it was a decent amount of time for kinos. In Detroit, where they said all of them, someone generally brought a backgammon set and when we got bored of kinos we would play

I took my little girl for a walk today because she needed to get out. It was so refreshing breathing the fresh air and looking around at the Galilean hills. May we merit the bais hamikdash to be speedily rebuild, in our days.