What is the Point of Mourning? (From the annual Shemiras Halashon Program, Johannesburg, 2026)

Why do we spend three weeks manufacturing grief for a building none of us ever saw? This is the question the Chief puts directly to his audience in this year's Shemiras Halashon shiur, delivered the Shabbos before Tisha B'Av - a program he has been part of given every year for over two decades.

The laws of communal mourning work backwards from the laws of personal mourning. Grief for a relative starts intense and eases with time. Grief for the Beit Hamikdash starts light and intensifies toward Tisha B'Av, because, as Rav Soloveitchik points out, the feeling isn't naturally there. We have to be walked into it.

Drawing on the Ramban's philosophy of mitzvot, the Chief Rabbi argues that this manufactured grief was never meant to be the goal. Misery isn't a mitzvah. The mourning exists to sensitize us to a loss most of us have never named correctly. Not bricks or sacrifices, but the diminished honor of Hashem's name in the world. And the Gemara's answer for what restores it starts somewhere surprisingly close to home.

It's the same place the Chofetz Chaim started when he built an entire program around the laws of lashon hora: how we speak to, and about, one another.

Key Questions

• If grief for the Beit Hamikdash doesn't come naturally, why does Jewish law go out of its way to manufacture it?

• What did we actually lose when the Temple was destroyed, and why isn't it the building itself?

• Why is fasting on Tisha B'Av not, technically, an act of mourning at all?

• What does the way we speak about other people have to do with the dignity of Hashem's name in the world?

• Why does Chillul Hashem stand apart from every other sin in Jewish law?