Parshas Devarim – Erev Tisha B’Av: Life in the Cracks
Chumash Devarim opens with the moment where Moshe finally speaks.
אלה הדברים אשר דבר משה
Not commands. Not fire from heaven. Just words.
Not for God. Not for history.
For them.
For the people he’s loved, fought for, suffered over,
and now, is preparing to leave behind.
Forty years of silence begin to unspool.
And I think—what if he had said these things earlier?
What might have changed?
—
I didn’t speak, either.
For over twenty years.
Most of my life.
I thought that was strength.
I thought it meant I was okay.
Until one day, it cracked.
Not loudly.
Not because I was ready.
Maybe I was, in some quiet, hidden way.
Or I saw what my silence was doing to the people I love.
But mostly, something in me just couldn’t hold the pressure anymore.
A memory surfaced. Then another.
And suddenly I was standing in the ruins of the stories I had never told.
That was the beginning of change.
This past year, I started to speak.
To say the things I had swallowed.
To let the stories out of my body and into the light.
To let myself feel what I hadn’t let myself feel.
I’m naming what I had buried.
Home. Schools. Camps. Yeshivas. Farbrengens. Life.
Moments I’d sealed away in silence.
Things I told myself weren’t traumatic because they were so normal.
But they weren’t. And I wasn’t okay.
Speaking didn’t fix everything.
But it loosened the weight I’d been carrying.
It let breath come back into my body.
It let healing begin.
And now?
Now I feel lighter.
Not finished, but open.
Not fixed, but real.
I don’t live in silence anymore.
I live in presence.
—
Moshe doesn’t get to enter the Land.
He climbs the mountain. He sees it. He names each stop along the way.
He holds the map, but not the arrival.
And somehow, that makes his words even more important.
Because he’s not speaking for his own redemption anymore.
He’s speaking so everyone else can get free.
I think of that every time I share a piece of my story. To understand myself better.
Not to rewrite the past.
And to help someone else feel less alone inside theirs.
—
It’s Erev Tisha B’Av.
Not yet the fast, not yet the tears.
Just the quiet before.
The ache that builds behind the chest, the stillness before the cry.
And there’s a teaching—that the Beis HaMikdash wasn’t destroyed all at once.
That the foundations cracked before the flames ever touched the stones.
I’ve felt that in my story.
But I’ve also seen what comes after the crumbling.
What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t have imagined,
is that something had been growing there the whole time.
Something green.
Something stubborn and alive.
—
If there’s someone you love,
a sibling, a parent, a partner, a child, a friend,
and you’ve been holding something back
for weeks or years or forever,
it’s time to speak.
To let it out.
Not the sharp version, not the weaponized truth,
but the tender one.
The part that’s ready to be held, not hurled.
Moshe waited.
We don’t have to.
—
The cracks in the walls can be holy.
Like the tufts of green that grow between the stones of the Kotel.
They’ve been growing all along.
Quiet. Steady.
Not in spite of the cracks, but because of them.
Even the tears helped.
The Midrash says the Shechinah wept through those walls.
That’s what softened them.
That’s what watered the moss.
The signs of life we see now
are rooted in the pain that was finally allowed to flow.
That’s how the Third Beis HaMikdash begins.
Not with trumpets.
But with a whisper.
A word spoken softly, but finally.
A life that decides it doesn’t want to live sealed off anymore.
It’s the greenery itself that reminds us
the wall was never too broken.
It was just waiting for something real to grow there.
—
I didn’t grow up knowing that speech could be healing.
That it wasn’t just okay to talk—it was necessary.
That silence might keep things tidy, but it doesn’t make you whole.
I never learned that telling your truth, softly and bravely, could be a mitzvah.
I’m learning now.
At 34.
Like Rabbi Akiva, who didn’t even know the Alef Beis until he was 40.
He sat among the children and started again, letter by letter.
And now it’s also my turn to sit with my children
and teach them a different Alef Beis.
One where feelings aren’t weakness.
Where talking is safe and healthy.
Where crying has a place at the table.
Where silence isn’t the price of peace.
The Alef Beis of life.
Alef = Awareness.
Beis = Bravery.
—
Let us say a יהי רצון:
that the cracks keep softening,
that the stories keep rising,
that our speech becomes sanctuary,
and that the pain we’ve carried
becomes the ground where something holy can grow.
May this Tisha B’Av be the last one of silence.
May it turn, soon and gently,
into the joyous day it was always destined to become.
The day of the birth of Moshiach.
The day the tears turn to life.
May we have a healing fast,
and a fast healing,
with Moshiach now.
ונאמר אמן
Good Shabbos,
Berke