When Comfort Becomes Cruelty

by Om Green

The disabled body knows destruction intimately. We carry within us the smoldering ruins of what was, the persistent ache of what will never be again. On Tisha B'Av, when the Jewish world sits on the floor and wails for the Temples, for Jerusalem, for all that has been lost, I find myself wondering: why do we insist grief be a redemption story? What do we do when the mourning never ends? What do we do with intractable pain and grief? 

In the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan teaches that "whoever mourns for Jerusalem will merit to see her joy" (Taanit 30b). But what of those of us whose Jerusalem burns every day? What of those whose bodies are perpetual sites of destruction, whose pain is not a temporary exile but a permanent dwelling place? 

The Cruelty of Comfort

The sages tell us that on Tisha B'Av, we refrain from study except for the most mournful texts: Job, Lamentations, the sections of Talmud that speak of destruction. We sit on the floor. We don't greet each other. We don’t shower. We don't pretend that this day is anything other than what it is: a day of catastrophe. We are obligated to let others see our bloodshot eyes, hear our strained voices, and watch us hold more than we could ever handle.

Yet in our modern world, our personal grief must be sanitized. We speak of "differently abled" when we mean broken and shattered. We invoke "everything happens for a reason" when we mean we cannot bear the weight of meaningless suffering. We offer "you're so inspiring" when we mean we're grateful it's you and not us. The culture of toxic positivity steals from disabled and chronically ill people the only thing they have left: the truth.  

The prophet Jeremiah, author of Lamentations, knew better. "Is there any pain like my pain?" he cries (Lamentations 1:12). He doesn't soften the blow or wrap his anguish in platitudes. He stands in the smoking rubble of Jerusalem and refuses to pretend that destruction is anything other than cataclysmic. He grieves openly and declares: “No one has ever hurt the way I am hurting right now. My pain is bigger than I know what to do with. I am alone.”

In today’s society, we loathe the egotistical proclamation of individual pain. We can't handle the meaningless suffering because it implies our suffering may also be without resolution.  But Jeremiah's radical acceptance of his pain is actually recognition of the truth: Your pain is its own, and no one will ever know your agony. 

My body has its own language of lamentation. My vertebrae collapsed into each other like the walls of the Temple, creating an architecture of ruin that no amount of positive thinking could rebuild. What world-class surgeons couldn’t fix, well-meaning friends who believed themselves bastions of resilience tried to. They suggested yoga, meditation, and gratitude journals. They had no idea what they were talking about. Their comfort was violence forcing me to be silent and comply with their language of grief. It ignored the simple fact that my pain and anguish were beyond control or meaning. My anguish renders me just as powerless as it renders them. 

The Liturgy of Loss

In the Kinah (dirge) "Zion, Will You Not Ask," the medieval poet Judah Halevi writes: "I am a jackal when I weep for your affliction, but when I dream of your return, I am a lute for your songs." The pivot from jackal to lute, from howling to harmony, happens in a single breath. That breath is the breath of hope. But what if there is no hope to be had? What if the jackal's cry is not a prelude, but a haunting reminder that at any time, any and every one of us will eventually know irreconcilable pain.  

The Talmud records that when the Temple was destroyed, the walls themselves wept (Taanit 29a). Stone grieved. Mortar mourned. The very foundations of the sacred space refused to accept their devastation quietly. They teach us that some losses are so profound that even inanimate objects must bear witness to the horror.

My body weeps like those walls. In my worst days, the tender skin of my eyelids are swollen and purple and can barely open against the sun. The tears don’t stop and they are not cleansing or cathartic. They are the extension of pain, and acknowledgment that something holy has been destroyed, that the sanctuary of my former self lies in ruins. The pain is not redemptive. It is not making me stronger or better or more compassionate. It is simply the ongoing reality of living in a body that has been conquered and destroyed. Even the ruins continue to collapse. In this progressive condition, I am actualized to the reality that I will never be rebuilt. I will only continue to deteriorate.  There is no stability or consistent state. Every day, I lose more and more of myself. 

The Rabbis Who Knew

The Talmud tells us that when Rabbi Yochanan's study partner died, he was inconsolable. The other rabbis sent Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat to comfort him. "Give me your hand," said Rabbi Elazar. "Why can't you pull yourself out of your grief the way you've helped others?" Rabbi Yochanan replied, "A person cannot release himself from prison" (Berakhot 5b).

Prison. Not a temporary setback. Not a learning opportunity. Not a blessing in disguise. Prison. A place of confinement, stripped of personhood, languishing in the dark. 

Rabbi Yochanan understood what the comfort-peddlers refuse to acknowledge: that some forms of suffering are prisons from which we cannot liberate ourselves. The disabled body is not a zen retreat of wisdom. It is a draconian prison. The grieving heart is such a prison. The mind that knows depression, anxiety, trauma—these are prisons with no escape route marked "positive attitude" or "everything happens for a reason." To assert a higher purpose in suffering, we deprive the suffering person of the right to fully acknowledge this. The obsession with betterment only adds shame, indignity and exhaustion. 

The Talmud doesn't rush to comfort Rabbi Yochanan. It doesn't tell him his pain has purpose. It simply records his truth: some grief is a prison, and the imprisoned cannot free themselves.

Sitting Shiva for the Body

When someone dies, we sit shiva. We cover mirrors, we don't bathe, we tear our clothes. We ritualize the acknowledgment that something irreplaceable has been lost, and make space for the wound of their absence. On Tish b’Av, we are mourners for the nameless who have died in the repeated pogroms throughout time.  But when the body dies while the person lives, when function disappears while consciousness remains, we have no ritual. We have only the expectation that we will adapt, overcome, inspire.

The disabled person sits in permanent shiva for their former self, on a minute by minute basis. I mourn the child's cries I cannot respond to, the unbridled sex my body choreographed from painless passion, the distances I could walk, the friends who looked up to my prowess and inimitable intellect. We mourn the future we planned, the activities we loved, the identity we built on the foundation of a body that worked.

But unlike the traditional shiva, our mourning has no prescribed end. Seven days, thirty days, eleven months—these markers of grief's progression don't apply to loss that regenerates itself each morning anew. We wake to discover again that we cannot rise without assistance, cannot walk without aids, cannot function without accommodations. Death is daily, and so is the isolation in the chasm of grieving.

The Theology of Absence

The Talmud asks: "Where was God when the Temple was destroyed?" Some say God wept. Others say God was present in the destruction itself. But the book of Lamentations offers a different answer: "God has become like an enemy" (Lamentations 2:5). Not absent, but actively hostile, opposed to the survival and peace of the sufferer. 

This is the theology of chronic illness, of disability, of unrelenting loss. Not the absence of the divine, but its presence in the form of opposition. The God who knit us together in the womb has become the God who unravels us vertebrae by vertebrae, synapse by synapse, hope by hope. We carve the opposite of the Shehecianyu on the roof of our mouths with the shape of unspoken words. We castigate the God who seems to delight in our pain. 

The mystics speak of tzimtzum, the divine contraction that made room for creation. But what of the inverse—the divine expansion that leaves no room for our wholeness? What of the God who fills the space where our health used to be, who occupies the territory of our former capabilities? We cover our eyes in the shema and demand that all of Israel listen. The lord is God, God is One. I am suffering, you are too, and God designed it. 

The Comfort of No Comfort

The book of Job ends with God speaking from the whirlwind. God offers no comfort, no promise of change. Instead, God asks questions: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?" (Job 38:4, 31). The comfort is not in explanation but in the acknowledgment that some suffering exceeds human comprehension.

This is the only comfort that doesn't feel like cruelty: the recognition that our pain is too vast for easy answers and too deep for shallow consolation. The disabled body lives in Job's whirlwind, where questions multiply instead of resolve, where the divine response is encounter without expectation or false equivalence that denies us the right to scream in pain and fear.  The empathy of acknowledging without fixing, amending or shunning our suffering is the only way we keep ownership of our life.

The Continued Destruction

The Talmud teaches that the Temple is destroyed anew in every generation in which it is not rebuilt (Yerushalmi Yoma 1:1). But what of the bodies that are destroyed anew each day? What of the spines that collapse further with each morning's awakening? What of the minds that break more completely with each night's sleeplessness?

We live in the ongoing destruction, the perpetual Tisha b'Av. Our bodies are the Temple that will not be rebuilt, the Jerusalem that remains in ruins despite our prayers. We are the daily fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy: "Her gates have sunk into the ground; he has ruined and broken her bars" (Lamentations 2:9).

The healthy world moves through its calendar of hope and healing, of new years and fresh starts. But we remain in the ninth of Av, sitting on the floor, refusing to pretend that our destruction is anything other than devastating. We don’t shower. We don’t sing. We don’t speak of joy. We don’t greet you from the place of our pain because we know our pain is not a place you can recognize. We honor the truth that Jeremiah knew: some things, once broken, remain broken. Some losses are the conclusion.

The Jackal's Song

In the end, perhaps the jackal's howl is not inferior to the lute's song. Perhaps the sound of unmediated grief is its own form of music, harsh and necessary and true. The disabled body knows this music intimately—the song of ligaments stretched beyond their limits, of bones ground to powder, of nerves firing in patterns of pure protest. We know the song of doctors who can't find a solution, of family that discards you when your purpose is gone.  

We sing this song not because we choose to, but because we must. We sing it not as a performance of inspiration but as a declaration of presence. We are here, in our ruin, refusing to be rebuilt into something more palatable. We are here, in our grief, declining to be comforted by lies.

On Tisha B'Av, we join the eternal chorus of the broken, the mourning, the unconsoled. We refuse the theology of everything that happens for a reason and embrace the theology of Lamentations: sometimes things are simply ruined, and the agony is real.

The Temple will not be rebuilt in our bodies. Jerusalem will not be restored in our lives. But in our refusal to pretend otherwise, in our commitment to honor the truth of our losses, we become the living embodiment of Jeremiah's witness: present in the ruins, faithful to the devastation, singing the only song we have.

Om Green is a feminist writer, artist and ritualist whose work focuses on the intersection of the sacred and the profane. She explores radical wanting as an act of resistance, especially through the lense of feminism and disability. She is the founder of Beit Mayim Virtual Mikveh and The Pomegranate Tent Collective. She co-leads the Mayan Stream for Mayim Hayim, exploring outdoor and non-traditional mikveh. Om is always happy to connect on transgressive creativity, disability, Judaism, and water as the source of all life.