HOW SHE SITS ALONE
אַיֶּכָּה
You are three years in. You cried twice this week — once when the no came back through the shadchan with no reason attached, and once Friday night, in the quiet after the zman came in, standing in an apartment with no candles to light, before walking to someone else’s table. Then you sat across from a married friend and asked her how she got through it. It was hard, she says, but it was worth it. Three years is normal. Everyone goes through this. You will find your bashert when it is the right time. She means every word. She is also wrong about most of it, and the reason she is wrong is the same reason her words feel warm: she survived, and surviving rewrote what she remembers about the gauntlet she came through.
The single most important fact about the people you go to for advice is that they made it out. The ones who didn’t are not at the table. Some of them left — stopped returning the shadchanim’s calls, stopped coming to simchas because every simcha meant a night of being asked, moved somewhere no one knew enough to ask. Some married outside the framework and were quietly written off. And some never got a yes at all. They davened for it at thirty and at forty and at sixty. They buried their parents and came home from the levaya to an empty apartment, and years later they died in it — no husband holding their hand, no children to say Kaddish, a shiva with no one sitting. The system never called any of them to ask what it cost. Whatever the married people tell you is the testimony of the ones it didn’t happen to.
In 1959, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills ran an experiment that has been replicated for sixty years.[1] Two groups of women went through entry rituals for the same boring discussion group. One got a mild initiation. The other got a humiliating one — reading embarrassing material aloud in front of evaluators. Then both joined the identical group. The harshly-initiated women rated the experience significantly higher. The pain became the proof. The harder the entry, the more they needed the group to have been worth entering, so they remembered it as having been worth it. The finding has held across hazing, military training, religious conversion, and dating systems with high friction.
This is what happens when a married friend tells you the years were worth it. She isn’t lying. The “worth it” is what her mind produced in order to fold three years of pain into a self that could keep functioning. She needs the gauntlet to have been good. So she remembers it as good. So she tells you it is good.
There is a second mechanism, and it is the cruelest, because it defeats even the friend who honestly tries. Pain does not keep. A person in a cold state cannot reconstruct the force of a hot one — not in someone else, and not in her own past.[2] Nordgren’s subjects underestimated the pain of social exclusion even when they had lived through the identical exclusion themselves; once the pain stopped, their access to it stopped too.[3] Memory finishes the job: negative feeling drains out of memories faster than positive feeling does, and whole stretches of life are recalled rosier than they were lived.[4] Your married friend is not refusing to remember her Tuesday nights. She remembers that she cried. What she can no longer retrieve is what the crying was — the heat is gone from the file. You are asking her from inside the hot state, she is answering from the cold one, and everything she hands across that gap arrives room-temperature.
Then there is the third mechanism, and its evidence is invisible by definition. You ask a hundred married couples and a hundred married couples tell you it worked out. They are not lying either. The sampling is broken. The destroyed do not testify — the woman buried last winter with a minyan of strangers is not going to tell you what three years feels like when it becomes thirty. The testimony pool says the system is fine, and it is guaranteed to say so no matter how many people the system grinds down, because everyone it ground down has gone quiet.
Put the three mechanisms together and you get the chorus. The married friends, the parents, the mentors, the shadchanim. All of them survived something, and that something needs to have been worth it for each of them to live with the years they spent inside it. Their testimony is unanimous, consistent, well-meaning, and structurally wrong. What comes back from the chorus is not advice. It is the chorus’s self-defense, dressed as wisdom and offered in good faith.
The parent who tells you to stop being so picky got married at twenty-two, in a community where the pool was smaller, the criteria narrower, the decisions faster. They survived it, so they believe the way they did it is the way it works. They are wrong about almost every variable of the system you are inside, and they cannot tell, because their own marriage is the standing proof that their advice was right.
The friend who says three years is normal is reporting honestly — for her, three years ended in a yes. For the woman whose three years didn’t, three years was the runway to leaving, and your friend doesn’t know her anymore, because leaving is exactly what she did. The shadchan who promises the right one will come has hundreds of yeses in her files. She has no file for the singles who stopped calling back, or the woman whose name simply stopped coming up. Her confidence is the average of her stored cases, and her stored cases are the yeses.
So you are in the gauntlet, crying on an ordinary Tuesday night, and every voice you can reach assures you that Tuesday nights like this are normal and temporary and worth it. The people who could say “I went through this and it broke me” — they are gone, or silent, or dead, and no one ever collected what they knew. You are alone in a way the chorus cannot see, because the only people who could keep you company are the ones it cannot hear.
This isn’t anyone’s fault. Effort justification is not a character flaw, the empathy gap is not coldness of heart, and survivorship bias is not a failure of caring; all three are standard human equipment. But the system runs on the chorus’s testimony, and the chorus, structurally, cannot deliver the truth about the gauntlet it survived. The people running the system are its graduates, holding the same survivor’s license as everyone else.
· · ·
These are the Nine Days. And the day they are dragging us toward began, the Gemara says, with a testimony problem. Ten spies delivered their report; two disagreed; the assembly moved to stone the dissenters.[5] The nation wept all night over the testimony it had chosen to believe, and Hashem said: you wept tonight for nothing, and I will fix this night as a weeping for generations. That night was the ninth of Av.[6] The worst night in our history is the anniversary of trusting the wrong voices and silencing the right ones.
But look at what the day asks of us, and at the engineering problem buried in the ask. No one alive is in pain about the churban. Two thousand years is the coldest state there is. You cannot summon grief for a city you never saw — the same gap that stands between your married friend and her own tears stands between all of us and Yerushalayim. So the halacha does not ask us to remember. It heats us up. Three weeks without music. Then Av enters and joy is diminished by law[7] — no meat, no wine, no fresh clothing — restriction by restriction, until we are on the floor in the dark, hungry, forbidden even to greet each other. Chazal built a machine for inducing a hot state about a loss no living person has felt. It is running right now. These nine days, you are inside it.
And at the peak of the heat, on the floor, we are handed the testimony we are finally warm enough to receive. The first breath of Eicha is a woman alone. How she sits alone; the city once full of people has become like a widow. She weeps in the night, her tears on her cheek; of all who loved her, she has no comforter.[8] Weeping at night. Tears on the cheek. No comforter. The scene the megillah opens on is playing out tonight in apartments in every frum neighborhood — and this is the one week of the year the community is in any condition to feel it.
Eicha even names its audience. Is it nothing to you, all who pass along the road? Look and see if there is any pain like my pain.[9] Every other week of the year, the married friend is the passerby — not from coldness of heart, but because the cold state is where the calendar leaves her, and no honest effort crosses the gap from there. “It was worth it” and “the right one will come” are what the gap sounds like from the far side. Underneath them sits the quieter reason: the woman across the table is evidence that the system does not always deliver, and if it does not always deliver, it could have been her — her Friday nights with no candles to light, her at sixty in the empty apartment.
And the word has one more thing folded into it. In the scroll there are no vowels. The letters of Eicha — alef, yud, chaf, heh — are the letters of Ayeka: Where are you. The first question Hashem ever asked a human being, asked of Adam while he hid among the trees in his shame — and the midrash says that question was itself the first lament: I mourned over him, Eicha.[10] So the word runs in two directions at once. Read toward her, it is testimony: how she sits alone. Read toward the one avoiding her eyes, it is a question: where are you. Her Eicha and your Ayeka are one word.
But this week she is not the passerby. The halacha has already stripped her table and silenced her music and is lowering her, day by day, toward the floor. Whatever grief she can reach for Yerushalayim this week, she is — for nine days only — within reach of her friend’s Tuesday nights too. The machine does not check what the heat gets used for. So use it. In a house of mourning, the comforters may not say a word until the mourner speaks first.[11] No theology, no timeline, no promise that it will all make sense. Sit down on the floor next to her while you can still feel what she feels. Do not reach for the sentence that makes you safe — next week, back in the cold, it will be all you have again.
There is no fix. There is only whether she sits alone.
How can she carry it alone?[12]
[1] Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). “The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. The foundational effort-justification study, replicated for sixty years across hazing, military training, religious conversion, and entry rituals of all kinds.
[2] Loewenstein, G. (2005). “Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making.” Health Psychology. People in cold states systematically underestimate the force of hot states — in others, and in their own past selves.
[3] Nordgren, L. F., Banas, K., & MacDonald, G. (2011). “Empathy gaps for social pain: Why people underestimate the pain of social suffering.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Only participants currently in social pain estimated it accurately; having experienced it before did not close the gap.
[4] Walker, W. R., Skowronski, J. J., & Thompson, C. P. (2003). “Life is pleasant — and memory helps to keep it that way!” Review of General Psychology — the fading affect bias: negative emotion fades from memory faster than positive. Mitchell, T. R., Thompson, L., Peterson, E., & Cronk, R. (1997). “Temporal adjustments in the evaluation of events: The ‘rosy view.’” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
[5] Bamidbar 14:10 — “And the whole assembly said to pelt them with stones,” after Yehoshua and Kalev spoke against the spies’ report.
[6] Taanit 29a — on the verse “and the people wept that night” (Bamidbar 14:1): that night was the night of Tisha B’Av. Hashem said: you wept a weeping of nothing, and I will establish for you a weeping for generations.
[7] Taanit 26b — “When Av enters, we diminish joy.” The Nine Days restrictions are codified in Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 551; the prohibition on greeting on Tisha B’Av in 554:20.
[8] Eicha 1:1–2.
[9] Eicha 1:12.
[10] Bereishit 3:9. Bereishit Rabbah 19:9 (and the petichta to Eicha Rabbah): “I mourned over him, Eicha — as it says, and He said to him, Ayeka; it is written איכה.”
[11] Moed Katan 28b — “The comforters are not permitted to say a word until the mourner opens first.” Codified in Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 376:1.
[12] Devarim 1:12 — Moshe’s Eicha: “Eicha esa levadi — how can I carry it alone?” Read this Shabbat, Shabbat Chazon, and by widespread custom chanted in the melody of Eicha. Eicha Rabbah 1:1: three prophesied with the word Eicha — Moshe, Yeshayahu, and Yirmiyahu.