On the ninth of Av, the blackest day on the Jewish calendar, the normal pleasures drop away one by one. No eating. No drinking. No anointing with oil. No leather shoes on the feet. No intimacy between husband and wife. A Jew sits low, on the floor or on a short stool, as a mourner sits for a parent.
Even Torah study falls silent. The rabbis read a startling verse against itself: The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart (Psalm 19:9). If Torah rejoices the heart, they reasoned, then on a day when the heart must grieve, Torah in its usual form is forbidden. Children are kept home from school. The ordinary sweetness of study, which Jews take as their daily bread, is suspended.
But a mourner does not sit in silence. The rabbis prescribed substitute reading. A Jew may read the books that match the mood of the day: the Book of Lamentations, which mourns the first Temple; the Book of Job, which grieves through every kind of loss; and the hard, bitter passages of Jeremiah, the prophet who watched the walls fall and wrote what it felt like. He may also study sections of Torah he has never opened before, because the unfamiliar does not yet carry the taste of joy.
This teaching from tractate Taanit 30a, preserved in Hebraic Literature (1901), is an unusual map of grief. Even in mourning, the Jew does not stop reading. The pages only change.