First, two pieces of art that were shared during tisha b'av services tonight. By the Waters of Babylon by Joey Weisenberg and the Hadar Ensemble and The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
Tisha B'av is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. We mourn the destruction of our first temple, the temple of Solomon; and also the destruction of our second temple, which led to our subsequent exile from our homeland and diaspora around the world (although it's not like Jews only lived in the province of Judea before we were completely exiled and banned from living there.) Our worst tragedies have historically, supposedly, happened all on Tisha B'av throughout our history. From the destruction of both our temples, to the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, to major pogroms, to the crusades and inquisition, and even major moments of the holocaust.
So on Tisha B'av we mourn. We sit on the floor and read Eicha—the Book of Lamentations. We read poetry and discuss not just our most major tragedies, but also recent tragedies, and we fast for twenty five hours. The only other day we fast for this long and intensely is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year.
Tonight, I struggled to mourn. We talked about Roe Versus Wade, and we talked about the constant ongoing mass shootings, and we talked about the climate and of course the pandemic. But I kept thinking: "I can't mourn this. It's not over yet."
Mourning is a process of letting go. Mourning a death is a process of accepting that this person is dead, and they are never coming back, and you are never ever going to see them again. They are gone and you have to accept that and give it all the proper respect you need to give it so that you can move on into the new world without them in it.
But how can I mourn Roe Versus Wade? How could I accept the loss of constitutionally protected abortion access? How can I let go of this? To say "OK, we live in a world without that now, time to move on?" It challenges my sense of what it means to mourn. I can mourn the loss of our temples. We will never have a third temple. A third temple should never be built, not until HaOlam Haba. I can mourn the loss of Jerusalem, and accept that in the current state of geopolitics I may never be able to visit my ancestral home in an ethical manner. I can mourn the pogroms, which drove my family to this continent, and the loss of the new communities we had built in the Pale which we once again had taken from us. Again, an ancestral home I can never see, for it has been destroyed. I can mourn the crusades, and the inquisition, which forced many Sephardic Jews to lose their heritage, their identity, and their religion. I can mourn the holocaust, all those lives we lost and will never have back again, all that history and life, and I can mourn the generational trauma and fear and the broken families that came from it. Those are all things we have lost and will never have back again. We can never undo them.
How can I mourn the loss off abortion access? I do not wish to accept that this is something we cannot undo. How can I mourn the mass shootings? I do not wish to accept that this is just something we have to see happen every single week. How can I mourn climate change? I cannot accept that it's too late to slow it down to an eventual halt. How can I mourn the pandemic? It isn't over yet. It feels like mourning someone who still lay alive in a hospital bed.
But I am thinking about the placement of Tisha B'av in the year. Surely, it is not true that all of our greatest tragedies all happened to fall on the ninth day of the month of Av. Over time we decided communally that, somehow, they all happened on this day, and could all be mourned together on this one day. This one day in the middle of Av. Av, the penultimate month of the year.
In many ways, perhaps, it is here for us to mourn the year. The rabbi spoke about how the walls of Jerusalem were sieged, they were torn down, and so too does Tisha B'av begin to tear down our walls before the high holidays begin. It rips down our defenses. Our stony callouses. We harden ourselves to the world around us just to cope with the day to day. We disconnect. We don't let ourselves feel the pain because if we let ourselves feel the pain every day we could not function. Tisha B'av is a day that confronts us with overwhelming tragedy and forces us to tear down the walls we've built and feel that grief. All of the built up grief of the year.
For how can we enter the new year without having processes the year we've been through? During the Days of Awe we reflect on our own personal faults. Where we messed up and what we need to repair and do right by. But some things about this life are not our faults. The mass shootings this past year were not my fault. There is no personal flaw of mine that is the cause for these tragedies. If I say "it's because I did not devote my every spare moment to fighting for gun reform" that would be unhealthy and stupid because that is only one issue and there are so many other tragedies and if you applied that logic to all of them it would be impossible to do t'shuvah. I cannot effectively fight for gun reform and the climate and against the pandemic and against police brutality and for reproductive rights and still apply the logic that every time there is a tragedy in the world it is my fault because I did not try hard enough to prevent it. That mentality is a self-centered protagonist syndrome which will burn you out and destroy you.
But I still cannot shut out all emotions about these tragedies. They are still tragedies. Many horrible awful things happened this past year and some things may have been my fault and some things were absolutely not. But I still have to process them. I have to grieve them and process them and pay them their due respect. Before we can enter 5783, we have to mourn 5782.
And so no, I cannot mourn abortion access, because I refuse to accept that it is gone forever. But we can mourn that, in 5782, Roe V Wade was overturned. We can never change that this is something that happened this year. In the future, we can change the situation around abortion access. When a loved one passes, you can love again. But it will never be the same. Even if we halt climate change, those who died in heat waves and natural disasters will always still be dead and due their mourning. Even if we win a federal abortion access protection law, we will never have prevented all the forced births that happen in-between.
Even if we say Never Again with the holocaust, the holocaust will have always happened.
And so even if I cannot mourn all these things, I can lament. I can say Eicha this is horrible and feel all those feelings. As Joey Weisenberg sang, we can lay our lyres down, sit by the water, and cry. Cry without singing. Just, simply, cry. There are times to say "then we will build a new home" But there is also a time to simply sit down on the floor and cry about what we have lost. As the rabbi said, when we get to sukkot, we can hesitantly, nervously, begin to build again. But Tisha B'av is not for building. Tisha B'av is for lamentations.
As Franny Choi wrote, the world ends, and the world goes on. Every day is another apocalypse, and they have happened again and again going back for centuries. We can identify no year in history when it did not feel like the world was ending to somebody; it was simply ending differently, and the world yet continued. This awful, bloody, horrible world.
So I think of our ancient prayer. Eicha 5:21–22. Which we sing on Tisha B'av, and on Yom Kippur.
Redeem us, G-d, that we may be redeemed. Renew us our days, as in days of old. For if you have already rejected us, then you have already been exceedingly cruel to us.
This world must be redeemable. Even if it has been ending again and again for as long as humans can remember. Ending from pandemic. Ending from climate change. Ending from war. Ending from nuclear threat. Ending from world wars. Ending from pandemics. Ending from industrial destruction. Ending from pandemic. Ending from genocide. Ending from slave trade. Ending from pandemic. Ending from witch hunts. Ending from pandemic. Again and again the world has seemed to end. Yet we must continue to live in this world. This world must be redeemable. Redeem us, G-d. Redeem our world, so that this world can be redeemable. Renew us our days. Renew us for yet more years to come. So that we may yet continue to live in these worlds again and again, so that the world does not fully end, so that we can weather more tragedies, and mourn, and persevere, and pay our respects, and mourn, and live, and mourn.
For if long ago, the divine source of life had already given up on this world, then it is exceedingly cruel to continue to deliver us these tragedies again and again with no intent of anything ever getting better.
Sometimes, awful, horrible things just happen, and it is important for us to lament them, and to mourn them.
This has been an incredibly difficult year. Somehow, even with our vaccines fully available, it did not stop feeling like the world is ending. We began with Delta, and then Omicron. More and more tragedies just kept coming. We had so much hope that this would be the year of our post-pandemic life. That this would be the year we get back to normal. That this would be the year the world stops ending. But somehow, we must mourn that loss, that year we thought that we could have, the year we never had. We must accept that we can never change what 5782 was. The omicron spike will have always happened.
Yet still, we pay our due respects, and build hope again, for 5783. Next year we will mourn the tragedies that will inevitably come in 5783. But that is next year. In 5782 we are mourning 5782. We are taking our time processing 5782. We are letting go of 5782. Paying it its due respects. Preparing to learn our lessons. Preparing to repair what we can. Preparing to enter 5783, and begin to build that hope again.
Without Tisha B'av, you remain dissociated from the pain, and without feeling the pain, you will not be able to heal from it when 5783 comes. You cannot sort out your pain, to mourn that which cannot be helped, and identify that which can still be repaired.
Even on a personal level, you can mourn the personal tragedies. Friendships lost irreparably. Hardships we struggled through. It's important to mourn so we can reflect, pay our due respects, and enter the world where it has already happened, and cannot be undone. We can do something else, that improves the situation, but we cannot make it never have happened at all. Some things cannot be undone at all. We must accept the world where it has happened. We must enter, and live in, the world without our temple.
But this I do call to mind,
therefore I have hope.
The kindness of the divine source of life has not ended.
Her mercies are not spent.
They are renewed every morning.
Ample is her grace.
— Eicha, 3:21–23