I stopped by Luna's house this afternoon for a cup of tea, always a treat. Luna has been my holiday muse this past year and some, always a source of new inspiration for each festival as it comes around on the calendar. Today was no disappointment. Both of us had the same idea, expressed almost simultaneously, breathlessly, urgently. This has been a terrible year, we both moaned. This year of all years we should really observe Tisha B'av.
Tisha B'av (Hebrew for the ninth day of the month of Av) is a kind of anti-festival, a day of fasting and mourning for layers of historical calamity. It is said that both the first and second Temples were destroyed on the Ninth of Av; the Bar Kokhba Revolt was crushed that day; a few years later on the same date the emperor Hadrian built a heathen temple on the site of the Holy of Holies, and then a millennium and a half later the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was said to have been initiated on the same terrible date. It became customary to observe Tisha B'av like a cross between a funeral and Yom Kippur. One fasts completely, from all food and water, from sundown to sundown; one does not wash or use cosmetics or wear leather; one sits low to the ground as in a shiva house. One does not study Torah, except for the grimmest passages, because Torah study is a source of joy. Instead, all night and day you chant lamentations and dirges.
Each year that I have been here we have touched Tisha B'av. A few of us have gotten together, usually late in the afternoon for the last service of the day, and we have sat on the floor and read the book of Lamentations. We've put a toe into the holiday but never gone deep into it. This year we will invite you to join us to plunge into the depths of the Ninth of Av -- details below, if you're interested. But even in making this invitation, it gets me thinking about the role of religious ordeals in general.
More and more I think of my years in terms of their festivals: there's the big run in the fall -- Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot (Hoshana Rabbah, Shemini Atzeret) and Simchat Torah. On the other side of the same axis is the series that runs from Purim through Pesach to Shavuot in the spring. The year lists between the High Holy Days and Passover. I am always getting ready for one or the other. Like the moon and the sun they pull me centrifugally through my life.
At present I am already (admittedly abetted by the later date of the women's retreat this year) deep in gathering thoughts and sources about preparing for the High Holy Days. I am already starting to comb through my own memories of the year which is moving towards its end. I'm already starting to "plan my attack" for Ellul, the month of introspection, starting to think about apologies I will need to screw up my courage and make, starting to feel the possibility of making changes in how I see and do things. It seems like I just yesterday put my hametz, my leavened foods, back in my kitchen cabinets. My kitchen is just now starting to look like Pesach cleaning was a century ago.
Now I really could apologize for my various wrongdoings any time of the year. There is no day when it would be inappropriate to think about how to heal and change and better my relationships and my inner life. I can try to deepen my experience of the ultimate at any moment. I don't "need" the High Holy Day season.
Likewise I can remember the imperative to seek freedom -- for myself and for anyone who is in any way enslaved -- at any time of the year. I can recall the Saving Hand and the Outstretched Arm at any time I need that memory. I can let go of that which has accumulated and crusted and blocked my home and my spirit any time I want. I don't "need" Pesach either. So too I can rest any time I want to. Who "needs" Shabbat?
More and more each year, though, I have found myself submitting to these rhythmic demands of the tradition. Sometimes I think of them as invitations from my ancestors. "A new year is coming. You could use this time to reflect and change in preparation if you'd like to." "The season of our liberation from Mitzrayim is approaching. You might want to prepare your home and acquire the symbols that will make you feel this liberation in your own life right now." Sometimes I just think of these seasonal observances as treats, opportunities to enjoy, things to get away with. Many of you know that my observance of Shabbat just happened to begin at the same time I took a job in a shelter that ran seven days a week. "Oh I just can't work Saturdays, you see. It's Shabbat!"
However it all began, my year is deeply marked now by the grooves of this particular pattern: the weekdays and Shabbat, the fall and spring holidays, the little sparkle of Hanukkah and Tu B'shevat in the winter. Nowadays I crave the next New Year, the next Pesach, each and every Shabbat. I can hardly imagine life without these opportunities and invitations and gifts, these chances to go deep and work hard for a season, do the preparation as fully as I can until the new moon or the full moon rises for that festival. And then a full, exhausting day or week of celebration, and then it's done for that year, however well or poorly, to wait for the next cycle of the seasons.
But I have never accepted the invitation from my ancestors to mourn the calamities of history, or I have only done so in the most superficial way. An exception to this was the year that Tisha B'av happened to fall on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. I observed the holiday that year at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site with a hundred religious peace activists of all sorts. But I didn't do it in a particularly Jewish way.
Now comes this year 5762 -- the year that began with September 11 and continued with the war in Afghanistan, the same year that was pockmarked throughout with suicide bombings in Israel and military incursions in Palestine, a year in which there were executions of children and retarded people in this country and efforts to sell our local water to multinational corporations, the same year when the USA refused to take any responsibility for global warming, the same year that there has been a renewed effort to drill for oil off our coast, the same year when nuclear war has been repeatedy threatened between India and Pakistan, the same year when US troops were deployed to guard an oil pipeline in Colombia and on and on and on it goes. You might include slightly different items in your litany of horrors than the ones that so deeply grieve me. But I doubt that your list is shorter. This year I hear the invitation to observe Tisha B'av with new ears. I crave the opportunity to grieve aloud, to mourn, to chant the traditional dirges. For once I long to fast, to sit on the floor in the dark, to wrap the Torah in black rags.
It's not that I don't mourn now -- not at all. I mourn constantly, but formlessly, anxiously, endlessly. A verse in the Jerusalem Talmud says that some year the Messiah will be born in the afternoon of Tisha B'av. And so it used to be in some communities that young women would put on fragrances towards the end of the day, in anticipation of joy to come. I could use that anticipation! From the seventeenth day of Tammuz to the Ninth of Av the mourning escalates to its crescendo on Tisha B'av. And then it is over. One goes forward to end the year optimistically. Imagine!
These holidays are in a sense arbitrary, artificial. In another sense, of course, they are cosmically intended, built into the very fabric of time, mystically essential. But that is perhaps another conversation. For now I note with appreciation the way they give form to what is frighteningly formless and endless, the way they move us into and then beyond deep and complex experiences, the way they are finite and at the same time appear year after year, presumably forever.
Each of us comes to these observances in our own ways, for our own reasons, at our own pace. In this case I wouldn't presume to say what you should do to manage the enormous anxiety and sadness of our wounded world. But I did want to highlight the invitation of Tisha B'av, just in case it calls to you as it does to me. And I wish us all a world in which we need only mourn for the past and not the present.
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 07/08/2002 (rge)