Tag: Tisha B’av

Summer Breather, Toward Fall

Calendar Notes for a Summer of Collapse

Part 1 (of 10)

Download PDF version — Summer Breather, Toward Fall


The Jewish calendar’s springtime is full:

  • Purim, Passover and the Omer Period, then Shavuot;
  • The months of Adar, Nisan, Iyar, and Sivan mark, on the one hand, winter’s overturning, the early (barley) and the later (wheat) harvests; on the other:
  • unveiling of hidden power, the beginnings of Liberation, the path to Sinai, and Revelation.

After all that, Tammuz holds one minor fast day.

The 17th of Tammuz starts the semi-mourning period of “The Three Weeks” (see below). And that period leads into preparations for the High Holidays and “THE festival” of Sukkot in the fall.

Tammuz itself offers a kind of breather. And For Times Such as These suggests it is a good month to ask:

What’s growing in your garden now?
What is feeding you? What does the sun have to offer?
Where do you see signs of what’s been destroyed in your communities?
What destruction needs attending to?
How are the hurts of your communities/histories manifesting in the collective body?
What grief is unresolved and impacting your community?
— Rabbi Ariana Katz & Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg. For Times Such as These: A Radical’s guide to the Jewish Year (Wayne State University Press, 2024), p.249

As Tammuz comes to a close — the month ends this year on July 25 — we can still ponder, carrying our answers or remaining questions into the next phase of the calendar.

The new month of Av begins on Shabbat, July 25-26 (2025) and For Times Such as These suggests that we ask:

NOTE: Av questions relating to love and sex seem better suited to the post-mourning days of the month; again, see calendar notes below, and check out For Times Such as These for more on the Jewish year.

God’s Questions and Ours

God has a lot of questions for us, according to the prophet Jeremiah*:

1) what? [מַה, mem-hey, mah] — Jeremiah 2:5

2-4) where? where? where? [אַיֵּה, alef-yud-hey, ayyeh] — Jer 2:6, 2:8, and 2:28

5) why? [מַדּוּעַ, mem-dalet-vav-ayin, madua‘] — Jer 2:14

6-7) whatsoever? or what-in-any-way? [מַה־לָּךְ, mah+lamed-kaf] — twice in Jer 2:18

8) how? [אֵיךְ, alef-yud-kaf, eikh] — Jer 2:23

Interrogatives are not unusual in biblical Hebrew. But eight in the space of 24 verses has an impact. Together, the piled up questions turn this passage into a kind of awareness demand.

Three of these interrogatives — what, where, and how — are part of questions we might already be asking ourselves, and each other, for the months of Tammuz and Av (see page 1).

In addition, the final question, Eikh [How?], hints at a theme in the next week’s readings, which are dominated by “Eikhah / How?!” as lament.

It’s important to ask specific, seasonal questions — and lean into the lament they raise. And it can be oddly comforting to know that the Jewish calendar is designed to stress this need. But it can also be helpful to imagine a less specific dialogue with the divine, one centered around questions as wake-up call: What? Where? Why? What-in-any-way? How?

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*Jeremiah 2:4-28 plus 3:4 is read as the second “haftarah of affliction” in preparation for Tisha B’Av. When, as in 5785/2025, the reading comes on Rosh Chodesh Av, two verses about new moons are added to close the haftarah: Isaiah 66:1, 66:23.

** For language geeks and trivia lovers: The form of “where” in Jeremiah 2 is lengthened from the simpler alef-yud, אַי. The Brown-Driver-Briggs biblical dictionary adds about this form:

used of both persons & things (but never with a verb [contrast אֵיפֹה (eifo, alef-yud-pei-hey)]; oft. in poet. or elevated style, where the answer nowhere is expected…

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Broken Cisterns, Holding Water

Amid all the questions, this chapter of Jeremiah includes the following divine complaint:

כִּי־שְׁתַּיִם רָעוֹת עָשָׂה עַמִּי
אֹתִי עָזְבוּ מְקוֹר מַיִם חַיִּים
לַחְצֹב לָהֶם בֹּארוֹת בֹּארֹת נִשְׁבָּרִים
אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָכִלוּ הַמָּיִם׃

For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, That can hold no water.

— Jer 2:13, (JPS 1917 translation — a little old-fashioned, but chosen for its rhythms)

Water is often linked with Torah and with healing. So God’s complaint might be understood as accusing the people of failing to value God’s teaching and healing, and of creating faulty containers, unsuitable for gathering and preserving God’s life-giving offerings.

A related passage in Proverbs is used for much commentary on Torah, water, and healing:

שְׁתֵה־מַיִם מִבּוֹרֶךָ
וְנֹזְלִים מִתּוֹךְ בְּאֵרֶךָ׃

יָפוּצוּ מַעְיְנֹתֶיךָ חוּצָה
בָּרְחֹבוֹת פַּלְגֵי־מָיִם׃

Proverbs 5:15) Drink water from your own cistern [borkha],
Running water from your own well.

16) Your springs will gush forth
In streams in the public squares. [Revised JPS 2023]

These teachings, attributed the Talmud’s Rabbi Akiva, focus on the idea of bor [pit/cistern]:

In this season of contemplating all that is broken, in and around us, the Jeremiah and Proverbs images and Rabbi Akiva’s teaching are worth reflection. Here are some questions for this particular season:

  • In what ways have our Torah-containers broken, over time and more recently?
  • Are all such breaks “bad”? How might cracks help us move forward differently?
  • Have we (individuals, communities, society) forsaken divine teaching? How? And, if so, how might we remedy that?
  • What kinds of containers do we need for communal Torah today?
  • What kind of work is required to build what is needed?
  • How does the imagery in Prov 5:15-16 differ from that found in Jeremiah?
    • — Is one vision more universal than the other?
    • — Is either more hopeful?
    • — Many translations, including RJPS, opt for “your own cistern” and “your own well” rather than just “your cistern” and “your well.” What is “ours” or “our own”?
    • — Does sticking to our (own) Torah caution us from “bad” teaching? limit us in some way? Or does it encourage us to bring out our (own) Torah?
    • How does Akiva’s imagery differ from that in the biblical passages?
  • — How does Torah/water get into the cistern in the two sets of images?
  • — A pit may contain no water to start with, but is all Torah poured in by scholars?
  • — Consider, too, this story about Akiva himself, water, and a bor:

Speaking of Broken Things

Akiva (c. 50 – 135 CE) is a huge figure in the Talmud and later lore. For this summer of collapse, it’s particularly worth noting that Akiva was a controversial figure in the politics of responding to Roman occupation and that two of the most quoted stories about him involve major tragedy: his 24,000 students who died in a plague of disrespect (B. Yebamot 62b), and “the four who entered Paradise” (B. Chagigah 14b: Wikipedia’s basic page on the legend of Pardes is pretty useful).

The latter story brings us back to stones and water — in a strange, mystical way:

[Akiva told his fellow travelers:] When you reach the stones of pure marble, don’t say, “Water! Water!” As it states, “One who speaks falsehood shall not endure before My eyes” [Psalms 101:7] — Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 14b

Four men entered pardes [paradise]: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher ([“Other”], Elisha ben Abuyah), and Akiva. We are told: “Ben Azzai looked and died; Ben Zoma looked and went mad; Acher destroyed the plants [became a heretic]; Akiva entered in peace [or wholeness, “shalom”] and departed in peace” (B. Chagigah 14b again). Many teachers assume that this means Akiva was of superior mind or spirit. But the story does raise the question: What does it mean to survive in wholeness amid such disaster, for near friends and so many others? Returning to the For Times Such as These questions for Tammuz:

Where do you see signs of what’s been destroyed in your communities?

What destruction needs attending to?

How are the hurts of your communities/histories manifesting in the collective body?

What grief is unresolved and impacting your community?


Toward Tisha B’Av, “Within the Straits,” and Then Beyond: Calendar Notes for Tammuz and Av and Elul — here as PDF (if anyone needs another format for accessibility, please advise) —

Toward Tisha B’AvDownload

Download Toward Tisha B’Av

Eicha for my city and others, 5781

Alas! How lonely sits the city
Once great with joyful people!
New horrors fill horizons now
while old pain never left
Each new loss diminishes
the streets themselves bereft

Bitterly we weep all night
cheeks wet with tears unseen
If we are to join together,
we must widen this choir of woe
When some cries are background noise
what’s the meaning of “friend” and “foe”?

City crying out with loss:
six-year-old child shot to death
joining a list, far too long,
of youth killed in past years.
Community grief so deep for some
while others escape most tears.

Down our roads, more peril
desolation, violence, fear
systems that crush and jail
separate, cage, and hate
Borders come in many shapes
Too often closed, that welcome gate

Evidence mounts. But do we act?
ICE camps remain; racism persists.
Policing prospers, yet safety eludes
Some thrive, while too many do without.
Must we ignore some of our truths
in chasing a joint goal to shout?

Forging coalition is struggle, tougher in anguish.
Inside affliction, can we hear another cry?
It is painful and complex, but we must keep trying
trying to heed the whole sound
I know you can hear it, God once declared loudly:
that voice of a sibling crying up from the ground

–V. Spatz, songeveryday.org CC-BY-SA


Back in 2019, a number of Jewish communities were marking Tisha B’av with vigils and protests, attempting to demonstrate that Jews will not turn our backs on refugees arriving in this country and on immigrant neighbors already here. The original “Eichah: for my city and maybe for yours” (2019) asked us to consider the following:

  • Recognize many ways our country has long separated families, caged and brutalized people?
  • Cry with our local, national and international communities, refugees and not, who lend different voices to the chorus of “How lonely sits this place!”?
  • Send prayer energy to our many beleaguered communities, near and far?
  • Commit to exploring, in the days to come, ways in which we are complicit in so much suffering and ways we might take up action for repair?

On this Tisha B’av, 7/18/21, DC-area Jews please acknowledge:

  • Nyiah Courtney, age 6, shot to death in Ward 8 on 7/16/21 (the 108th homicide in DC, 2021)

And remember:

  • Makiyah Wilson, age 10, shot to death in Ward 7 on 7/16/18
  • Karon Brown, age 11, shot to death in Ward 8 on 7/18/19

Here is the 2019 version, “Eichah: for my city and maybe for yours.” And here is a PDF to use and share of this version.

eichah-for-5781Download

Eicha for my city and maybe for yours

Alas! How lonely sits the city
Once great with joyful people!
New horrors fill horizons now
while old pain never left
Each new loss diminishes
the streets themselves bereft

Bitterly we weep all night
cheeks wet with tears unseen
If we are to join together,
we must widen this choir of woe
When some cries are background noise
what’s the meaning of “friend” and “foe”?

City in despair right here,
Can Jewish space bring rest?
Refugees are some, just some,
of misery’s many faces
Public protest spreads the nation
are we stuck in narrow places?

Down our roads, more peril
desolation, violence, fear
systems that crush and jail
separate, cage, and hate
Borders come in many shapes
Too often closed, that welcome gate

Evidence mounts. Not in our name.
Closing camps, protecting neighbors and strangers –
that is work we are all called to do
But what about mutual care?
Or must we ignore some of our truths
in chasing a goal that we share?

Forging coalition is struggle, tougher in anguish.
Inside affliction, can we hear another cry?
It is painful and complex, but we must keep trying
trying to heed the whole sound
I know you can hear it, God once declared loudly:
that voice of a sibling crying up from the ground

–V. Spatz, songeveryday.org CC-BY-SA

Yes: We demonstrate publicly that Jews will not turn our backs on refugees arriving in this country and on immigrant neighbors already here. We support vigils and protest to #CloseTheCamps. Now!!
Can we not also:

  • Recognize many ways our country has long separated families, caged and brutalized people?
  • Cry with our local, national and international communities, refugees and not, who lend different voices to the chorus of “How lonely sits this place!”?
  • Send prayer energy to our many beleaguered communities, near and far?
  • Commit to exploring, in the days to come, ways in which we are complicit in so much suffering and ways we might take up action for repair?

“It is not ours to complete the task, but neither are we free to desist from it” — Pirkei Avot 2:16

Here’s a PDF of this post, should anyone want to print a single page.Eichah for my city maybe yours

How Does the Faithful City Harbor Murderers?!

Eichah?! How is it that our city is now the home of murderers? That’s one question (Isaiah 1:21) we are asked in the prophetic reading (Isaiah 1:1-27) for the Shabbat before Tisha B’av, the day of mega-mourning in the Jewish calendar. It’s one that many in the District of Columbia, and other cities in the U.S., are asking ourselves this year, as in years past.

In DC, we recently lost an 11-year-old child, Karon Brown, who spent his summer days selling water and Gatorade on the street; Jamal Bandy, a 27-year-old assistant coach at the rec center where Karon played; and a 17-year-old student and poet, Ahkii Washington-Scruggs, who wrote shortly before his death:

In D.C., it’s nothing but people trying to take your life away
I’m from a city where it’s a blessing to see the age 20

These are just three of the 96 lost to violence since January inside our city limits. This doesn’t count the many more injured in gun violence, the communities traumatized, the educations disrupted, and the constant grief and fear in which some parts of the city live…while other neighborhoods are free to enjoy the city, tuning in or out, at will, to the dreadful conditions a short distance away.

In Isaiah’s frightful prophecy, we are told that two true things are:

1) we are a rotten mess, harboring thieves and murderers while hiding behind empty rituals, and

2) we can stop adding more blood to our hands and turn things around:

And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide My eyes from you;
Though you pray at length, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes, cease to do evil;
Learn to do well;
seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
— Isa 1:14-17 (JPS 1917 translation adapted)

Multiple Mournings

The state of my city is what I hear when first Moses, in the Torah reading for Shabbat Hazon (right before Tisha B’av; Deuteronomy 1:12), and then Isaiah (above), and finally Lamentations (read on Tisha B’av, which begins with nightfall on August 10), cry Eichah?!

So it is hard for me to enter into prayers on Tisha B’av, as Truah is calling us to do, to mourn in solidarity with immigrants and demand closing the camps, without also acknowledging the many other ways families have been torn apart, caged, and otherwise brutalized since the last Tisha B’av.

I strongly support Jews standing against the camps and witnessing that Never Again is Now. When non-Jews called for Lights for Liberty protests a few weeks ago, I advocated for bringing a strong Jewish presence to those events. But I don’t understand how it is — again, however unintentionally, that Eichah?! — that we can mourn for the one set of griefs, and atone for the one way in which our hands are bloody, without acknowledging the other… and the many other ways in which our country has been complicit in murder, here and abroad.

Last year, I joined the Truah Tisha B’av observance at Lafayette Park ONLY because I saw that DC’s listing included this statement: “…not just on the southern border, but every time a parent is put in prison for months on end, is brutally murdered by police—we lament” (excerpts from the 2018 announcement below). In actual practice, however, it turned out that the focus was entirely on refugees except for some words around the mourners’ kaddish about local gun violence deaths.

Eichah?!: How is it that this second year of solidarity with refugees for Tisha B’av, there is still not one resource that Truah provides — as far as I can see; if I missed something someone please let me know — that allows Jews to mourn separations and cages and death in more ways than one?

Whether you or your community join a Truah event or pray and mourn in another way on Tisha B’av, please consider acknowledging the many ways our country has ripped families apart, caged, and otherwise brutalized refugees AND OTHERS. There is still time. I know we can do better.

Some resources that might be adapted to the purpose — or we can write new ones!





Eichah! How My city
אֵיכָה הָיְתָה לְזוֹנָה קִרְיָה נֶאֱמָנָה
מְלֵאֲתִי מִשְׁפָּט צֶ֛דֶק יָלִין בָּהּ וְעַתָּה מְרַצְּחִים׃
How is the faithful city become a harlot! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. — Isaiah 1:21

לִמְדוּ הֵיטֵב דִּרְשׁוּ מִשְׁפָּט, אַשְּׁרוּ חָמוֹץ; שִׁפְטוּ יָתוֹם, רִיבוּ אַלְמָנָה
Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. — Isa 1:17
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Excerpts from DC’s 2018 Truah co-sponsored Tisha B’av

Our grief is compounded by holding many overwhelming tragedies together in one day.

It is written that baseless hatred and paralyzing humility were the reasons the Holy Temple was destroyed. We read from the Book of Lamentations and bare witness, through our lament, to the horror of children separated from parents—not just on the southern border, but every time a parent is put in prison for months on end, is brutally murdered by police—we lament. In the face of the fear and uncertainty plaguing our immigrant communities, plaguing Black mothers who fear for their children’s safety, of Muslim children, witnessing daily state violence, of indigenous families, ripped from their land, we lament.
— full 2018 announcement; scroll down for Washington DC

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PS — Some Starting Points

Just a few resources that could be adapted

Materials with some beautiful and pertinent adaptable bits:

From this blog:

Spin grief’s straw into gold: Moving on from Tisha B’Av

UPDATE: Please note that the “DC Against Hate” website has been updated with more details about three inter-connected actions. See also this blog’s update.

Jewish tradition teaches that much was lost in our history due to “baseless hatred” and that few things require more of our attention than making our communities welcoming to all, strangers included. We use Tisha B’Av — the day of mourning for destruction and calamities over the ages, the lowest point of the Jewish calendar — to help us consider all that needs changing if we are to move toward a better new year for all. (Tisha B’Av fell on 7/21-22 this year, and the new year begins 9/10-11.)

The month of Elul, an important point in this journey and the last of the old year, starts on August 12 this year — which happens to be the date a group of Klan and Nazi supporters have chosen for their “Unite the Right II” rally in DC, celebrating the anniversary of the violence at Charlottesville, VA last year (because they were refused a permit in Charlottesville).

National and local Jewish groups are planning responses, but none have been announced yet (7/24), to the best of my knowledge. Meanwhile, I hope Jews, in DC and beyond, are thinking of ways to celebrate Rosh Chodesh Elul, by joining with others who oppose baseless hatred and maltreatment of strangers and the most vulnerable among us.

…get back to work
you don’t have forever

…the wounded world
is still in your hands

…get on with it
gather grief like straw
spin it into something like gold
— from Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s “Drone”
The Book of Seventy
Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Some of us will be joining already planned mobilization efforts standing together for “ICE abolition, open borders, dismantling the prison industrial complex, and ending the settler colonial system. We will confront fascism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and state violence.”

Others will find alternative ways to move into the new year with (re-)new commitment to opposing hate in its many forms.

I pray that none of us will be silent in the face of Klan- and Nazi-supporters gathering outside the White House.

DC Against Hate.jpg

Now What? Exploring Babylon Stage Two

I launched the “Exploring Babylon” project on this blog in October 2017. Stage One was to run for roughly 40 weeks, from Sukkot through Tisha B’av. WordPress statistics tell me that I’ve posted 40 times in the category, “Exploring Babylon,” although not entirely on the weekly schedule I’d originally planned, and Tisha B’av is fast — no pun intended — approaching (eve of July 21 through dark July 22).

Not sure yet what shape Stage Two will take. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Where Exodus Metaphors Fail

Meanwhile, a recent interview with the author of Black Power, Jewish Politics returns us to the basic challenge that impelled me into this project.

When I talk generally with white Jews about why Jews are involved in social justice or civil rights or racial equality, they’ll talk about this shared history of oppression.

And the problem is that American Jewish history and African-American history are 180 degrees opposite on that question. One of my African-American colleagues, he said, “If I ever go to a Seder and the Jews say that they know what it’s like because they too were once slaves in Egypt,” he’s gonna punch ’em.

Because if Jews have to go back to ancient Egypt to get the slavery metaphor, then they’ve kind of missed that American Jewish history is a story of rapid social ascent, and African-American history is the legacy of slavery. That argument is insulting, and it’s very elementary.

And, of course, I found that the people actually involved in the movement in the 50s, they knew that. And they were quite clear that they were not buying into that.
— Marc Dollinger, 6/4/18 NPR interview

In the struggle for racial and other forms of social justice, might the language and history of Exile serve where Exodus metaphors sometimes fail?

And, as we move through the month of Av and on toward a new year, how might we use ideas about exile and Babylon, in particular, to inform us?

As the source of a long intertextual journey, Psalm 137 generates the poetic vocabulary of exile: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and cried as we remembered Zion.” The pleonastic “there,” repeated in the third verse, calls attention to itself by its very redundancy; syntactically superfluous, “there” defines exile as the place that is always elsewhere. Being elsewhere, being far from Zion, is the pre-text for poetry….(p.9)

With the (re)territorialization of the Jewish imagination in the twentieth century, a radical shift takes place in the relative position of ends and means, of original and mimetic space, of holy and profane, of ownership and tenancy. If exile is narrative, then to historicize the end of the narrative is to invite a form of epic closure that threatens the storytelling enterprise itself–an enterprise that remained alive, like Scheherazade, by suspending endings. Conversely, to claim an absolute place for the exilic imagination is to privilege the story as the thing itself; the map for the territory, language without referent; and to regard “nomadic writing” as the inherently Jewish vocation…. (p.14)
— Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage

Again, comments and suggestions welcome.

May the mourning of the weeks ahead bring us some new light.

NOTES:
Pleonasm
Although it’s pretty clear from context, and maybe everyone else knows, I did look up “pleonasm” for my own edification. Here’s a useful and not overly ad-filled explanation of pleonasm.
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Citation
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
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“Let us search and try our ways”: Trouble to See prelude

The lowest point of the Jewish calendar, the day of mourning known as Tisha B’av, commemorating destruction of the Temples and other calamities, calls us:

“Let us search and try our ways, and return to the LORD” (Lamentations 3:40).

As we move on from this day, through the season of repentance and beyond, I invite Jews — and others interested — to join me in an effort to “search and try our ways,” looking closely at the ways in which race has formed our lives and the life of this country so that we might build something new.

Here is my beginning, with resources and background —

Many things are “fully as terrible” 60 years on
What formed the background assumptions, about race and justice, of your life?
We must neither discount experience and work of different generations nor turn past Jewish racial justice efforts into symbolic moments to applaud

Trouble to See #1: Expelling Creases from the Fold

Trouble to See #2: Beyond Central Casting

Trouble to See #3: Beyond the Romance

Trouble to See #4: Peeling Back Some Tricky Layers

Trouble to See Related Resources

Tisha B’av

During all the years that Israel was in the wilderness, on the eve of every ninth of Av, Moses sent a herald throughout the camp to proclaim, “Go out and dig graves, go out and dig graves!” and the people went out and dug graves, in which they spent the night. In the morning, the herald went and announced, “Let those who are alive separate from the dead!” The living then stood up and found themselves some fifteen thousand short [NOTE: One-fortieth of the adults died each year — see parashat Shelach-Lecha for narrative explanation]….In the last of the forty years, they did the same….finally when they saw that not one of them had died, they said: It appears that the Holy One has removed the harsh decree from over us. The declared that day a festival. Continue reading Tisha B’av

Devarim: Something to Notice

“How [‘eikhah] can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden and the bickering!” — Devarim/Deuteronomy 1:12 (JPS translation)

Alter notes the unusual use of “the elongated form ‘eikhah, which often marks the beginning of laments” — instead of the simpler ‘eikh here. Plaut (The Torah: A Modern Commentary) lists two prophecies, in addition to this verse, begin with this elongated form: Continue reading Devarim: Something to Notice