This article originally appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter, Recharge. Click here to sign up to receive Recharge in your inbox each week.
Amid the long, light-filled days of summer, we find ourselves in a period of the Jewish calendar called the Three Weeks, a time of collective mourning that culminates on Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the fast day that commemorates a litany of historic Jewish losses. In Hebrew, this period is called bein hametzarim (“between the straits”). There is perhaps no time of year less well known, yet more important to us as a human race at this particular moment, than one that provides space for acknowledging and mourning our shared loss.
This time between the straits offers us 21 days in which we can open up to our grief. The spaciousness of this time (several weeks instead of a one-day memorial day) gives us the opportunity to give space to our shared losses, to break free from the narrowness in which we so often keep them buried. With each passing day, we can let our grief flow freely, let it breathe, perceive it and feel it. Our hard edges begin to smooth out as we surrender to a sadness that is always present somewhere beneath the surface for most of us, but rarely gets the chance to speak.
The calendar is brilliant because it seems to understand that one day is not enough to really open up to the work of grief. Instead, we build slowly, opening the portal to grief with tenderness and care and seeing what lies within. Can you imagine taking 21 days to reflect on what has been lost, what the many communities you belong to have suffered over time? What would you need to be able to really enter that portal? What do you think might emerge on the other side if you did?
Originally, Tisha B’Av was a day to mourn the destruction of the two ancient Temples in Jerusalem, which were the centers of connection to God before the rise of Rabbinic Judaism. It was a day to mourn the loss of God’s place in the world and the severing of the threads of community, practice, connection and holiness that once held us together. The day marks the loss of a religious system that, like all systems, worked for some and not for others, a system that was considered unchanging and immovable until we saw it crumble to pieces before our eyes.
The historical reality that Tisha B’Av commemorates is important, and for some it is the focus. Yet over time Tisha B’Av has become a gateway to all of our collective losses, connecting and summarizing each tragedy into a day of primal mourning. On this day, all of the communal devastation that has occurred across time and in different places is gathered together and mourned simultaneously—mythical loss, ancestral loss, the ever-growing pile of collective losses of the current century and last year and five minutes ago when we last saw the news. Tisha B’Av is an invitation to collective mourning that goes beyond the details of the destruction of the Temples.
We live in a time when losses seem to pile up endlessly—species, peoples, paradigms, futures. And yet, in mainstream American culture, there is no language or practices for processing or even acknowledging these losses. Instead, our grief festers only to surface behind the closed door of therapy, or when we speak sharply to our spouse, children, or coworkers, not knowing why we are so agitated and nervous. Without frameworks and rituals, we feel helpless. Our grief gnaws at us silently, as if it were our own personal problem or psychosis that we must resolve.
This time offers us not only the gift of knowing that we are not alone in our feelings, not only of creating space to recognize unacknowledged feelings, but also the medicine of the mythical. Ain mukdam u’meuchar baTorah, Jewish tradition teaches. In the Torah, there is no early or late. Likewise, this time of the calendar takes us to a mythical realm beyond the linearity of space and time, a place where the tragedy and pain of the past are alive and can be touched in that aliveness so that they can one day be transformed.
On Tisha B’Av, each of us, in our own way, enters the portal of grief, as a sacred act of service to ourselves and to others. Feeling grief is not simply about wallowing in despair, but about giving ourselves a limited number of days in which we allow the grief to surface, in which we sit next to one another in tears, honoring the past and making room for the future, remembering that we do not have to do all this alone.
is a spiritual leader, author and educator who believes in the power of creativity to reinvigorate our lives and transform Jewish tradition.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
