Repetition Compulsion — Tisha B'Av

At our August 9th Friday night service, Rabbi Lizzi spoke on the power of Tisha B’Av to lend us a space to mourn and process all that we have lost, both in ancient times and today. How can this holiday which appears so pessimistic — at least in comparison to the largely optimistic Jewish calendar — actually nourish our souls?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Repetition Compulsion

Much of Jewish spiritual and ritual practice is what we might call Sacred Theater– an immersive physical/intellectual set of behaviors that help us tap into a shared memory or feeling. At Passover, a seder table is sacred theater helping us feel, taste, smell and speak words that point us toward the shared memory of our own liberation from Egyptian bondage, so that we can might bring that consciousness into our lives and the world around us now. On Shavuot staying up all night learning Torah in community is sacred theater, embodying the best of what we know Torah can be about and collectively remembering that we all stood together at Sinai, receiving revelation as a diverse community of people who understand that Torah very differently and nonetheless cherish each other.

As the sun sets this coming Monday night, Jews all over the world will turn off the lights, and sit on the floor and chant the haunting words of Eicha, the Book of Lamentations. This Monday night and Tuesday is Tisha B’Av, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, the day we mourn not only the destruction of the first and second ancient temples in Jerusalem, but a whole series of calamities that befell the Jewish people both before and since, including Moses’ smashing of the first set of Tablets; and every pogrom, expulsion, or massacre of Jews across Europe over the course of the middle ages and modern period. 

This is a holiday many non-Orthodox Jews don’t learn about growing up unless you went to a camp that does something for it– partially because this day falls outside of the Sunday school calendar, and partially because this holiday is a bummer and hard to make fun for children. And philosophically, in the Reform movement at least, there is no pretense to be mourning the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem because of course– if not for the Romans sending us into exile, we as Jews practicing rabbinic Judaism today in diaspora, wouldn’t be here. 

That said, Tisha B’Av is sacred theater too. The sitting on the floor in the dark by candle light, the fasting for 24 hours, the not wearing nice-smelling lotion or fancy clothes or shoes, the abstaining from sexual pleasure for a day, and the chanting from the most depressing book in all of the Hebrew Bible… all points us toward the collective experience of grief. I would argue, this is sacred theater we need desperately right now.

 “Eicha yashva badad,” the book begins, in its characteristic mournful trope. “ha’ir rabati am hayita k’almana” Alas, how– how could it be? The city that was once full of people, sits alone, like a widow. Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheek wet with tears. Of all her friends, there is none to comfort her, all her allies have betrayed her; have become her enemies. Jerusalem has greatly sinned, Therefore she has become a mockery. All who admired her despise her, for they have seen her disgraced; and she can only sigh and shrink back.” (Lamentations 1:1)

The book goes on for 5 chapters that way, describing the survivors of Jerusalem’s destruction trading their goods away for scraps of bread, their children carted off into captivity, babies dying for lack of food, the ones who are not turned into food themselves– the nations of the world jeering in delight to see the downfall of the once-great city of Jerusalem – in all of this God being neither help nor savior, rather silent, apparently on the side of the destroyers.

If we’re doing the theater of this day right we will touch not only the grief of those who lived through that tragedy, but also experience horror, incredulity, sense of rejection, embarrassment, confusion, and shame.

Needless to say, Jewish tradition does not relish these emotions. Generally speaking, our people is relentlessly optimistic in our sacred theater, pushing back against our culture’s fixation on productivity by instituting a mandatory day of rest; or instructing us to defy the cold, darkness of winter by lighting up candles in our windows and recounting miracles; or celebrating the buds of fruit trees in hibernation season. In a world where so much is broken, 364 days a year our tradition admonishes us not to accept the world as it is, not to accept brokenness and oppression as the natural state of things, rather instructs us to to envision and create the world as it could be, to be agents of tikkun, of healing.

But not Tisha B’Av. The optimism of our tradition is met with a profound wisdom, too: we need a place to put our grief. Not to moralize about it, do analysis or advocacy around it, certainly not to weaponize it against someone else, to avenge it, or even to heal it… Rather, for a day, we are told to just be with the brokenness. Be with the suffering and the pain and the heartbreak.

How profoundly challenging this is, both counter cultural and counter intuitive. Generally we like fix any feeling of discomfort we have. Hungry? Go to the fridge. Bored? Scroll! Annoyed? Scroll! Or eat. Sad? Distract! Scroll! Or eat, or do anything other than really sitting with the feeling of profound sadness. So Tisha B’Avi is the day we practice doing a very challenging, very simple thing in the presence of sadness and heartbreak: nothing.

As many of you know I spent three and a half weeks at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem during the 

Some years we really need the ritual of it all to bring these latent feelings to the surface, to force us to find those feelings of alienation, anger, loss, betrayal, shame, and bring them to the surface… This year it seems to me that these feelings have been on or just below the surface, for many of us, for about 10 months. And I wonder if during that time any of us have really created the space to just sit with grief. To just take in and weep at the deep sense of everything stable crumbling and a breathtaking sense of our own powerlessness in the face of it.

Just like when you enter a house of mourning you wouldn’t moralize to the person who just lost a loved one, telling them why it happened, on Tisha B’Av, we don’t moralize to each other. We engage in a ritual of collective grief and for 24 hours simply feel the brokenness and stop trying to make the pain go away.

Rabbi Alan Lew observes that the

We need this this year. 

Alan Lew: Teshuvah is being in the same situation as you were before, make a new choice