Tisha B'Av Preview

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Transcript

Transcript

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  0:04  
All right, placing a tallit over my head, over my shoulders, around my whole self, taking a moment wherever you are, to feel that you are wrapped in light ancient light on the light of the sun, you know, through the clouds, through the roof of the house or building you live in, just drenched In light, taking a moment to breathe it in

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  0:50  
saying the blessing for putting on a tallit. Baruch at Adonai, Elohim, Ashok, Witz, liheif, bitsytit, I taking a moment to continue enjoying the feeling of bringing attention, bringing attention to your to your body, to your breath, to the light that surrounds you. I

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  1:28  
I want to just show us again. Some folks were here yesterday and saw this, and for those who weren't,

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  1:47  
I wrap myself in a fringe tallit to fulfill the mitzvah of my creator, as it is written in the Torah, Basu lehem, tzitzit, al khanfebi de hem, they will put tzitzit on the corners of their garments. As I wrap myself in a tallit in this world, so maybe so, so may my soul be dressed in a beautiful garment in the world to come. And then, after saying the blessing which we just did from Psalm 36 mayakaz dekha, How precious is your constant love, the one who wraps us mortals take shelter under your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house and drink from the stream of Delights. With you is the fountain of light. Keith Ha, im Ha, mccour Chaim or ha in your light nire or we are bathed in light. May your constant love for those who acknowledge you and your beneficence for those who are honorable constantly surround us. All right, gonna move us to amo Dean, and you'll notice I don't have my guitar, as I said yesterday, I'm leaning into the nine days. We're a few days into the month of Av. And in the month of Av, the tradition says, starting with the beginning of the month of Av, you diminish your joy, just like it's like the exact polar opposite of in the month of Adar, you amplify your joy. And so whether or not you're actually feeling joyful or not joyful, the idea is, as you get aligned with the Jewish calendar, you try to tap into the spectrum of emotion that the calendar is inviting us into. And at this season, in the month of Av for the first nine days, and really for the whole three weeks leading into Tisha Bob, we we diminish our joy. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna read a little bit in a second from a book that gives a little more context for this. But I think it's not very hard right now. We all live in this world, you know, for anybody who's reading the news, for anybody who's paying attention, my guess is it is not hard to find reasons to diminish your joy. And you might say, well, like that sounds dysfunctional. Why should I do that? You know, I always in the whole point of all this davening to, you know, help me access joy? And of course, of course, yes, but I'm explaining why I'm not using a guitar this morning, and we're going to lean into the traditional structures that help us, yes, access Joy gratitude, as we do every single day, and also during these first this first week and a half of this month, it's a practice to actually, like, take out some things that bring joy and levity. So some people don't eat meat, some people don't drink wine, some people don't listen to instrumental music. So on Shabbat at Mishkan, we're going to, like, lean back into all those things. On Shabbat, you sort of suspend. Dollar rules of mourning, which you also do, by the way, even if it's like a Shiva, like, take one day off on Shabbat, even from Shiva. So like, you know, never fear come to come to Shabbat this Saturday. And you know, it'll be as joyful as ever. And here it is, Wednesday. I don't have a guitar, and we're going to do a little bit of learning on Tisha Bob to talk about how this you know, how we might make this season matter each one of us this year,

Unknown Speaker  5:31  
moda ni le fan, Rucha, ru Acha, vikaya, shezar, tabi NIH Mati behem la Rabbi em una teha, moda ni le fa Na Ruha.

Speaker 1  6:47  
I vikai,

Speaker 1  7:09  
i

Unknown Speaker  7:40  
i

Speaker 2  8:00  
i invite us to find ourselves at the morning blessings.

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  8:11  
Feel free to stand if you if you want, otherwise, in whatever position you're in, you can find meaning and connection to these words. And if there's any of these words that strike you today as particularly meaningful you know on on a personal level, feel free to share in the chat, or as we wrap up the blessings, feel free to just unmute and and share what hit you

Speaker 1  8:37  
today. But I am

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  8:48  
grateful to make distinctions between day and night. Baru Hata, Adonai, Elohim, no mereka. Adam Shah Sanibel, I am grateful that I was created in your image. Baruch atah Adonai Elohim, no mereka. Odam shasani, bad horeen. Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu. Melech Ha olam shasani, Yisrael. I am grateful that I am a Jew today, a god wrestler. Baruch atah Adonai Elohim, no mereka. Olam po Keith Ibrahim, I am grateful that my Oh, my eyes open each day with new vision. Baruch ata Adonai Elohim, no mereka. Olam malbi Sha Rami, I am grateful for the gift of clothes over my naked body, for the gift of shelter and boundaries. Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu, Melech Ha Olam, Mater asurim, I am grateful for the ability to release what is all tied up, what is all bound. A Prayer for the release of captives, a prayer for the release of anyone who is. Constricted in ways that are unnatural, in ways that we wish could be released. So we pray for that release. We pray for the blessing of that release for all who are bound, captive and constricted, and take a moment to breathe into some of those tight spaces in your own body that are bound and tight and constricted. Baharu, Adonai, Eloheinu, mereka, olumzo, Keith, Keith fufim, I'm grateful for the ability to straighten. What is bend, set up a little bit straighter, or stand a little bit straighter. Imagine your head being connected by some kind of a, you know, some kind of a vertical force up into the heavens, connecting to the great beyond the great beyond, the great mystery. And then your feet being connected to the earth, standing up a little bit straighter, breathing up a little bit deeper. That haruha, rokahaar maim, I am grateful for the stability of the earth over the water. Baruch at arunaina, I'm grateful that you prepare my steps. Baruch at arunamin. Shaza Lizzi, kehi, I am grateful that you provide for all my needs. Baruch at Adonai Elohim, no mereka. Olam, ozei, Yisrael, beura, I am grateful that you give strength to me and to my people. May You send strength to everyone who feels weak and vulnerable. Baruch ataron, Elohim, oterious. Rabbi T Farah, I'm grateful that you crowned me with dignity and beauty. So take a moment now to just feel your own crown of dignity and beauty, to imagine it there. What does it look like? Does it sort of look like an Elsa crown like or like a Glinda crown? Or is it kind of like a flower crown, or is it like a little string of beads, or is it made of light? What's your crown like this morning? Take a moment to enjoy it. I don't like going to the last blessing here Baruch atah in America, and attend the blessed. Are you the one who gives me strength when I am tired? All right, and I'm just seeing some of the little notes here in the chat. Grateful for good comrades as our communities that as hard as our communities attempt to tear each other apart, tear themselves apart, God forbid. Grateful beyond words for my longtime Chicago friend who flew here yesterday to pack me up and drive me back to Chicago land. All right, Tehila, amazing. I'm grateful to be in Maryland to take care of my mom all sending you and Mama so much, so much love and strength. Miriam, we'll check in later and see how you're doing and how she's doing. I'm glad you're there and everybody holding you and her in love and in prayer. And Susan nerlove, grateful that the surgery was successful on Monday and that you came home and got a full night's sleep last night. And Admiral, you can pull weeds out of your garden, which means you can get down on your knees or sit on the ground or whatever. You can move vertically up and down, which is a great blessing. Noah, grateful for a relief, for the heat wave over. Nebraska, grateful for healing. Grateful for the opportunity to work from the mountains. Beautiful, cooler temperature. That sounds really nice. Roberta, I'm going to move us over here to the blessing right before we go into barco. For those of you who are just joining us on Wednesday, we we sort of we appreciated how this Sidor sim Shalom both gives the English and the Hebrew, but unfortunately, it does it on every other page. So it's a lot more text to scroll through here. Here we go. This is Psalm 30, mismo Shir Hanukah, bayet le David. I'm just going to read this last little piece in Hebrew, and then we'll see it in English.

Unknown Speaker  14:41  
Shema Adonai,

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  14:44  
vejone, me. Adonai, hey. Ozer li ha mispedi le maholi, Pita sa Keith as rainy. Simha the man. Chai is America covered below you? Dome. Adonai, aloha. Aileam. O deheka, a psalm for the dedication of the temple. I extol you. Adonai, you raised me up. Do not let my foes rejoice over me. God, I cried out and you healed me. Save me from the pit of death. Sing to God. You faithful acclaim God's holiness for the anger that you may feel lasts just a moment. Divine Love is lifelong. Tears may linger for the night, but joy comes at the dawn, while at ease. Once I thought nothing can shake my security. Favor me and I am a mountain of strength. But hide your face, God, and I'm terrified to you, God, I call before you, I plead, what profit is there if I am silenced? What benefit if I go to the grave? Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim Your faithfulness? Hear me. Adonai. Be gracious to me. Be my help. Transform my mourning into dancing, my sackcloth into robes of joy that I may sing your praises unceasingly, that I might Thank you. Adonai, my God forever. This is a little a little taste of what we studied yesterday in tachanu, and this feeling of both vulnerability and also desire for a sense of wider, bigger protection from beyond, not from people, but from from the the great source, the great source of support that supports and breathes us all moment by moment, I'm going to move us all the way up to the Shima over here, so that we can spend a little bit of time studying. So we take a moment to gather the four corners of art, seat, seat, taking a moment to just meditate on all the disparate pieces, all the fragments, all the parts, but don't necessarily all fit together, but actually fit together quite well, if we can hold them lightly and with love. We hold them up to our eyes and close our eyes as we say the Shema, Shema Yisrael,

Speaker 3  17:22  
Adonai, Don't I? Hello, hey. No.

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  17:40  
Donai, Aloha, whole love. Ha, Aloha, whole navshaha, they how you who had a variem Hila share a no he mitsha hayom, aleva, shenan, tam Levana, over left, ahava Derek, over after, how You little tough beneath Tom

Speaker 1  18:14  
amazu, Zoet better he shara, we're

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  18:24  
going to do a healing prayer. Take a moment now to just think of who you want to send love and healing to the places in the world that need care, that need compassion. We say it every single day to our brothers and sisters who are still being held hostages in Gaza, to the many, many 1000s of children, women, men, people who are hungry in Gaza, for all of the people who are responsible for captivity and pain and suffering, may they be infused with compassion that heals their hearts so that they can see pain and heal it, no matter who it belongs to, no matter who that pain belongs to, sending sending love to the people on your lists that are beginning to come up here. Mark Nachman, Ben rabbika cliff, everyone on haya's list here, everyone on Meredith's list and Meredith, everyone on Lori and Ellie's list. Moshe benhaya, Jennifer Newman, Lizzi, Herrick, Audrey and Trayvon Hudson, Karen and Paul i Anyone who's trying desperately to conceive, anyone who is struggling on a sobriety journey or struggling with mental health or physical health, just sending our love to every single one of these folks and every. Every person in this Minion who comes every Day for a little bit of soul healing.

Unknown Speaker  20:40  
El na Ra,

Unknown Speaker  21:11  
Na,

Speaker 1  21:18  
re, fa, Na,

Speaker 2  21:38  
sending a rifuwash Leymah to everyone who needs healing in this room and far, far beyond. I

Unknown Speaker  21:48  
mean,

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  21:51  
all right. So here we are, before we go into kedichiatome, we often do a little bit of learning here on Wednesdays. And so today I'm bringing this learning from a book called for times such as these, not to be confused with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove's book for such a time as this. Both good books, different. Both drawing their title from the same line in the book of Esther. Quite different books. So this is a calendar book. It kind of goes through the seasons of the Jewish year. And I'm it starts with Elul. And now Elul is like the high holiday season. It starts there. So here, by the by toward the end of the book, we're making our way back toward Elul, but we're Kieran AV, and so the book gives context for each holiday, you know, on in many cases connected to sort of like radical radical politics. But before it can do that, it has to talk about the origins of the holiday. So that's what I want to do here today. The first mention of the ninth of of as a day of collective mourning appears in the Mishnah in Tanit four, six. It says this is 1000s of years ago. Five calamitous events occurred to our ancestors on the 17th of Tammuz a couple weeks ago, and five other disasters happened on the Ninth of Av. On the Ninth of Av, it was decreed upon our ancestors that they would die in the wilderness and not enter Eretz, Israel. And the first temple was destroyed in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and the SEM the temple was destroyed the second time by the Romans. And the Beitar was captured, and the city of Jerusalem was plowed, was razed to the ground. And so when the month of Av begins, Joy decreases lower hand. How could all of these calamities possibly have happened on the same day? Centuries apart, the rabbi and the Gemara and the Mishnah wrestle with divergent accounts of the actual days of the destruction of the temple. They do impressive calendrical and historical wrangling, debating what happened, when, what to mark and why to land them both on the Ninth of Av in the seasons of our joy. Another good book by Rabbi Arthur Waskow. He says the very anxiety of the rabbi's to justify the date of Tisha of AV may be taken as a support, to support the theory of some of our modern scholars that the date was partly affected by the religious patterns of Babylon among the Babylonians, the Ninth of Av was a day of dread and sorrow, a climactic moment In a month long celebration focused on torches and firewood, and perhaps this Babylonian holy season also had to do with the midsummer and a sense of the raging sun. Once Jews had gone into the Babylonian exile in seeking to commemorate the day of their disaster, they may have chosen the fiery day already set aside by the Babylonians. Around them the day, whose date was so close and whose fiery significance echoed so well with the burning of the temple. So I'll skip around a little bit. The rabbi of the Talmud wrestled with questions of why these catastrophic events occurred and tried on different explanations on Shabbat, excuse me. Excuse me. In Shabbat 119 B, this is in the Talmud. It says that Jerusalem was destroyed because people desecrated Shabbat in yomah 9b the destruction of the First Temple was said to be caused by forbidden sexual relations, the degradation of consecrated ritual objects and bloodshed and the destruction of the Second Temple was said to be due to sinat hinam, baseless hatred. That's the one you often hear, perhaps most cinematically of all the reasons given is in getin 50 5b and 56 A, there is the story of Kamsa and bar kamtza In a layered and dramatic story public humiliation, power relations and Jewish infighting led to the destruction of the temple. In this waterfall of explanations for the destruction of the temples, some are resonant with Jewish experiences today. Some are steeped in and radiate misogyny, what is incredibly noticeable and painful is the lengths that the rabbi's will go to to find or invent internal communal reasons for what was, by and large caused by the impacts of empires exploring tishabaav as a location for and container of the experiences of collective historical trauma and its impacts, part of our work is reckoning with the shame and self blame that centuries of Jewish ancestors associated with Tisha Bob, while both Tanakh and Talmud are multi vocal and nuanced texts. Strands of each of them are shaped by the development of identities based in exile for centuries, our ancestors told each other that Israelite sinning and Jewish infighting caused God to retract God's self, and that that was what created space for the Babylonian and Roman conquests. We see how powerless these ancestors were, how weak their systems of governance and the overwhelming violence of conquest. They developed reasons for the destruction that gave them collective responsibility, agency and control. So interesting. We can talk more about all of this. I'm going to just pause here because it is 830 and at least one person has to leave at 830 and I want to make sure we do. Keith Chatham, I am happy to keep reading from this book to you. I will do it after we say Warner's Kaddish. So let's pause, pause here. And who are we remembering this morning? Janet spraggs, Barry Coss David Soufiane, Janine, husband, Joan kurlo. Is there anybody who would like to lead us in college, and Kaddish, Leonard, Simon, Cheryl, Rosenberg, J Frank and Dave Suf and I will also, I'll just add the name of Palestinian man from um al here, a town in the West Bank, many of my rabbinic friends who have spent time in that village are mourning him. He died. He was murdered by a West Bank settler a few days ago. His name is Auda hafaline, and apparently he was a great he was like a great fighter for peace, and he was incredibly hospitable to all of these Jews who would come through to, you know, to spend time in the town and to be with these with these people. May all of their memories be blessings. Every single person mentioned here and out of Halloween. Truly, anybody want to leave Kaddish Otherwise, otherwise, I got this. But, you know, all

Speaker 4  28:59  
right, I'll do it, but everybody, but I come from a reformed tradition where everybody says it so that we end up sounding like an orthodox service.

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  29:08  
All right, so, so do you want everybody saying it on mute so that you can kind of hear yourself, or do you want everybody like

Speaker 5  29:15  
everybody? Okay? All right. Thank you, community. All right, here we go. Thank you. Loria Lori,

Unknown Speaker  29:40  
it's a lot.

Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann  30:32  
Memories be blessings. Amen. Amen. You've been listening to contact Chai, a production of Mishkan Chicago. If you were inspired or informed by this episode, please leave us a five star rating on Apple podcasts so that others can encounter our work. And if you appreciate what Mishkan is doing, I invite you to join as a builder or make a donation on our website@mishkanchicago.org Shabbat shalom. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai