Observing Tisha B'Av
08/12/2024 02:58:08 PM
Aug12
What is Tisha B'Av?
Tisha B'av begins this Wednesday, July 26 at sunset. A day of mourning for the Jewish people, Tisha B'av (the 9th of Av) marks the destruction of both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem in the 7th Century B.C.E. and the 1st Century C.E. The 9th of Av was also infamously the last day Jews were allowed to live as Jews in Spain according to the 1492 edict of expulsion. This edict ended 700 years of residence and the most populous Jewish community of the Medieval era. Thus, the work of Tisha B'Av is commemorative, a time for collective reflection on the disasters of history.
A time of collective mourning
From sunset to sunset, there is a period of intense mourning in which one abstains from food and drink, wearing leather, sex, washing one's body, and using perfumes, lotions, or ointments of any kind. On Erev Tisha B'av, it is customary to read the Megillat Eicha (the Book of Lamenations), which describes the post-destruction Jerusalem of the 6th Century B.C.E.
Mourning as the precondition of a history beyond trauma
Rabbi Alan Lews has observed that Tisha B'Av can be seen as the beginning of the High Holiday season. Before teshuvah - before we can return to our most righteous selves - we must first sit with, acknowledge, and mourn the brokenness within and without. Such acknowledgment is the precondition upon which teshuvah becomes possible; that without which change cannot occur. As Rabbi Lews writes in his philosophic, psychoanalytic-inflected exploration of the High Holidays:
“There are two ways of looking at the way our tradition has collapsed history on this day, two ways of thinking about the conflation of calamity. We can regard the ninth of Av and the weeks surrounding it as a cursed time... or we can regard the ninth of Av as a time when we are reminded that catastrophes will keep recurring in our lives until we get things right, until we learn what we need to learn from them.” (This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, p. 41)
What is catastrophic can and has been in the hands of the Jewish people an occasion for the resilient reinvention of our practices and our understanding. Rabbinic Judaism, centered around communal worship and Torah Study, emerged from out of bereavement, a way to continue worship in the absence of the Temple.
Do we know how to mourn?
This year, amidst a catastrophe with no end in sight, there is much to mourn. But I hope that Rabbi Lews words can serve as a reminder that the transformation of history is in no one's hands but our own and that such a transformation is conditional upon our own cultivation of the capacity to mourn - to grieve even in the face of the seemingly intolerable. For the alternatives - a desire for vengeance; numbness; ignorance - these do not lead into a genuine future, i.e., one freed from the repetitive traumas of history.
“Comfort, comfort my people”
The mourning that begins on the 17 of Tammuz and reaches its height on the 9th of Av comes to a close on the Shabbat immediately following Tisha B'Av. Shabbat Nehamu - so called because the Haftarah that days begins with the words “nahamu nahamu ami” (“comfort, comfort my people”) - begins a period of comfort that leads up to Rosh Hashanah and the joy of the new year
The mourning that begins on the 17 of Tammuz and reaches its height on the 9th of Av comes to a close on the Shabbat immediately following Tisha B'Av. Shabbat Nehamu - so called because the Haftarah that days begins with the words “nahamu nahamu ami” (“comfort, comfort my people”) - begins a period of comfort that leads up to Rosh Hashanah and the joy of the new year
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