Reaching Through the Smoke and Ash:

The Lament of Tisha B'Av

Lonely, sits the city once great with people. She that was great among nations has become a widow. The princess among states has fallen under their power. She weeps bitterly. Her friends offer no comfort. Her allies have betrayed her. Empty of festival pilgrims, her gates are deserted. My eyes flow with tears.

Every year we chant these words on Tisha B’Av and are reminded that lament deserves our time. Pain will not be forgotten, but can be held. There is no just future without having an honest reckoning with our past.

Whether or not God continued to exist was not questioned by this author, my ancestor. Other ancestors, sure, but not that one. How could our God forsake us? Eicha? How could we continue within God’s rejection? Eicha? How were we to make sense of a world such as this? Eicha? How could we impossibly hope for return? Eicha? We have a record of these questions in Eicha – Lamentations, there is no satisfying answer.

After three weeks of anticipatory semi-mourning – no marriages, no shaving, no haircuts, for some no listening of music, no gift-giving, no new clothes, no festive gatherings, and on Tisha B’Av itself no greeting one another – the arrival of this 25-hour fast day has sometimes felt like a relief to me.

Sitting on the synagogue floor, reading along by the light of my candle, every year I close my eyes and reach through the smoke and ash and remember that golden center of forgiveness and atonement, the place where my people came together joyously and abundantly from all over the Land and all over the world to present their harvest offerings. I hold the image until I can hear the bells on the gold-wrapped horns of the oxen and smell the loaves of bread and feel myself pulled into the laughter and singing. Then opening my eyes to the page before me I bring to mind the slaughter, the destruction of the first Temple, and then the second. I look at the faces in my community and wonder who has inherited Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel’s eyes, who the tilt of Rabbi Akiva’s head, and then steel myself to the memory of their torture and executions among the other Ten Martyrs. I think of the deaths of 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students by plague. Of the expulsions from England, from France, and from Spain. My throat catches around the “Final Solution.”

It was sinat chinam, we are taught.
Baseless hatred at the center of all of this suffering.

This year, on July 29th, as the sun sets and Tisha B’Av arrives and we turn out the lights and sit on the floor in our own homes, we will also be sitting with George Floyd (z”l) and Breonna Taylor (z”l) and Tony McDade (z”l) and their loved ones. Thick in the air will be the Arctic heat, Australian wildfires, flash floods in Jakarta, and world-wide mega droughts. Our hearts will wrench to think of the many thousands of children still held in ICE custody. Our eyes will sting with the awareness of the missing and murdered indigenous women. We will wonder about the identifying details of the hundreds of thousands of people around the world and close to home who have died so far in this pandemic, and about how many of those deaths could have been prevented.

Beginning in the days just after the killing of George Floyd, I’ve been hearing the earnest desire of many of my non-Jewish and non-Muslim colleagues to host or attend healing services. Certainly some of us, those of us who are Black, Brown, and Indigenous, could hold spaces for healing, but not others of us. The rest of us need spaces to lament, to learn, and to be provoked into just action. We need to understand that there are things we should not feel better about. Not ever. There are things that are never okay, and never going to be okay. As long as suffering and oppression and the murder of unarmed people by representatives of the state continue, we should not be comforted. As long as those of us who aren’t continue to disregard the lives of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, we should not be comforted.

In the Jewish world, for three weeks we grieve suffering and losses that had ends thousands of years, hundreds of years, and decades ago. There is hard-learned wisdom there: Lament deserves our time. Pain will not be forgotten, but can be held. There is no just future without having an honest reckoning with one’s past.

Where does that leave us?

It leaves us wrung out. It leaves our eyes flowing with tears. It leaves us committed to creating a world that is more just, more whole. It leaves us praying the words at the end of Eicha:

Take us back, Adonai, to Yourself, and Let us come back.

Ken yehi ratzon. May it be Your will.

First Published in Convergence on Campus on July 8, 2020.