The featured artwork on this post is titled “Nether,” a painting by artist Stanley Donwood, it was developed as the book cover for Underland by Robert Macfarlane, a fascinating “journey into the worlds beneath our feet.” Click through for more information on the artwork and the book itself.
How many of you are gardeners? Could be big or small, pots or plots or acres. I find gardening is a wonderful teacher and this is a great time of year: vegetables are ripening, reaching toward the harvest, and everything seems to be blooming. Me, I’m harvesting cherry tomatoes and have more basil than I know what to do with! If you have any good pesto recipes, send them my way. There’s one I know that swaps out pine nuts for pistachios that sounds interesting…that’s a whole ‘nother cooking show…
A few years ago, I went through a period where I had a whole room dedicated to seedlings—tables, grow lights, self-watering trays, the works.
Because seeds are magical. To think these plants and flowers and fruits and vegetables grow from these tiny seeds we bury in warm soil. My girls loved to watch that, to see the progress from day to day. Even things as gigantic as oak trees start in little acorns. Think of the giant redwoods in California—each tree produces tiny cones about an inch long, their seeds are carried within, and those seeds are tiny. A single tree may produce up to 100,000 seeds, but very few of them germinate and survive.
When you think about it, living things begin with decay. Every seed has to crack, split, and disintegrate before it grows. The husks have to be stripped away and removed before the inner kernel of new life can emerge.
Destruction generates life.
Tomorrow we enter into a special period of the Jewish year called, “The Three Weeks” or “Bein Hamitzarim” (between the straits). It runs from the 17th Day of Tammuz, the day the walls of Jerusalem were first breached by the Romans, to the 9th of Av, the day the entire Temple was destroyed. During this period there are no weddings, no listening to music, no haircuts, no shecheyanu on new clothing. It is a kind of a shloshim period, with more intense mourning practices happening once we reach the month of Av.
It is the nadir of the Jewish year. Going forward, the only way we can ascend is by embracing its depths. As a people, it’s where we dive deep. In the Tanya, a 16th century compilation of Chassidic philosophy, the Alter Rebbe teaches us, “This going down is for the sake of going up.” Descent is always for the sake of ascent.
There would be no revelation at Sinai if we had not lost spiritual ground in Egypt. History, life, is not one continuous upward trajectory, it rises and falls, there are dips and valleys, and then, hopefully, new rises again. This is what our people live and have lived—this is what the Three Weeks comes to teach us.
Why did the sages institute mourning during this time? Couldn’t we just “get over it” after 2000 years?
Well, it was in large part to remember what we had lost—more precisely, to stop us from forgetting what we had lost: the Temple, the Land, and the presence of the Holy One in the world. The customs and the communal mourning which date back centuries are part of a coordinated plan to shore up our faith and confidence not in the past, but to bring Mashiach, a better future. They remind us what was lost. If we forget what was, if we suffer communal amnesia, how would we know what it is we need to restore?
Have we forgotten what it is like to have schools without active shooter drills? Our children have. Already, many have never known a time without them.
Have we forgotten what it is like to go a full week without memorials for the names and faces of those murdered for no reason? Have we forgotten the freedom to be in our own synagogues without guards, locks, and alerts?
America is a country that loves to move on and forget. Some say we have to accept this as “the new normal,” the “price of freedom.” Is freedom worth the lives of school children? Or even a single child? Is it worth innocent lives at synagogues, grocery stores, hospitals, let alone the violent manner of those losses? Do we really compartmentalize these things because we’re insulated by language, by euphemism, by turning away from the facts of these tragedies? Are these lives truly reduced to nothing but numbers and names forgotten days later?
Each tragedy is put away after a short time until the next one. It hurts even to say that—why do we expect a “next one” and so soon? And that amnesia, that inability to hold onto memory and tragedy, that urge to get back to “normal”—even the “new normal”—is part of how we got to here.
Judaism has a different approach to tragedy. Each year, we have these three weeks of mourning for all we have lost. But it is not only about the past. We also mourn for our current state, we are mourning for the sins we commit even now which prohibit the temple from being rebuilt and the Moshiach returning.
The Slonimer Rabbi, Sholom Noach Berezovsky teaches that even though our mourning leaves us shattered and broken, only by the disintegration of that husk of ego, can we begin to grow and change, rather like a seed into a sapling. If we are distant from God because of what we have done, we can return and repair—it is never too late—and in that very turning is the start of the bringing of Moshiach. He calls Tisha B’av a “healthy, therapeutic brokenness.”
Matshona Dhliwayo, a Zimbabwe-born Canadian author and philosopher teaches the following: “When seeds want to rise they drop everything that is weighing them down.” What is weighing you down in the next three weeks? What do we mourn and what do we remember? What should we mourn that we have chosen to forget? Because that too weighs us down—it is only in remembering that we have release. We are taught, “If I forget You O Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” 2,000 years on and we are most definitely not getting over it. To forget the destruction, the loss would be to ensure we have no future. So for three weeks we slow down to mourn and reflect. We remember to remember.
Speaking of which, remember I was talking about gardening? It’s dry right now, be sure to water your plants.
One thing you learn quickly with a seedling room is that you need to put your grow lights on a timer. Yes, they need light, but they also need darkness to live. Constant light will make them grow spindly and deformed.
And remember the redwoods? The most successful don’t grow from the single seed landing on a patch of ground by itself. They grow from sprouts that form around the base of a tree, living off the nutrients and root system of a mature tree. And when that parent tree dies, a new generation of trees rises from it, creating a new circle of trees often called fairy rings. They grow and thrive together.
We all need a balance of light and dark, and we need one another. The rabbis teach that just as Sukkot provides continuous joy for a year, so too does Tisha B’av bring a healthy brokenness for a year. We all need moments of darkness. As Jews during this special time, we remember the pain of our past, we look at our own actions then and now, and we move forward together towards a more perfect world.
Our people, our community, this temple—this is the base of our redwood, you are our circle of trees. We live in light, and we live in dark, not one or the other. Deep, rich, fertile darkness is where we grow and mature, find grace, and rejuvenate—and so nourished and renewed, let us remember to bring beauty, knowledge, and life into a new and better world.
Shabbat Shalom.