This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
In the midst of summer’s long light-filled days, we find ourselves at a time in the Jewish calendar called the Three Weeks, a period of collective grief that culminates on Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the fast day commemorating a litany of historic Jewish losses. In Hebrew, this period is known as bein hametzarim (“between the straits”). There is perhaps no period of the year less well-known, yet as important for us as a human species at this particular moment, than one that makes space for acknowledging and grieving of communal loss.
This time between the narrow straits offers us a period of 21 days in which to open into grief. The spaciousness of this period (multiple weeks rather than a one-day observance) provides time in which our communal losses are given the space to unfurl from the tight quarters where we so often keep them clenched. With each day we allow our grief to speak, to breathe, to be acknowledged and to be felt. Our hard edges begin to soften as we let ourselves feel a sadness that for most of us is always present somewhere under the surface, but is rarely given a chance to speak.
The calendar is brilliant in that it seems to understand that one day would not be enough to truly open into the work of grief. Instead, we build slowly, allowing ourselves to open the portal to mourning with tenderness and care and see what resides within. Can you imagine giving yourself 21 days to contemplate what’s been lost, what the many communities you are part of have suffered across time? What would you need to be able to truly enter into this portal? What do you imagine might emerge on the other side if you did?
Originally, Tisha B’Av was a day set aside to mourn the destruction of the two ancient Temples in Jerusalem, the centers of connection to God before the rise of rabbinic Judaism. This was a day given over to grieving the loss of space for God in the world and the severing of the threads of community and practice and connection and sanctity that once wove us together. The day marks the loss of a religious system that, like all systems, worked for some and not for others, a system that was seen as unchangeable and immovable until we watched it fall to pieces before our eyes.
The historic reality that Tisha B’Av commemorates is important, and for some that remains the focal point. But over time, Tisha B’Av has become a doorway into all of our collective losses, connecting and collapsing each tragedy into one day of primal grief. On this day, all of the communal devastation that has transpired across time and space is aggregated and mourned at the same time — mythic loss, ancestral loss, the ever-growing heap of collective losses of the present century and of last year and of five minutes ago when we last checked the news. Tisha B’Av is an invitation to collective grief that transcends the particulars of the destruction of the Temples.
We live in an era in which losses seem to pile up without end — species, peoples, paradigms, futures. And yet in mainstream American culture, we aren’t given language or practices for tending to, or even acknowledging, these losses. Instead, our grief festers only to come out behind the closed door of therapy, or when we speak sharply to our spouse or children or colleagues, not knowing why we are so agitated and on edge. Without frameworks and rituals, we feel unhinged. Our grief silently gnaws at us, like it’s our own personal problem or psychosis that we need to solve.
This period of time offers the gift not only of knowing that we aren’t alone in our feelings, not only of opening space for unacknowledged feelings to become known, but of the medicine of the mythic. Ain mukdam u’meuchar baTorah, Jewish tradition teaches. There is no early or late in Torah. Likewise, this time of the calendar brings us into a mythic realm beyond the linearity of space and time, a place where the tragedy and pain of the past is alive, and in that aliveness can be touched so that it may one day be transformed.
On Tisha B’Av, each of us enters into the grief portal in the ways we can, as a sacred act of service, for ourselves and for one another. To feel grief is not simply to wallow in despair, but to give ourselves a bracketed number of days in which we let the sadness come to the surface, in which we get to sit alongside one another as we cry, to give honor to the past and make space for the future, and to remind ourselves that we don’t have to do any of this alone.
