This week of the summer always feels a little off for me.
Like, mixed confusing feelings.
Selfishly- I look forward to the summer all year long. I never outgrew that schoolgirl feeling of elation of June, the sun is out, and it's time for fun, freedom, swimming, beaches, barbecues, and watermelon.
But also, in my tradition, this particular part of the summer is what many Jews call "the three weeks" and then "the nine days," and it's a time of mourning. (And I wish it were in February.)
Historically and technically, this time is about the grieving for the destruction of ancient, centralized temples of worship in Jerusalem. Philosophically and spiritually, it's about everything that's wrong and broken and painful in the world as we know it.
Some might feel that being a person of faith entails trusting that if G-d is good, then everything He made and does and allows is also good, and so we should just relax and "be happy" with it.
But it's not that simple: G-d also made us humans psychologically capable of feeling pain, sorrow, indignation, anxiety- He also created the reality of "not good."
Yes, some would argue that, "no- everything G-d made is good; humans made things bad."
But if we're being honest, G-d made humans too, and He's Omnipotent, so that's all included in the Plan too. The sense that "things are not the way they should be" is part of the way it was designed- part of the way it should be, paradoxically, confusingly.
The Hebrew word for bad, "rah," doesn't actually mean bad; technically it means broken off. The sense of being One, being connected, integrated, in alignment with self, others, the universe, is "good." The sense of being isolated, fragmented, split off- that feeling is "bad." When we're connected to ourselves and others, it inspires the good. When we're not, it feels off.
The last few years have been described way too much as "unprecedented." And in many ways they were. At the beginning of the pandemic, the world was somewhat unified in its very fragmentation. The way we all ostensibly suffered from the same core crisis has been historical. Yet it hasn't unified us at all- it often feels like we're more divided than ever.
In this week's Torah portion, Moses/ Moshe asks a timely question:
"Eichah? How, G-d? How can I carry by myself all these troubles, burdens, and fighting?"
We might think that tension with leadership is a post-revolutionary era issue, but people have been grappling with authority from the day we were created.
That word, "Eichah"- how, G-d, is the word of lamentation (and the title of that megilla). It's the word used to confront humanity about the original transgression- the overstepping between the boundaries of "knowledge of good and bad." It means "how?" and also "where are you?"
How and where are we, indeed?
There's a difficult, Utopian concept called Mashiach/ Messiah. It's not mentioned in the Torah overtly, but it's part of the 13 Maimonidean principles of faith, and referenced often in the Oral tradition. The goal of tikun olam- repairing the world through love. If "bad" is "fragmented" then "good" is "unified." (In fact, the numerical values of the Hebrew words for "love" and "one" are the same: 13.)
Years ago, my family used to listen to a cassette tape lecture on the fast day of Tisha B'av, the last of these Nine Days. We found the ideas in this lecture insightful and inspiring. Until we heard that the person who gave this lecture was the center of serious and credible allegations of the worst possible kind. We stopped listening to the tape after that. But ironically, that sort of represents what we're mourning. The confusion of good and evil/ broken, wisdom and corruption. The lack of clarity about who's who and what's what, and how things are supposed to be.
As hard as it is to have this time of heaviness and mourning in the middle of the summer, it's also validating. That yucky, niggling feeling that we all get from time to time, a fear that the world is broken, that things are not ok, that something is missing- that's not necessarily neurosis or depression. It's accurate. We're not struggling emotionally because there's something intrinsically wrong with us, but because we're paying attention. We're attuned to the chronic, global pain that's very real and in need of healing.This is the part of the universal human experience that built into this time of year to actively feel and sublimate our pain.
"Eichah" means "how, G-d?" How do we fix this? How do we reconnect? To You, to ourselves, to others to Truth, to Goodness? In this iteration of the world, there are and will be more questions than answers.
But there's one answer we can act upon.
That answer is love. Kindness. Unity. Giving. Coming back to ourselves, to one another, to G-d, specifically by crying, feeling, mourning the brokenness- so that we can begin to heal it. Acknowledging what's wrong so we can work, hard, together, continuously, imperfectly, over time, to make it right.
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