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Today is the first day of the month of Av.
It's traditionally a month of mourning, because like 90% of the terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people happened or started on the 9th of Av (Tisha b'Av).
It's traditionally a month of mourning, because like 90% of the terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people happened or started on the 9th of Av (Tisha b'Av).
Most of us who aren't Orthodox don't observe most of the traditional fast days, other than Yom Kippur, but if you fast any other day of the year, it's almost certainly Tisha b'Av.
It's a day of mourning (preferably mourning AT people like police or ICE agents).
It's a day of mourning (preferably mourning AT people like police or ICE agents).
And yet this month is also supposedly the season of chesed (depending on how you want to translate it, "loving-kindness," "tenderness," or even, in its original sense, "loyalty."
So how can a season of intense mourning, of commemorating all the terrible cruelties to which we've been subjected, be the season of loving-kindness? (There's a different word, incidentally, for "compassion." That one I'd understand.)
I've been thinking a lot about what an entire month of mourning means right now, because I've been thinking about the mourning we as a country need to do--and haven't been.
We haven't *accepted* that the pandemic means the loss of normal life, not just for a few months, but for the foreseeable future. And that with other projected pandemics waiting in the wings this winter, possibly for a very long time.
With police murders of Black people, the protests in response, the national orgy of police violence, every new terrible thing Trump does, all of it, I feel like our *ability to pay attention* is itself hypervigilant and traumatized.
Which doesn't leave space to mourn.
Which doesn't leave space to mourn.
But we *do* need to mourn.
We need to mourn the 2020 loss of freedoms, of yet more of our innocence and ability to trust, of yet more hope, of plans, of time with friends and family we'll never get to have.
We need to mourn the 2020 loss of freedoms, of yet more of our innocence and ability to trust, of yet more hope, of plans, of time with friends and family we'll never get to have.
And most importantly, we need to mourn our dead.
150,000 people dead just in the US.
An individual death is a tragedy. We can't let this mass death become just a number.
150,000 people dead just in the US.
An individual death is a tragedy. We can't let this mass death become just a number.
I know people who've lost loved ones during this pandemic. Some from COVID, and some from other causes.
And it seems that the hardest thing for them, after the loss itself, was that the lack of ability to hold a funeral felt like the death was going unremarked.
And it seems that the hardest thing for them, after the loss itself, was that the lack of ability to hold a funeral felt like the death was going unremarked.
How horrible, how hollow, how wrenchingly painful it must be to feel that your loved one has passed from the world and no one notices or cares, to be cut off from the physical comfort of others at that time.
And we can't give mourners what many of them need right now, which is to be physically surrounded by people who love them, to be hugged, to sit next to others and speak of their lost one when the words come, not on a scheduled Skype call.
I am thinking about this a lot today, because while the big day in Av is the 9th, the 1st supposedly commemorates the death of Aaron. Midrash Yalkut records Moses speaking tenderly to his dying brother, talking him through the process, sort of.
And supposedly Moses and Eleazar perform the rudiments of what would come to be, in Jewish tradition, the work of the chevra kadisha, the Jewish burial society. https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1057322228201619458
Judaism says that the dead must be honored, and that they should be treated with respect and tenderness.
I don't know how we should honor the pandemic's dead, but I do know that we will lose something vital, something human, as a society, if we don't.
I don't know how we should honor the pandemic's dead, but I do know that we will lose something vital, something human, as a society, if we don't.
This is also the month in which we read the Torah portion that first discusses the cities of refuge, the cities to which those who have killed another may flee to avoid death at the hands of their victims' families in a sort of plea bargain of self-imprisonment vs death.
Once you took refuge in one of these cities, you were not allowed to leave until the death of the current high priest (at which point your sentence was considered served).
So in theory, the imprisoned would hope for the death of the high priest so they could be freed. The Talmud imagines the high priest's mother making care packages for all those imprisoned killers so that they will pray for her son's well-being instead of his death.
And I wonder, in this month of mourning, what it would be like if we actually felt *responsible*, as a society, to those we'd imprisoned. If we actually continued to feel interconnected with them rather than forgetting them. If we felt like care for them was *our* life and death.
I think about those who are imprisoned right now because Av is a month about both loss and *restriction.* The 9th of Av marks the end of three weeks of intense mourning that start on the 17th of Tammuz, called bein hameitzarim, "between the narrow places."
The name for Egypt in Hebrew is Mitzrayim, the narrow place, the place of slavery and restriction and suffering.
So for these three weeks, we are back there.
So for these three weeks, we are back there.
And yet, while in one sense, during these three weeks, we are still trapped in Egypt, in the narrow place, the place of restriction and confinement, in the cycle of Torah reading, we're in the book of Numbers (in Hebrew, Bamidbar, "in the wilderness").
Bamidbar is basically a horror story: the Israelites aren't *lost* in the desert. They're stuck in something more horrific than not knowing how to get where you're going: they're waiting for an entire generation to die off.
They can't move forward until that generation is gone.
They can't move forward until that generation is gone.
So instead of having somewhere to go and just needing to figure out how to get there, they're stuck in a holding pattern of wandering aimlessly.
In one sense, they have all the freedom in the world. They have wide open space, endless possibility, to wander in.
On the other hand, they have no real *purpose.* Just waiting for people to die.
On the other hand, they have no real *purpose.* Just waiting for people to die.
And that strange, seemingly contradictory duality of the month of Av--restriction and confinement vs restless wandering, and threaded throughout all of it, grief--strikes me as very much where we are in this pandemic.
On one hand, we are largely confined to our homes. But we're not waiting for a known release date, or being held there by a human power that wants our labor, wants us to *build* something. We're aimlessly circling, not knowing when we can move forward again.
This is the season, according to midrash, of the demon Keteb-Meriri. The rabbis warned people to avoid standing in direct sunlight or direct moonlight because of it. And yet the demon was said to stalk the border *between* light and shadow.
It is also the season, elementally, of water within fire. The season of turning the fire of pain, of anger, of fear into tears, which I think is related to the idea of a demon who will seize you in direct sunlight but itself lives in the edge between darkness and light.
That story says that in staying where we might feel safe--in the direct light--we're actually endangering ourselves. It's an insistence on embracing transition. Mourning means letting go *consciously,* to move on, turning fire into water, pain into tears, rigidity into flow.
Moving on not as denial or forgetting, but as being willing to loosen up enough to cry, to let it out, to grieve, to accept loss.
And again, I don't know what a societal mourning of our pandemic dead, let alone a true reckoning with grieving the other things the pandemic has taken from us looks like, but I know we need to do it.
And this feels like the month for it.
And this feels like the month for it.
