Tisha B’Av: Dealing with Death as a People
Rabbi Tom Samuels
(From the teachings of Yehuda Kurtzer, Rami Shapiro, and Rabbi Art Green)
How do we, as Jews, collectively deal with the death and despair that permeates much our history? How do we actualize our Covenant with God, to become a Nation of Priests that thinks and acts aspirationally? And, how do we process the losses and traumas, ever so present in our collective memory and psyche, without becoming a cult of death? Where our defining story, our defining metaphor as a people is that of death and survivalism? How do we not become entirely about memory and loss, to the exclusion about the present let alone the future? How can we hold onto the two seemingly conflicting paradigms, simultaneously: that of an appropriate sense of loss, and at the same time an appropriate sense of aspiration of what we are supposed to become?
In the Talmudic tractate Moed Katan, the Rabbis warn against mourning too much. Rav Yehuda says to Rav: whoever indulges, weeps too much in grief over the death of someone, will end up weeping for another. The story related is a mother of seven sons. One son dies. Rav Huna warns that the mother's obsession with the loss of her son is making her incapable of parenting her remaining sons. The story continues with her other sons all dying, one after the other. Rav Huna asks her if she is now preparing for her own death. And then she dies. RavYehuda explains: that living in a perpetual narrative of death in turns actually invites death. That this mother in the story was incapable of recognizing the possibility of life and therefore remained imprisoned in a climate of death.
This is clearly a very difficult and heartless text. By no means am I advocating that this should serve as a guide for dealing with death in our everyday lives, our families, or friends. Rather, what I am trying to do is to extrapolate from this text some direction on how we, as a society need to deal with death, in a healthy way.
And so, back to my question: how, in fact, are we to mourn as a people?
Let's take a cue from how we mourn the Temple: According to the Talmud, when a Jew stuccos his home, he is to leave a little bit bare. We are to leave an item or two out of a prepared banquet. We smash a glass at a wedding. These rituals are surprisingly banal given the magnitude of the impact of Temple's destruction on the entirety of our Jewish experiences.
I can only guess that the Rabbis knew how banal these rituals were. Perhaps they prescribed them specifically so that the mourning of the Temple did not hinder or undermine the full continuum of sadness and joy, mourning and celebration, death and life, which are part and parcel of being a Jew. That rather than the deep embrace of the loss, we have markers of the loss. The glass. The stucco. We have institutionalized mechanisms to retain some sense of loss even as we build anew. The Mishna in Taanit tells us that five misfortunes befell our people on the 9th of Av, Tisha B'Av: it was decreed that our forefathers will not enter the Promised Land; the destruction of both Temples; Betar was captured, and Jerusalem was plowed over. Did these five events actually happen on Tisha b’Av? That is not really the point. The rabbis understood that you need a moment of darkness in the liturgical calendar in order not to have the entire year be a period of blackness.
My Zaida was a beautiful man, a beautiful soul, a beautiful doogma, a model for living a life of passion, integrity and of empathy. The ravages of heart disease ate away at his body, but never his menchlichkeit. I miss him dearly. When he died I was left with a huge emptiness, a vacuum of unanswered questions, fears, and doubts. How do I make his lessons, values, inspirations a part of who I am, of who I am becoming? How do I hold onto his memory, his neshoma, while at the same time find my own voice of aspiration, of Kedusha in this world? How could I hold these two intentions? I turn to how we Jews mourn the Temple. I chose a seemingly banal and understated way to ritualize my grandfather's memory and message of hope. At the Shabbat table I sing Mizmor L'David, Psalm 33, The Lord is my Sheppard, "Tommy's Song", as my Zaida called it. And there he sits, across from me, smiling, beckoning me to take a seat at the table, and to sing along with him as we welcome in Shabbat together.
Rabbi Tom Samuels
(From the teachings of Yehuda Kurtzer, Rami Shapiro, and Rabbi Art Green)
How do we, as Jews, collectively deal with the death and despair that permeates much our history? How do we actualize our Covenant with God, to become a Nation of Priests that thinks and acts aspirationally? And, how do we process the losses and traumas, ever so present in our collective memory and psyche, without becoming a cult of death? Where our defining story, our defining metaphor as a people is that of death and survivalism? How do we not become entirely about memory and loss, to the exclusion about the present let alone the future? How can we hold onto the two seemingly conflicting paradigms, simultaneously: that of an appropriate sense of loss, and at the same time an appropriate sense of aspiration of what we are supposed to become?
In the Talmudic tractate Moed Katan, the Rabbis warn against mourning too much. Rav Yehuda says to Rav: whoever indulges, weeps too much in grief over the death of someone, will end up weeping for another. The story related is a mother of seven sons. One son dies. Rav Huna warns that the mother's obsession with the loss of her son is making her incapable of parenting her remaining sons. The story continues with her other sons all dying, one after the other. Rav Huna asks her if she is now preparing for her own death. And then she dies. RavYehuda explains: that living in a perpetual narrative of death in turns actually invites death. That this mother in the story was incapable of recognizing the possibility of life and therefore remained imprisoned in a climate of death.
This is clearly a very difficult and heartless text. By no means am I advocating that this should serve as a guide for dealing with death in our everyday lives, our families, or friends. Rather, what I am trying to do is to extrapolate from this text some direction on how we, as a society need to deal with death, in a healthy way.
And so, back to my question: how, in fact, are we to mourn as a people?
Let's take a cue from how we mourn the Temple: According to the Talmud, when a Jew stuccos his home, he is to leave a little bit bare. We are to leave an item or two out of a prepared banquet. We smash a glass at a wedding. These rituals are surprisingly banal given the magnitude of the impact of Temple's destruction on the entirety of our Jewish experiences.
I can only guess that the Rabbis knew how banal these rituals were. Perhaps they prescribed them specifically so that the mourning of the Temple did not hinder or undermine the full continuum of sadness and joy, mourning and celebration, death and life, which are part and parcel of being a Jew. That rather than the deep embrace of the loss, we have markers of the loss. The glass. The stucco. We have institutionalized mechanisms to retain some sense of loss even as we build anew. The Mishna in Taanit tells us that five misfortunes befell our people on the 9th of Av, Tisha B'Av: it was decreed that our forefathers will not enter the Promised Land; the destruction of both Temples; Betar was captured, and Jerusalem was plowed over. Did these five events actually happen on Tisha b’Av? That is not really the point. The rabbis understood that you need a moment of darkness in the liturgical calendar in order not to have the entire year be a period of blackness.
My Zaida was a beautiful man, a beautiful soul, a beautiful doogma, a model for living a life of passion, integrity and of empathy. The ravages of heart disease ate away at his body, but never his menchlichkeit. I miss him dearly. When he died I was left with a huge emptiness, a vacuum of unanswered questions, fears, and doubts. How do I make his lessons, values, inspirations a part of who I am, of who I am becoming? How do I hold onto his memory, his neshoma, while at the same time find my own voice of aspiration, of Kedusha in this world? How could I hold these two intentions? I turn to how we Jews mourn the Temple. I chose a seemingly banal and understated way to ritualize my grandfather's memory and message of hope. At the Shabbat table I sing Mizmor L'David, Psalm 33, The Lord is my Sheppard, "Tommy's Song", as my Zaida called it. And there he sits, across from me, smiling, beckoning me to take a seat at the table, and to sing along with him as we welcome in Shabbat together.