Today is the 17th day of Tammuz: a minor
fast day in Jewish tradition, inaugurating the "Three Weeks" of mourning leading up to Tisha b'Av. According
to the Mishna, this was the day the Romans breached the
walls around Jerusalem, which led to the destruction three weeks
later of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Tradition also holds that
today is the anniversary of Moses breaking the tablets of the
Ten Commandments when he came down the mountain to find the
Israelites worshiping that golden calf.
The Three Weeks are also called bein ha-meitzarim
-- "between the straits." They're a kind of narrows, a temporary and temporal
Mitzrayim. During these weeks, many Jews don't celebrate weddings; some eschew
instrumental music (a source of joy), haircuts (a nod to vanity),
and even saying the shehecheyanu (blessing of gratitude
sanctifying time.) These mourning customs are intensified during
the nine days of leading up to Tisha b'Av.
I've read some striking and resonant things about minor fasts like 17 Tammuz. In God In Your Body, Jay Michaelson writes:
I approach the five Temple-related fast days by expanding the
metaphor of the Temple's destruction to embrace the principle of
separation itself. Then I see my fast not merely as mourning, but
also as the path to healing...
I draw strength from the knowledge that around me as I
write this, hundreds of thousands of people are also fasting on
this communal day -- even if my reading of the day's significance
is different from theirs. Jews have never agreed on why we do anything; we have four new years, and three names for the Passover holiday.
Yet community is built by doing... Secondly, and relatedly, is the aspect of humility in spiritual practice. Every year, I learn from the tradition, even if my relationship to it is no longer as orthodox as it once was...
I approach the five Temple-related fast days in the spirit of
practice, and practice requires form. If we only do the practice
when we feel like it, it isn't a practice.
Really good points, all.
But for many liberal Jews, minor fasts like this one are barely
on the map, and ditto the customs of the Three Weeks
that follow. In The Jewish Holidays, Michael Strassfeld notes that an increasing number of Jews maintain an observance of 9 Av, but not an observance of minor Temple-related fast days like this one. As Rabbi Everett Gendler writes:
There is a practical reason for phasing out
certain of the minor fasts, aside from loss of the significance
they once had. Now that we have added observances to the
calendar -- Yom ha-Shoah, Yom ha-Atzma'ut, and more -- we need
to drop those that mean little to us, lest we fill the calendar
up with holidays. If too many days are special, what's special
about special days?
He has an interesting point.
Many liberal Jews no longer ardently hope for the restoration
of the Temple-that-was, preferring instead to embrace the paradigm
shift into rabbinic (and post-rabbinic?) Judaism as a necessary
turn in the unfolding of history's spiral.
For those who don't observe the Three Weeks in the
traditional ways, and don't yearn for the restoration of
sacrifice atop the Temple mount, can 17 Tammuz still hold meaning?
There's a kind of slantwise answer in this quotation from Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi:
There is a danger posed by the Three Weeks with its list of
catastrophes that befell the Jewish people one generation after another.
The danger is a paranoia that declares that everyone else in the
world is wrong and therefore their fate is of little concern to us.
Instead, we should generalize from our experience and become
involved in the universal... The teshuvah for the Three Weeks is to
examine how we have distorted the particular. In the midst of
remembering our history, we must reclaim as well our role as
planetary citizens.
It falls to liberal Jews today to turn and re-turn these
narrow straits into a container for meaning in a way that shifts our focus to the universal.
This drash by Reb Arthur Waskow finds resonance in the teaching that this date marked Moses'
shattering of the tablets. He suggests that Moses
shattered the tablets just as we today shatter a wineglass at
every marriage. The breakage, paradoxically, seals the covenant of
the relationship.
Whether by fasting or not, today Jews remember the breakage of Jerusalem's city walls -- the
first step toward the destruction of the Temple, and the rebirth
of Judaism which ultimately followed. Even as we prepare ourselves
in three weeks to mourn the Temple's fall, and the experiences of
exile that 9 Av represents, can we see the
breaching of those city walls as a kind of sacred shattering, opening
the possibility of something lasting and new? When the walls
between us fall, and the dust of their collapse settles, what can we create in the new negative spaces that are left behind?
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