Tisha B’Av: No Room for Despair
I’ve never been much into Tisha B’av. Maybe nobody is. After all, it brings us into a place of mourning over a Temple from two thousand years ago that we can’t really relate to if we’re not from a religious community. And if we’re part of the progressive Jewish community, then we are forced to face the pain of today’s society.
These days, we’re a bit overloaded, no exaggeration.
But I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when my 20-year-old daughter read to me from one of her books about Jewish stuff. This one was a book about Tisha B’av.
Being in a funk myself, I was pleasantly inspired.
There is the story of a Holocaust survivor, gaunt from starvation, who approaches a Jewish lieutenant who comes to the ghetto. The ghetto resident tells the story of a rabbi Elchanan Wasserman whom he had approached in the ghetto and asked in despair, “What is the meaning of this?”
Rabbi Elchanan proceeded to tell him a parable of a man who came to a farmer who wants to learn about farming. (Said man seems extremely naive, but so it goes with parables sometimes.)
The farmer takes him through the process month by month and the man is horrified each time by what he sees and experiences. First, a field is cleared of its beautiful flowers and grasses, stripped bare and left ugly. But then neat rows are made and things begin to grow. So it goes every step of the way, as the wheat grows and is cut down and beaten to separate the seeds from the sheethes, all the way to creating a loaf that is placed in the oven to be “burned!” Each time, the man feels like he is witnessing senseless destruction. Each time he is told to be patient and wait and see.
When the beautiful loaf of bread comes out of the oven, the man in the parable finally sees clearly what he could not along the way. We are told by Rabbi Wasserman that we can not understand God’s ways until we look back and see the entire process.
We, too, are having a hard time seeing the big picture. It all feels so, so horrible and hopeless. When Trump was elected, as scary as it was, I thought it was a good thing that we were being forced to confront the issues that would stay swept under the rug if we continued with the status quo, comfortably in denial.
As scary as things are, they’re getting scarier. We have a president who “doesn’t like to lose,” and may refuse to concede if he does. (On Democracy Now! Noam Chomsky points out what we are facing is unprecedented in history, even in dictatorships. To listen, go to democracynow.org, or here’s the link on youtube.
This alone is terrifying enough, but it’s piled on top of everything else (need I make a list?). I would argue that we are living through the worst times on earth on a global level and I’m not alone in saying that. It’s enough to leave us in despair.
Yet, the bigger picture over the arc of history has yet to be revealed, as much as it feels like we haven’t made any progress and we are going backwards. In the grand scope of things, the history of this country is very, very short.
The protesters in Portland are not giving up. There is no room for despair. They need us.
