Rabbi Nathan's blog

In his spiritual preparation guide for the High Holidays entitled This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew z"l starts his reflections with the Jewish holiday of the 9th of Av, the moment that we mark the calamitous destruction of the Temple and our subsequent exile. (The holiday also encompasses later tragedies of exile and destruction as well.)

Rabbi Lew considers 9 Av, which falls exactly 7 weeks before Rosh Hashanah, to be the beginning of the High Holiday cycle. For Rabbi Lew, this moment of 9 Av offers a psycho‐spiritual roadmap for us. It is the beginning of the teshuva process, the process in which we begin not only to mourn our national calamities, but it is also the beginning of the process in which we to turn away from the destructive behaviors and patterns that tear down the houses of our relationships. In Rabbi Lew's words,

[9 Av] is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest in our own lives ‐‐ in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others. Teshuvah ‐‐ turning, repentance ‐‐ is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at‐one‐ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives. (p.41‐42)

I find Rabbi Lew's framing of 9 Av a useful one. While it is so important to delve into and seek to connect with the national calamities that have befallen our people, this approach can oftentimes for me be hard to internalize. The many centuries of loss and pain can seem overwhelming and abstract. But Rabbi Lew,  following in the footsteps of Hasidic tradition as well, helps us to transform the communal into the personal. How can we use this moment of public alienation to explore alienation in our own lives for the sake of deepening our relationship with the sacred?

And, of course the personal and communal are connected. Rabbi Lew reminds us in his chapter of the Talmudic story of Kamza and Bar Kamza. In the story, a local dignitary instructed his servant to invite his friend Kamza to his feast but the servant accidentally invites Bar Kamza, his enemy, instead. After Bar Kamza arrives the dignitary would not be placated by Bar Kamza's increasingly generous gestures of money to pay for his place at the feast and avoid the embarrassment of being kicked out. But his gestures were of no avail. This later led Bar Kamza, in reprisal, to connive to force the Jewish leadership to refuse to accept his Temple sacrifice (which was blemished) and thereby signaled Jewish disloyalty and revolt against the Romans. The rest as they say, is history. 

While the story may not actually be true, the themes are. The pain which the local dignitary cultivated, his destructive behaviors, led to his tearing down his possibility of relationship and reconciliation, and by extension, tearing the social fabric as well. These are lessons we need to continue to learn today. 

As we prepare for our 9 Av commemoration on August 12, I invite us all to begin to consider and take stock of the patterns that hold us back from deeper relationship and healing. And may we too take the energy of this holiday to reexamine our disconnection from the truth of our lives as we also commemorate the disconnection and exile our people experienced throughout our history. May this season of “turning” be a productive one for all of us.