Dear Friends,

 

Two weeks after the horrific events of October 7, I officiated a wedding.

Standing under the chuppah with the bride and groom toward the end of an incredibly emotional ceremony, it was time to break the glass. What would it mean to break a glass when there were shards of brokenness all around us?

I struggled to find the words to introduce the ritual. Normally, at this point, I would look to history or metaphors to describe the challenges our people have faced and the brokenness of our world. But in that moment, I didn’t need any metaphors, and I didn’t need to look to the past. We had just witnessed with our own eyes the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

I’ve been reflecting on that moment leading up to Tisha B’Av next Tuesday. It’s the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, and it’s also the first time we’ve marked it since October 7.

Commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem as well as other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish People, Tisha B’Av serves as a metaphor for and a reminder of our broken world and the Jewish pain, loss, and grief that come with generations of persecution, expulsion, and exile.

On Tisha B’Av, we will remember a painful history that none of us ever wanted to relive. The sages of our tradition marked this day and the three weeks leading up to it because they understood that history and memory bind a people together. They wisely knew that resilience and the capacities to move forward and rebuild — even in the face of tragedy and trauma — require the ability and willingness to grieve.

In her book, In the Narrow Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks, Dr. Erica Brown writes powerfully about history, tragedy, and community:

. . . History is one of the key connectors that enables us to discover a shared life together. And history is not only about that which we once celebrated together. History, in its most profound sense, is the joint language of pain that forms the crucible of peoplehood. In simple human terms, we know that when strangers undergo a tragedy together, they form intense and unique bonds. Something life-changing happened in the presence of another, and both parties may be transformed forever as a result. Both need each other as reminder and witness.

I think the “joint language of pain” helps to explain the renewed sense of solidarity, connection, and peoplehood — within our communities and between Israelis and American Jews — that so many of us have felt since October 7. Israelis have lived through a modern Tisha B’Av. American Jews are experiencing antisemitism that we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. We have undergone tragedies together, we have been transformed, and we have realized, perhaps remembered, that we do indeed need one other.

Tisha B’Av feels too real and too raw this year because we are still in the midst of trauma, war, destruction, loss, and grief. As we pause to remember the past and bear witness to the present, we can at least be together in grief, so we may also find the resilience and strength to discover and rebuild shared lives together.

Shabat Shalom,

Rabbi Marc Baker

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