Rosh Chodesh Av: Isolation
I want to be feeling kinder and more generous than I am, as Av comes in. The nagging thoughts that have been lingering at the back of my mind since, honestly, October, have now become more of a roar: How dare people who have never really grieved talk about grief as if we are all having parallel experiences?? Oh, we are all grieving for the deaths on 10/7? We are all longing for the return of the hostages? We are all watching with horror as Gaza is under relentless attack?
These kinds of statements – and I am embarrassed to admit it – make me want to yell. Your sadness and worry and fear for groups of people you care about in the aggregate are real. You should scream and cry and protest and fight. But grief?? Grief is for people you KNEW. People you LOVED. People who you can tell stories about, people who show up again and again in your childhood photo albums or your voicemail inbox. In my life, it has not been a matter of degree, but one of kind: grief is not sadness, but bigger. Grief is an entirely different monster, and you don’t know it until it knocks down your door.
You can probably hear, in that paragraph, some of my least flattering impulses: the desire to claim total ownership of an experience, to write off anyone who is not similar to me, who doesn’t know the same things I do. And this Av, those unflattering, embarrassing parts of me, the desire to insist that only some things can be Real Grief and only some people qualify for the circle of the grievers, are so loud. Oh, you’re sitting on the floor to act like you’ve lost someone but actually it’s for the Beit HaMikdash? Try lying on the floor sobbing because you can’t make yourself move. Oh, you’re not saying hi to people because it’s a mourning practice? Try completely blanking someone you were once very close with outside of the shiva house because your mind simply is empty.
And here we are again – the competitiveness, the sense that there is real grieving and then a fake imitation. I don’t want to feel this way.
I have been thinking about the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tisha B’Av this year as a time period to be endured. In just over a week, it will be over, and the roaring defensive parts of me will be able to recede again, to stop trying to protect me so fiercely from all the things that want to stir up my grief. But Tisha B’av is not the last thing in Av. In fact a scant six days later is Tu B’Av – when “the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in white clothes, which each woman borrowed from another, so as not to embarrass one who did not have her own white garments… And the daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards. And what would they say? Young man, please lift up your eyes and see what you choose for yourself for a wife.” (Mishnah Taanit 4:8)
This custom, the Mishnah teaches, was practiced not only on Tu B'av, but also on Yom Kippur, and “There were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as the fifteenth of Av and as Yom Kippur.” My friend and teacher Rav Tali Adler connects the swapping of the white dresses, so that no woman would be identifiable based on class or power, and not experience any shame, to the midrashic account of our foremother Rachel teaching secret signs to her sister Leah. These signs were made between Rachel and her intended, Yaakov, so that if Rachel and Leah’s father Yaakov were to swap the sisters under the wedding veil, the ruse would fail. But Rachel ultimately teaches Leah the signs rather than allow her to be embarrassed. Rav Tali teaches that Yom Kippur’s white dress swap is a re-enactment of this, and that this is designed to arouse God’s mercy, a model of sacrifice of mutuality and love.
So what does it mean that the other dress-swapping, dancing day, Tu B’Av, follows so closely on the heels of Tisha B’av?
Another Mishnah in Taanit teaches that among the tragedies of this time period , alongside the destruction of the Temple, was that Moshe, upon coming down from Mount Sinai with the two Luchot HaBrit, the tablets of the covenant, smashed those sacred tablets in response to seeing that the Israelites had built a Golden Calf to worship in his absence. [The original version of this essay wrongly quoted the mishnah as saying this was on Tisha B’av, but it actually places this event on Shiva Asa b’Tammuz - thank you to R. Avraham Bronstein for the catch!] There are many rabbinic attempts to explain why Moshe smashed the tablets in this moment, some more pious than others. But I am feeling, this year, the destructive anger and loneliness that grief can engender. Moshe thought he was coming down the mountain to his beloved community, and instead he found an unrecognizable scene of idolatry. Of course he wanted to break something.
We need the space to feel this way. We need that crash of the luchot against the mountain, the rage and loneliness and even the desire to lash out. But we also need to be offered a hand to climb out of it – and to accept that hand when it reaches out.
Tu B’Av can be a model. We can have Tisha B’av in all its loneliness. But the following week, we can accept a borrowed dress and hold someone’s hand. We can step into a world where we can be with others, even if their pains and joys are so different from ours as to be unknowable. I don’t know if I will ever learn how to let loss open me up instead of close me off. But I want to practice anyway.