Summertime sadness, summertime joy: Leading the way to our dreams

I always struggle with the tension between the Hebrew calendar and secular American culture at this point in the summer. For most Americans, this is the time for camping, beach visits, domestic and international travel, and other fun. But we’re also in the Jewish period of mourning known as Three Weeks, between the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av. These weeks are traditionally understood to be unlucky, even ominous. The Paris-based British Masorti Rabbi Joshua Weiner argues that this is not a superstition, but a sensitivity to the nature of the world we inhabit. The two dates that begin and end these three weeks mark terrible events in Jewish memory and remind us of the brokenness in our world.

According to tradition, on the 17th of Tammuz Moses smashed the first version of the two tablets of the Torah. On the 9th of Av, the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Since then, for two thousand years, the Jews lost a central point of our intimacy with God. We have felt a sense of exile ever since, while striving to draw closer to our dreams of a redeemed world.

This week’s double parashah of Mattot — Mas’ei completes the Book of Bamidbar, and yet it leaves us with a feeling of incompleteness, even grief. Aaron and Miriam are dead, the generation that left Egypt have all died, and Moses is told that he, too, will die before entering the land. A midrash (Eichah Rabbah, Petichta 33) teaches that every Tisha b’Av during their wandering in the desert, the Israelites would dig themselves graves and lie in them, waiting to die. But eventually, on the 15th of Av of the 40th year, the Israelites noticed that no one had died, and rejoiced, knowing that it was time to enter the Promised Land.

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In the meantime, however, the wandering in the desert continues. Just last week, when we read Parashat Pinchas from the Torah, we saw a broken letter in the Hebrew word Shalom (peace). This is not a mistake, but a scribal tradition: in every Torah scroll, the letter vav in this particular word is split into two. Even peace, even language itself, are not whole these weeks.

We know this experience of incompletion and brokenness very well today, both here in the United States and in the Land of Israel. We’re still yearning for the ultimate tikkun, the repair of the world and the healing of all the brokenness that we encounter. We fight and pray and work for as much real justice in this world as we can, but we often feel the gap between what we see around us and the ideal of the perfect world for which we work so hard.

In the Talmud (Sanhedrim 98b), there is a discussion about the coming of the messiah. One rabbi, Ulla, says: Let him come, but I don’t want to see him. If the arrival of the messianic era is filled with so much pain, if the process of arriving at the ideal justice is filled with so much incomplete and broken justice, Ulla says it’s not worth it. He’d rather have less pain and less perfection. But Rav Yosef says the opposite: Let me have the privilege even to sit in the shadow of the dung of the donkey of the messiah. For him, the fight for ideal justice is worth the price. The brokenness is also part of the healing.

There are times when I find hope in Rav Yosef’s optimism. Other times, I identify with Ulla. I don’t even want to reach ideal justice, if so many people are hurt along the way.

Our parashah closes with Moses speaking to the Israelites about entering the Promised Land. Moses is standing on a mountain and he can see the land, the place to which he’s been leading the people for 40 years. But he will not enter it himself. We can imagine the feelings of relief at arriving at the destination, and the bitterness of never completely arriving. It is this ambiguity that I think many of us feel this summer, whether we’re thinking about the leisure and relaxation that we’re supposed to enjoy this season or the anxiety and grief that we feel when noticing the suffering going on in the world at large, while also observing the Jewish commemorations of these Three Weeks.

My hope is that we can know that we’ve achieved many good things, that we all deserve (and need!) some happiness and rejuvenation this summer, and that we can feel true gratitude, even as we honor the feelings of distance between where we are and where we dream to be. As Jews, we are strong and resilient enough to hold and bear all these feelings.

Indeed, in the words of Rabbi Lisa Edwards, “just by being who we are, we may find that we are leading society in a new and necessary direction… opening new possibilities to those who lead the way and to those who will follow.” (Torah Queeries, p. 221, 223) Like the next generation of Israelites in this week’s parashah, may our journeys through a difficult midbar (wilderness) come closer to an end, and may the distance between our dreams and reality become ever smaller.

Shabbat shalom.