The parade, joy, and sunlight - The Jewish Standard

June is such a transitional month. It’s when the days stretch out to nearly impossible lengths — it gets dark so late and light so early that it feels like the sun’s confusing us with Alaska — and then, imperceptibly at first but inexorably, they start getting shorter again.

The weather goes nuts too, ridiculously cold, uncomfortably hot, so you have to wear layers and shed them. It’s so easy to miscalculate.

It’s also a month of beauty. The flowering trees have finished their color bursts, but everything is else green and bright and lush and joyous.

On the Jewish calendar, the mourning period — the Three Weeks, then the sadder 10 Days, then Tisha b’Av, then the countdown to Rosh HaShanah — is a month away.

So maybe it’s a good time for us to feel a little joy, even in this scary time.

The Israel Day parade was on Sunday; the photos we got from it show happy people, taking pleasure in being together, basking in the glory of midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side, with Central Park on one side, stately (and jaw-droppingly expensive, but whatever) prewar apartment buildings on the other, and cheering, flag-waving spectators lining the sidewalks on both sides. There were lots of beaming children, and who can’t smile back at the picture of a happy child?

Yes, there was some controversy about the parade — Mamdani wasn’t there, Smotrich was, so there was something to anger just about everyone — but overwhelmingly it was just plain happy.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum’s message goes along with what we saw at the parade.

She took the pulpit at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in 1992, when AIDS was torturing and killing a terrifying number of her congregants. It would be inaccurate to say that the disease was decimating the community, because to decimate is to kill one out of 10; about 40 percent of CBST members died, she reported.

She and the whole community felt nearly disabling grief. But, she said, it was important for all of them to allow in occasional flashes of joy. It was, in fact, necessary. And if that’s true of the fight against a disease, which kills dispassionately and randomly, how much more must it be true of the fight against hatred, antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the other bigotries that now are disfiguring our world?

It’s possible, Rabbi Kleinbaum said, and in fact it’s necessary.

So if you can, go outside. Look around, revel in the sunlight, appreciate the sharpness of the shadows, stare slack-jawed at the intricacies of the buds and flowers all around you, and remember that joy is possible.

—JP

Opinion

comments