The Three Weeks - The Jewish Standard

We’ve now entered the outer layer of the most somber time on the Jewish calendar — the Three Weeks, which began on Tuesday night with the fast of the 17th of Tammuz. These weeks commemorate the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem, the beginning of the galut, and other tragedies the Jewish people has suffered over the three millennia of our existence, and it is marked by the kinds of behavior — what you don’t eat, what you don’t wear, what you don’t wash — that indicate mourning.

The Three Weeks culminates in the fast of Tisha B’Av, the ninth of the month of Av — this year it’s the evening of Monday, August 12 through sundown on Tuesday — where we sit on the floor and listen to the blunt horrors of the book of Eichah, sung in keening melodies that enter your heart and squeeze it. (In English, the book is aptly named Lamentations.)

There’s much in this week’s paper to echo the despair of this time of year. YIVO’s exhibition is smart and powerful, and it’s necessary — as the generation that lived through the Holocaust leaves us, we must not let the story go — but it’s not light summertime amusement. It’s a look at the worst of humanity, leavened with hope that crushes us when it evaporates. The kind of hope that might have been better off left in Pandora’s locked box.

It’s felt pretty much like Tisha B’Av all year, starting with October 7, slogging through the antisemitism that’s rising from the sewers, and then going through the disastrous political season. Many of us felt like we were trudging toward disaster.

But the lesson of Gidi Dar’s movie, “Legend of Destruction,” is clear. No one goes to see a film to be preached at — at least no one we’d care to spend any time with — and there are many other reasons to see this one. It’s dramatic, engaging, engrossing, and novel. Still, the message — that we cannot allow ourselves to be polarized to the point that we care more about hurting our opponents than helping ourselves, our community, and our world — is terrifyingly relevant today. Compromise is necessary.

That is of course not easy. Sometimes compromise is wrong. There are some principles that must not be surrendered or bartered. It’s not accidental that while in general it’s good to compromise, at least in theory, it’s never good to be compromised.

The early history of the United States shows both the benefits and the dangers of compromise. The Founding Fathers compromised on slavery. If they had not, they would not have had a union. But that meant that the union was based at least in part on real evil. The results of that compromise, incorporated in American life as structural racism, bedevil us to this day. It’s hard to imagine the counterfactual world in which we would live today had that compromise not been made.

We have also learned this week, just before the Three Weeks began, that it’s a fool’s errand to predict the future. We knew, at the beginning of this election cycle, that a large number of Americans — probably a majority — did not want the 2024 presidential election to be a replay of the last one. Most people wanted new candidates.

And now, hey presto!, we have one. Now the outcome of the race is not easily predictable, and the way we will get from here to there — the surprises, the outrages, the mistakes, the flashes of brilliance — is unmapped. We might be horrified, but we are unlikely to be bored.

When Tisha B’Av is over, when joy is allowed to return, even if it’s necessarily colored by the grief and horror we’ve lived through, we are granted the seven weeks of consolation, when we read haftarot of comfort and healing. Nachamu, nachamu, ami, we are told. Comfort, comfort, my people.

So there will be excitement, and maybe, maybe, please, there will be comfort as well, once we make it through these new and difficult times

—JP

Opinion

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