Thinking about Tisha B’Av

Until now, Tisha B’Av commemorated distant horrors.

The evening service tends to attract many Jews who no longer go to shul often during the summer but remember the emotional impact it had on them when they were at sleepaway camp.

Campers and staffers — who also were young — would sit outside, near the lake if there was one — dressed in white, watch the sun set, look at the fireflies, and listen to the searing story of the destruction and rejection of Jerusalem, and of the Jewish people’s gradual uplift from desolation to light.

The story of the long-ago horrors were sung to hauntingly beautiful melodies.

The impression often was of entwined beauty and horror, death and life, filtered through raging adolescent hormones.

Now, many of us go to shuls where we sit on the floor, in rooms that often are beautiful and deeply familiar to us but still look and feel different in the dark, and listen to the same haunting melodies. We know more about life now than we did as campers, but still the degrading depths of the story’s images — starvation, humiliation, utter hopelessness, and the very worst, the grand guignol of mothers eating their babies, that one perhaps an image too far — seem somehow both real but also distant. That really isn’t us.

This year, though, it’s a little different.

The stories of October 7 aren’t that different from the ones in Eichah. That was true last year too, but last year it was still so raw that many of us realize now that our imaginations then refused to accept them. We heard the stories and we believed them but we tried to save ourselves from their horror. We weren’t ready yet to incorporate them. To assimilate them into the part of our minds where we store reality. To believe that they wouldn’t flicker and fade away in daylight.

Now we know that those stories and those images are part of us.

And there’s also the starvation in Gaza. Whatever political calculations and miscalculations and cynical evil from Hamas caused it, we know that there is real starvation. We know that children are suffering and dying. No matter what caused the children in the photographs we see online to look like, that is what they look like. That cannot help but color our reading of Eichah, making it even darker.

There is hope, even on Tisha B’Av. Maybe particularly on Tisha B’Av. There is an arc to the day that brings us from the depths of the evening to increasing sunlight during the day, and then hope as twilight falls again. Things get better. Everything repeats, yes, but still, because time is not a flat circle but a spiral, it arcs toward better. Or so we hope.

There’s one other thing that we have to say this week. Tom Lehrer. We have to say goodbye to the brilliant, acerbic, casually hilarious songwriter (and mathematician) who died this week at 97. His skill at the kind of verbal cleverness that seems to have gone out of style but can send those of us who love it into fits of hopeless (and to be honest occasionally envious) giggles was extraordinary.

We’re deeply grateful that Zalmen Mlotek and Bobby Underwood were able to sing his songs in a birthday tribute to him last November; Mr. Lehrer wasn’t there, but he sent his good wishes.

We will think of him as eternally spending Chanukah in Santa Monica, wearing sandals lighting candles by the sea. If only he said something about Tisha B’Av!

We hope that our readers find meaning in Tisha B’Av, and some glimmer of hope.

—JP