Rabbi’s Monthly Message

Last week the Jewish people observed Tishah Be’av. It is a commemoration that is not as well-known and is unique in its observances. There is no glitz or glamour. No traditional food (other than boiled eggs and burned toast). There are no family gatherings. And yet, it is a critical moment for our people. It is a moment in the Jewish calendar when we sit on the floor. We take off our shoes. We read a scroll not by candlelight but by the dimmer, sadder glow of memory. This is Tishah Be’av, the ninth of Av, when we mourn the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem — the first by Babylon, the second by Rome — and with them, the long exile that followed. In the Jewish community it is seen as our National Day of Grief.

I have always found it strange, and then not strange at all, that this day of ashes sits so close to the start of our Jewish new year. Grief and renewal, it turns out, are friendly neighbors. The rabbis understood this. They placed Tishah Be’av at the bottom of a staircase that climbs, slowly, through seven weeks of comfort, toward Rosh Hashanah. We do not stay in the rubble of destruction and ash. We walk out of it, together, toward Elul and the Days of Awe.

This year, the ancient story feels uncomfortably current. Look anywhere in the world right now and you will find people who know exactly what it means to lose a home to fire and shelling, to become strangers in a strange land, or to carry keys to houses that no longer stand. Ukraine. Gaza and Israel. Sudan. Haiti. The Congo. The Uyghurs of Northwestern China. The displaced persons camps along countless borders, including some on our own southern border. Displacement is not a metaphor for these families. It is Tuesday. It is the walk to a border crossing with whatever fits in two hands hoping that safety and security is on the other side.

Our own tradition gave us language for this long before it gave us solutions. In the Book of Lamentations, written in the wreckage of the first Temple, we find a plea that has outlived every empire that ever tried to silence it: “Turn us back to You, O Lord, and we will be turned; renew our days as of old” (Lamentations 5:21). It is worth noticing what the verse does not say. It does not say fix us, or rescue us, or make the world as it was. It says turn us. The work begins with turning — a small, human motion, available to us long before any large repair is possible. It is a recognition that we cannot fix what is entirely and irreparably broken. But that does not alleviate our obligation to respond in some way and to try to make the world, and ourselves, better.

That is, I think, the real invitation of this season. Elul asks us to practice the turn: away from indifference, toward the neighbor who is suffering; away from certainty, toward humility; away from the comfortable distance of news headlines, toward the harder, closer work of showing up. Teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but its root just means “return,” or “turn.” We are not trying to become new people by September. We are instead just asked to turn our faces in a better direction and keep walking.

As many of you know, in the rest of my life, I work alongside many refugees and immigrants. In that work, that turning is not abstract for us. It shows up in a caseworker learning a family’s story. It shows up in a food pantry line, a legal clinic, a volunteer who shows up on a Wednesday because someone needed assistance and they made a choice to show up for them. At the Coalition it shows up too in less dramatic but still impactful ways. It shows up in how we respond to members who are sick and have lost their independence to injury or illness. It comes in how we care for one another, and how we make new pathways for connections when needed. Lamentations remind us that ruins are real, whether they exist dramatically at borders or quietly between friends. And it reminds us that they are not the end of the story. Renewal is possible. It is just rarely handed to us as a gift. Instead, we have to turn toward it, and then toward one another.

As we move from the ashes of Av toward the hope of the High Holy Days, may we find the strength to make that turn: toward peace where there is war, toward justice where there is exile, and toward one another, always.

Kol Tuv,

Rabbi James

rabbijames@gmail.com