Devarim - Edge days
Deuteronomy 1:1 - 3:22 | Isaiah 1:1 - 27
Summary: There are edge days and edge times - opportunities to see a life as a whole unit, to see a year as a whole unit, to see a movement as a whole unit. We need t take the opportunity to stand at the fine line between one phase and another and to ask, as well as we can, what is working and what is not.
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“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a party-house. For [death] is the end of every person, and let the living person consider this in their heart.” That’s one of many gems from the book of Kohelet - Ecclesiastes.
No one invited me to any parties today, but I did have the chance to visit with a wonderful family as they mourned together. Through stories and photos and jokes, through feeling the cadences of the family as they spoke, a visitor like myself got a glimpse of a life, sort of like a mosaic. I walked away wanting to fly a plane and do way more spelunking, but more importantly, I walked away wanting to make sure I live my life more fully, so that my kids will feel welcome to do the same.
Of course, when you visit a house of mourning, you’ll get only glimpses of the fullness of that person’s life. But the real prize is a sense that a life is complete unit, with edges at both ends. There is a beginning and an end. While there is certainly plenty that happens upstream of our births, and hopefully we leave abundant and generative legacies in our wake, our terrestrial days are numbered. This, I believe, is what Kohelet wants us to know.
It is hard to remember this when we are in the middle of it. Sure, some people think they are immortal. But most of us just don’t have time to think about it one way or the other. But others ignore it because it’s too scary. And still others simply have too much to do. An infinite stream of challenges and opportunities, choices and actions confronts us, and we must meet them and decide them and then move on to the next ones. It’s just so much. We do the best we can and then we move on. What’s done is done.
This would make it quite difficult to tell the story of our life while we are in it. We are on a path, but we don’t see it. We don’t have a natural edge at which to plant our feet, a place to root our perspective from which we can see a life as a whole, with an arc, with themes and chapters. When we’re in the midst of life, such moments must be superimposed. We can (and should) create times to rise up from our current position to the highest heights that we can manage so that we can see what we see where the current path is leading.
A story is told of Rabb Natan of Nemirov who was seen weeping at a funeral of someone he barely knew. When asked about he, he responded that sometimes we need to borrow tears from other places and use them for our own purposes. My take: when we sit at a shiva house among mourners who are standing at an edge, we need to borrow their grief in order to consider our own lives with the edges we cannot see but are surely there. We need to consider that we are in the midst of a story that has, at least on one plane, an ending, and the story told at the end of our lives will consist of the things we do and the choices we make today and tomorrow and the next day, so we have work to do.
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Don’t believe them when they tell you the 9th of Av is the saddest day of the Jewish year. That’s sloppy language that hides the true importance of the day. It’s somber - like a shiva house is somber. It is a serious and important affair that affords us the precious and priceless opportunity to rise up from our day-to-day and to consider where we are coming from and where we are going as a people.
Forget about that building that was destroyed. It’s not about that anymore. The Temple was one iteration, one attempt to concretize our relationship with the Divine. It worked for a while. Then it didn’t. And it was destroyed because it wasn’t working. More importantly, what are the more recent attempts to concretize our relationship to the Divine? And how are those going? What’s working, and what is not?
Edge days like 9th Av provide us with the mandate/opportunity to consider where we are, and where we should be going, as a people. What’s going on? Is it working? What would “working” even mean? Do we know? Do we have a vision for the future? If not, why not? What makes a legitimate vision? Who says? If it’s not working, what can we do? Who should do it? What are the rules? What are we longing for?
Is Zionism working? Is Modern Orthodoxy working? Is Jewish Renewal working? How about the ways our families celebrate Shabbat and holidays - is that going well? What’s possible? But it seems we never quite get to this most essential conversation.
9th Av is the day. It is the beginning of the new year of the Jewish people.
Edge days are days when one thing ends, before another thing begins. That’s why shiva is seven days. We need time to absorb, to contemplate, to tell stories, to listen and yearn and work through emotions.
9th Av is an edge day. It’s a day in between, when we can imagine that a new course could be set, when we can take the time to look at the ruins of what was and take guidance toward a different future. It’s not a day when when we run back into the ruins and salvage the bricks and start building new structures. That iteration of the story is over. The next story has not begun. This is an essential day.
9th Av is really the beginning of the High Holidays. The realization we have on 9th Av is the vision around which we configure our Rosh Hashanah. The people we need to be in our new story are the backdrop of the teshuva we do on Yom Kippur. Sukkot is the model of the space we want to build. It is a model Temple of a future world.
I hope we can find our way to the deepest places on 9th Av. Hamakom Yenachem.