This coming Sunday marks a minor fast day on the Jewish calendar, the Fast of Tammuz. Usually the fast is on the 17th of Tammuz, but this year because that's Shabbat, the fast is pushed to Sunday. It begins a period known as “the three weeks,” culminating on the 9th of Av. The 17th of Tammuz remembers painful and sad parts of our people’s history, and because of its connection to the 9th of Av (when the Temple was destroyed), it’s most often remembered for being the day when the walls of Jerusalem were breached.
The Mishna describes several other calamities that befell the Jewish people on the 17th of Tammuz. One of those events is Moses breaking the two tablets when he came down from Mount Sinai. Leading up to the 17th of Tammuz this year, I’ve been thinking about what it means to mark the breaking of those tablets. It must’ve felt like a shattering of Truth. I try to imagine that moment - looking at the ground, in total anguish, with pieces of broken Divine word scattered all around the foot of the mountain.
In the past few weeks, over and over I’ve felt like we live in a world of broken tablets. A world of fractured Truth and a world where it’s entirely unclear how we will make our way back to wholeness. For the Israelites two thousand years ago, when the walls were breached and soon after, the Temple destroyed, it was a shattered world. But it was a world that brought with it change that wasn’t imaginable before the destruction of the Temple. That calamity and the dispersion of the Jewish people into exile brought about the proliferation of Rabbinic Judaism which is the basis for our own modern, lived Judaism. They figured out how to bring wholeness back into the world. There was an unfolding of possibility, change, and reinvention that occurred after tragedy.
There are times when we will look at the shattered pieces and not know what will come of the world. And on the 17th of Tammuz, we take the time to mourn the brokenness and the pain. But it’s also a time to act from a place of hope; it’s a time for imaginative rebuilding. It’s a time for knowing that the world can be different. This year, this 17th of Tammuz, let’s hope and pray and act that the we can emerge from brokenness, and that we will dedicate ourselves to putting the pieces back together.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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