Shabbat Chazon (D’varim)
You can listen to Rabbi Eleanor's sermon here or read it below
Even if you’re not usually a sports fan, there’s something compelling about the Olympics. It’s hard not to love stories like that of Amber Rutter, who returned to compete for Britain in the Skeet shooting category just three months after giving birth to her son. Rutter did so well that in the very final round, it was only a controversial failure to use video-reviewing that saw her win a silver medal rather than gold. Yet after initial frustration she returned to acceptance of the result, perhaps because she discovered at the very end that her husband had come, with their son, to see her compete – and so in her post-competition interviews Rutter refused to dwell on the frustration of being denied the ultimate prize; instead, she described herself as “on top of the world right now”, to have her family there to see her return to the sport she loves.
Then there was the men’s 1500 metres, with lots of coverage of Josh Kerr running for Britain against his Norwegian rival Jakob Ingebrigtsen – only for the American Cole Hocker to come through in the final metres and beat them both. To his frustration, Kerr had to settle for a silver medal, yet by the time of his post-competition interviews he was able to say, “that will have to be enough for now” and talk about focusing on the next competition.
This issue of something being enough for now makes an appearance in Parashat D’varim, near the beginning of the section we heard Judith read and in the chapter before it. Deuteronomy 1:6 recalls G-d telling the people
“רַב־לָכֶ֥ם שֶׁ֖בֶת בָּהָ֥ר הַזֶּֽה - You have stayed long enough at this mountain. [Start out and make your way…]” Then again in our reading we heard,
“רַב־לָכֶ֕ם סֹ֖ב אֶת־הָהָ֣ר הַזֶּ֑ה You have been skirting this hill country long enough; פְּנ֥וּ לָכֶ֖ם צָפֹֽנָה now turn north” (Deuteronomy 2:3).
If you can remember back to the middle of the book of Numbers, you might remember this phrase rav lachem as connected with Korach and his complaint against Moses, where it had a sarcastic, accusatory quality. Here, however, it seems to be something different: rav lachem is a phrase G-d uses to nudge the people onward when they have spent long enough in one place.
Easy for G-d to judge what is enough, perhaps, but much harder when it comes to us, and especially to our responses to tragedy. On Monday night, Jews around the world will gather to mark Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av, on which we commemorate the destruction of the Temple, first in 586 BCE and then in 70 CE; yet it’s also a much bigger destruction, because along with the Temple and even the many Jews who were displaced, enslaved and killed in the process, a whole way of life was destroyed. Without the Temple, Judaism as people then knew it became impossible – and as inheritors of the tradition that the ancient Rabbis developed in response, it can be hard for us to conceive of the devastation at the time.
That devastation is at the heart of Eichah, the book of Lamentations. Written after the destruction of the First Temple, it describes the physical suffering and mental anguish of Jerusalem, the city personified as a woman – yet this book is only five chapters long: how can just five chapters describe total devastation? The answer, perhaps counter-intuitively, is through self-imposed limits. Each of the first four chapters of Eichah is an alphabetical acrostic, with one or three lines for each letter of the aleph-bet, and the fifth has the same number of verses: working through the whole alphabet is a way of conveying totality, expressing everything from A to Z, even though it also functions as a limiting device.
In the Talmud, after the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Yehoshua also addresses the need for limits on how people mourn (Bava Batra 60b). When he encounters people abstaining from wine or meat now that the Temple is destroyed, he asks them: why? They explain that it would be wrong to eat wine and meat which were offered to G-d on the altar, now that the Temple and its altar are no more. Rabbi Yehoshua understands this, but gently points out that by this logic, they should no longer eat bread, which was once offered on the altar, nor vegetable produce, nor even water, which was poured as an offering at Sukkot – and the abstaining people fall silent. Rabbi Yehoshua takes pity on them, saying, “To not mourn at all is impossible… but to mourn excessively as you are doing is also impossible…” That is, it is not sustainable: to behave like this would lead to your own destruction too, and then who will remember the Temple?
So he explains what they should do instead, as a response to the destruction of the Temple: “A person may plaster his house with plaster, but must leave over a small amount in it without plaster… a person may prepare all that he needs for a meal, but must leave out a small item… a woman may engage in all of her cosmetic treatments, but she must leave out a small matter.” Each of these is a way of weaving remembrance into the fabric of daily life, so that the remembrance remains strong but does not cause the person remembering to suffer excessively. In support of all these, Rabbi Yehoshua quotes a familiar verse from the Psalms: “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning” (Psalms 137:5). Not ‘if I fail to show mourning every moment,’ but “if I forget”: the Talmud’s understanding of the Psalmist is that we must – at the same time – find ways to remember and also put limits on how we mourn, so that we remain alive and able to remember.
When we meet tragedy, from national devastation to the deaths of three young girls who just wanted to dance, the pain that we seek to express may be limitless. Even if we are not among those who would take it the extent of emotional or physical violence, if we attempt to express it without restraint, we risk becoming self-destructive, and still never being able to express all we feel. Our tradition instead suggests putting limits on how we express it: limits which don’t diminish our feeling but paradoxically, by allowing us to fill them, convey totality.
Some of those limits are expressed in time, including over the coming ten days: after Tisha B’Av on Monday and Tuesday, the following Sunday night brings another significant date. Tu B’Av, the fifteenth of Av, is the anniversary of a day when the young women of Jerusalem would go out and find husbands: it’s a day to focus on love and building for the future by making new matches that will become new families. It’s a bit like G-d telling the Israelites ‘rav lachem’ in Deuteronomy, or the Olympians who have to turn from missing out on gold to focus on training for the next event: the Jewish calendar gives us Tisha B’Av, a time to mourn some of our deepest Jewish sorrows, and then the calendar effectively tells us, ‘rav lachem - you have been here long enough. Turn now, to life and to love,’ with Tu B’Av.
While a trauma is ongoing, we – like the poetic author of Eichah – may wear out our eyes with inexhaustible weeping. Afterwards, however, keeping memories alive requires us to live, and that may mean finding limits to our expressions of grief. May we all find the limits that let us dwell fully in those moments of mourning then turn towards life, and may we continue to follow Tisha B’Av not with days of rage but with days of love and building for the future.
