Words of the Spirit - MEANING AND MENDING
A group is seated on the floor in a dark, quiet room. In the center of the circle are piles of charcoal pulled from a spent campfire, nd sheets of blank newsprint. The sounds of a simple, mournful melody fill the air as everyone takes a piece of charcoal to depict on paper challenging moments from their lives.
The melody ends as folks finish up their drawings and annotations, and a hopeful message is offered about ancient and contemporary challenges, and possibilities for transformation. The teaching is over, and participants leave the space in silence.
As the staff of Camp Havaya – the Reconstructionist movement summer camp in the Pocono Mountains – stay behind to clean up, they also glean important insights from the concerns expressed by the campers.
They have addressed bullying; the death of family members; challenging family dynamics; discrimination; personal anxieties and struggles. However, the staff do not just literally leave these anonymous notes and drawings on the floor. During the following day, there might be activities like digging a geniza, a burial site for worn sacred texts; cleared nature trails; or constructed new wooden benches for the camp’s outdoor beit tefillah, or prayer space. As one educator explains: “The intention of this work is to take a day when we commemorate destruction and turn it into one of reconstruction. As is the case at the end of the program the previous evening, we want campers to understand that, as a community, we have the ability to pick ourselves up and move … ”
The destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem wrought not only the defeat of its Jewish defenders, but a cataclysmic upending of the prevailing observances and practices of the religion. There had already been a previous destruction, and between the era of the first and second Temples, the communal practices also manifested differently, just as there was a shift from the practices of the earliest biblical era.
There is truly no end to the upheavals and transformations that can touch our lives as a people and as people in all our identities, in all our ways of being. Yet, as the staff of Camp Havaya so wisely had their campers experience, through and beyond unbidden challenge there are ways that purposeful action can level the unevenness.
The first weeknight evening prayer before the shema, as re-imagined by my colleague Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael, says: “Evening the evenings/evening the frayed edges of our lives/maariv aravim [evenings fall]/amen." The second prayer following the shema implores: “Help us to lie down, eloheynu, in peace, and let us rise again, malkeynu, to life.”
And then – the morning blessings are capped with Psalm 30: “Though I lay down in tears, I awoke in the morning to joyous song.”
The frayed edges of the world are showing, and so are many in our lives. If I began now to list the world events and place, or the sorrows being borne just within our beloved community, there would, truly, be no end.
You may never have thought of Tisha B’Av at all, never mind imagined that it could offer a moment in time to chart a path towards rebuilding or mending a broken place in you, or in the world. But this is how we Jew, this is how we live lives of integration, meaning, purpose and celebration. We gather and sing, we reflect, and we do things both the same and differently from our ancestors. It is in Eicha, the book of Lamentations from which the haunting melodies were chanted around the charcoal and paper, that we read: hashivenu Adonay elecha venashuva, hadesh yamenu kekedem – Return us to you, YHVH, and we shall return! Renew our days as of old!
Let the season of renewal begin as we turn from suffering towards solidarity, from destruction to transformation.
Rabbi Liz
