I have a very clear memory of the month of August from my early childhood. I remember sitting in the back of my mom’s red Toyota Corolla, and asking her why this month felt distinctly different. I was remarking on both the temperature and the way that the light hit the Connecticut hills in which we lived at the time. She said that this was because it was the final breath of summer. Soon autumn would be arriving, something we took notice of in the cooling winds that arrived each evening, which had not been present in the month before. For Pagans, this is a time of celebrating the harvest with the Sabbat of Lammas, a moment when we pause and gather what we have planted throughout the first part of the year. But as someone who grew up with a grandfather who was a farmer, I know something about the harvest that many people have forgotten. After it is done, there is a feeling of barreness. The fields once heavy laden with produce now rest emptied of all that they created. There can often be a sense of sorrow around this, growth leaning into death, that summons a sense of loss.
This all reminds me of another August holiday, Tisha B’av, the Jewish holy day for grief. Originally designed to commemorate the loss of the first and second temples, this day now also stands as a reminder of many other atrocities committed against the Jewish people throughout time. Living in a moment with such prominent antisemitism permeating our cultural landscape, many people in the Jewish community are finding new realities to grieve on a daily basis. Our country is also grieving the loss of the dream that was a diverse and equitable America. A dream that we were never fully able to see realized, but held onto for hundreds of years. We grieve as a world, the endless violence that is wrecking our landscape in every corner of our planet. Children living in endless cycles of terror in Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Hostages who may never come home, and if they do are never the same. The people who fill our stores with the produce that satiates our bellies are being violently carried away to internment camps. Their cries are so close to our hearts and minds here in Florida, and for many of us, the grief that we bear is with how little we’re actually able to do to stop it all.
Like so many of you, I find myself caught between continuing to live my everyday mundane life (laundry still beckons in the apocalypse), and being wrecked by an overwhelming sense of sorrow at the world in which I must continue to exist within. Every single evening, when I do my daily practice of Hitbodedut, I talk to God about these things. And more nights than not, of late, the tears flow. Tears that cleanse, tears that cry for answers, tears that beg for all of this pain to end. I am grateful that my ancestors had the wisdom to know that at least once a year we need to set aside a period of time to feel these feelings. To not rush them, or try to find quick and easy answers. But to sit in grief and honor it as the wise teacher that it is. For it is only through grieving that we can raise our eyes once again to the horizon and believe that despite the night that seems eternal, the sun will rise again. And if history can repeat its horrors, it can repeat its redemptive moments too