Day of Mourning

Today is Tisha B'av - the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av. It is historically a day of national mourning beginning with the Israelite spies who went to spy out the land of Canaan and came back with horrible reports of giants and giant grapes (I see nothing wrong with giant grapes) which terrified the Israelites in the desert. The story goes that God said something like - on this day because you cried for nothing, now I'll give you something to cry about (which sounds very Jewish-motherish). And so on this day all these catastrophes happened to us - the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem with the subsequent exile to all parts of the earth, expulsion of Jews in England, expulsion from Spain, and the list goes on.

It's a 25 hour fast day - no eating or drinking. This is personally very difficult for me but because I mourn too, I chose to fast. I'm the only one in my family who is keeping this fast and decided to go to the Kagans for a workshop. Otherwise, I'd be at home watching everyone eat and drink and watch tv all night and the day would be meaningless. I knew it would be different from a synagogue or the usual run-of-the mill reading of Lamentations, etc. For one, everyone left their shoes outside and were given tea candles to read Lamentations with. The people reading it out loud in a mournful tone were women instead of men. We were told to write down what we would want written on our tombstone. After all, why wait and let someone else write it for you? We lied down on the floor and were told where our grieving spot was where our rib cage meets - the place where it hurts where you touch it. After we wrote down on a sheet of paper all that was lost to us - personal, national, etc. We had to grieve in order to heal. I wrote furiously - of the sadness at losing my parents, my cat, missed opportunities in my life, my tough children, the fact that so many people lack spirituality in their lives, the fact that Ibrahim's kids can't come back to Jerusalem to live because they're not Jews, the unfairness of life, the fact that in Israel/Palestine we don't live like the brothers/sisters we should be. We took our papers and burned them in a tray. I watched my paper burn and it rolled up by itself as it burned, like a scroll. After I took the ashes from that sheet of paper and put it on my forehead, as people did in ancient times. And I hope from this day on, we can build towards a better world.