Thought of the Week: 11 August 2016

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 11 August 2016

This Shabbat we begin to read the final book of the Torah, Deuteronomy. We are now in the run up to the end of the yearly journey of the Jewish people which will finish for us with Rosh Hashanah and, for the Torah, with Simchat Torah. But there is first a major event in the Jewish calendar. This is the fast day of Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. It will begin at dusk on Saturday night 13th August and end at dusk on Sunday night 14th.

Rosh Hashanah every year enables us to celebrate renewal, the renewal of the year, the potential to renew ourselves and the way we live our lives. It enables us to make changes. But before we reach renewal and change we have to recognise another inevitable part of life – that we will all experience loss on the way. That can be the loss of old habits, the awful loss of people who have made us who we are, the loss of certainties in our lives.

That is Tisha b’Av’s place in today’s Judaism. It stands as a day to remember the losses of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem respectively in 586BCE and 70CE, and so the loss of the ways of Jewish religious life that they stood for. It has also become a remembrance of Jewish loss in the Diaspora, the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 both of which are attributed to the same date, the 9th Av, in the Jewish calendar. All of these events were deep tragedies of their time, but our existence as part of thriving Reform Judaism in the Twenty First Century, here in London demonstrates every day that Judaism has the capacity to survive loss and to renew itself.

Tisha b’Av tells us that Jews do not forget that the loss happened, as if what there was before was of no importance. Our worship and Jewish ways of life remains deeply influenced by Temple worship, the Psalms we sing, the Seder and Shabbat table, the structure of the Jewish service being just three examples. Our lives as Jews in medieval England and Spain remain deeply worth remembering, as last week the coach load of Alyth members who visited the remains of the medieval Jewish communities of Northampton and Bedford could attest, and as every time we sing Adon Olam, the poem written in the meter of Arabic Spain can remind us.

Come and join your community from 9:00-10:45 on Sunday morning August 14 as we commemorate Tisha b’Av for this year with a Shacharit service, the haunting chant of Eichah, the Biblical Book of Lamentations, which records the emotions of the loss, and a study session with your Rabbis from Eichah Rabbah, the Midrashim which our Rabbinic Ancestors wrote to work out what this loss meant to them many centuries later. Then we can move on towards Rosh Hashanah ready again to grow from our past.